"Kill them all" is a confession to murder under American law
The United States of America stands at the edge of war against Venezuela.
Until now, no one has cared. It seems tat no one in authority has cared, but perhaps that is changing.
A letter from Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker and Democratic Senator Jack Reed seems to suggest that the Politburo takes a dim view of blatant murder, and may seek to assert its muted powers and end its eunuch status, by reminding the executive branch of its co-equal status within the government of the Republic.
However, anyone betting on these people to do their duty at this point is a fool waiting to be separated from their money. For the optimist, the best I can do is say “Trust, but verify.”
I say this based on precedent. If Trump favors invading a nation of 28.4 million without a strategy, plan or any debate under utterly incompetent leadership after dividing the nation, MAGA is for it.
When the inevitable disaster comes they will blame it on anyone from Conan the Barbarian to Chelsea Clinton to Mr. Magoo, but never Trump. Never Trump. After all, God can do no wrong — at least their God.
When Trump retreats and the bodies come home they will say it was a victory.
When the economy crashes they will call it prosperity.
When your job disappears they will call it opportunity.
When a masked secret police thug smashes a window and punches a woman or child they will call it justice.
When an election is lost they will say it is stolen.
The war in Venezuela has been concocted on a south Florida patio by the most incompetent gang of American leaders in American history. It will end in ruin.
The United States is going to war against Venezuela with no congressional debate, no public debate and scant media coverage on the back of war crimes being committed in the name of the American people — and executed by men who have likely committed murder under the Geneva Conventions. Incredibly, the war will begin before the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and before the 5th anniversary of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Kill them all.
— Pete Hegseth, ‘Secretary of War,’ September 2025
Seventy-nine years ago this autumn, a US Supreme Court Justice named Robert Jackson, the US chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, began his opening statement with these magnificent words:
The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life…. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.
These words matter a great deal in this moment of boiling insanity, during which Holocaust deniers, revanchist Nazis, conspiracists, bigots and religious fanatics, who preach a gospel of political domination, sit together under a MAGA flag with iron devotion to their leader.
Kill them all.
— Pete Hegseth, ‘Secretary of War,’ September 2025
Imagine a Venezuelan village next to a drug lab in the jungle. Imagine something going wrong.
Imagine Pete Hegseth giving the order to wipe out the village:
Kill them all.
Imagine the order being given on an American street corner to a 20-year-old marine:
Kill them all.
Shall we pretend such things have not happened before, including in America?
Eighty-five years ago, the western powers, which included England and France, allowed Adolf Hitler to carve up a European country in the middle of the continent.
Today, it is Donald Trump playing the role of appeaser, demanding that Ukraine submit to aggression by a tyrant already preparing his next conquests. The Witkoff-Kushner pact is every bit as pernicious as the Molotov-Ribbentrop act with one main difference: it is far more materially corrupt and constructed around self-enrichment schemes by Trump and his oligarchs, working in partnership with Putin and his.
Eighty-five years ago, Czechoslovakia was dismembered and destroyed by German malice and western delusion.
Neville Chamberlin promised peace in his time, in part, because he couldn’t imagine something worse than World War I.
His naïveté was summed up by Winston Churchill, who said the following, just after the Munich Agreement. He was responding to Chamberlain’s assertion that the agreement had achieved “peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.”
You were given the choice between war and dishonour.
You chose dishonour and you will have war.
And do not suppose that this is the end.
This is only the beginning of the reckoning.
This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.
Churchill was right, just as today, it has been Trump’s most steadfast and honest critics who have been right about the situation that is accelerating in danger for free people everywhere. A rising tide of malice, hate, and extremism boiling for 10 years time has intersected with a deep American derangement at a moment when Trump is spiralling psychologically and physically.
He is decomposing before our eyes…
BTW, it’s good to see that Bret Baier has fully committed to Mar-a-Lago face. But I digress…
Let me tell you a story of an illegal order given in response to an assassination of one of Hitler’s most vile lieutenants, the principal organizer of the murder of 11 million people, Reinhardt Heydrich.
There have been many meditations, studies and first-hand accounts around the catalysts for extraordinary acts of physical and moral courage. In the end, what drives the most selfless acts is love.
There is a grass field with a gentle slope outside of Prague.
A village called Lidice once stood there. Lidice became world-famous in 1942 when the world learned what happened there.
The Nazis wiped it off the face of the earth and killed every man, woman and child who lived there.
The SS salted the earth.
Most of the children would die by gas at the Chelmno extermination camp.
There were no Jews in Lidice. Adolf Hitler personally ordered the destruction of the village and the salting of the earth as revenge for the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich, referred to as the “Butcher of Prague.”
Heydrich was the principal architect of the Holocaust. He was assassinated by a team of Czech and Slovak commandoes who parachuted into their occupied homeland from Allied planes that departed from London. They came to kill Heydrich, a ruthless war criminal and sociopath. They accomplished their mission.
The men of Lidice were lined up by the SS. They gave the village priest an opportunity to live by walking away. The priest chose to die with his flock. He was murdered with his parishioners.
The children of Lidice are memorialized in a monument that marks the evil and murder that stole their lives at the hands of the SS.
It is among the most haunting monuments I have ever seen.
The Czech and Slovak paratroopers were hunted by the Gestapo and SS. They were betrayed by one of their own – a man named Karel Curda, who would be hung after the war for his treachery and treason.
The paratroopers hid in the crypt and loft of Sts Cyril and Methodius church in Prague. They were given sanctuary by the Orthodox bishop, who would be martyred for his love and courage.
The paratroopers killed scores of SS as they fought to their last rounds and to the death. None were captured alive.
Thousands of innocent people were murdered to avenge the life of the man, who six months earlier, had chaired the 90-minute meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the Final Solution was approved.
There will always be a challenge to democracy because power is foundational in any society. The attainment of power and the costs involved in taking it are at the root of so much suffering in the world. This has always been so.
Courage is what is required to defend freedom. Without it, freedom is extinguished.
The Nazi party was born out of grievance, resentment, inflation, a shattered economy, hate and lies. It took more than a decade for the spell-binding orator and antisemite to lead the party from the Beer Hall to the Reichstag. It took six months for the Nazis to extinguish democracy after they took elected power in 1932. It took 10 more years after that before the meeting took place to plan the murder of every Jew in Europe.
What was special about 1942? Simple: the Nazis were winning.
They did everything they said they would do and more. There was no lack of imagination about what happened by 1945, when a shattered world was briefly at peace. It takes a long time to forget. We forget at our peril. At the beginning, the loss of freedom leads to places that are twisted beyond any depraved imagination. When people become the law, great evil follows. All around us are the reminders. Yet, the ball keeps rolling along.
The American role in the world is indispensable. It should combine idealism, humility and pragmatism. Without America, the powers that rise will be hostile to something that is at the core of the imperfect American experiment – human beings.
Democracy is what keeps all of us free from the jackboot. There is always someone willing to bring it down on the heads of children. Lidice is a reminder of what happens when the darkness doesn’t break, and the sun can’t rise.
My friends, there is no ‘Department of War’ or ‘Secretary of War’ in America.
There is a Department of Defense and a Secretary of Defense.
Neither has the right to murder.
One is not the SS — and though the other may have Heydrich fantasies — he does not have the power to act them out.
“Kill them all” is a confession to murder under American law.
“Kill them all” is a confession to an evil act.
Pete Hegseth is a war criminal, and so is Donald Trump.
Brilliant and bracing admonition about the moral accountability indispensable to a civilized human society. We should all take note of war criminal Trump’s own self-incriminating words that underscore his Hitler-like evil sociopathy:
"I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war," Trump said. "I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead."
America pretends the system is neutral, but the operating code has always been cruelty rewarded and shamelessness excused.
What Schmidt exposes is that the rhetoric of annihilation isn’t fringe anymore; it’s the business model of power.
And when a democracy normalizes that, it’s not breaking…it’s remembering exactly which Constitution it serves.
—Johan