The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 20-26, 2026, finds that most White evangelicals (69%) approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president. And a majority (58%) say they support all or most of his plans and policies.
Let that sink in for a bit. The operative term here is probably “white,” but Trump has been embraced by the evangelical community, despite his being about as far removed from the ideals of Christianity as their arch-nemesis, trans people the Devil. (And let’s not forget I’m talking about the ideals, which are often preached but rarely practiced.)
Here’s how Trump handled Easter morning, one of the holiest (no pun intended) holidays observed by the people most likely to support him no matter what:
President Trump: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
In Trump’s own words, at 5:03 am on Easter Sunday:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Now, I have to admit that when I first read this, I thought Trump was announcing some new celebration of US infrastructure before derailing his own train of thought. But it’s definitely not that.
Both sides have threatened and hit civilian targets like oil fields and desalination plants critical for drinking water. Iran’s U.N. mission on social media called Trump’s threat “clear evidence of intent to commit war crime.”
Iran’s military joint command warned of stepped-up retaliatory attacks on regional oil and civilian infrastructure if the U.S. and Israel attack such targets there, according to state television.
The laws of armed conflict allow attacks on civilian infrastructure only if the military advantage outweighs the civilian harm, legal scholars say. It’s considered a high bar to clear, and causing excessive suffering to civilians can constitute a war crime.
While it looks like both sides in this war are willing to strike civilian infrastructure, the United States should be trying to take the high road (the one without war crimes). And if it can’t be bothered to do that, the administration should — at the very least — try to keep the president from publicly saying we’re going to commit war crimes.
But, alas, there’s no one willing to stop him. Pete Hegseth is definitely relishing his unearned role as the Secretary of Defense (“Back to the Stone Age.”) And he appears to be firing anyone who disagrees with things like drone-killing people in international waters and, you know, engaging in war crimes.
Shamefully, they won’t see a drop in support despite Trump threatening war crimes, dropping an F-bomb, and promising to send people halfway around the world to hell, as if he were a god himself. And that’s a damning indictment of an entire segment of Americans who choose to treat their religion as a weapon and want the world to be remade in their own image — something they often accuse Muslims of doing. The irony is lost on them, along with the man they’ve chosen to treat as God’s appointed leader.
We’ve had a lot of low points as a nation, but usually we’ve at least tried to improve. That’s no longer the case. We’re under the rule of people who debase and abuse the nation they claim to love. Happy Fuckin’ Easter, you crazy bastards. Welcome to Hell.
Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.
Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”
Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.
The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.
The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.
Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.
The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.
By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.
“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.
Spike in Strikes
Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.
Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”
In 2015, twodozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.
“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.
A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.
Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.
In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.
Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.
During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.
“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.
The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.
A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”
Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involvingboat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.
Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.
At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.
Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.
Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.
To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.
“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”
Reforms Unraveled
As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.
At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”
When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”
Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.
The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.
A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”
At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”
By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.
Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.
Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.
Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.
“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.
Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”
Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.
“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.
After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.
“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”
In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.
Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.
CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.
One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.
“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.
Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”
“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”
Now that congressional members on both sides of the aisle have decided it might be worth taking a look at the Defense Department’s “murder people in boats” program, we’re finally learning more than the Trump administration has been willing to share about these extrajudicial killings.
The administration’s lawyers have cobbled together justifications for these actions — OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) memos that rely heavily on claims that trafficking drugs (whether or not those drugs ever end up in the United States) is the same thing as engaging in a conventional war against the US government and its citizens.
All that’s really happening is this: the US military is sinking boats in international waters it claims are loaded with drugs. That alone would be horrific enough, especially since drug interdiction processes have historically always involved the seizure of alleged drug boats and their occupants, not justified-after-the-fact drone strikes.
Most legal experts believe these actions are illegal. No court has ruled otherwise, which means Trump will keep doing them until (and, most likely, after) they’ve been found to be illegal.
One recent boat strike has not only undercut the Trump administration’s justifications for these attacks, but has exposed the ruling party as bloodthirsty thugs willing to cross the line into war crimes just because it can.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the U.S. military on Sept. 2 to kill all 11 people on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea because they were on an internal list of narco-terrorists who U.S. intelligence and military officials determined could be lethally targeted, the commander overseeing the operation told lawmakers in briefings this past week, according to two U.S. officials and one person familiar with the congressional briefings.
[…]
The detail that the 11 people on the boat were on an internal U.S. military target list has not previously been made public. It adds another dimension to the Sept. 2 operation that has been mired in controversy over the military’s decision to launch a second strike after the first left two survivors in the water.
It’s that last sentence that’s raising an issue here even Republican representatives are having difficulty defending. The recording of the September boat strike (which has yet to be released to the public) shows two survivors of the first strike clinging to the boat wreckage and waving their arms in hopes of being rescued.
The administration has made a couple of claims about what’s shown in this recording. First, it claims the survivors were waving to their compatriots, hoping to be rescued along with whatever drugs had survived the first strike. It also insists this “waving” is indicative of drug traffickers who wish to remain “in the fight.” In other words, the government is insisting any boat strike survivors who refuse to immediately die are only interested in delivering their drug payload, rather than simply being the byproduct of violent acts: the people who somehow manage to live through a government attack designed to kill them.
For nearly an hour, DoD personnel — including Admiral Bradley — discussed what to do with these impertinent “traffickers” who had somehow survived the initial strike. According to Bradley, he ordered a second strike. When that failed to sink the wreckage the survivors were clinging to, he ordered two more strikes, ceasing his attack only after the boat was sunk and both survivors were definitively dead.
The head of the Defense Department — Pete Hegseth — continues to claim he neither ordered the additional strikes, nor had any knowledge there had been survivors of the first strike. This simply cannot be true given his position and access to boat strike footage. Furthermore, both the administration and Hegseth himself released truncated recordings of this boat strike while bragging about their willingness to engage in extrajudicial killings in international waters.
There’s no reason to believe this boat strike program is legal. Pretty much everyone outside of the administration and Trump’s MAGA gravitational pull have stated as much. The administration itself is still struggling to generate legal rationale for these strikes. What it has produced so far is just as incoherent as its defense of this “double tap” attack that targeted shipwreck survivors, including its absurd claim that the less threatening these alleged traffickers appear to be, the more the administration is justified in killing them and removed the obligation for Trump to approach Congress to ask permission to continue the extrajudicial killings.
It is considered a war crime to kill shipwrecked people, which the Pentagon’s law of war manual defines as people “in need of assistance and care” who “must refrain from any hostile act.” Although most Republicans have signaled support for President Donald Trump’s broader military campaign in the Caribbean, the secondary strike on September 2 has drawn bipartisan scrutiny — including, most consequentially, a vow from the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct oversight.
While the laws surrounding the executive branch deployment of military force have been significantly diluted since 2001 (the current Authorization of Use of Military Force [AUMF] is still in effect, 25 years later but was only supposed to be in response to terrorists connect to the 9/11 attacks), the administration can’t simply wave awayliteral war crimes by claiming people just trying to survive the sinking of their boat constituted a clear and present threat to the United States that demanded three additional US military strikes to ensure they were dead and their boat was completely destroyed.
And if you still think none of the above is persuasive, there’s also this fact: the boat hit by four military strikes wasn’t even headed towards the United States. It was headed to another South American country that usually serves as a transport point for drugs headed away from the US.
The alleged drug traffickers killed by the US military in a strike on September 2 were heading to link up with another, larger vessel that was bound for Suriname — a small South American country east of Venezuela – the admiral who oversaw the operation told lawmakers on Thursday, according to two sources with direct knowledge of his remarks.
[…]
US drug enforcement officials say that trafficking routes via Suriname are primarily destined for European markets. US-bound drug trafficking routes have been concentrated on the Pacific Ocean in recent years.
It’s immediately apparent that this boat strike program has nothing to do with deterring trafficking and everything to do with the administration’s desire to destroy anything and anyone coming from countries south of our southern border. I mean, it’s already made it clear it won’t prosecute military troops or officials for engaging in illegal activities related to its boat strike program.
With that deterrent removed, the only constraint left is the consciences of those asked to carry out the administration’s orders. And anyone with a functional sense of right and wrong will find themselves out of a job during the next Trump administration purge cycle until there’s no one left to refuse to do Trump’s dirty work.
You know this is a spectacle, right? A show. That’s what it is. A performance for social media. With blood.
Pete Hegseth just ordered the twenty-first strike on a suspected drug boat. Three more bodies. Another video posted to X showing a vessel bursting into flames. “Three male narco-terrorists” dead, the military announces. No trial. No evidence presented. No due process. Just boats exploding on camera and bodies labeled terrorists because the Department of Defense says so.
This is governance as content creation. TikTok foreign policy. Snackable clips of military strikes designed for engagement metrics while everything that actually matters falls apart around us.
Blowing up drug-running boats in the Caribbean isn’t going to stop the flow of drugs into America. Everyone knows this. The drugs will keep coming—they always do, they always have. Different boats, different routes, same product reaching the same streets. This isn’t policy designed to solve problems. This is spectacle designed to produce feelings. The feeling that someone strong is doing strong things. The feeling that enemies are being punished. The feeling that something is being done even as nothing actually changes.
But it is illegal. Under United States law and international law. The rule of law is being killed alongside these men in these boats. Admiral Alvin Holsey—the four-star admiral overseeing these operations—resigned because the boats weren’t showing immediate hostile intent. Colombia says we’re killing their fishermen. Ecuador released survivors for lack of evidence. Congress hasn’t authorized any of this. The Constitution hasn’t been consulted. Just Hegseth ordering strikes and posting videos while the legal framework that makes civilization possible burns alongside the boats.
So they can post it on X. So they can show you what an amazing job they’re doing. While your prices rise. While the Epstein files document twenty thousand pages of connections that cannot be explained away. While the artificial intelligence market bubble exhausts its last breaths of irrational exuberance. While American citizens are illegally detained by masked federal agents and some have been shot. This is a show for social media.
Twenty-one strikes now. How many bodies for the algorithm? How many “narco-terrorists” killed without trial before someone asks to see evidence? How many boats exploding on camera before Congress remembers it’s supposed to authorize military action? The carrier arrives tomorrow. Fifteen thousand troops ready. And still no authorization. Still no debate. Just Trump saying he’s “sort of made up my mind” while Hegseth produces content.
This is what authoritarian governance looks like in the age of engagement metrics. The policy is the spectacle. The spectacle is the policy. You’re not supposed to ask whether it works. You’re supposed to watch the boats explode and feel like winning is happening. You’re supposed to see bodies labeled terrorists and feel safer. You’re supposed to consume the content and move on to the next post before you have time to ask: Where’s the evidence? Where’s the legal authority? Where’s Congress? What is this actually accomplishing besides producing clips for social media?
The boats keep exploding. The videos keep posting. The body count keeps rising. And while you watch the performance, Trump’s Epstein connections sit in those twenty thousand pages. While you debate whether the targets were really terrorists, American citizens are detained without warrants. While you argue about drugs, the Constitution collects dust and admirals resign in protest and the rule of law dies with every strike that produces another video for posting.
This is governance for the algorithm. Bodies for engagement. Military action as content strategy. Twenty-one strikes. The carrier arrives tomorrow. Eighty people dead in undeclared war. Congress silent. The Constitution ignored. Admirals resigning. The rule of law burning.
For fucking TikTok.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Remember when government officials discussing sensitive information over unsecured channels was treated as a national crisis worthy of endless investigations? Apparently, those days are over. While Hillary Clinton’s email server spawned years of investigations and Attorney General Pam Bondi is still trying to rehash it, the White House wants us to simply forget about top officials planning potential war crimes over Signal just last week.
The contrast is striking. Clinton’s email server triggered multiple congressional investigations, FBI probes, and years of lawsuits. Yet when it comes to senior officials casually discussing military targeting plans over a consumer messaging app, we’re told there’s nothing more to see here.
And this isn’t just about partisan hypocrisy from the “lock her up” crowd, though that’s certainly on display. This is about national security officials casually planning military operations over a consumer messaging app — operations that may constitute war crimes in their targeting of civilian objects. The only reason we even know about this massive security breach is their stunning incompetence in adding Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to their illegal chat group.
Even some top Republicans recognize this deserves serious investigation. But the White House has other plans.
The White House’s response? A dismissive wave of the hand and a “case closed” declaration from press secretary Karoline Leavitt:
“This case has been closed here at the White House as far as we are concerned,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday.“There have been steps made to ensure that something like that can obviously never happen again, and we’re moving forward,” she said.
And much of the media seems content to simply parrot this talking point:
Let’s be clear: uncritically reporting the White House’s “nothing to see here” stance isn’t journalism — it’s stenography. The press secretary’s statement isn’t just meaningless, it’s an active attempt to sweep serious actual violations under the rug.
This White House’s strategy is clear: lie, mislead, and deflect until the story dies. We’ve seen it with Bondi’s desperate “but her emails” deflection last week, and we’re seeing it again with this premature “case closed” declaration.
But there are plenty of things in this story that require investigation:
How did multiple senior officials decide it was totally acceptable to plan military operations over a consumer messaging app?
What other sensitive discussions have happened on unsecured channels such as Signal?
Have these conversations been recorded, as required under the Federal Records Act?
Have other illegal commercial chats been scrubbed to see how many outsiders were allowed in to them like Goldberg was?
How did they fuck up so badly to add an external person (incredibly, a reporter) to this illegal chat?
Who approved targeting civilian infrastructure, and what was their legal justification?
What “steps have been made” to prevent this from happening again, and why should we trust them?
The media’s job isn’t to parrot White House talking points — it’s to uncover the truth. And the truth here is explosive: top government officials casually planned what appear to be war crimes over an unsecured channel, and we only know about it because they accidentally included a journalist in their illegal discussions.
If the White House (and Congress) won’t investigate, then the media must. The administration clearly doesn’t care if we know they’re wielding national security laws as political weapons while ignoring actual security breaches. But the public should care deeply about this cynical abuse of power. When national security becomes just another partisan cudgel, we’re not just undermining the rule of law — we’re creating a system where real threats to national security go uninvestigated while manufactured scandals consume years of attention and resources.
When the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed this week that senior White House officials had accidentally added him to their Yemen bombing planning session on Signal, he did something remarkable: he actually protected operational security better than the officials themselves did.
While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others now insist “Nobody was texting war plans,” the administration’s frantic response suggests they know they’ve stepped in something worse. Their defense has evolved through four increasingly desperate stages:
Saying that Goldberg is a liar and a sleazy journalist
Claiming that this was just a little mistake, and no big deal
Insisting that no actual classified info was shared and…
Saying that even if it was real (it was), and was a mistake (it was) and classified info was shared (it was) that none of it mattered because the Yemen attack was just great.
It has yet to be explained why, if Goldberg is such a terrible journalist, they then added him to their group chat to plan an attack, but we’ll leave that aside for now.
Part of that response included multiple claims, mainly from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that absolutely no war plans were shared in the chat. Also, many other administration officials swore up and down, including under oath to Congress, that no classified info was shared.
Goldberg and the Atlantic responded by… sharing the remaining messages. First, he notes the vehement denials from the admin:
On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”
Then he proved them all to be liars.
The messages couldn’t be clearer. Details of precise strike timing, delivered just hours before bombs actually dropped, along with specific weapons information — information that anyone with even passing familiarity with classified material (or basic common sense) would recognize as obviously classified. Even Fox News’ own national security reporter noted that every expert she spoke to said, if anything, what Hegseth texted was actually worse than what is commonly referred to as “war plans.”
The key bit from that:
“Attack orders” or “attack sequence” puts the joint force directly and immediately at risk, according to former senior defense official #1. “It allows the enemy to move the target and increase lethal actions against US forces.”
This kind of real time operational information is more sensitive than “war plans,” which makes this lapse more egregious, according to two former senior US defense officials.
But rather than acknowledge the obvious, the administration doubled down on increasingly desperate semantic gymnastics. Their primary defense? That the Atlantic’s headline called them “attack” plans rather than “war” plans — as if this distinction somehow negated the sharing of classified military operations in an unsecured chat group that included a journalist. The semantic games only got more desperate from there:
That’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pretending that because The Atlantic called them “Attack Plans” instead of “War Plans” it was some sort of concession, even though (as noted above) experts point out this is worse and more egregious.
We’ve written a few times now about how the administration has been playing cutesy semantic games in court, in which they act like they think playing obvious word games is some sort of magic loophole away from accountability. This is more of that, but to the press. As with courts, no one but the dumbest MAGA faithful are buying this nonsense. THEY STILL WERE PLANNING AN ATTACK INCLUDING CLASSIFIED INFO VIA SIGNAL. The fact that they accidentally added a journalist was only worth noting in the sense that that’s how we know about it. The existence of the Signal chat is the first problem.
Others in the administration really leaned in on this “no war plans” semantic game:
This is again, utter nonsense. It was texting clear details of a military operation before it occurred. It included details of weapons being used and timing. No one — NO ONE — thinks that this is acceptable or normal. Not even this crew now weakly trying to defend it.
But the administration’s semantic tap dance around “war plans” versus “attack plans” isn’t just missing the point — it’s actively trying to distract from something far more serious: evidence of potential war crimes. The Signal chat reveals senior administration officials deliberately targeting a civilian residential building, with full knowledge of its non-military status.
Let that sink in: they authorized bombing a civilian apartment building because a target’s girlfriend lived there. This isn’t just reckless — it’s a likely violation of international humanitarian law, which explicitly prohibits attacks directed at civilian objects. The fact that these officials casually discussed targeting civilian infrastructure in an unsecured chat group — while including a journalist by mistake — demonstrates a shocking combination of moral bankruptcy and operational incompetence.
This reckless disregard for both operational security and international law isn’t just dangerous — it’s potentially criminal. And while the administration tries to deflect with absurd arguments about the difference between “war” and “attack” plans, the reality is that they’ve provided documentary evidence of planning what appears to be a war crime, sharing classified operational details in an unsecured channel, and then lying about it to Congress.
For an administration that campaigned on bringing back competence and accountability to government, they’ve instead demonstrated they can’t be trusted with either classified information or military power.
I think I can state the following without controversy: video games are, by and large, a path for escaping the real world for the sake of entertainment. The idea is that the real world can be a place that we want to get away from, diving into some fantasy world where the same rules don’t apply, our mundane tasks don’t exist, and we can do things digitally that we would never even consider doing in real life. I, for instance, have not even one single time stomped a turtle to death only to pick up its carcass-shell to be thrown at one of my enemies. And yet I’m a fan of the Super Mario Bros. series of games.
The same goes for wargames. Sure, there is value for some in games of war being as realistic as possible. But that isn’t the case for everyone. And, yet, for years now, with several examples, the Red Cross has attempted to inject the IRL rules of war into video games. The idea I suppose is to educate the public about the actualities of real life war in an attempt to force them to realize that IRL war is not a game. But that’s fairly silly. We know it’s not a game. That’s why we spent $60 on a video game instead of signing up for the Marines.
But the Red Cross isn’t going to give this up. Recently it partnered with several streamers on Twitch to get them to play a bunch of war games under fairly strict rules prohibiting their committing any war crimes.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has partnered up with a bunch of Twitch streamers to encourage gamers to not commit war crimes in popular shooters like Call of Duty. The ICRC hopes that its event, “Play by the Rules,” will educate players on the statutes of actual war. The organization has even created its own Fortnite mode to help communicate what those rules are.
“Every day, people play games set in conflict zones right from their couch. But right now, armed conflicts are more prevalent than ever,” the ICRC website said. “And to the people suffering from their effects, this conflict is not a game. It destroys lives and leaves communities devastated. Therefore, we’re challenging you to play FPS by the real Rules of War, to show everyone that even wars have rules—rules which protect humanity on battlefields IRL.”
Look, this is all… fine I guess? In fact, I can see it being mildly interesting for someone who has watched gamers, or played war games myself, conduct themselves in a manner completely outside of those rules, if only to see what these war games look and feel like when you try to adhere to IRL rules of war. Those rules have been whittled down to incorporate the following:
No thirsting (don’t shoot downed/unresponsive enemies)
No targeting non-violent NPCs
No targeting civilian buildings
Use med kits on everyone
Those are certainly rules I want to be followed in IRL wars, even though they rarely are. One need only look at the conflict in Ukraine to know that to be the case.
But as laudable as this IRL rules are, they simply don’t always make sense in a video game setting. Half the fun of these games is, again, doing things you’d never do in real life. Breaking the rules, intentionally or not. Gibbing out a downed enemy to rub it in. Emptying a clip without regard for NPC civilians because all you care about is taking down your human competition.
At some level, the Red Cross has to understand that engaging in all of that in a video game isn’t a war crime; it’s simply entertainment. And no amount of finger-wagging is going to change that.
The NY Times recently published quite a story, sharing videos and text messages of various Navy SEALs who had reported to officials their concerns with Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher. Gallagher was then put on trial for war crimes and mostly acquitted last summer. The one charge he was convicted for resulted in a demotion and a confinement sentence, but President Trump stepped in and reversed that decision, leading to some turmoil within the military, as many leaders were not at all happy about what former Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer (who was fired over all of this) called “shocking and unprecedented interference.” Other long term military officials also found the decision shocking.
The NY Times report shows Navy investigators interviewing a number of Navy SEALs whom Gallagher commanded, revealing some of their concerns about Gallagher, with quite a few striking quotes. For example:
?The guy is freaking evil,? Special Operator Miller told investigators. ?The guy was toxic,? Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. ?You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,? Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
[….]
Asked whether the chief had a bias against Middle Eastern people, Special Operator Scott replied, ?I think he just wants to kill anybody he can.?
There are more quotes in the piece. Gallagher has insisted that the SEALs in his command who reported him were “disgruntled” SEALs who, according to the NY Times report “could not meet his high standards and wanted to force him out.” However, the Times report also reveals text messages between the men as they prepared for this, and it suggested a fairly different story as they repeatedly reminded each other to just tell the truth — and even acknowledged that any embellishment would harm what they were trying to do:
?Tell the truth, don?t lie or embellish,? one sniper who is now in SEAL Team 6 told the others in a group text in 2017, when they first tried to report the chief. ?That way, he can?t say that we slandered him in any way.?
But Tim Parlatore, Gallagher’s lawyer, said the Times “cherry-picked” footage, ignoring his client’s side of the story. “Fake reporting” is how Parlatore described it Friday.
“We’re filing a lawsuit against Dave Philipps,” Parlatore said, referring to The New York Times reporter behind the story.
If that actually comes to pass, it will almost certainly fail. It has all the hallmarks of a SLAPP suit. Philipps’ reporting clearly is showing what these men said about Gallagher. If Gallagher believes they are lying, he could sue them for defamation (also unlikely to succeed), but to sue the reporter for sharing the details seems incredibly cowardly. It looks like little more than an attempt to create a chilling effect and to intimidate others who are reporting on what the men who served with Gallagher have to say.
Of course, without a strong federal anti-SLAPP law, and with many states having very weak anti-SLAPP laws, any such lawsuit could still cause quite a hassle for Philipps. For what it’s worth, Philipps even has a statement from Gallagher in his piece (which is certainly not required, but shows that he did even more due diligence than was necessary to make sure he got Gallagher’s side of the story). Gallagher (and his lawyer) seem to think they can sue over the fact that they don’t like the way that Philipps put the entire piece together and left out some of the things they wanted included:
“I’ve sent him so many things to make sure that he tries to get the story right, and he just willfully ignores it and refuses to print any retractions,” Parlatore said. “… He has really crossed the line on this thing.”
But… that’s not how defamation works at all. You don’t get to dictate what the press says about you. You don’t get to demand that they only cover things the way you want or to portray the facts only in ways that you approve of. It is notable, of course, that not once do Gallagher’s lawyers cite a single factual statement that he says is defamatory. The only argument he makes is that Philipps didn’t do more to highlight that Gallagher was acquitted of all but one of the charges:
The SEALs’ initial claims about Gallagher didn’t hold up in court, Parlatore said, and the Times didn’t do enough to convey that in its coverage….
[….]
“This is the very bedrock of our Constitution, that people have to have the right to face their accuser in court,” Parlatore said. “What Dave Philipps is asking everybody to do is to ignore the fact that Eddie Gallagher exercised his constitutional rights, faced his accusers in court, poked holes in their stories — ignore all of that and go back to the initial videos.”
Except, Philipps’ piece is a news article, not a court of law, so Parlatore’s statement about “the right to face their accuser” is meaningless. The article was about the previously unseen video footage of the folks who were upset about Gallagher actions. And the piece does, in fact, highlight the acquittal, stating:
Chief Gallagher was acquitted by a military jury in July of all but a single relatively minor charge, and was cleared of all punishment in November by Mr. Trump.
And later it quotes Parlatore responding to the videos:
Chief Gallagher?s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said the video interviews were rife with inconsistencies and falsehoods that created ?a clear road map to the acquittal.?
So, uh, what exactly is he complaining about? It’s not defamation. It’s not even leaving stuff out. Because the things he claims were left out are in there. This is bluster and bullshit and if it turns into a lawsuit, it’s one that will end poorly for Gallagher.
A Navy prosecutor last week sent an email to the editor of Navy Times that was embedded with a secret digital tracking device. The tracking device came at a time when the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is mounting an investigation into media leaks surrounding the high-profile court-martial of a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes.
That email, from Navy prosecutor Cmdr. Christopher Czaplak to Navy Times editor Carl Prine, came after several months of Navy Times reporting that raised serious questions about the Navy lawyers’ handling of the prosecution in the war crimes case.
The NCIS claims this is all above-board, which is obviously the case because no one was surprised by the presence of trackers and no one had to issue a statement defending the use of emails containing tracking software. Oh wait. The other thing.
The reporter was more than surprised the prosecutor decided to engage in his own leak investigation to track the source of information covered by a protective order. The prosecutor’s employer, the US fucking government, explained via a spokesman that this tracking software was not “malware” or a “virus” and does nothing more than send IP addresses back to the NCIS home base. This is apparently supposed to make this OK.
But how OK is it really? Not very, it would appear. Not only does the use of this NIT violate a handful of laws, it also plays havoc with a handful of protections, Constitutional and otherwise.
The Navy email to Navy Times contained hidden computer coding designed to extract the IP address of the Navy Times computer network and to send that information back to a server located in San Diego. Under U.S. criminal law, authorities normally have to obtain a subpoena or court order to acquire IP addresses or other metadata. Not using one could be a violation of existing privacy laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Defense attorneys involved in the SEALs’ war crimes cases have said that 13 lawyers and paralegals on their team also received emails with a similar tracking device, according to court documents filed by the defense attorneys.
Sure, there’s not much to be gleaned from scraped IP addresses, but it’s possible that’s not all that was picked up by the NCIS’s NIT. It could have gathered email metadata as well, which can be almost as revealing as the content of the emails, especially when prosecutors are looking for sources of leaks.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. Targeting journalists to reveal sources does damage to First Amendment protections. Targeting defense attorneys puts attorney-client confidentiality at risk and strongly suggests the government isn’t interested in a fair trial.
“The conduct of the prosecution is egregious,” said Tim Parlatore, a New York-based attorney, who is among several, including Marc Mukasey, a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team, defending the 39-year-old Gallagher. “(Cmdr.) Chris Czaplak should lose his law license and face criminal charges. He illegally spied on the defense attorneys and the media. The prosecutor needs his own defense attorney.”
The US government continues to downplay this as just a normal thing done in leak investigations. But it isn’t. It targeted journalists and defense attorneys — two parties that definitely shouldn’t be on the receiving end of anything even mildly nefarious originating from government prosecutors. This prosecutor decided the most important thing here wasn’t respecting rights or focusing on the suspect on trial, but rather sniffing out the source of a leak. This doesn’t reflect well on the NCIS and it’s quite possible there’s a benchslap awaiting this prosecutor, if not sanctions and a dismissal.
Just last week, we talked about the new Christchurch Call, and how a bunch of governments and social media companies have made some vague agreements to try to limit and take down “extremist” content. As we pointed out last week, however, there appeared to be little to no exploration by those involved in how such a program might backfire and hide content that is otherwise important.
We’ve been making this point for many, many years, but every time people freak out about “terrorist content” on social media sites and demand that it gets deleted, what really ends up happening is that evidence of war crimes gets deleted as well. This is not an “accident” or such systems misapplied, this is the simple fact that terrorist propaganda often is important evidence of war crimes. It’s things like this that make the idea of the EU’s upcoming Terrorist Content Regulation so destructive. You can’t demand that terrorist propaganda get taken down without also removing important historical evidence.
It appears that more and more people are finally starting to come to grips with this. The Atlantic recently had an article bemoaning the fact that tech companies are deleting evidence of war crimes, highlighting how such videos have actually been really useful in tracking down terrorists, so long as people can watch them before they get deleted.
In July 2017, a video capturing the execution of 18 people appeared on Facebook. The clip opened with a half-dozen armed men presiding over several rows of detainees. Dressed in bright-orange jumpsuits and black hoods, the captives knelt in the gravel, hands tied behind their back. They never saw what was coming. The gunmen raised their weapons and fired, and the first row of victims crumpled to the earth. The executioners repeated this act four times, following the orders of a confident young man dressed in a black cap and camouflage trousers. If you slowed the video down frame by frame, you could see that his black T-shirt bore the logo of the Al-Saiqa Brigade, an elite unit of the Libyan National Army. That was clue No. 1: This happened in Libya.
Facebook took down the bloody video, whose source has yet to be conclusively determined, shortly after it surfaced. But it existed online long enough for copies to spread to other social-networking sites. Independently, human-rights activists, prosecutors, and other internet users in multiple countries scoured the clip for clues and soon established that the killings had occurred on the outskirts of Benghazi. The ringleader, these investigators concluded, was Mahmoud Mustafa Busayf al-Werfalli, an Al-Saiqa commander. Within a month, the International Criminal Court had charged Werfalli with the murder of 33 people in seven separate incidents?from June 2016 to the July 2017 killings that landed on Facebook. In the ICC arrest warrant, prosecutors relied heavily on digital evidence collected from social-media sites.
The article notes, accurately, that this whole situation is kind of a mess. Governments (and some others in the media and elsewhere) are out there screaming about “terrorist content” online, but pushing companies to take it all down is having the secondary impact of both deleting that evidence from existence and making it that much more difficult to find those terrorists.n And when people raise this concern, they’re mostly being ignored:
These concerns are being drowned out by a counterargument, this one from governments, that tech companies should clamp down harder. Authoritarian countries routinely impose social-media blackouts during national crises, as Sri Lanka did after the Easter-morning terror bombings and as Venezuela did during the May 1 uprising. But politicians in healthy democracies are pressing social networks for round-the-clock controls in an effort to protect impressionable minds from violent content that could radicalize them. If these platforms fail to comply, they could face hefty fines and even jail time for their executives.
As the article notes, the companies rush to appease governments demanding such content get taken down has already made the job of those open source researchers much more difficult, and actually helped to hide more terrorists:
Khatib, at the Syrian Archive, said the rise of machine-learning algorithms has made his job far more difficult in recent months. But the push for more filters continues. (As a Brussels-based digital-rights lobbyist in a separate conversation deadpanned, ?Filters are the new black, essentially.?) The EU?s online-terrorism bill, Khatib noted, sends the message that sweeping unsavory content under the rug is okay; the social-media platforms will see to it that nobody sees it. He fears the unintended consequences of such a law?that in cracking down on content that?s deemed off-limits in the West, it could have ripple effects that make life even harder for those residing in repressive societies, or worse, in war zones. Any further crackdown on what people can share online, he said, ?would definitely be a gift for all authoritarian regimes. It would be a gift for Assad.?
Of course, this is no surprise. We see this in lots of contexts. For example, the focus on going after platforms for sex trafficking with FOSTA stopped the ability of police to help find actual traffickers and victims by hiding that material from view. Indeed, just this week, a guy was sentenced for sex trafficking a teenager, and the way he was found was via Backpage.
This is really the larger point we’ve been trying to make for the better part of two decades. Focusing on putting liability and control on the intermediary may seem like the “easiest” solution to the fact that there is “bad” content online, but it creates all sorts of downstream effects that we might not like at all. It’s reasonable to say that we don’t want terrorists to be able to easily recruit new individuals to their cause, but if that makes it harder to stop actual terrorism, shouldn’t we be analyzing the trade-offs there? To date, that almost never happens. Instead, we get the form of a moral panic: this content is bad, therefore we need to stop this content, and the only way to do that is to make the platforms liable for it. That assumes — often incorrectly — a few different things, including the idea that magically disappearing the content makes the activity behind it go away. Instead, as this article notes, it often does the opposite and makes it more difficult for officials and law enforcement to track down those actually responsible.
It really is a question of whether or not we want to be able to address the underlying problem (those actually doing bad stuff) or sweep it under the rug by deleting it and pretending it doesn’t happen. All of the efforts to put the liability on intermediaries really turns into an effort to sweep the bad stuff under the rug, to look the other way and pretend if we can’t find it on a major platform, that it’s not really happening.
