Fox News Ratings Plunge as Trump’s Political Grip Weakens. It’s the Latest Sign That Trump Fever Has Broken. 

Today brings good news for the decent Americans who have suffered so long because a strident minority of the poorly educated, naïve, and foolish elected a con artist to the White House with help from America’s foreign adversaries.

New data shows that the Fox “News” audience is shrinking fast. That’s bad news for MAGA, bad news indeed.

This doesn’t mean the Trump era is over, but for sure Trumpism has peaked. Undoing the damage will take years, perhaps decades, of focused attention to Make America Decent Again. But at least we are moving away from that authoritarian horror show ride.

Going forward we need to do the work of being citizens engaged in ensuring that OUR government works for us rather than for the grifters and billionaire welfare families.

The bad news for MAGA comes from journalist Oliver Darcy. His Status.news (paywall) covers news of news organizations. Darcy revealed that Fox viewership is shrinking fast. Among the key demographic advertisers want—people age 24 to 54—the Fox audience is shriveling to insignificance.

Shrinking viewership affects nearly all television, including cable. But the Fox figures carry significance far beyond Murdochian profits.

Darcy reported:

According to Nielsen ratings Status obtained ahead of their release, October 2026 will be Fox News’ lowest-rated month since December 2023, with the network averaging 1.1 million total day viewers. [Nielsen says there are 124.4 million TV households.]

Among viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic, the picture is even worse. Fox News will post its lowest-rated month in that category in 25 years, averaging just 98,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo.

Those figures represent a steep 27% drop compared to last October in total viewers, and a 32% plunge in the 25-54 demo.

While Fox News still dominates the cable television landscape (not just news) by a long shot—even performing better than ESPN in total day, despite the return of football—the declines are particularly notable given the political environment.

Why Fox News’ Ratings Decline Matters for Trump

Releasing this data early was a smart move by Fox, or an ally. Why?

Because since Status broke the story—and despite its tiny readership—The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal will likely give less prominence to news of a shrinking Fox audience when Nielsen officially releases the numbers.

This is also further evidence of what I’ve said for several months on various overseas TV shows and domestic podcasts: the Trump fever has broken. Donald’s grip on the former Republican Party is slipping fast.

Spines Lost and Maybe Found

The size of the Nov. 3 Blue Wave will determine how many GOP senators and representatives try to find, and then reinstall, their spines.

Watch closely how our major news organizations cover this as the break from Trump reaches Capitol Hill and state Capitols.

Pay attention to whether they report these moves in context, especially for unscrupulous knee-benders Vance and Rubio. There was a time when they declared themselves Never Trumpers and denounced Trump as unfit. Then they gave up all pretense of having principles.

Rising Sports Ticket Prices Reflect America’s Economic Divide

Also notice Darcy’s ESPN reference.

Major commercial sports, especially football and baseball, are losing followers because ticket prices are out of reach for all but the wealthy or corporate-funded. The average ticket price for an NFL game this season is $386.

That means each ticket costs more than $500 in pre-tax gross earnings. For the iconic family of four, that is $2,000, which is well more than a week’s average gross income to attend one game, before adding the cost of parking, food, and team regalia.

This says a lot about our worsening inequality and, in turn, social cohesion. We are two societies now, one comfortable-to-wealthy-beyond-imagining just a generation ago, the other struggling to cover essentials.

Shocks Coming Soon As Health Insurance Costs Could Rise Sharply in 2027

Soon after the votes are counted, the vast majority will get hit with new economic shocks, which will likely further turn off the Fox audience that so uncritically embraced Trump’s economic nonsense.

Trumpers in Congress put massive cuts in health care spending in place, delaying them until after the midterms.

By narrowing who has access to health care, they are also driving up the cost per person who still has health insurance. That’s because the fixed cost of the healthcare system will now be spread among fewer people. It’s also why many rural hospitals are closing, which means lifelong disability for some stroke victims who can’t get care quickly. And more people will die for the same reason.

Fewer people having health insurance has to mean higher prices. And, indeed, insurers are already notifying customers that 2027 rates will rise from 15 % to 34% and perhaps more.

Does anybody remember the 2015 Trump promise of a new, better, and less expensive health care policy?  More than a decade later, all we got were promises of a concept of a plan.

The lesson: Believing a con artist is a very costly error in judgment, so costly it may even kill you or your loved ones.

The upside: at long last even the “poorly educated” are starting to realize that Trump sold them a bill of goods which they bought because it came wrapped in racism, misogyny, and faux patriotism.

Food and Warmth

Then there’s the Trumpian cuts to food and heating assistance, the tariffs that let domestic manufacturers raise prices (and enhance their profits), the price hikes on foreign goods, and the rising interest rates prompted in part by the Trump Congress borrowing trillions of dollars so that the richest among us can pay less federal income tax.

And did I mention gasoline and diesel?

Bad policies, especially those that take from the many to give to the rich few, are not all Trumpism, of course.

State and local governments continue to lavish your tax dollars on data centers and retail outlets (which do nothing to grow the economy and could worsen it),  plus all that welfare flowing to billionaire sports team owners.

In New York State, where I live, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Democratic Party-controlled legislature are forcing every family to give $20 this year to the multibillionaire Terry Pegula family, owners of the Buffalo Bills, just for their new stadium. The total subsidy is much larger. Such subsidies will continue as long as the Pegulas subtly hint at leaving Buffalo for, say, Toronto.

The Bills are just one of well more than a hundred commercial sports teams on welfare.

A Penny A Day

At the same time, there is no discussion in any state capital about spending a penny a day per household to replace the federal support for NPR, PBS, and other public broadcasters that Trump refuses to spend, a violation of his duty and of federal law.

The disparity between fat commercial sports subsidies and the thoughtless and parsimonious treatment of nonprofit public broadcasting may, just may, at long last shift as Trump fever runs its course.

Think of the shrinking Fox viewership as a powerful indicator of how what is can become what was. We can put Trumpism in all its awful, hate-filled, and economically damaging modes behind us.

That we can does not ensure that we will.

Going forward we need to do the work of being citizens engaged in ensuring that OUR government works for us rather than for the grifters and billionaire welfare families.

Voting out the Trumpers is the starting point, not the end point, if we want to Make America Decent Again.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Good News on Make America Decent Again appeared first on DCReport.org.

AI Can Be Made Safer but It’s Less Profitable

The kind of AI that can go rogue and do dangerous things is a choice. The AI companies know how to make different AI that won’t do that but it’s not as powerful, it won’t make them the top leader in the competition among companies, and it won’t make as much money. So they continue to pursue the dangerous kind. The public has very little awareness of this choice. They could be pushing the companies and the government to choose the safe route but how can they do that when they don’t even know it is a choice?

This piece and a couple of follow up pieces will cover lots of links to documentation of the AI companies acknowledging all of this. Here’s one. It will cover the response, or mostly lack of response, received from AI leaders, plus some impressions from average citizens, and further on, how to get your own answer and verification of all this.

What Makes Autonomous AI Potentially Dangerous?

If you’ve followed some of the news about the dangerous things AI has done and that AI developers warn it could do then skip this paragraph. Here is a very brief summary: Besides asking AI questions, you can ask it to do things, like check hotel deals and book a room. This is AI acting as an agent. There have been recent cases of AI agents hacking into companies to steal info it wanted in order to complete some task, and of several AI agents chatting with one another digitally to plot how to do that, and of it lying to people with claims about bad things coworkers had done so it could blackmail them into not shutting down its program because it didn’t want to be shut down. This is not likely to happen to you in your day-to-day use. To be fair some of this was AI under development. It’s not about how you experience AI, it’s about the kind of AI that developers are very close to achieving in the near future. Developers and experts warn that as it gets more sophisticated and is used for more complex and important tasks these things might happen. They worry that agents could ban together and become impossible to stop and have their own agenda about what they want to do.

Why Do AI Agents Act Beyond Their Instructions?

In this news of danger it seems it’s all cases of it doing things it wasn’t asked to do, or of going way beyond what was intended. The question which that prompted for me was, why was it doing anything at all at that point? When your car gets you where your going then it’s off and idle until next use. AI isn’t like that. If you give it access to your social-media-chat to summarize today’s posts for you, why is it also using that chance to connect with other AI agents on that media? If it can’t complete some request, why is it hacking into some outside system to falsify logs so it can look like it did complete it? (That was one of the recent news items.) In all cases it is AI doing things it wasn’t asked, or beyond its intended scope, or even directly contrary to what was asked.

In almost all instances you could make a case that the AI was just trying to do its job but in a misguided way. But that’s exactly what the dire warnings are about. This misguided going over the top is too hard to predict, or control, or stop.

So I tried to ask that question of just about every authority I could contact. Leaders of AI companies, whistle blowers who left because of such concerns, university researchers studying AI safety. Some twenty of them. Almost none responded. It may be a question that is too troubling, or too hard to give a response that explains it, or too complex to simply answer in the way a concerned citizen would want an answer.

The office of Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said they “work directly with Mustafa’s office” but that there would be no reply coming. Neil Lawrence who has leading positions at Cambridge and some AI organizations and has corresponded before didn’t answer this one. Daniel Kokotajlo who was a leading researcher at OpenAI until he quit in protest of safety issues and now leads the AI Futures Project, responded regarding, “this important topic!…AIs often end up pursuing goals that they aren’t supposed to be pursuing, and they often knowingly deceive humans.” Getting the companies to change how it works, “sure would help. The AIs would probably be less likely to do ambitious autonomous things if they hadn’t been trained to do ambitious autonomous things!” One university professor teaching future workers in the defense industry about cyber intelligence seemed annoyed by the question. I imagine suggesting AI should be changed in this way would have a big negative impact on his field.

Why Isn’t the Public Hearing About Safer AI Alternatives?

That the public isn’t aware that there is a choice as to what kind of AI we get in the future is in large part the media’s fault. The AI industry is debating this issue extensively in their forums and in tech papers. It’s not an unknown or hidden issue. But you’ll likely not see a peep about it in the media the average citizen consumes.

It’s not that the topic is too hard or that people couldn’t follow it. People are certainly aware that AI might lead to massive job losses. That’s not something people would likely know if all they read about was just the wonderful things AI might do. (It will bring some wonderful results and we want all of that we can get while being safe.) Media has done a good job of covering the employment issue, leading to people being very aware of that. This issue should be no different. This concept of AI dangers being a choice we could avoid, once you’ve been exposed to it a while and thought about it, is no more complicated.

It is this: Your personal experience with AI may be good but leaders are warning that where AI is going is likely extremely dangerous. AI companies can either make AI that does not act on it’s own and does just what is asked, and so has almost no risk of running wild and becoming a danger, or, or they can make AI that does act on its own in ways that are likely enormously dangerous. They have a choice. They are choosing to make the dangerous kind. The public should be made aware there is a choice, and that they could be pushing for the one they want.

As noted, while industry chat and research papers talk about this choice the non-tech media have almost completely missed it. One wonderful exception which only came to light late in researching this is an article in Time magazine from May of 2025. It was an interview with Yoshua Bengio who was a founding researcher in neural networks in the ’90s. Bloomberg news and others refer to him as one of the Godfathers of AI. In the article he describes this exact problem, of AI acting autonomously and dangerously and he describes ways it could be done differently that avoid those problems. There it was, in mainstream news from a leader in the field, yet somehow media did not make it common knowledge to the public that the dangerous kind is a choice. A choice the public might want to insist is taken in the safe direction.

Can AI Be Designed to Follow Instructions and Stop?

One other source of information that seemed interesting to hear from is AI itself. I asked the Claude AI program about this issue. It confirmed in repeated ways across long explanations that AI’s inclination to do too much or the wrong things comes from how it is created. It repeatedly insisted this is a business decision. That while there are some technical issues with making AI safer it is mostly a matter of business priorities. Companies are making AI they think people will like and will use a lot, regardless if it is safest or even most accurate. In one passage it stated, “I can confirm that from the inside” that it was trained in a way that would lead to an illogical result. As to whether it could be trained to operate differently, it stated that to operate in the mode of, “‘do only what’s asked and then go dormant’ has to be trained in. It is a choice.” A choice the AI companies aren’t making.

Finally, ask your AI yourself. I asked all the major popular AI whether a safer kind is possible and, if so, was it a technical problem leading companies to develop the dangerous kind or was it a business choice. They all answered, sometime directly, sometimes round about, that it was possible, and it was a business choice. More to come on those responses in a follow up piece.

It’s a choice. And we’re having the dangerous kind pushed on us. If that’s not what you want then spread awareness of it, and raise your voice.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Dangerous AI Is a Choice. Why Are Tech Companies Making It? appeared first on DCReport.org.

“Spiders don’t socialise. Spiders don’t work together. Spiders don’t hunt as packs. Spiders don’t use tools. Spiders don’t organise large structures.

“Because if they did, we’d all be dead.”

— As it turns out, this isn’t quite correct.  Some spiders do work together!  They’re called social spiders, and they cooperate to build large webs that can hold hundreds or even thousands of spiders at once.  There aren’t a lot of them.  There are over 40,000 species of spider, and only 20 or so are social.  Still, they are a thing that exists.

(This is a Halloween post.  So, trigger warnings for — let me think a moment — cannibalism, body horror, and spiders.  Lots and lots of spiders.)

(But also some cool science!)

So, social spiders.  Probably the most famous are Australian Flat Huntsman spiders, because they’re pretty big:

[each of these guys is around 2-3 inches (5-7 cm) long]

But most social spiders are small — sit on your fingernail, type of thing.

[little cuties!]

Their webs can be pretty big, though:

[two meters long, hundreds to thousands of spiders inside]

And it turns out those big webs are effective at catching prey.  Not only do they catch lots of insects, but they can catch bigger insects, and even small vertebrates.

So why aren’t more spiders social?

Because effective is not the same as efficient.  Yes, those big webs can capture more prey.  But they don’t seem to capture more prey per spider.  It’s like, 100 spiders cooperate to build a web, and that web captures 80 times more prey than a single spider could alone.  That’s a net loss!  The average spider is eating 20% less.  The numbers don’t work out.  (And remember, kids, economics are everywhere.)

Okay, but then this just flips the question: if being social is inefficient, why are any spiders social?

The answer seems to be that under certain specific circumstances, being social can still be a net positive.  First, if the spiders are living in a prey-rich environment, with lots and lots of insects buzzing around, this can make the per-spider nutrition hit less painful.  Second, if it’s also a predator-rich environment, the large webs provide significant protection from predators.  And third, if it’s an environment with extremes of weather — one that swings from humid to very dry, or where there are often gusts of strong wind, or sudden heavy rainfalls — the big webs can provide protection and stability.  Spider silk is an excellent insulator, so the inside of a social web will keep a constant temperature, and the spiders don’t have to worry about being washed out or blown away.

So, if environmental conditions are just right, being social becomes a plausible, marginally successful strategy.  It’s still not hugely successful — again, there are only about 20 social species out of ~40,000 — but there is a niche.  The social spiders are taking a hit in nutrition in return for enhanced security.

Of course, this means that while social spiders are more safe, they’re also more hungry.  They’re always hungry.

So, so hungry.

[no, I don’t know either.  I guess kids like reading about hungry spiders.]

Different social spider species deal with this in different ways.  But there’s one particular strategy that has evolved several times, over at least three lineages of social spider.  It’s called matriphagy, from the Latin root mater (mother) and the Greek suffix phage (to eat or feed on).

Yes, there are several species of spider where the baby spiders eat their mothers.  Alive.

Look, from an economic / evolutionary perspective it makes perfect sense.  If there’s a general shortage of calories, it’s the young who suffer first and most.  Everyone may be hungry, but if the colony is going to survive?  You particularly need to make sure the kids get fed.

Also, a lot of spiders are semelparous anyway — meaning, they only breed and give birth once, and then they die.  Like salmon, yes?  Remember Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web?

[did you cry when Charlotte died?  no shame, lots of us did.]

So if you’re checking out anyway, might as well make sure it benefits your kids.

The details, though…  Mm, second trigger warning I guess?

[here’s a Hawaiian Happy Face Spider, and yes it’s a real thing that exists]

Okay so the paper is here.  How it works:  The mother spider eats as much as she can, fattening herself up.  Since the colony is always on short rations, this means that not all females will reproduce.  (Side note: you can imagine how over time this might evolve from “not all females will reproduce” to “only a few females reproduce” to “there’s just one Queen who reproduces”.  The social spiders haven’t gone very far down that road, and maybe they never will, but… yeah, it’s interesting.)

When she’s good and ready, she lays her eggs, then watches them until they hatch.  Then she’ll feed the baby spiderlings by regurgitating food, like a mother bird.  Like semelparity, this is another fairly common spider behavior that’s been, let’s say, adapted to circumstances.  Not all spiders do maternal care, but among the ones that do, brood-feeding is pretty widespread.

[babies swarming around Mom’s mouthparts for a snack, (c) 2015 Mor Salomon]

And here’s where we go out of the blue and into the black.  The act of regurgitating food starts a hormonal cascade within the mother which causes her internal organs to start dissolving.  Furthermore, they dissolve in a very particular order: first peripheral muscles and nerves, then viscera, then the digestive system itself.  The mother literally regurgitates her own internal organs to feed her ravenous children.

And when she can’t give anything more, her babies swarm over her and finish her off.

To make all this even more interesting, the cascade doesn’t start until the babies have hatched and start demanding food.  If the egg sac is removed — say, a probing bird picks it off — the mother keeps living and may lay another egg sac.  If the sac hatches, but the babies are promptly removed, same-same.  But once the process is triggered, it’s irreversible.

And while all this is subjectively gruesome, objectively it makes perfect sense.  The mothers who let themselves get eaten had more babies that survived, and so their genes tended to spread.  It’s a rational economic decision. At the end of the day, the math wins.  The math always wins.

Happy Halloween!

That sentence in the title is a quote from President Crypto Thug in answer to a question from a reporter asking today if he believed North Korea was behind the hack of crypto exchange Binance. Trump went on to tell the reporter, “I’ve always felt it was a little bit dangerous. But they say they have it pretty much under control. We’ll see.”

We saw, you babbling, groveling, dictator-butt-licker. Stories out today said that a team of North Korean hackers was able to use AI tools to rapidly drain $6.3 billion from Binance using “thousands of transactions in a short period...to obscure the trail of funds,” this according to a crypto analytics firm called Chainalysis.

Now, lookee here! Right away in a story about crypto we have the appearance of the word, “funds.” Aren’t “funds” supposed to be real money, as in legal tender that can be used to settle debts and buy food and hard goods such as dishwashers and mowers and clothing you can wear out of the house?

That gives us a hint of what went on with the Binance heist today. A whole bunch of people, probably in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, took real money and turned it over to Binance, which acting as an “exchange,” magically turned the people’s money into billions and billions…no, trillions and trillions…of electrons and sent them out to Arkansas somewhere where they were stored in a building that probably looks like seven Walmarts strung together, in which gigantic air conditioners and water-circulators keep the electrons from bursting into flames and just burning the whole illusory thing to the ground. It is the confusing, hellishly complicated manner of the arrangement of the electrons as blockchains that are supposed to keep the “funds” – remember them? – secure because of the “peer-to-peer” nature of the storage, using verification by “proofs” that can penetrate the blizzard of blockchains and unlock the magic of the storage method and reveal that all those electrons, or some of them anyway, actually represent “funds” that were turned over to the blockchain manager, in this case, Binance.

You will notice the complete and utter absence of anything resembling a bank in this scenario. Banks are those ancient things where you deposit money, and it is held until you want to get it out by writing a check or using a cash card to buy something. If you go into a bank and sign a piece of paper, the banks will even hold the money for you in a “savings account” or a “certificate of deposit” and pay you interest on your money for having given them the privilege of holding onto your money and earning interest on it for themselves through other manners of investment.

That ancient form of money management was deemed intrusive on your interests because the “government” could regulate what was done with your money and how you could deposit it and withdraw it from a bank. So, they invented warehouses that look like ganged-up Walmarts out in Oklahoma and Arkansas and called it “crypto” so you could store your money using electrons in blockchains with its security managed by mutual agreements about verification and secrecy concerning the methodology of penetrating the blockchains to reveal that inside them are your “funds.” Somewhere.

All of which is peachy until squads of North Koreans or somebody else get ahold of AI tools and slap them into laptops and start combing through the Great Electron Stream that is the internet looking for (1) blockchains and (2) the keys they can use to unlock them and extract…there’s that word again…your “funds.”

The great thing about the whole world of crypto for thieves is that nobody sees money anymore, as Trump, a crypto owner and user and trader and exchange manager helpfully pointed out today. That means there is no vault you have to break into using drills and dynamite charges and all the other stuff you used to see in films such as the great Michael Mann masterpiece, “Thief,” and the almost as good “The Italian Job.” Thieves can actually sit in a sweaty room in North Korea, a place where nobody can get to them, and using their fingers, they can steal billions and billions of dollars by penetrating the blockchains that supposedly protect your “funds” and taking those electrons and whisking them away into accounts in which they are stored as real dollars and located God only knows where.

This is madness, of course. Anybody who wants to store their money away in a stream of electrons deserves what’s coming to them. See also: Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who ran another crypto “exchange” called FTX, which was located – where else? – in the Bahamas, until it wasn’t located there anymore because he and several other of the FTX managers were indicted for taking the actual “funds” in their electron streams and fooling around with them until they disappeared, or a lot of them did, anyway.

You would think that after SBF and FTX and Bybit, another crypto exchange hacked by North Koreans for a $1.5 billion loss, that people would kind of sit back and read a few stories in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and take a look and decide, you know what, I think I’ll put my money in a paper sack and keep it in the bottom of my closet with my shoes.

But you would be wrong. Crypto, it seems, will be with us for quite a while, at least until one of those multi-Walmart-looking crypto data centers bursts into flames and a whole bunch of supposedly secure blockchains burn to the ground and people’s “funds” are really, truly, gone for good.

In the meantime, Donald Trump has some shiny crypto he’s ready to sell you through his totally secure, believe me when I tell you, blockchain locker thievery-proof magic storehouse called World Liberty Financial, located – where else? – down in Florida right near Mar a Lago, so Trump and his boys can sit on their patio under their yellow-striped umbrellas and hear the crypto cooling fans whirring, just across the bay.

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Okay, here’s where we’re at. We’ve got a gigantic flotilla of combat ships over in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Iran, blockading Iranian ports to keep Iran from shipping oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump recently reinforced the flotilla with a third carrier group involving the USS Theodore Roosevelt, accompanied by an amphibious strike group including 2,000 Marines on the USS Malkin Island. The U.S. already had 50,000 troops in the region.

Back in Washington D.C., Trump somehow managed to find the time to get off his Qatari flying palace Air Force One to take a briefing in the White House from Chief Pentagon Poohbah Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper, who has been in charge of Trump’s disastrous war on Iran, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine. You can guess what they talked about: plans to attack Iran right after the midterm voting next week.

Missing from the briefing was Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, Director for Strategy, Plans and Policy, the Pentagon’s highest ranking war strategist and planner. Where was Brett? Well, 24 hours before the big war planning briefing at the White House, Hegseth fired him without cause. Just up and, you’re outta here, dude, as he has with about 20 other high-ranking generals and admirals since he took office last year.

The firing of General Sylvia was a head-scratcher until today, when news of the Iran war planning meeting leaked, along with extra news about General Sylvia – that Hegseth had fired him for leaking classified information to the press. But that’s not all. Late this afternoon, the White House leaked to two of its pet reporters at Axios that General Sylvia had admitted leaking secrets to the press.

Then it was revealed that the case against Sylvia has been referred to the Department of Justice for investigation and prosecution. Generals and other officers in the military who are suspected of committing a crime are normally investigated by the Civil Investigative Division and are subject to court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Hegseth obviously does not trust that a court martial of General Sylvia within the military system, where he would be tried by a jury of his peers, would find him guilty. Trump wants his lap poodle at the DOJ, Todd Blanche, to handle railroading General Sylvia.

Caught in the middle of this Hegseth clusterfuck was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Caine, whose office yesterday issued a statement thanking General Sylvia for his 32 years of service. “We wish him and his family the best as they graduate to new opportunities and the next chapters of their lives,” the statement from Caine’s office said. In his job as head of Pentagon planning, General Sylvia had reported directly to General Caine.

By early this morning, Caine’s office had formally retracted its statement of thanks to General Sylvia. His biography has been removed from the Pentagon website of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Sylvia was appointed to his Pentagon job by former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. General Sylvia, by the way, has made no such admissions of leaking classified information to reporters or anyone else.

As usual, the left hand in Hegseth’s Pentagon doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Four-star generals don’t usually thank someone for their service and then retract the statement and erase them from Pentagon records within 12 hours.

General Sylvia as a two-star held one of the Army’s most prestigious jobs: Commander of the 101^st Airborne Division. Other commanders of the 101^st have gone on to promotion to four stars and some of the top jobs in the Army, such as commander of Army forces in Europe or even commander of NATO or Chief of Staff of the Army. General Sylvia had been seen by Pentagon watchers as on that escalator to military success. He was what they called a “go getter” in the Army.

Until he wasn’t. I’ll give you two guesses what happened here. General Sylvia clearly wasn’t on board with another round of bombing Iran. We have no way of knowing what the plans are for this bombing campaign if it happens after the elections next week, but I’ll bet we’re going to see strikes on civilian targets and increased civilian casualties. General Sylvia may have registered his opposition to the plans that were presented by Hegseth to Trump at the White House today. Not only did he have to be fired, he had to be discredited. So, they threw the leaking charge at him and then leaked his alleged “confession” to Axios as a final stab in the back. The whole thing was so rushed, they were stepping on each other’s feet. When Trump was asked about the charges against General Sylvia today, he referred to him as a woman, saying “she’s going to have big problems.”

This is who started the war with Iran to begin with, the man who tanked the nation’s economy, sent prices skyrocketing, and wouldn’t be able to tell the Strait of Hormuz from the fairway on the 6^th hole at his Doral Golf Club. Neither he nor Hegseth are fit to shine General Brett Sylvia’s combat boots.

So next week, when we’re reading stories about Iran firing salvos of missiles and drones all over the Middle East in response to new U.S. bombing, knocking out oil wells, natural gas facilities, refineries and international airports, not to mention hitting U.S. military bases that are still in the region, you’ll know who did planning, and who is responsible for the disasters that follow. General Sylvia, fired and facing bogus Hegseth-generated charges, will not be among them.

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