VIDEO & ARTICLES: USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN & Families of US sailors denounce Trump and Hegseth for ‘dismissing their experiences and calling them liars’ 16AUG26

 

I just have to wonder how many of these sailors and their families, as well as members of the other branches of the US military and their families, voted for their draft dodging C-I-C NOT MY pres drumpf/trump and his neo-nazi fascist administration believing they would be taken care of and to hell with everyone else? How is that working out for yous now??? Is neo-nazi Sec of Defense more like a no class gang leader fascist fotze petie lola hegseth taking good care of ya??? Not really, eh? Keep this in mind when you vote in the Midterms on 3 November 2026. In the meantime many of us will keep our nations service people and their families in our prayers and will keep pushing congress to take the necessary actions to provide for and protect all of you. From facebook post and The Guardian

Sailors are trying to jump over the side of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Pete Hegseth called it "fake news." Annabelle Loma's husband has given the Navy thirteen years.

She told Military Times that the ship's ombudsman called her: her husband had tried to jump from the carrier, and he is now on a medical hold. "He's scared," she said. "He thinks he'll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That's not fair, that's not right. That's not what he should be worrying about right now."

The Lincoln left San Diego on November 21, about five thousand sailors and Marines aboard, expecting to be home by May. Then came the war with Iran. The ship was rerouted to the Middle East, the deployment was extended indefinitely, and day 260 at sea was last week.

Another wife, Maria Rodriguez, told the paper what her husband did on watch. He saw a shipmate preparing to jump, called out, grabbed their arms, and pulled them back onto the deck. Three more sailors came running to help. He told her he had never felt adrenaline like that in his life.

The families have been fighting from shore since spring. They first sounded the alarm in April, the Navy denied the complaints, and the "fake news" verdict came from the Secretary of Defense himself.

Last week they were back, this time in town halls with Navy leadership. In recordings reviewed by MS NOW, they described food shortages, no soap or toothpaste, broken plumbing, delayed mail, and sailors missing births and funerals. One parent said their daughter believed she would die on that ship.

The Navy is listening now, on the record. "We hear you loud and clear," a vice admiral told the families. The acting Navy secretary said the USS Theodore Roosevelt is being prepared to relieve the Lincoln, with no timeline, citing operational security. And a Navy spokesperson said the service has "not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship."

The deployment doesn’t have an end date because the Iran War has none. The administration's own plan, per the Wall Street Journal, is a ceasefire stretched out indefinitely, and a top adviser in Iran's parliament says Tehran will wait out this presidency. The Lincoln's crew is where "indefinitely" lives.

The families are asking the Navy for a date. So far, they have gotten town halls.

They sounded the alarm once and got called liars. They are sounding it again. This time the whole country can hear it.

Families of US sailors denounce Trump and Hegseth for ‘dismissing their experiences and calling them liars’

One US sailor’s mother asks: ‘My son signed up to serve his country. But why isn’t his country serving him?’

Ed Pilkington

Sunday, 16 Aug 2026  0600 EDT

Naval families with loved ones deployed for months on US warships amid the Iran war have reacted with fury to Donald Trump and the defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s dismissal of their concerns about the extreme pressures and dire conditions they are enduring.

The Guardian has talked to three naval families who have been following the physical and mental stresses bearing down on their relatives with mounting alarm. The families, with loved ones on board the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Tripoli, all spoke anonymously for fear of retribution against their active duty relatives.

They spoke of insufficient nourishment that has led to close relatives losing 20-30lbs in weight since they were sent to the Middle East five months ago, leaving one sailor “emaciated”, according to his mother. They spoke also of low-quality drinking water and scarce mental health counseling and support despite the intense burden of being at sea for months on end without making land.

The USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier with more than 5,000 sailors and marines onboard, has been at sea for nearly nine months, having begun its deployment in November. There have been reports of multiple suicide attempts including jumping overboard.

When Trump was asked on Friday whether naval families were worried about conditions on board, he replied: “No, they’re not.” He said that the Lincoln’s deployment, now in its ninth month, was “not nearly long enough”.

Earlier, Hegseth also swatted away families’ concerns, saying that the reality onboard the Lincoln had been “completely misrepresented”.

The sister of a Lincoln crew member in his late 30s said that the remarks made her want to grab Trump and Hegseth and shake them. “I grew up in a United States where you have to be very respectful of the military, as they’re making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting their country, and now you have the commander-in-chief and defense secretary dismissing their experiences and calling them liars. I’m really angry,” she said.

She added: “It’s a feeling of betrayal. These are frustrating, false and careless comments, and they are going to have a lot of consequences for my brother.”

The mother of a sailor on board the Lincoln in his early 20s said: “My son signed up to serve his country. But why isn’t his country serving him? They are not feeding him or supplying clean water, and living conditions are horrible. He didn’t sign up for that.”

The sister of the Lincoln crew member shared text messages she has received in recent days from her brother. In one he said that “the water is so bad that they took out the scuttlebutts”, referring to the drinking containers on the carrier.

He also described the mental health services available to struggling sailors that are now stretched thin. “Our deployment resilience counsellor quit months ago. To see the ONLY PSYCHIATRIST is a five-week wait unless you do like three of our shipmates and jump off the ship or take 27 sleeping pills.”

He added that a senior officer from Centcom, the US central command overseeing operations in the Middle East amid the ongoing US-Israel war with Iran, visited the Lincoln for two hours recently. “He made an interesting speech. It was all pretty good news and quite inspiring, until he reminded us that it’s not mental health it’s just health and we can simply exercise our brains to make ourselves happy.”

CNN has reported that among the multiple suicide attempts onboard the Lincoln, a sailor succeeded in going overboard earlier this month and had to be rescued by helicopter.

The Guardian asked Centcom to explain the logistical challenges faced by US warships in theater in the course of the Iran war, but it did not respond.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that another aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, is being sent to replace the Lincoln.

The Lincoln crew member’s sister said she would believe that the anguish was over when it actually happened. “We have heard it said before that they were going to be relieved, but the relief vessel got diverted to Guam.”

She said that in the months of deployment her brother had lost 20lbs. An even more extreme picture was painted by the mother of a sailor on board the USS Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship with 3,500 sailors and marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit onboard.

The Tripoli was redeployed from its base in Sasebo, Japan, on 11 March, and returned to base last month. Over the five months of active deployment, the mother’s son lost more than 30lbs in weight.

The mother, herself a naval veteran with six years service, showed the Guardian photos of her child before and after deployment. Before he had a fleshy round face and muscular arms; after, in a photo in which he is seen holding a placard saying “The wait is over, welcome home daddy,” he is markedly skinny with thin arms and scrawny neck.

“He’s emaciated,” the mother said. “This is so insane – he didn’t deserve this. When I saw that photo I was livid. It should not have gotten this far.”

She sent the Guardian screenshots of communications with her son while he was on active duty. “I need to make up weight,” he said in one. Asked how much weight, he replied: “Quite a bit. I’m not anorexic and my rib cage isn’t showing, but I’ve definitely lost weight. It’s been rough.”

“I’m running very low on energy. I am burnt out,” he said in a separate text.

In a third, he said: “I eat when I can. My coworkers make sure everyone in our unit eats and we all try to share food whenever someone gets more than normal. Keep praying for us. We are doing our best to make sure we protect our country and our families.”

The mother said that her son had been on many deployments with the navy. This was the first time that he had ever indicated a lack of food and other basic supplies. “Something genuinely wrong has happened,” she said.

As warships eventually return to base after historically long deployments in the Middle East, there are growing concerns about long-term consequences of inadequate supplies. Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran and CEO of the advocacy group Vet Voice Foundation, said that there was “longer-term damage to the sailors and marines serving, and their families waiting for them at home”.

She added: “You cannot keep extending deployments, grinding down crews, and gaslighting families without destroying trust in the institution and its leaders.”

The Tripoli mother said she worries about how long it will take for her son to regain weight and strength. She fears his naval command might discipline him should he flunk upcoming fitness tests – which would be a punishment on top of punishment.

“Our military deserve the best of the best,” she said. “They are fighting for our country, and the government has a duty to provide them with the basics. If they’re losing weight, that means you’re starving them.”

US navy veterans and military health experts express concern over USS Abraham Lincoln sailors

15 AUG 2026

Trump downplays concerns about sailors on board USS Abraham Lincoln amid record deployment

14 AUG 2026

ENLIGHTENING FACTS: MARGARET ATWOOD, A MODERN PROPHET

 

WE were warned in 1985 and in 2017 and we are being warned again in 2026. THE 2026 Midterm elections can be the beginning of restoring our democratic Republic. Please go to Rock the Vote to confirm you are registered to vote and all the information is correct and then please vote on 3 November 2026.

She was sitting in a walled city, surrounded by the sound of deliberate sonic booms, reading the newspaper and taking notes.

It was the spring of 1984, and Margaret Atwood had rented a typewriter in West Berlin. The Berlin Wall encircled the city on all sides. Every Sunday, the East German Air Force sent jets screaming overhead — not for any military purpose, but as a reminder. The Soviet Empire was watching. It was always watching. Elderly women who had survived the Second World War walked the streets without speaking much. Young men hid in the city to avoid military conscription elsewhere. West Berlin was a small island of the West sitting inside a totalitarian sea, and you could feel the pressure of that arrangement in the air.

Margaret Atwood was writing about a future in which women lost everything.

She had given herself one rule before she began, and she intended to keep it without exception: nothing would go into the book that had not already happened somewhere, at some time, to real people. No invented horrors. No atrocities she had imagined from nothing. Every single dark thing in her dystopia had to have a precedent in documented human history.

So she began collecting.

She cut newspaper articles and filed them in binders. Pieces about infant mortality rates. Reports from Romania, where the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had banned abortion and contraception and ordered women to produce children in service of the state. Stories about Soviet women losing ground in the workforce as the political climate shifted. News from American states where abortion access was being restricted. Headlines about baby stealing, forced surrogacy, missing children, women losing property rights they had only recently gained.

She did not call it research. She was, she would later say, just reading the news.

The novel had begun as a question she could not put down: if someone wanted to reverse every right women had gained — property ownership, employment, bank accounts, bodily autonomy — how would it be done? What would the mechanism look like?

The answer, she found, was not complicated. You would reverse the steps that had produced the freedom, one by one, in the right order. You would justify each reversal with safety, or morality, or the protection of family. You would make each step seem reasonable before the next one began.

In her dystopia, women were sorted by function and color-coded by clothing — a system with direct precedents in Renaissance sumptuary laws and Calvinist dress codes. Women who could bear children became handmaids, their bodies the legal property of the state. The handmaid system itself was drawn from the Lebensborn program in Nazi Germany, where SS officers maintained biological wives to produce what the regime considered racially desirable children. The public executions in the novel came from the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. The stolen children given to commanders' families came from Argentina's Dirty War, in which military officers took infants from political dissidents they had murdered. The surveillance, the careful speech, the way people changed the subject when someone who might be listening came too close — Margaret was living all of that in West Berlin in 1984, in a city that understood what it meant to exist under eyes that never closed.

She finished the manuscript in early 1985, moving between Berlin and Canada and Alabama to complete it. She titled it The Handmaid's Tale.

When it was published in August of that year, critics called it a feminist 1984. Some praised the imagination behind it. Others dismissed it as paranoid, as overwrought, as the kind of book that mistakes anxiety for prophecy. One of the common refrains was that nothing like this could happen in modern America.

Margaret kept her newspaper clippings.

The book became a bestseller and won awards and was taught in schools and then banned from schools, sometimes the same schools that had assigned it. Parents objected to the sexual content, the treatment of religion, the political argument beneath the story. The objections themselves were a kind of evidence she had not been looking for but could not ignore.

For decades the novel lived in that particular category of books that are considered important warnings about somewhere else, some other time, some other kind of society — not here, not now, not us.

Then 2016 arrived and something shifted.

Hulu announced a television adaptation. The series premiered in April 2017, three months after a new administration took office in Washington with explicit intentions to reshape the country, the same month that states began passing laws restricting abortion access, the same month that women in many places felt, in a way that was difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore, that something was moving in a direction that had a name.

The show became a cultural phenomenon. But it was what happened outside of the screen that no one had anticipated.

Women began appearing at political protests dressed in the handmaids' red robes and white bonnets. They stood in silence, in rows, outside the Texas Capitol while lawmakers debated abortion restrictions inside. They appeared at Senate confirmation hearings. They marched in Washington and Buenos Aires and London. The costume from a novel that critics had once called paranoid became the uniform of real political resistance in multiple countries simultaneously.

A warning dressed as fiction had become a language that real people used to describe what they felt was actually happening.

In June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional protection for abortion access that had stood for nearly fifty years, search traffic for The Handmaid's Tale rose by six thousand percent. The book, written in 1984, became the number one bestseller again — thirty-seven years after its original publication. Women who had never read it, or who had read it and filed it away as a period piece, were suddenly searching to understand whether it was a prediction.

Margaret Atwood, by then in her eighties, gave the same answer she had been giving since 1985.

She had not made anything up. It had already happened. She had simply remembered.

The newspaper clippings from 1984 and 1985 are stored in boxes at the University of Toronto archives. Researchers who examine them report a consistent and unsettling experience: the headlines feel current. The stories about reproductive rights, about women losing economic standing, about children separated from parents — the dates say 1985. The content reads like this week.

In 2019 she published The Testaments, a sequel that won the Booker Prize. By then she had stopped needing to defend the plausibility of her fictional world. She was watching pieces of it arrive.

What Margaret Atwood understood in that walled city in 1984, sitting with her binders of newspaper clippings, was something that most people find genuinely difficult to hold in their minds: dystopia does not announce itself. It does not arrive with villains explaining their intentions. It moves slowly, through restrictions framed as protections, through curtailments framed as safety measures, through the patient reversal of freedoms one at a time until the reversals feel normal.

And it is never new. It is always a return to something that already happened, somewhere, to people who also believed it could not happen to them.

She was forty-four years old in 1984 when she wrote a warning and disguised it as a novel, following a rule that nothing in it could be invented — that every horror had to be borrowed from history because history had already provided more than enough.

The terrifying part, she has said more than once, was never that she predicted the future.

It was that she never had to.

For those who believe that the most important warnings are the ones we dismiss as exaggerated until we suddenly cannot — what piece of history do you think the present moment most urgently needs to remember?

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MOTHER JONES DAILY: AI Andrew Tate haunts my dreams & The Tate Brothers’ Lawyer Is on an Aggressive, AI-Riddled Quest to Win Their Release, AI helped me build a killer drone, Scientists have created a new category of heat waves: "snow eaters", A Trump judge called mail-in ballots a threat to democracy, Documents reveal the federal government’s vast Minnesota surveillance dragnet, A Young Immigrant’s Deportation Nightmare 14AUG26

 

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August 14, 2026 The Tate brothers—a pair of accused rapists, sex traffickers, and manosphere podcasters currently sitting in federal prison—seem very unlikely to win pretrial release before they are extradited to the United Kingdom, where they will face charges related to sex trafficking, rape, assault, and indecent images of a child. Though the Tates count members of the Trump administration (and immediate Trump family) among their fans, the administration has thus far ignored their pleas for aid.  They're relying on lawyer Joseph McBride to secure their release, and McBride has been implementing some unusual strategies to do so. Mostly, he's flooding X and Instagram with AI-generated images of the two men, designed to project a positive and manly image.  This is an unusual thing for a lawyer to do, to say the least. But as McBride told my colleague Anna Merlan, it's all part of the plan to free the Tates. In some of the pictures, the Tates are (as Anna put it) "manfully bearing their suffering," and in others they're sitting around a table with great men of history like George Washington and Joe Rogan.    McBride refused to tell Anna which image generator he's using, and it remains to be seen whether his AI Tate pics will do much to shift public opinion. But in the meantime, things are getting weird. — Sophie Hurwitz

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The Tate Brothers’ Lawyer Is on an Aggressive, AI-Riddled Quest to Win Their Release   Joseph McBride's strident defense of the accused rapists includes a flood of faked propaganda images. BY ANNA MERLAN

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AI helped me build a killer drone REPORTED BY MATT SMITH WITH VIDEO BY DAVID RITSHER Scientists have created a new category of heat waves: "snow eaters" BY KATE YODER A Trump judge called mail-in ballots a threat to democracy BY JULIA MÉTRAUX Documents reveal the federal government’s vast Minnesota surveillance dragnet BY SOPHIE HURWITZ

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A Young Immigrant’s Deportation Nightmare ICE is going to war against kids who have a special legal status. BY SAMANTHA MICHAELS

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