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Pete Hegseth's D-Day Remarks Prove the US Is No Longer an Ally to European Democracy
Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis, and he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders. Mr. Hegseth: You are that threat.
Jun 13, 2026
This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was on hand in Normandy for the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He made the usual remarks about US dedication to defending freedom, just as he did last year on a similar occasion.
This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory.
Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech. Unlike last year, the US government hasn’t seen fit to provide a transcript of Hegseth’s remarks. You have to nose around the internet to find out what Hegseth said that raised so many eyebrows.
Did the Pentagon chief use the D-Day commemoration to denounce the current specter of fascism that is haunting Europe?
It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.
No.
Did he warn of the threat that Russia poses to the continent?
Hardly.
Hegseth denounced an invasion of an entirely different sort. “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”
Between his speech last year and the one this year, Hegseth has evidently gotten his marching orders. Ever since JD Vance lectured his elders and betters at the Munich summit last year, the Trump administration has united around the theme that immigrants threaten European “civilization.” Vance wasn’t even being original. Both his and Hegseth’s talking points come straight out of the mouths of the European far-right. Unlike the usual game of telephone, where the message is garbled through misheard repetition, the fulminations of President Donald Trump’s henchmen are loud and clear.
The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign.
Abroad, the Trump administration is trying to “save” Europe from the immigrants that are in reality keeping European societies afloat in the face of demographic decline. In this effort, it has joined hands with the most repulsive extremists on the continent. Greg Bovino, who headed up Trump’s immigration crackdown in the United States as the commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, recently showed up in Europe to headline an event in Portugal populated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The era of covert alliances and dog-whistling is long past.
But the D-Day speech was something different: a historical commemoration that has usually avoided contemporary politics. Prompted to reflect on present-day “invasions,” the European heads of state listening to Hegseth’s speech might have been thinking of an entirely different group of men and boats. The Trump administration has talked about the possibility of storming the beaches of Greenland to seize the island, an eerie echo of Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg seizure of Poland in 1939. On this anniversary of D-Day, Americans in boats are the last thing Europeans want to see approaching the fringes of the continent.
“Different dangerous ideologies, indeed,” the Europeans in the audience must have been thinking. Having been warned on numerous occasions, European capitals are certainly doing something to prepare for the impact of the ideologies dominating the Trump administration. It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.
The Immigration Obsession
The European far right has made its name by playing up the “threat” of immigration. Keeping out immigrants was a central plank in Viktor Orban’s platform in Hungary as well as that of Law and Justice Party in Poland, both of which have subsequently lost power. No matter: Other parties are on the ascendant. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland, having weaponized the issue of immigration, is on the verge of taking control of its first German region in elections in September in Saxony-Anhalt. Similar anti-migrant far-right parties are in coalition governments in Finland and Croatia and dominate the parliament in The Netherlands.
Then there’s Italy. Although she has diverged from the Trump administration on a number of issues, including their views of the current Pope, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni remains vehemently anti-immigrant, pushing ahead with the country’s expulsion of migrants and asylum-seekers to detention centers in Albania, despite legal pushback from Italian courts and European Union bodies.
What might have once been a fringe opinion has now moved front and center in Europe. As a result of rising far-right influence, the EU is now using Italy’s detention centers in Albania as a model for “detention hubs” planned for Africa. “This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander of the International Rescue Committee told PBS. “It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse.”
So much for Europe stepping forward in the Trump era to uphold the rules-based order. At least on immigration policy, the EU is instead following Trump’s lead. Hegseth, in addition to his other failings, didn’t even read the newspaper before giving his D-Day speech. Even as he was channeling the rhetoric of the European far-right, European capitals have already been channeling Trump’s immigration policies.
The Real Threats
It’s frankly astonishing that an American politician could discuss D-Day and invasions at this historical moment without mentioning the single most destabilizing invasion since World War II.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a deliberate attempt to remake the European order. Violating international law by disregarding Ukrainian sovereignty was unsettling to be sure, but that was just a means to an end. The incorporation of as much of Ukraine as he could digest was designed to expand Russian power at the expense of the European Union and its cohesiveness.
On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.
Although Russian President Vladimir Putin and his mouthpieces have droned on about the threats of NATO expansion—and, to be sure, rapid NATO expansion eastward was a mistake—the real threat to Putin’s dominion has always been the accession of Eastern European and then post-Soviet states into the European Union. A model of economic prosperity, democratic governance, and unrestricted travel, if extended to Ukrainians, Moldovans, and Georgians, would inevitably get Russians to thinking: why not us? Putin has always worried more about the threat from within, like a color revolution, than threats from without, like NATO expansion.
Against the liberalism of the EU, Putin has offered instead a vision of ethnic counter-expansion that appeals to the aggrieved Russian sense of self. Adoption of the euro, the right to work in Paris, the freedom to gather outside the Kremlin to protest: None of these can compete against toxic masculinity, blood and belonging, and the appeal of an iron fist.
Putin’s alternate conception of illiberalism, with its emphasis on conservative values and ethnonationalist triumphalism, is now threatening Europe in turn. Some of Putin’s allies have gone down for the count, but his rhetoric still resonates in the speeches of far-right figures throughout the continent. A number of leaders are scrambling to be the next Viktor Orban—Robert Fico of Slovakia; Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic; and, most ominously, the frontrunner in next year’s French presidential race, Jordan Bardella of the National Rally.
Putin is not so dumb as to double down on his Ukrainian blunder by sending military forces into Poland or even the Baltic states. Cyberattacks and clandestine operations can be more effective since they don’t cross the threshold that mandates a NATO counterattack. Meanwhile, influence operations—disinformation campaigns, strategic political alliances, and the marketing of illiberalism—are even more effective in undermining the ideological underpinnings of the EU.
This latter campaign has more than double the impact when it’s mirrored on the Atlantic side by the actions of Trump, Vance, and Hegseth.
European Response
Europe is not in full-fledged revolt against Trump. The shift in EU immigration strategy demonstrates that some European leaders don’t want to just flatter Trump; they want to imitate him as well.
Still, there are pockets of resistance. A number of European countries defied the Trump administration in 2025 to recognize Palestine. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez refused to toe the US line on Iran. Denmark has led the charge to beat back the administration’s efforts to secure Greenland.
European capitals are preparing in more institutional ways to address the much larger threat of Americans in boats, this time the ones that don’t arrive for a future battle as their counterparts did so reliably on D-Day. Trump has variously threatened to leave NATO or ignore US Article 5 commitments to defend fellow NATO members in the event of an attack. This month, the Pentagon announced a decrease in the forces that the United States will make available—aircraft, ships—during a crisis in Europe.
Europeans have gotten the message. They’re not just increasing their military spending. They’re building up their capacity to produce their own weapons rather than rely on the US military-industrial complex. They’re talking about creating an autonomous European army. They don’t want to be caught flat-footed by American ambivalence.
In the wake of Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, Europeans are also eager to wean themselves of dependency on US fossil fuels. Fresh from their campaign to reduce imports of Russian fossil fuels, more far-seeing Europeans want to make sure that they’re not yoking themselves to American gas and oil. The better option: full speed ahead on home-grown renewables.
“The European Union can’t fully trust US President Donald Trump to keep Europe out of the cold next Winter,” writes Linda Aziz-Rohlje of Renew Europe. “We are risking our democracy, our prosperity, and our security if we do not take action. That’s why liberals and democrats call for an energy-independent Europe, with a more integrated energy market.”
Finally, Europeans are worried about their reliance on US technology. “European leaders have become increasingly alarmed by the reliance on American technology in areas like artificial intelligence, cloud computing and semiconductors,” reports Adam Satariano in The New York Times. “Many worry the dependence creates a ‘kill switch’ that the Trump administration or future US presidents could exploit to block access to essential tech services.”
On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.
Against this background, Pete Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis. And he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders.
Mr. Hegseth: You are that threat.
Hegseth and everything he stands for, from the effort to grab Greenland to the attacks on European liberalism, should persuade the French to rescind any invitation to next year’s ceremonies in Normandy.
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Will Colombia Be the Next Country to Embrace Right-Wing Authoritarianism?
The pattern set by Trump in the US, Milei in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador, Noboa in Ecuador, and now Asfura in Honduras, seeks to replicate itself with Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia.
Jun 01, 2026
The results that began to surface around 5:30 pm Sunday May 31 of this year in the first round of the Colombian presidential elections left many perplexed, as Abelardo “El Tigre” de la Espriella, won an uncanny number of votes, 10,359,902 as of this writing, over 670,000 votes above the front-runner Ivan Cepeda and his vice-presidential partner Aida Quilcué, with 9,687,508 votes. Paloma Valencia and her running mate Daniel Oviedo came in a distant third, much weaker than expected with 1,639,421 votes. Sergio Fajardo, the perennial symbolic centrist candidate, came in with 1,008,864 votes. The blank vote came in fifth with 406,955 votes, while Claudia Lopez, the neoliberal former Bogotá mayor, scrounged 225,480 votes, just above Santiago Botero’s 206,128. Mauricio Lizcano came in eigth with a handsome 53,839 votes. The remaining 50,000 votes were shared among a handful of remaining candidates.
Ivan Cepeda questioned the results shortly after the first round was called: “There is a discrepancy that we want to verify with respect to the electoral results. This isn’t just any old discrepancy. We are talking about 885,000 people or ID numbers.” He added, “There is information that indicates atypical votes from an undetermined number of tables. [...] Let us emphasize that only when the commission analysts clarify this discrepancy clearly and rigorously, will we share our conclusions on the results of this election.”
The electoral commission is required to clarify the situation within 72 hours. Similar concerns were raised after the March primaries and congressional elections, when 600,000 votes were recovered by Cepeda's party after they flagged irregularities, leading to 20 additional congressional seats.
Out of approximately 24,000,000 votes cast in the first round, the challenge will be how to get the 3 million or so votes in play, while also mobilizing new voters for the second round. Paloma Valencia, formerly the chosen successor of Alvaro Uribe, has already endorsed Uribe’s new horse (tiger?) Abelardo de la Espriella for the second round of the race, presumably giving him close to 11,000,000 votes for the second round. However, Valencia’s running mate, Daniel Oviedo, has indicated he will not support de la Espriella. Where his nearly 1,000,000 voters from the march primaries will align remains uncertain. He was a kind of neoliberal semi-progressive centrist before aligning with the heiress of the paramilitary political tradition in Colombia. Ironically, Valencia, in her attempt to appear centrist, seems to have lost more votes to de la Espriella than she gained from Oviedo. In the immediate aftermath of the first round results, Sergio Fajardo was coy about where he would try to direct his million-plus votes. If they were to go to Cepeda, he would be in striking distance of de la Espriella. Claudia Lopez’s votes would be an additional boost to whomever she endorses, while Santiago Botero’s 200,000 votes will likely go to de la Espriella, due to his narrow political profile as a businessman accused of domestic violence.
In the background, questions lurk about US intrusion, after threats made by President Trump and Colombian-born Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) toward Colombia as a whole if they vote the left back into office.
In 2022 Gustavo Petro won 8,542,000 votes in the first round, more than 2,000,000 votes behind the combined right-wing frontrunners, Rodolfo Hernández and Federico Gutiérrez. In the second round, he increased his vote count to 11,281,013, an increase of more than 2,700,000 votes from the first round. This means the focus over the next three weeks will be on turnout, beyond the jostling and backroom negotiations for support from the rest of the first-round candidates. Whoever can increase their turnout more dramatically will be the victor, assuming a clean election.
Abelardo de la Espriella is a Jekyll and Hyde character construction: imagine Alan Dershowitz wrapped up in the Batman comic book version of The Joker, in a bipolar bind with billionaire Bruce Wayne.
Of the current right-wing authoritarian archetypes, de la Espriella fits neatly between the evil clown, represented by President Donald Trump and Argentinian President Javier Milei, and the sadistic heir represented by presidents Nayib Bukele and Daniel Noboa (and Trump) in El Salvador and Ecuador (and the US), respectively. You could also say he is a non-senile version of Rodolfo Hernandez, the “outsider” right-wing real estate tycoon candidate who “surprised” the right-wing establishment by coming in second for the first round of the 2022 elections, which Petro ultimately won.
De la Espriella became wealthy while representing the dregs of Colombian high society, paramilitaries, cocaine capos, money launderers, pyramid schemers, mass murderers, and the like. In the carefully produced image de la Espriella has cultivated over the course of the campaign, he flaunts his lavish lifestyle, always with a twist of misogyny, while promising Nayeb Bukele-style policies, including persecution of the left, 10 new maximum security prisons, and Mileiean cuts of 40% of the public sector.
The pattern set by Trump in the US, Milei in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador, Noboa in Ecuador, and now Asfura in Honduras, seeks to replicate itself with de la Espriella in Colombia.
Ivan Cepeda is a philosopher and politician, whose father was assassinated in 1994 as a senator for the Union Patriotica during a genocidal purge of the left-leaning political party by the same mafia elite that de la Espriella made his name defending. Cepeda has spent much of his time as a congressman, revealing the crimes of de la Espriella’s forebear, ex-president and paramilitary boss Alvaro Uribe, and aligning with popular President Gustavo Petro’s political economic program, which has initiated the process of land restitution to victims of Colombia’s decades-long civil war, and raised minimum wages in a country with the fifth most extreme wealth disparity on the planet. That is down from the third most extreme wealth disparity Colombia claimed leading out of the previous (Uribista) Duque administration into the Petro administration.
Cepeda recognizes that the road out of extreme wealth inequality requires the long-term continuity of a political project that makes solving this most fundamental of socioeconomic problems its top priority. Cepeda’s proposals build on the groundwork laid by the Petro coalition, seeking to expand public education and healthcare, while continuing the redistribution of land to millions of Colombians displaced by decades of the armed conflict promoted for so many years by Uribe and his mafia.
In the background, questions lurk about US intrusion, after threats made by President Trump and Colombian-born Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) toward Colombia as a whole if they vote the left back into office. The recordings released by HONDURASGATE and Red Diario of former Honduran president and convicted drug and weapons trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernandez, paint a picture of a US-Israel backed plan to topple left-wing governments in the region, with a particular focus on Colombia and Mexico, to pave the way for mafia states to ensure easy access by US and Israeli multinational corporations to oil and gas and key minerals for the construction of their rapidly expanding techno-fascist infrastructure.
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It's Well Beyond Time to Cut Ties With the Anti-Defamation League
While the ADL attacks and smears Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian justice, it gives cover to and helps legitimize (often antisemitic) right-wing politicians and others who back Israel.
Mar 16, 2026
The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, is holding its annual summit in New York City this week. The ironically-named summit on “hate” features far-right MAGA pastors and politicians, billionaire CEOs, and conservative journalists among its speakers.
No longer putting on the pretense of opposing all forms of bigotry, the ADL has shown it's perfectly comfortable with Trump-era racism. In the year since the last summit, the ADL has withdrawn its criticism of white supremacist groups, denounced antiracist education as "radical," continued to loudly back Israel's genocide in Gaza, and cheered on Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations of students and other noncitizens who have criticized Israel’s violence and stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people. In fact, the ADL endorsed the executive order issued by President Donald Trump in 2025 targeting critics of Israel and threatening those who aren't US citizens with deportation for protesting in support of Palestinian human rights.
The organization’s Islamophobia has also been front and center. Soon after the election, the ADL singled out New York City’s first Muslim mayor—and a supporter of Palestinian justice—and announced the “Mamdani Monitor: Holding the New Administration Accountable” to track his policies as well as his personnel appointments.
Far from opposing the ascendancy of the white nationalist right, the ADL has doubled down. While it may appear that the ADL’s recent visible displays of its reactionary agenda are the work of its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt alone, in fact, this agenda is not new. But the harm it’s causing is certainly getting worse. The organization’s reactionary political positions—evidenced by its ease in aligning with the likes of Trump and its behavior as an attack dog for Israel’s far-right government—were already clear in its long history of, among other things, Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism.
The ADL’s disturbing positions and actions have become even more aggressive since the genocide in Gaza.
For decades, out of the public eye, the ADL has illegally surveilled Arab Americans, Muslims, social justice activists, members of Congress, and others, including Jews, who speak and act in support of Palestinian justice. It has smeared the groups it targets as “suspect,” using the language of hate, terror, and antisemitism—as when it circulated blacklists of “Arab propagandists” in the 1980s and endorsed the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil for leading protests against Israel’s atrocities. When the NYPD launched aggressive, unconstitutional surveillance of the Muslim community post-9/11, justifying it as part of the domestic and global “war on terror,” the ADL gave an award to the program’s commanding officer.
The ADL’s disturbing positions and actions have become even more aggressive since the genocide in Gaza. As law professor and legal scholar Sahar Aziz points out, the organization has attempted to “criminalize Muslim and Palestinian students, as well as Jewish, queer, and BIPOC students” for opposing Israel’s actions. It has continued to attack Muslim and Arab American groups like Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which have challenged the ADL’s anti-Muslim racism.
The organization has continually platformed Islamophobes and anti-Palestinian bigots. In 2024, more than 60 Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and other organizations condemned the ADL for its consistent pattern of fostering anti-Palestinian hate and for giving a platform to anti-Muslim Pastor John Hagee. In 2025, ADL leaders elected to its board Johnnie Moore who was the executive chairman of the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which was responsible for numerous massacres of starving Palestinians. And its summit this week features archconservative pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who has made hateful remarks against Muslims as well as LGBTQ people.
While the ADL attacks and smears Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian justice, it gives cover to and helps legitimize (often antisemitic) right-wing politicians and others who back Israel. Excusing Elon Musk’s notorious Nazi salute and ignoring Trump’s invoking of conspiracy theories are just two examples of its hypocrisy.
As aptly stated by Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), one of the hundreds of signatories on an open letter to progressives to #DroptheADL, “The focus of civil rights organizations should be on critiquing state power and not about targeting those who critique state power.”
As the ADL’s reactionary agenda becomes clearer for all to see, there is a growing groundswell of social justice activists, progressive Jewish groups, educational institutions, and members of every profession who are pressuring policymakers to stop cooperating with the organization. The urgency of educators, political leaders, organizations, and others breaking ties with the ADL in this deeply racist, repressive national climate can’t be overstated.
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