DL Open Thread: Tuesday, December 2, 2025

Hegseth has clearly become a liability (well, he was always a liability, but he’s now publicly a liability):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been a political problem for President Trump since his confirmation in the Senate early this year, which he survived thanks to a single, tiebreaking vote cast by Vice President JD Vance.

He survived the leaked Signal chat episode, even when it became clear he had copied classified battle plans and pasted them into an encrypted, but unclassified, messaging chain. He blamed the press, began kicking news organizations out of the Pentagon press room and insisted they sign a pledge never to seek news not approved by his public affairs office. Almost no one signed, not even his previous employer Fox News.

Now, the political price of Mr. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon has increased. As investigations mount into the legality of strikes that have killed scores of people in the waters off Venezuela, his take-no-prisoners, leave-no-survivors approach has led even Republican supporters to demand answers. So far, few have been forthcoming.

I’m calling it: Hegseth doesn’t survive,  Perhaps doesn’t survive the week.  E-clip’n save.  Ah, a footnote–Hegseth has a history of ordering soldiers to ignore the law:

Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.

The anecdote is contained in a book Hegseth wrote last year in which he also repeatedly railed against the constraints placed on “American warfighters” by the laws of war and the Geneva conventions.

In his book…Hegseth called into question the entire edifice of laws of conflict, writing: “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think.”

Krugman Reveals Why Trump Pardoned Honduras’ Narco-Terrorist Ex-President:

Still, why would Trump, whose poll numbers are cratering, generate even more negative headlines by pardoning Hernández, who was duly convicted of conspiring to send more than 400 tons (!) of cocaine to America?

The answer is the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy. In fact, many of Trump’s pardons of the most egregious criminals are closely linked to their influence.

Krugman describes the bromance between Trump, the crypto crowd, and the radicals who have completely remade libertarianism (as in ‘Become Ungovernable’, a real slogan).

Which brings us to–Prospera:

Próspera is a for-profit city being built off Honduras’s coast. Its charter largely exempts the island from Honduran law. Instead, the city is run by a governing structure that for the most part gives control to a corporation, Honduras Próspera Inc., which is in turn funded by a familiar list of Silicon Valley billionaires including Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreesen.

So while the city is being marketed as a libertarian paradise, it’s best seen as an autonomous oligarchy, government of, by and for billionaires. And you won’t be surprised to learn that within Próspera, Bitcoin is legal tender.

The 2013 Honduran law that made the creation of Próspera possible was initially ruled unconstitutional by the Honduran Supreme Court. But that ruling was reversed after Juan Orlando Hernández’s predecessor, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, managed to dismiss 4 of the court’s justices. Like Hernández, Sosa was a right-winger, who became president after a populist president, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by a military coup. Under both Hernández and Sosa, chaos reigned – corruption, criminal gangs, and drugs overran the country. The current president, Zelaya’s wife, has tried to claw back some sovereignty over Próspera, which has struck back with a mammoth lawsuit that could bankrupt the country.

In any case, the point is that while Trump threatens and fulminates against Maduro in Venezuela, he is openly backing the Honduran political party that has allowed massive drug smuggling into the U.S. Why? The only logical answer is because of the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy and their interests in Próspera.

There you have it: Asked, and answered.

He’s Totally Sane:

President Donald Trump on Monday launched into a late night meltdown on his social media platform that saw him promoting a conspiracy theory about former first lady Michelle Obama signing presidential pardons on Joe Biden’s behalf.

The president turned up the dial on his typical Truth Social post spree, making over 160 posts and reshares from 7 p.m. to nearly midnight on the East Coast.

Among those, the president promoted a clip from far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who platformed the “WILD” claim about Obama and Biden from Bed, Bath and Beyond founder Patrick Byrne.

Byrne, a known conspiracy pusher, claimed on a recent episode of Jones’ show that Obama used Biden’s “autopen” — the alleged use of which Trump has turned into a frequent attack against his predecessor — to issue four to five pardons.

“And then you’d love to see, who knows if they charged a million dollars a par — who knows how that — that’s so illegal! That is so illegal!” he said in the clip.