Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog)

October 4, 2025

That anyone would even think of sending the 82nd Airborne to Portland should send chills of terror down the spines of all democracy loving Americans, By Hal M. Brown

The foreground above is from Spartan Military Prints and the background is from a tourist website showing a typical Portland street screen with a colorfully painted building like many others in the downtown area. That I would even take the time to put this together is nothing short of horrifying.

Not having any idea what to write I just read this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other Trump officials entertained sending the U.S. Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to respond to protests in what the president has referred to as “war-ravaged“ Portland, Oregon, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported Friday night.
Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Anthony Salisbury — in exchanges over the third-party messaging app Signal that were reportedly viewable from a “crowded, public space” in Minnesota — texted with officials such as Hegseth’s adviser Patrick Weaver, who wrote that the defense secretary wanted Trump to explicitly tell him to send troops into Portland.
“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver wrote.
Weaver described the 82nd Airborne — an infantry division that has parachuted into combat zones ranging from World War I and II to wars in the Middle East — as the “top tier” rapid reaction force abroad.

“So it will cause a lot of headlines,” he wrote. “Probably why he wants potus to tell him to do it.”

Below is the illustration the Daily Beast (subscription) used for their article:

Note that they are calling this “Signalgate 2.0” because this will be the second time this app was used for messages meant to be confidential. This is hardly the main story here, and I say this not just because I live in Portland and yesterday walking back from dinner we heard a helicopter above and looked up and saw it was military. I said I wonder if it is headed downtown and then realized it was going away from the city. Perhaps it had already been there. That we would even think this way is horrendous, but on Oct. 1st there was this article:

If the 82nd Airborne comes to Portland we may be seeing these:

Not only are these airborne death bringing machines meant for actual warfare, but when they fly overhead making a loud roar impossible to ignore, they can intimidating as hell if you fear them.

Most of us have heard them around here. Sometimes they belong to our National Guard on exercises, though more often they are the decidely friendly looking Coast Guard Blackhawks which we know are meant to be live savers and not life takers. We see them all the time when we go to the Vancouver Waterfront Park where they often fly over the Columbia River.

Addendum:

Here are a few of the comments to the HUFFPOST article:

October 3, 2025

Trump is the Baby Balloon enabled, unleashed, and unrestrained, By Hal M. Brown

The skin is the largest human organ.

Look up Trump and thin skinned and you will find how many people, including his psychologist cousin Mary Trump, have described his, metaphorically, as extremely thin skinned.

Clicking above will enlarge the image. You can look up the articles yourself.

Trump had to endure a number of abrasions to his thin skin in recent years. He had to sit through the Correspondent’s Dinner where he was roundly roasted by Barack Obama. He also had to sit through the entire E. Jean Carroll trial (but at least he got a useful mug shot photo out of this). And he had to suffer the indignation of the Russia election meddling probe which suggested he needed their help to be the winner he has all of his self-esteem invested in claiming to be.

I think one thing that got to him more than may be obvious is the famous Baby Balloon. (See Wikipedia where the entry about it is part of their series about him.)

I can’t find an estimate of how many mini-versions of the balloon were sold. Let’s say it was a lot and Trump couldn’t have been pleased about this. This is from this TPM 2018 article:

Here’s another:

I have no doubt Trump was well aware of the balloons and, as someone who has had great success marketing himself, he no doubt was cognizant that people were making money mocking him with a decidedly unflattering depiction of him in a diaper.

What is open to speculation is whether this got to him in a deeper way, in a way he wasn’t consciously aware of. Harsh and punitive toilet training is often considered by experts to be detremential to healthy personality development. Here’s a Google search.

Click below to enlarge:

Whether one wants to take a Freudian view or not, it is clear that being depicted as a tantrum throwing baby, not only with large helium filled balloons which make the news, but with smaller balloons at protests (sold for as little as $10 on Amazon) has to get to him at some level.

He fancies himself the master of the insult, so if he see himself being called “Diaper Don” if he’s honest with himself he’d recognize that this is a damn good one. I think it is far better than Shifty Shift, Pocahontas, Ron DeSanctimonious, Kamabla, and even Sleepy Joe (See the entire list here and judge for yourself.) In fact, I think it is one of the best insulting nicknames for any politician since Tricky Dick.

What the country is being subjected to now is this mentally warped leader acting like a anally impaired fixated baby having tantrums unleashing his rage. His target isn’t his parents. It is enemies, whether real people like James Comey, random brown skinned people, women in general, poor people, or unfortunate possible drug smugglers in speed boats.

Addendum:

This is unrelated to this particular Substack, but Sabrina Haake brought it to my attention as worth sharing. I agree:

I have often referenced quotes from Sun Tzu as he does.

October 2, 2025

I was going to write about the MAGA uproar and ICE threats about Bad Bunny and the Superbowl, but then I saw Melania Trump's AI post on X, By Hal M. Brown

I looked at HUFFPOST this morning and saw the articles above about Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl.

I decided that I’d take a break from writing about Trump’s “take as few prisioners as possible” blitzkrieg, or his unhingedness, and address how ridiculous their bothering with the culture war is. I mean, I never heard of Bad Bunny and I was curious enough to find some YouTubes of him. I am sure I am not alone.

Here’s his YouTube channel:

Then, also looking at HUFFPOST I saw this:

This prompted me to go to Perchance AI and ask for images of Melania Trump crying and then I used them in this reply to her post on X.

I even posted it as a comment to the HUFFPOST article:

I also used AI to make the top illustration for this Substack.

I admit that I’d like it if one of my posts on X or Bluesky was picked up and amplified on one or another the websites which features social media posts in one of their articles. Both HUFFPOST and RawStory do this. Not that I am starving for recognition beyond my miniscule pressence on Substack (insert humility emoji)…

Getting serious, I wondered whether Project 2025 addresed woke and the culture war so I asked AI. This is the answer I got:

Yes, Project 2025 includes proposals that address issues related to the culture war, emphasizing a conservative agenda that opposes “woke” policies. It advocates for a broader implementation of conservative values across various sectors of government, reflecting a focus on cultural issues.

I found this in this long article about Project 2025:

In calling for a return to the “biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family” (page 481), an end to all forms of “woke propaganda” (page 9) and the jailing of pornographers (page 5), Project 2025 is clear in its intention to make the federal government a combatant in the culture war.

I also found this is in “Voters Are Tired of the “War on Woke” from June 2024.

Of course Biden dropped out, Kamala ran and was, if anything, even more woke than him, and she lost. Between June of 2024 Trump added anti-trans to his campaign train of grievances and this may actually have swayed a few votes. He created some delusional demon called DEI. He went anti-woke bigly.

He’s president/dictator, possibly for the rest of his life, so the question remains as to why he and his minions are bothering with the woke war.

I will venture an answer. I think it is for a similar reason as mine for using AI to make the images of Melania. I think it is because it is fun to be malicious at times. For me it is a way to express my sense of helplessness through mockery. For them I think it is because they get pleasure out of kicking those they feel are already down.

I didn’t know the following:

I was looking up top Spotify streams and number one is Taylor Swift. Number two is Bad Bunny.