I guess Stars and Stripes will be next on the chopping block...
Last edited Tue May 13, 2025, 05:30 PM - Edit history (1)
EDITED to try to include the gist of the article and avoid copyright issues… Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the full article that doesn’t require a paid subscription, which is a shame because this needs to be spread far beyond the weird world of FB and private outlets. *sigh*
D. Earl Stephens, retired managing editor of the military's daily newspaper, Stars and Stripes, issues a warning, not only to the average citizen of the U.S. but, I believe, to rank and file military personnel at home and around the world.
He's exhorting them to consider if they will follow the orders of a madman hell bent on destroying the U.S. or follow the U.S. Constitution. I suspect tens of thousands of troops will disobey orders rather than invade Canada (less so with Greenland or Panama, I suspect). Those will be the first shots of the civil war.
“It would be helpful if we stopped pretending this terrible chapter in American history won’t close without bloodshed …
...
It would be helpful if Americans, and our feeble Democratic politicians in particular, stopped implying by their comatose actions that Democracy is some damn American right and has no end date.
America very well might be arriving at hers, because, yes, it really is that bad right now.
...
We are but six-plus weeks into the repulsive, wannabe-king’s second term and the damage he and his party are causing are already at catastrophic levels.
Our air, water, earned benefits, peace, public safety, civil rights, and human rights are all under immediate threat. Worse? This is only the first course of many that will be served by the vindictive, orange madman, and his pathetic party of supplicants.
The insults, the attacks, endless provocations, and thrashing of our Constitution will continue daily. All this carefully planned evil will be aimed at exactly one thing: breaking us.
Everything he is doing is designed to pound us into submission, and he’s having a grand damn doing it.
…
This country will never be the same, and the sooner we come to grips with that, and start acting accordingly the better.
What would you do if everything you had and everyone you loved was threatened? Would you act like Zelenskyy or Schumer?
The clock is ticking. The bomb is in place.
Which brings me back around to my original premise: At some point, he will do something so heinous … so anti-America … so dangerous … that the people who truly love our country will be forced into the streets to take a life-or-death stand. Sadly, this is actually the best-case scenario, because the worst case is we just go quietly into the dark, gloomy night and become an authoritarian country, where we have zero rights or say in how we are governed.
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And, really, end of the day, it not him who we have most to fear. It’s the stupid, goddam Republicans who are stubbornly in all of our lives. These are the people who have illustrated there is no known pain or sacrifice to our civil liberties or pocketbooks that they won’t absorb just for the satisfaction of watching some poor kid of color going without something they didn’t think she should have.
So the choice is yours: You can continue thinking there is some magical way out of this, or you can begin to take the threat to everything you hold dear seriously, and ACT accordingly.”
— D. Earl Stephens, author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes.
https://dearlstephens.substack.com/p/there-will-be-blood