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Why Congress Must Investigate Trump's Lies About The Hernandez Pardon

To ordinary MAGA voters in the American heartland — who may have witnessed the ravages of narcotics up close in their own families — the recent conduct of their favorite president must be troubling. While they may not know all the details, many have heard by now that President Donald Trump ordered deadly missile strikes against boats suspected of transporting drugs to the United States from Venezuela — and that he simultaneously pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduran president serving 45 years in an American prison for trafficking tons of cocaine to our shores.

Even Fox News commentators have noticed a contradiction between Trump's wanton killing of alleged drug smugglers and his merciful beneficence toward the ex-boss of the biggest narco-state in the hemisphere. Yet Trump lapdogs in the right-wing media have tastefully refrained from examining exactly how this strange juxtaposition occurred, or the real reasons behind his actions.

So far, neither Trump himself nor Pete Hegseth, his self-styled secretary of war, have provided any evidence that the boats blown apart in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific were transporting cocaine, fentanyl or any other narcotics — or that the people killed aboard them had committed any crimes at all. To label these attacks as "war crimes" when we have no declared hostilities with any state in the region is to elevate them above incidents of piracy and murder, which they in fact appear to be.

And while polls show that many Americans would like to see proof of White House assertions about the boat strikes, even including Congressional Republicans, too many Americans are content to see distant and foreign individuals' rights violated in the name of "fighting drugs."

Yet if Trump wants to fight drug smuggling, why did he pardon and release a convicted gangster like Hernandez, whose crimes range from election tampering and official corruption to trafficking and murder? Well, Trump and his minions — including the pardoned MAGA felon Roger Stone, who successfully advocated Hernandez's release — insist that he was a victim of "lawfare" by the Biden administration.

Indeed, Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Biden Justice Department treated Hernandez "very unfairly," without specifying how exactly he was wronged, and further explained that "many people" had urged him to issue the pardon because the prosecution was a "horrible witch hunt."

Trump's account, echoing Stone, reflects precisely none of the known facts concerning the felonious Hernandez. Not long before his indictment, his brother Juan Antonio (Tony) Hernandez, a former Honduran congressman, was convicted in a massive cocaine trafficking conspiracy. Among the charges against brother Tony, aside from assorted assassinations, was accepting a million-dollar bribe — on behalf of his presidential sibling — from kingpin Joaquin Guzman, better known as "El Chapo." Nobody has suggested pardoning Tony yet.

Perhaps that's because Tony's indictment was brought during the first Trump administration, with a prosecution team led by Emil Bove III, who represented Trump himself in private practice and was lately appointed to a lifetime position on the federal bench by his former client after serving several months in a top Justice Department position.

The enormous trove of evidence against both Juan Orlando Hernandez and his brother extended far beyond the testimony of the drug lords, killers and thugs who had sponsored their political careers. Verified exhibits included ledgers kept by the traffickers with entries of payoffs and drug transactions with "JOH," identified as Hernandez by his initials; taped phone calls and other data that discussed cash payments to him in exchange for his protection of drug routes; plus photo albums of Hernandez with cartel leaders at soccer games and other events.

To believe Trump's fantasy version is to discount all the evidence compiled by his trusted attorney Bove — and to assume that the Republican judges who oversaw the indictments and prosecutions were all somehow corrupted by former President Joe Biden. The hard truth is that Biden and the State Department in his administration coddled Hernandez, just as previous U.S. presidents had tolerated Honduran corruption for "geopolitical" reasons. There was no persecution or witch hunt.

So why did Trump pardon Hernandez? The right-wing narco boss had powerful friends close to the U.S. president, far more powerful than the loudmouthed gadfly Stone. Top industrial and tech leaders, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and oil baron Kelcy Warren, all major Trump donors, have major interests in Honduras that benefit from Hernandez's National Party political machine.

It is a shadowy network that merits much deeper scrutiny — and possibly a congressional investigation when responsible and honest leadership returns to power.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).

Reprinted with permission from Creators

'Vampire Billionaire' Peter Thiel Says Pope Leo May Be The Antichrist

Shortly after American-born Robert Prevost was elected Pope, J.D. Vance and his wife stopped in to visit with the new pontiff.

In addition to a Chicago Bears shirt, Vance brought the American Pope two books by St. Augustine. This gift represented a bond between the two men: Vance chose St. Augustine as his patron saint when he converted to Catholicism, and the Pope was previously head of the worldwide Augustinian order.

It's an open question whether Vance ever read either of the books, since Augustine spends a good amount of time lecturing against pride, encouraging humility, and preaching compassion for immigrants. But even assuming Vance still somehow clings to a highly selective edit of the saint ("An unjust law is no law at all," means Vance can do anything he wants, right?), it looks like he's going to have to denounce the guy in the big hat.

Because Vance's vampire boss says the Pope may be the Antichrist.

Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel is probably best known for three things: Company names stolen from The Lord of the Rings, trying to drain the blood of young people so he can live forever, and foisting J.D. Vance on America. But there's another side to Thiel.

He's not just a technofascist seeking to build an AI-fueled authoritarian surveillance state. He's also an absolutely bonkers pseudo-religious nutcase who views everyone who stands in his way as an agent of ... Satan. And that includes the Pope.Thiel has hosted a series of lectures for a very select audience in which he's warned that the Antichrist—harbinger of the apocalypse—is in the world today, making trouble for all the good little AI billionaires. Tickets for these events generally start at $200, so it's safe to say that most of those attending are already fairly well off. (Or they're looking for someone to fund their Senate campaign.)

In those lectures, Thiel puts his finger on some very suspect people. People like Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, other environmental activists, AI safety advocate Eliezer Yudkowsky, anyone else who suggests regulating AIs before they destroy humanity, and people who are worried about nuclear war.

Yes, according to Thiel, trying to prevent nuclear armageddon means you are also a potential Antichrist.

Thiel's view of the Antichrist “is that of an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times”. It's worth pointing out that, no matter how many times this idea may have appeared in conservative rhetoric or sweaty tent revivals, this is a profoundly unbiblical concept.

Several times in the Greek versions of the gospels, there are mentions of someone being "antikhristos," which is exactly what it sounds like: opposed to Jesus and his teaching. Another term, "pseudokhristos," is used to describe people who spread statements falsely attributed to Jesus. In both cases, these terms are applied, not to a particular individual, but to anyone seen as interfering with the message of Christ.

The idea that the Antichrist is an evil potentate who will usher in the end of the world was created after everyone involved with the Gospels was long dead. It's the vision of a 10th-century French monk, Adso of Montier-en-Der, who compiled centuries of speculation to turn an adjective into a title. In the process, he created an antagonist who has been beloved of poor biblical scholars ever since.While many people quickly adopted the concept, most of Adso's biography of the Antichrist has been conveniently discarded. He was supposed to be Jewish, born in Babylon, and to rule the world from a throne in Jerusalem. But all that stuff gets in the way of lots of fun speculation and flinging an Antichrist label onto anyone you hate.

The Antichrist is also supposed to be empowered to perform all sorts of miracles and be capable of resurrecting the dead. So if a 22-year-old Swedish woman best known for shouting environmental concerns into a microphone is secretly the Antichrist, she's been seriously holding back.

Thiel's Antichrist obsession goes back to at least the 1990s and borrows themes from French-American philosopher René Girard to posit that the left is intrinsically anti-Christian and the natural home for the Antichrist. There's already plenty to object to in how Girard's "mimetic" philosophy has been interpreted and applied. But he has enough hold on conservative Catholics that Thiel, who is not a Catholic (because Pope Francis was also too woke for his taste), has been invited to do his anyone-who-opposes-me-is-Satan dance at multiple conservative Catholic venues, including The Catholic University of America.

Somewhere in his decades of studying a figure that never existed, Thiel's views took a decidedly peculiar twist. He can't seem to distinguish between technology and God. As The Washington Post reported, Thiel's lectures have only grown more "intense" over recent months.

... recordings offer new detail about how the billionaire seems to place those who would critique or regulate tech developers into a religious good-vs.-evil worldview, where the future of all creation depends on giving innovators free rein.

As Wired reported in September, Thiel also has some very odd notions of what's good and what's evil. He doesn't just draw his thinking from Girard. He also frequently quotes Nazi attorney Carl Schmitt.

You know you live in strange times when one of the most influential billionaires in the world—an investor who lit the financial fuses on both Facebook and the AI revolution, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir and launched the career of an American vice president—starts dedicating his public appearances primarily to a set of ideas about Armageddon borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist. (As in: the guy who rapidly published the most prominent defense of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives.)

That Nazi is a big part of Thiel’s philosophy. According to Thiel, anyone who raises doubts about the benefits of new technologies is evil. And anyone who tries to generate unity is suspect. That makes a climate campaigner like Thunberg a potential Antichrist and every international climate agreement the work of the devil. Ditto for those cautioning against AI advancement and even those who have worked to oppose nuclear weapons.

But defending Nazi attacks on Jews? For Thiel, that sounds like someone with a lot of good ideas. Right on target for a billionaire who has also declared that democracy and freedom are "not compatible.”

So maybe it's not so strange that the vampire billionaire of the apocalypse has found a new potential Antichrist hiding under a big pointy white hat. Thiel has reportedly warned J.D. Vance about getting too close to "the woke American Pope" and fumed that Leo may actually be ... the A-word.

This warning appears to have come after Pope Leo cautioned AI developers "to ensure that emerging technologies remain rooted in respect for human dignity and the common good." The Pope also warned students against using AI to do their homework.

“AI can process information quickly, but it cannot replace human intelligence,” he said. “And don’t ask it to do your homework for you. It cannot offer real wisdom. It misses a very important human element.”

Them're definitely fighting words for Thiel. And he's taking the fight right to the man he installed as America's second-in-command in a way that hasn't gone unnoticed by Catholics who don't source their opinions from Nazi Germany.

Let that sink in: the main backer of the likely GOP nominee for president is accusing the Bishop of Rome of being an agent of the end times — and telling Vice President Vance to disregard the pope’s moral guidance.

For most of the billionaires hurtling the world toward AI destruction, fame and money are sufficient cause to light humanity's last bonfire of the vanities. For Thiel, this is a religious fight. Will we have the evil that comes with peace and environmental reform, or will we enjoy God's bounty of unregulated pollution and unchecked AI?

Either way, Thiel plans to be here to see how it turns out. If he can keep filling his veins with fresh, young blood.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Real Men Burn Stuff! Trump's Stupid War On Renewable Energy

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” That famous 2011 quip from the venture capitalist Peter Thiel still resonates, even though Thiel himself has become a deeply malignant force in American politics. I’ll write soon about the madness of the Trumpist tech bros, but for today let me focus on Thiel’s original insight — that everyone, venture capitalists included, had come to focus far too much on digital technology, neglecting the possibilities of breakthroughs in technologies that deal with the physical world.

Yet here’s the irony: In the years since Thiel’s lament we have, in fact, seen revolutionary progress in one fundamental physical-world technology, energy production. Yet the people Thiel and his buddies helped put in power are doing all they can to reverse that progress and send America back into the energy Dark Ages.

Most critiques of the One Big Beautiful Bill have focused on the way it explodes the budget deficit while imposing immense hardship on lower-income Americans. Yet energy policy is also an important component of the OBBB, which basically tries to roll back the rise of solar and wind power — sources that have accounted for more than half the worldwide increase in electricity generation since 2015.

To understand how self-destructive that effort is, you need to know three things about the economics of renewable energy.

First, there are powerful environmental reasons to favor renewables over fossil fuels where possible. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the most important, because climate change is an existential threat. But even aside from climate concerns, the air pollution created by burning fossil fuels takes a major toll on health and productivity, which solar and wind don’t.

Second, a transition to renewables, which might have seemed like pie-in-the-sky, hippy-dippy stuff a generation ago, is now not just feasible but the only sensible energy strategy. Here’s a chart showing estimates of the levelized cost of electricity generation (LCOE), adjusted for inflation, for a variety of renewable energy technologies, compared with the costs of power from fossil fuels. I’m aware that LCOE is an imperfect measure, but the results are still astonishing:

We’re talking in particular about a 90 percent decline in the real cost of power from solar panels and a 70 percent decline in the cost of wind power. This isn’t just progress, it’s a revolution.

And — my third point — the revolution isn’t over. Some technological leaps involve one big idea, which takes time to implement but is basically a once-and-done deal — which seems to be the case, to take an example I’ve studied, for freight containerization. Progress in renewable energy, however, has involved a continual process of “learning by doing,” in which efficiency keeps rising and costs falling as the industry expands. This is exactly the kind of situation in which government subsidies — like the clean-energy tax credits instituted by the Biden administration — can accelerate progress and boost overall economic growth.

But the OBBB killed those tax credits. And the Trump administration has been taking executive action to stall renewable development, for example, by halting federal approvals for wind farms. In general, MAGA clearly wants to move us back to burning gas, oil and above all coal. Why?

Campaign contributions no doubt play a role. Fossil fuel industries donate almost exclusively to Republicans. But renewables are also big business these days, and especially in red states. Texas, in particular, is by far the nation’s largest producer of wind power and gets a larger share of its electricity from renewables than any other state. Why would the G.O.P. want to demolish a key pillar of economic success in its biggest source of electoral votes?

Honestly, I think this is a case where the usual logic of money-driven policy is trumped (Trumped?) by irrational, psychological — you might even say psychosexual — issues.

We know that Trump himself has a weird thing against wind power, insisting that wind turbines massacre birds and kill whales. This appears to stem from the refusal of the Scottish government to cancel an offshore wind farm he thought ruined the view from one of his golf courses.

But it’s not just Trump. There is, it turns out, a strong link between the manosphere — the online movement promoting “masculinity,” misogyny and opposition to feminism — and anti-environmentalism. For example, in 2023 Jordan Peterson convened a high-profile conference to declare that concerns about climate change are a “conspiracy run by narcissistic poseurs.”

If you think about it, this makes sense — not intellectually but emotionally. Don’t concern about the environment and advocacy of “clean energy” sound kind of, well, feminine? Real men burn stuff and don’t worry if the process is dirty.

And manosphere-type attitudes are clearly widespread in MAGA. One of the main arguments Trump officials and supporters have made for tariffs is that they will bring back “manly” jobs in manufacturing. (They won’t, but that’s another story.) The same notion underlies the doomed attempt to revive the coal industry.

But here’s the thing: MAGA and the manosphere may hate clean energy, but they won’t be able to stop the rise of renewables. All they can do, possibly, is stop the rise of renewables in the United States. Other nations, China in particular, are making huge investments in wind and solar power, because they understand what Trump and his allies refuse to acknowledge — that this is the only way forward.

So while MAGA’s attempt to strangle clean energy will increase the risks of global climate catastrophe, it will also increase the risks of U.S. economic stagnation, forcing our nation to remain wedded to obsolete energy technologies while other countries march into the future.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

When Republicans Warn Us About Their Ruinous Agenda, Better Believe Them

It’s a lesson that we all should have learned many years ago: When Republicans tell you what they mean to inflict on you and your family, better believe them.

The most painful example in recent years of the public’s failure to comprehend what was coming -- despite dozens of announcements -- is the Republican right's successful assault on reproductive freedom. Donald Trump loudly and repeatedly promised a majority of Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, as did the Republican senators who confirmed them. And still many Americans seemed to be surprised when the high court ripped down principle and precedent to undo that fundamental right.

Now, in the final days of this election campaign, we are hearing from Republicans (and their billionaire masters) what they plan to do if Trump returns to the White House. They have a sweeping agenda to impoverish the middle class while pursuing power and privilege for themselves.

House Speaker Mike Johnson just issued a clear warning that they still yearn to cripple America's health care system in the name of their "free market" utopia. While he and Trump both deny that they will try again (for the 62^nd time!) to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Johnson vowed that “health care is going to be a big part of the agenda” should Republicans win – and that their aim will be “massive reform” that “takes a blowtorch to the regulatory state.” This blather portends the end of the reforms that protect people with pre-existing conditions and allow the young to get coverage on their family’s insurance until age 26. Neither those nor other crucial ACA protections would survive those massive changes that neither Trump nor Johnson will specify before the election.

And that’s merely the opening gambit in the Trump Republican scheme to ruin their fellow Americans.

The far-right financiers surrounding Trump have realized that his obsession with tariffs can be repurposed to line their own pockets – so they’re suddenly eager to abandon the principles of free trade they once cherished. For billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the tariff scheme is attractive simply as a form of regressive taxation, siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars from ordinary consumers in the form of far higher prices. Those tariff revenues could replace the proceeds of the progressive income tax – which the rich hate to pay -- while shifting the burden onto middle-class and poor families.

But Musk has even more nasty surprises in store, as he recently suggested on his X social media platform. He has invested vast sums – upward of $75 million or more – in Trump’s campaign, for which he expects to be named reichsmarshall of "government efficiency,” with unaccountable power to slash programs and fire employees. The world’ richest man breezily advised middle-class Americans that we should expect to suffer “hardship” in the early days of a Trump presidency, owing to the enormous cuts and layoffs he will dictate. (Of course he also promises a “sustained recovery” in the wake of economic disaster, although historically that isn’t how things work out under Republican administrations. You can look it up.)

According to Musk, his objective in a Trump regime would be to cut $2 trillion from future spending – even as Trump has promises trillions more in tax cuts for the billionaires. How does that math work? It doesn’t work at all unless, as J.D. Vance recently confided to a podcast host, Musk’s “government efficiency commission” sharply reduces Social Security and Medicare payments. “I’ve spoken with Elon a little bit about [the task force],” said the Republican vice presidential nominee. “And the thing that’s complicated about this, man, is it’s going to look much different in, say, the Department of Defense versus Social Security.”

We know Trump won’t cut defense spending, which he has always sought to increase with his Space Force and other boondoggles. The only alternative will be enormous cuts in Social Security and Medicare, which account for about $2 trillion in spending annually.

Optimists may imagine that Musk, who no doubt considers himself a “stable genius,” will come up with new ways to save trillions without harming the American people or the economy. Unfortunately his record as an executive is not reassuring. Upon purchasing Twitter (later renamed “X”), he dismissed about 80 percent of the staff and turned the site into a haven for neo-Nazis and the other extremists and conspiracy theories he apparently admires. The company's market value has never recovered and his investment has roughly the same value as if he had put a blowtorch to $44 billion in cash.

The truth about Musk as a businessman is that his profits have depended heavily on government subsidies from the beginning.

But that arrangement can still prop him up, so long as he and his cronies control the government. Musk, Thiel and the rest of the MAGA billionaires will tell you they are backing Trump because they want to “kill the woke mind virus” or “protect freedom” or some such cliched piffle. In fact they are driving a campaign to further enrich and empower themselves – and the rest of us are just road kill.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Why Congress Must Investigate Trump's Lies About The Hernandez Pardon

'Vampire Billionaire' Peter Thiel Says Pope Leo May Be The Antichrist

Real Men Burn Stuff! Trump's Stupid War On Renewable Energy

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