This Yale professor thinks patriotism is some kind of hate crime



Timothy Snyder has built a career trying to convince Americans that Donald Trump is a latter-day Adolf Hitler — a fascist demagogue hell-bent on dismantling America’s institutions to seize power. Last week, the Yale historian and author of the bestselling resistance pamphlet “On Tyranny,” briefly changed course. Now, apparently, Trump is Jefferson Davis.

In a recent Substack post, Snyder claimed Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg amounted to a call for civil war. He argued that the president’s praise for the military and his rejection of the left’s historical revisionism signaled not patriotism but treason — and the rise of a “paramilitary” regime.

Trump doesn’t want a second civil war. He wants the first one to mean something.

No, seriously. That’s what he thinks.

Renaming Fort Bragg

Trump’s first alleged Confederate offense, Snyder said, was to reinstate the military base’s original name: Fort Bragg. The Biden administration had renamed it Fort Liberty, repudiating General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate ties. Trump reversed the change.

The Biden administration had renamed the base Fort Liberty, citing General Braxton Bragg’s service to the Confederacy. Trump reversed the change. But he didn’t do it to honor a Confederate general. He did it to honor World War II paratrooper Roland L. Bragg, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained.

Snyder wasn’t buying it. He accused the administration of fabricating a “dishonest pretense” that glorifies “oathbreakers and traitors.”

That charge hits close to home.

My grandfather Martin Spohn was a German Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Berlin in 1936. He proudly served in the U.S. Army. He trained with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Bragg before deploying to Normandy. Like thousands of others, he saw the base not as a Confederate monument but as a launchpad for defeating actual fascism.

Restoring the name Fort Bragg doesn’t rewrite history. It honors the Americans who made history — men who trained there to liberate Europe from tyranny.

That’s not fascism. That’s victory over it.

Deploying the National Guard

For Snyder, though, Trump’s real crime was calling up the National Guard to restore order in riot-torn Los Angeles. That, he claimed, puts Trump in the same category as Robert E. Lee.

According to Snyder, the president is “preparing American soldiers to see themselves as heroes when they undertake operations inside the United States against unarmed people, including their fellow citizens.”

Let’s set aside the hysteria.

Trump didn’t glorify the Confederacy. He called for law and order in the face of spiraling violence. He pushed back against the left’s crusade to erase American history — not to rewrite it but to preserve its complexity.

He didn’t tell soldiers to defy the Constitution. He reminded them of their oath: to defend the nation, not serve the ideological demands of woke officials.

Snyder’s claims are as reckless as they are false.

He smears anyone who supports border enforcement or takes pride in military service as a threat to democracy. Want secure borders? You’re a fascist. Call out the collapse of Democrat-run cities? You’re a Confederate.

This isn’t analysis. It’s slander masquerading as scholarship.

The real division

But this debate isn’t really about Trump. It’s about power.

The left has spent years reshaping the military into a political project — prioritizing diversity seminars over combat readiness, purging dissenters, and enforcing ideological loyalty. When Trump pushes back, it’s not authoritarianism. It’s restoration.

The left wants a military that fights climate change, checks pronouns, and marches for “equity.” Trump wants a military that defends the nation. That’s the real divide.

Over and over, Snyder accuses Trump of “trivializing” the military by invoking its heroism while discussing immigration enforcement. But what trivializes military service more — linking it to national defense or turning soldiers into props for progressive social experiments?

RELATED: The real tyranny? Institutional groupthink disguised as truth

Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

And Trump isn’t breaking precedent by deploying the National Guard when local leaders fail. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson used federal troops during desegregation. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect civil rights marchers. The Guard responded during the 1967 Detroit riots, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the Black Lives Matter and Antifa upheavals of 2020.

Trump acted within his authority — and fulfilled his duty — to restore order when Democrat-run cities descended into chaos.

A House divided?

Snyder’s rhetoric about “protecting democracy” rings hollow. Trump won the 2024 election decisively. Voters across party lines gave him a clear mandate: Secure the border and remove violent criminals. Pew Research found that 97% of Americans support more vigorous enforcement of immigration laws.

Yet Snyder, who constantly warns of creeping authoritarianism, closed his post by urging fellow academics to join No Kings protests.

Nobody appointed Timothy Snyder king, either.

If he respected democratic institutions, he’d spend less time fearmongering — and more time listening to the Americans, including many in uniform, who are tired of being demonized for loving their country. They’re tired of being called bigots for wanting secure borders. They’re tired of watching history weaponized to silence dissent.

Snyder invokes Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to condemn Trump. But it was Lincoln who paraphrased scripture when he said, “A house divided cannot stand.”

Americans united behind Trump in 2024. Snyder’s effort to cast half the country as fascists or Confederates embodies the division Lincoln warned against.

Here’s the truth: Trump doesn’t want a second civil war. He wants the first one to mean something.

He wants a Union preserved in more than name — a Union defined by secure borders, equal justice, and unapologetic national pride.

If that scares Timothy Snyder, maybe the problem isn’t Trump.

Perhaps, the problem lies in the man staring back at him in the mirror.

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The first transgender officer in the U.S. Army and wife have both been indicted for allegedly attempting to communicate with Russian officials in the hopes of giving them kompromat on some members of the military and their spouses.

Over the summer, Major Jamie Lee Henry, 39, and wife Dr. Anna Gabrielian, 36, had reportedly made contact with someone whom they thought worked at the Russian embassy but who was actually an undercover FBI agent. Henry, an internist, is a medical doctor with security clearance at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, one of the largest military installations in the entire world. Gabrielian, an anesthesiology and critical care instructor at Johns Hopkins, allegedly expressed hope to the FBI agent that they could use her husband's security clearance to obtain the private medical records of some strategic members of the military and/or their spouses and relatives that Russian officials could then "exploit."

According to the indictment, which was unsealed on Thursday, Gabrielian said she was motivated to help Russia because of her Russian patriotism, and her profile at Johns Hopkins does indicate that Gabrielian speaks fluent Russian. However, it is unclear whether she is a Russian national or somehow otherwise affiliated with the country.

Though Henry was not said to be motivated by Russian patriotism, the indictment does suggest the Army officer expressed some sympathy for Russian interests.

"My point of view is until the United States actually declares war against Russia," Henry allegedly told the agent, "I'm able to help as much as I want."

Henry also told the agent that Henry had attempted to enlist in the Russian army to fight against Ukraine but had been rejected for a lack of combat experience.

"The way I am viewing what is going on in Ukraine now, is that the United States is using Ukrainians as a proxy for their own hatred toward Russia," Henry allegedly said.

Gabrielian also allegedly called Henry a "coward" when the Army officer expressed misgivings about violating HIPPA regulations in service to Russia.

During a meeting with the agent at a hotel last month, Gabrielian reportedly gave the agent private medical information belonging to the spouse of a service member in the Office of Naval Intelligence, as well as the information of a relative from an Air Force veteran. Henry likewise handed the agent the medical records of five Fort Bragg patients, according to the filing. It is unclear whether Henry had treated those patients personally.

During that meeting, the couple also supposedly attempted to establish a contingency plan, in the event they were ever arrested.

Gabrielian allegedly requested that the Russian embassy help find her children "a nice flight to Turkey to go on vacation" so that they couldn't be used as "hostages" against her if she were ever incarcerated.

Both Henry and Gabrielian have been charged with conspiracy and wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information. They face up to 15 years in prison each, if convicted.

The couple were married in 2015, the same year Henry came out as transgender. At the time, Henry gave an interview with Brightest Young Things. "My passion is service member health," Henry said in the interview. "...The biggest part in supporting the health of service members is listening to them. Trauma has to be handled on an individual’s timeline and in a way that is unique to that individual."

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Overdose a leading cause of death for Fort Bragg soldiers



An alarming new exposé from Rolling Stone highlights the fact that the U.S. military is not immune to the nation’s ongoing opioid epidemic.

Through casualty reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Rolling Stone found that a total of 109 soldiers assigned to Fort Bragg, active and reserve, lost their lives in 2020 and 2021. Only four of the deaths occurred in overseas combat operations.

Fort Bragg, located in North Carolina south of Raleigh, is one of the largest military bases in the world and is the headquarters of several of the Army’s commands.

After suicide, accidental overdose is the leading cause of death at Fort Bragg. A total of 21 deaths in the two years ending December 2021 can likely to attributed to drug overdoses, according to Rolling Stone.

The exposé highlights the story of Matthew Disney, who was a 20-year-old soldier stationed at Fort Bragg. Disney was found dead along with fellow radarman Joshua Diamond in the Fort Bragg barracks. Military investigators informed Disney’s mother, Racheal Bowman, that he had ingested an imitation Percocet, a prescription painkiller. The cause of death was acute fentanyl intoxication.

Rolling Stone found that at least 14, and as many as 30, Fort Bragg soldiers have died in this way since the start of 2020: “quietly, in their barracks, in their bunks, in a parked car, or somewhere off-post, from no outwardly apparent cause.”

“All these deaths are happening in the same way, and no one is talking about it,” Bowman told Rolling Stone. “It’s all very secretive. It’s all swept under the rug.” She adds, “This is obviously a problem. How is it that nobody knows about it?”

Rolling Stone also obtained the casualty reports for every U.S. soldier across the entire Army who died in 2021. The documents show that of 505 total deaths, 33 were confirmed overdoses. This number “would make overdose a leading cause of death among American soldiers,” behind suicide, illness, and accidents, but well ahead of homicides and combat fatalities. Rolling Stone notes that there were also 27 cases in which death resulted from “undetermined” causes, at least several of which were likely overdoses.

The opioid crisis has affected the military at all levels. Earlier this year, five cadets at West Point — the institution tasked with training the next generation of Army leadership — were treated for overdosing on fentanyl while on spring break. All the cadets survived.

Throughout America, 56,516 people died from overdosing on synthetic opioids like fentanyl in 2020.

Autopsy report reveals grisly details in camping trip death of Fort Bragg paratrooper



A Fort Bragg paratrooper who went missing on a camping trip with fellow soldiers in May was decapitated, according to the findings of a recently released autopsy report.

What are the details?

Spc. Enrique Roman-Martinez, 21, from Chino, California, was a human resource specialist in the 82nd Airborne Division stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he disappeared during a Memorial Day weekend camping trip with friends at Cape Lookout National Seashore, CBS News reported. His partial remains washed ashore one week later, and his death was ruled a homicide.

The autopsy report, signed Nov. 4 from the Division of Forensic Pathology at East Carolina University's Brody School of Medicine, indicates that Roman-Martinez was murdered. But examiners were not able to determine the exact cause, because the young man had been decapitated and his head was the only remains recovered.

"While decapitation is, in and of itself, universally fatal, the remainder of the body in this case was not available for examination, and therefore potential causes of death involving the torso and extremities cannot be excluded," the report states. But it also pointed to other grisly details, such as "evidence of multiple chop injuries of the head," and a broken jaw in at least two places.

The News & Observer noted that a toxicology report showed that no evidence of drug use in the soldier's tissues.

Members of Roman-Martinez's family first read the report last week. His sister, Griselda Martinez, told The Fayetteville Observer that it was difficult to read the details from the report, including that her brother's hair had been pulled out and that his eyes were missing.

"It was such a brutal crime," she told the outlet. "Reading it and seeing how horrible it was..."

"Everything about this case doesn't make sense," she said. "Me and my family are left wondering. The biggest question is, 'Why?'"

Griselda told the Army Times that when her brother disappeared, he left behind his cellphone, wallet, and "the glasses he desperately needed." According to Griselda, there were roughly seven other soldiers on the camping trip with Roman-Martinez, but none of their names have been disclosed to the family.

What else happened on the trip?

The unidentified 911 caller who reported Roman-Martinez missing said the group looked for the soldier all day on May 23 when they woke up and discovered he was gone.

The Times reported:

However, early in the afternoon, Park Rangers encountered the group and asked them to move their vehicles, said Cape Lookout National Seashore spokesman B.G. Horvat. The group was parked too close to sand dunes, an important park resource, and asking them to move was a routine request.

"The Rangers moved on after hearing the group would comply ... [and] did not make mention to the Rangers at this point that anyone was missing from their group," Horvat said in an email. "You would have to ask members of the group why they didn't report a missing person then."

Investigators are still looking for clues to find out what happened to Roman-Martinez, whose remains were found near Mile Marker 53 on Shackleford Banks Island.

The Observer further noted:

Lt. Col. Mike Burns, an 82nd spokesman, said a $25,000 reward remains in place for information leading to the apprehension and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murder. Anyone with information about the case is asked to call 910-396-8777, submit anonymous information via www.p3tips.com or contact a law enforcement agency.

Foul play suspected in deaths of decorated master sergeant, veteran at Fort Bragg



Foul play is suspected in the deaths of a master sergeant and an Army veteran whose bodies were discovered Wednesday in a training area at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

What are the details?

The deceased were identified as Master Sergeant William J. Lavigne II, 37, and veteran Timothy Dumas, 44.

No weapon was found at the scene, but CBS News reported that according to an Army official, "shell casings were found on the ground, leading investigators to suspect that it was a double homicide resulting from a drug deal gone wrong." The official explained that both men had been under investigation for using and selling drugs.

The Washington Post reported that "their remains were found together in a remote part of the training area, with one body in a car, according to [an Army] official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the circumstances are under investigation."

Lavigne was a decorated soldier. WNCN-TV reported that he graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course in 2007 and served several deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was a recipient of two Bronze Stars and a Meritorious Service Medal.

In a statement, Lavigne's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Justin Duvall, said, "The loss of a Soldier is always tragic. Master Sgt. Lavigne dedicated himself to the Army for 19 years and deployed multiple times in the defense of our Nation. Our condolences go out to his family during this difficult time."

Less information has been released on Dumas, but he also had special forces experience, an official told The Post.

2 bodies found on Fort Bragg identified www.youtube.com

Anything else?

Newsweek reported that deaths of Lavigne and Dumas marked the fourth and fifth to occur on or near Fort Bragg this year.

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