What Happened Today - 18 Dec 2025
What Happened Today – 18 December 2025
Flags at half‑mast in 6 states
Coast Guard swastikas mess
DC National Guard court ruling
AI data centers and Bernie’s energy/water alarms
Jack Smith’s hearing yesterday
Bongino: done at FBI
FCC testimony clown show
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Flags at half‑mast in 6 states
Right now you’ve got a patchwork of grief and politics showing up as flags at half‑staff across multiple states, and it’s all for different reasons that say a lot about where the country’s at. Several states are lowering flags for the Brown University shooting and related victims, while others are doing it for fallen Guard members and dead politicians. Newsweek’s latest tally has flags down in places like Iowa, Rhode Island, Tennessee, West Virginia and others around that same cluster of events, mostly tied to the Brown campus shooting, Guard deaths in Syria, and a former Tennessee lawmaker’s death.
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Heritage board resignations over Fuentes/Carlson
Heritage is in open civil war over Tucker Carlson deciding that giving a cozy platform to Nick “literal pro‑Hitler” Fuentes is just fine. Two more trustees, Shane McCullar and Abby Spencer Moffat, walked this week, both basically saying they’re done lending their reputations to an institution that can’t even bring itself to clearly reject this fascist garbage. They’re the second and third to bail after Robert George already left over the same mess, and their resignation letters are basically a eulogy for whatever “respectable conservative” brand Heritage pretended to have.
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Coast Guard swastikas mess
The Coast Guard managed to step on every possible rake at once over swastikas and nooses. An internal harassment-policy rewrite quietly downgraded them from straight‑up hate symbols to “potentially divisive symbols,” which is deranged even by this administration’s standards. After the Washington Post and others exposed it and members of Congress started breathing down their necks, they scrambled into full damage‑control mode, rushed out a “clarification,” and re‑reclassified swastikas, nooses, Confederate flags, and similar crap as explicitly banned hate symbols again. The acting commandant is now loudly insisting these were “always prohibited” while the paper trail says otherwise.
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DC National Guard court ruling
On the D.C. National Guard front, Trump scored a big legal win this week that basically green‑lights his occupation‑lite posture in the capital. A federal appeals court in D.C. lifted the lower‑court order that would’ve forced him to pull the Guard out and said the deployment can continue while the appeal plays out. The key move from the three‑judge panel is leaning hard on D.C.’s weird status as a federal district, not a state, and signaling that Trump is “likely to succeed” on the core question of whether he can use the Guard there this way. Translation: the court is telling D.C. residents, yet again, that they have fewer rights than people in the states when it comes to federal muscle on their streets.
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AI data centers and Bernie’s energy/water alarms
Bernie Sanders is out here trying to slam the brakes on the AI gold rush by going straight at the data centers powering it. He’s calling for a nationwide moratorium on new AI data centers, arguing that this isn’t just about tech bros making toys but about massive electricity and water usage that regular people end up paying for. He’s pointing at specific mega‑projects: an OpenAI/Oracle facility in Texas projected to draw as much power as hundreds of thousands of homes and a Meta data center in Louisiana that he says could use multiple times the electricity of all of New Orleans, plus enormous water draws. The basic argument is: billionaires are locking in decades of higher bills and more fossil‑fuel generation and drying out communities just so they can sell more AI hype, and he wants Congress to hit pause before the build‑out becomes irreversible.
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Jack Smith’s hearing yesterday
Jack Smith finally got dragged behind closed doors by Jim Jordan and the MAGA crew on House Judiciary, and it did not go the way Trump world wanted. In his testimony, Smith doubled down on the legitimacy of his Trump prosecutions, saying he had “evidence beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump was at the center of a criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election and that there was strong proof Trump knowingly kept classified documents and tried to obstruct justice to hide them. He also made the point that, if faced with the same facts again today, he’d make the same charging decision regardless of party. Republicans wanted a scalp; instead they got him calmly reaffirming that the record still points straight at Trump.
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Bongino: done at FBI
Dan Bongino is bailing out of his short, chaotic stint as FBI deputy director and heading back to the grievance‑media swamp. He’s been quietly cleaning out his office and has now told folks he’s leaving in January after months of drama, including backlash over the Bureau stonewalling further Epstein files and the general sense that he was dropped into a job he wasn’t really built for. Trump brushed it off to reporters by praising him and suggesting Bongino “wants to go back to his show,” which is exactly what this looks like: grab the title, stir up chaos, then cash it back in for content and clout.
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FCC testimony clown show
Over at the FCC, yesterday’s Senate hearing turned into exactly the kind of captured‑agency spectacle you’d expect from a Trump‑stacked commission. In the middle of the hearing, somebody at the FCC literally deleted a reference to the commission being an “independent agency,” which is as on‑the‑nose as it gets. At the same time Trump was publicly ranting that networks like NBC and ABC should be forced to pay big for using public airwaves because he doesn’t like their coverage, and he’s been pressuring his hand‑picked FCC leadership to go after broadcasters he considers unfriendly. So while the commissioners are sitting there trying to pretend they’re neutral regulators, the real story is them quietly editing out any mention of independence and bending toward the White House’s vendetta against the media.
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Today’s news cycle is going to be insane with the files “releasing” tomorrow, Trump’s crazy ass speech last night and who knows what else they will pitch to distract from tomorrow. So short and sweet today.
Speak Truth! Keep speaking TRUTH!
Don’t Give up the Ship!
Go Cause Good Trouble, with Your Elbows Up!
These are facts that I researched and verified – AI helped put together some sentence structure, but the words and tone are mine. These are my views based upon facts, research and thoughtful consideration using logic. I own the copyright to any images used. I’m comfortable to stand alone to uphold truth. Feel free to check me, but do not attack me. I am only causing good trouble.