Sunday, August 30, 2026
The Felon/GOP's Obsession Wit "Blood and Soil"
Nine years ago this month, America was introduced to what was then called the “alt-right” and is now pretty much just “the right.” On Aug. 11, 2017, we witnessed what had been advertised as a “Unite the Right” rally in which a large group of young white men marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil!” The next day, a young counterprotester named Heather Heyer was killed by an alt-right participant who drove his car through the crowd at high speed. President Donald Trump famously announced that there were “very fine people on both sides,” and it was clear to many Americans just where he and the Republican Party were heading.
It was startling at the time to hear those chants. They seemed like something out of the history books. Such open antisemitism was a vestige of the Klan and neo-Nazi marches of the past, and the words “blood and soil” had no American antecedent at all, at least not the specific term. They are associated with the Nazis, derived from the German völkisch movement, which romantically valorized the agrarian people as the backbone of society and evolved into the eugenics and ethnic cleansing programs under Adolf Hitler.
A large faction of the modern American right has now adopted this idea to promote nativism and white nationalism, calling it “Heritage American” and basically positing the idea that only people of European ancestry are appropriate to live in the United States. But it’s actually even more specific than that. A true heritage American would be able to trace their ancestry to the colonial period, to Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish early settlers.
The most famous of those pushing the Heritage American idea is Vice President JD Vance, although he doesn’t use the term. In his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention, he declared, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” . . . People will not fight for abstraction, but they will fight for their home.”
Vance has said that he looks forward to being buried in that old cemetery himself, as will his children. But as political analyst Mona Charen noted, “his children are the product of a marriage between himself and the daughter of recent immigrants. Her ancestors are buried in India. Is that their ‘homeland’? Are his children less American than he [is]?”
Aside from that important point, what Vance says is simply not true. Americans have fought for “abstractions” plenty of times, including two bloody World Wars, both of which were fought on foreign shores. If you ever had the chance to talk to World War II veterans, you know they believed they were fighting for “freedom” against the scourge of fascism. Setting aside Pearl Harbor, any real threat to the “homeland” was mostly an abstraction in itself. And all the literature about the American Revolution itself is rife with the passionate cries for liberty and equality, not paeans to “the land.”
The late Gordon Wood, the preeminent scholar of the revolutionary period, explained that there was no common lineage, even at the nation’s founding. Hence, these “Heritage Americans,” thinking they are the one true bloodline, are deluded. There were three quarters of a million people of African descent, thousands of Native Americans, people from every European nation and quite a few from elsewhere. The country was always a nation of immigrants and, according to Wood, a widespread concern at the time was that forming a national identity could be difficult.
But we did — around the Declaration of Independence and the belief in individual liberty and equality, as formalized in the Bill of Rights. America is the only country on earth that organized itself this way, but as Wood pointed out, we had no choice. Unlike other countries, we were literally not “a people” until we became a nation.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — one of the justices who voted in the minority in Trump v. Barbara, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee automatic birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors — was quizzed heavily on the idea of America as a creedal nation when he recently made the rounds flogging his children’s book. His response caused much agita among the Heritage American types. “Our nation is not founded on a religion,” Gorsuch said. “It’s not based on a common culture even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation. And I hope we take a moment to reflect on that and to recommit ourselves to that.”
The justice’s mention of religion is what struck a nerve because the insistence that the country was founded explicitly as a Christian nation is fundamental to the Heritage American belief system. That specific argument has been going on forever, and Vance and others — like Tucker Carlson — who have jumped on this bandwagon, know it to be a potent signal to the powerful evangelical bloc. To have an avatar of far-right jurisprudence espouse the belief that America is, in fact, a creedal nation and was not founded on Christianity was a welcome shock.
As the Atlantic’s Toluse Olorunnipa reported, various red states are now attempting to pass laws disallowing naturalized citizens from holding office, essentially creating a group of second-class citizens. This is yet another attempt to create a “blood and soil” nation out of one that was built on something else entirely.
America has never perfectly lived up to those ideals, and the struggle to do so continues to be painful for those who have yet to fully benefit from the nation’s promise. It’s always two steps forward, one step back. But attempting to redefine the country as white nationalist völkism is a fool’s errand. Wait until Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito discovers that he doesn’t qualify because his family didn’t emigrate to the U.S. until the 20th century, and Donald Trump will be mighty disappointed to find out that he and four of his five children are not true Americans because their mothers were born in another country. Once you start pulling on this thread, the whole thing starts to unravel.
As Wood wrote, “since the whole world is in the U.S., nothing but the ideals coming out of the Revolution and their subsequent rich and contentious history can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the ‘one people’ that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”
For the record, on my mother's side, I would be a "heritage America" because I have ancestors from England who arrived in Massachusetts in the early 1600's, English and Scottish ancestors who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in the early 1700's, and French ancestors who arrived in New Orleans shortly after the city's founding. Yet, since I am gay, the authors of Project 2025 would no doubt say I do not qualify.
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Pete Hegseth: Egotistical And Blind to His Own Incompetence
A flurry of reports from various media outlets is revealing how the unqualified secretary of defense is damaging national security with his incompetence and slavish devotion to MAGA ideology. The New York Times reported on how numerous senior positions within the Army have gone months without leadership since Hegseth fired them. The Washington Post reports that the firing of Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, in April was a result of George dragging his feet on terminating the investigations of Army aviators who violated safety regulations in order to “buzz” Kid Rock’s mansion.
Additionally, ProPublica reported that Hegseth overrode military leadership who warned him not to terminate the Civilian Harm and Mitigation Response program last year. The secretary of defense did not regard preventing civilian casualties as a worthy goal of the military and eliminated the program entirely. As a result, when the United States struck Iran, it hit a school for girls, killing more than 100 and inciting international condemnation. U.S. strikes in Yemen killed at least 150 civilians. These events drive anti-American sentiment in the region and push potential allies away.
This couldn’t come at a worse time. We are witnessing, in Ukraine, a revolution in military technology and fundamentally how we think about war. Iran has grasped it, and China is leaning hard into drones and AI as part of the “kill chain.” The battlefield is becoming faster, deeper, and more lethal than anything we have seen in human history. It’s less Gulf War and fighter jets with precision munition and more Terminator, with nearly autonomous tiny drones produced by the millions every year picking off almost 1,500 people daily.
Instead of leaning into the future, however, Hegseth canceled the Army’s elite experimental assault drone brigade, which had been championed by the generals he sacked. What he has touted instead is a military that looks the way he thinks it should look.
This means no transgender people, no female flag officers, no Black men with shaving chits, no non-Christians (and none of the wrong sorts of Christians, either). The new fitness standards being ushered in by the Army require a very specific waist-to-height-ratio requirement that is not waiverable. Previously, a soldier with an atypical body was exempted from these measurements if they scored extremely well on the physical fitness tests. Thus, a skinny soldier who barely passes the physical tests would be retained and promoted over someone with a thick core who scores a perfect 500 out of 500 on the Army Fitness Test.
Hegseth’s entire plan to modernize the military was basically carried out to get rid of “woke,” to purge anyone who didn’t meet his Christian warrior image, and to sunset rules of engagement that might prevent the killing of civilians. In order to go down this route to solve a problem that didn’t exist, he needed to get rid of anyone who wasn’t on board with doing whatever they were told, even if it was a spectacularly bad idea, like giving free license to young pilots to violate safety regulations or getting rid of the people who might prevent the Air Force from bombing little girls and random fishermen to no real effect.
After 14 months of applying Hegseth’s theory that getting rid of woke and bombing with minimal rules of engagement would make the U.S. military invincible because of testosterone and looking manly in uniform, Hegseth urged Trump to test this theory and take out Iranian leadership in what he promised would absolutely, positively be a three-day special military operation. Military leadership warned against this course of action, but Hegseth won out. Now, six months into the war, Iran has the U.S. “by the balls,” according to a senior American official interviewed by Zeteo. And the amount of testosterone in them has proved immaterial. Last I checked, T levels have no impact on missile stores or production, both of which are critically low, and will be for years after the fiasco in Iran.
Meanwhile, female drone operators in Ukraine are playing a crucial role in killing Russians faster than new ones can be recruited, and transgender people are helping to fight the largest army in Europe to a standstill. I’m also not seeing many Ukrainians or Iranians griping about how stubble makes them too unprofessional to fight.
At the end of the day, Hegseth is what he is: an ideologue who never made it past the rank of major in the National Guard, and he wasn’t a particularly good one at that: His own unit revoked his orders and refused to deploy him in 2020. He never saw things beyond the viewpoint of a guy who chafed at rules of engagement that didn’t let him blow stuff up and kill things with impunity. He never went to the War College. Never worked in industry. Never did a Pentagon tour as a civilian or as a member of the armed services.
He’s basically your random infantry captain who managed to somehow get promoted to the most powerful position in the world’s most powerful military on the strength of being a TV personality on a network that was ride-or-die for the president and despises the same sorts of people he does. He came in with the attitude that he knew better than all these other people with far more experience, who had seen the military from every angle over the decades, and he is willing to fire anyone who pushes back on his ideas. This is perhaps the worst example of someone being promoted way above their aptitude next to Trump.
Trump and Hegseth keep claiming that they’re restoring the American military. To the rest of the world, it looks like chaos and weakness caused by people too egotistical and incompetent to know they’re incompetent: the Peter principle and the Dunning-Kruger effect all rolled into one.
Friday, August 28, 2026
Six Months In, Iran’s Regime Stands
As noted in a prior post, the Felon is desperate to keep the news media from reporting on his lost war with Iran - something which alone makes it worth writing about - and is busy creating chaos with his new trade war with Canada (which seems to have been planned as poorly as his Iran adventure if Canada can turn off electricity and block Great Lakes marine traffic if it wants to do so) and, of course bloviating about "election fraud." The reality is that the Felon has made a huge mess with his war of choice which has left the USA looking diminished, short on critical munitions, some allies trying to make accommodation with Iran, viewed as more untrustworthy, with Iran in control of the Straight of Hormuz, and Americans suffering economically at home. Much of what we are witnessing was predicted, but the Felon in his typical narcissistic and hubris filled nature ignored all such advice. The end result is that there is no end in sight to the conflict, Iran is left able to attack shipping at will - thus putting the conflict back on the front page - and a weakened USA is reduced to imposing more economic sanctions in the likely false hope that it will force Iran to surrender. The whole debacle is a masterclass in what not to do. A piece in the New York Times reviews the current stalemate:
It was supposed to be quick. Still, six months after the U.S. and Israel launched massive airstrikes on Iran, the conflict drags on. The Trump administration has replaced its military war with an economic one, but the result is likely to be no different, analysts said, with a lack of American clarity about goals, a decline in American credibility and a strategic defeat.
One thing remains constant, however. The ordinary people of Iran are bearing the brunt of the war, victims of both the United States and their own leaders.
The Iranian leadership, increasingly dominated by military men, sees its own survival as the nation’s, and it considers the sacrifices of ordinary Iranians as a necessary act of patriotism and even martyrdom. It has been ever more ruthless in stamping out the slightest signs of dissent.
It is hard to dress up what has clearly been an American failure to bend Iran to its will, despite the might of the combined American and Israeli militaries. Not only has the Islamic Republic survived, but it effectively controls the Strait of Hormuz. It has strengthened its influence in the region, with even the countries it was bombing a few months ago trying to reinvigorate ties with Iran.
“The war has failed to deliver U.S. objectives,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House.
Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and head of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, judged the war a failure. “We did a lot of damage to Iran, but they have come out stronger than before,” she said. Iran’s neighbors have decided they must find a modus operandi with an Islamic Republic that is not going away.
American credibility among allies has suffered along with Mr. Trump’s own reputation for avoiding costly, interminable wars in the Middle East and promoting “affordability” at home. And it has made his promise to liberate ordinary Iranians look hollow.
“This war has really overtaken the Trump presidency,” Ms. Maloney said. “Operation Epic Fury” began with a joint American-Israeli surprise attack on Iran, which killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many of his officials, while badly wounding his son and now successor, Mojtaba.
Weeks of intense bombing destroyed much of Iran’s air force and navy and badly damaged its missile program. But the population did not rise up and the leadership did not fracture.
Iran’s military restored many of its missile launchers and attacked key American allies in the region as well as American bases, which were inadequately defended. It effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz and caused global economic disruption.
The original “Operation Epic Fury” has been replaced with what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday announced as “Operation Economic Outcast,” designed to isolate Iran further and crash its badly damaged economy. . . . . Despite rhetorical flourishes about D-Day and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Bessent did not indicate how long this economic war will last, what instruments it will use or what it aims to achieve.
“There is no clear articulation of America’s goals,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a research organization based in London. “But if you don’t define behavior change, sanctions as coercion fail.”
Iran, already the target of many thousands of sanctions, is considered unlikely to surrender because of a few more. More likely, analysts said, is that the country will respond in time by escalating its attacks on ships in the Persian Gulf and on American allies, which could produce another round of American bombing.
With American objectives unclear, the confusion is real in Tehran, too, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. They will wonder, he said: “Does the U.S. want to achieve collapse, capitulation or compromise?”
Given that Iran’s leaders see the effort to strangle them as another form of warfare, Mr. Vaez said, the new American strategy has two risks. If it fails, the only option left is to return to military escalation. And if it works, it may lead Iran to escalate to break the U.S. naval blockade.
Iran’s public-facing leadership, including President Masoud Pezeshkian and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliamentary speaker, has been blunt about the economic imperatives to ending the war. They have warned of the consequences of hungry people and economic collapse.
They nonetheless take a consistent line on negotiating with Washington, insisting on a return at minimum to the June Memorandum of Understanding, which Mr. Trump signed but now says is “over.” They also continue to negotiate with Oman about managing the strait in a way Washington is unlikely to accept.
But the stalemate is also risky, said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is an increasing view in the White House that you can’t deal with this Islamic Republic,” she said. “It’s a dangerous moment, with both Tehran and D.C. concluding that no deal is possible with the other.”
Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, remains puzzled why Mr. Trump has not taken any of the available offramps to ending an enormously unpopular war at home. By pushing even more economic sanctions, he said, Trump officials “are pretending they’re still fighting instead of pretending that they’ve won” — or admitting that they’ve lost.
Thursday, August 27, 2026
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