BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
IT seems fascist fotze trunt kenni paxton thinks himself above being questioned about his adultery, his protection of pedophiles, his illegal voting six times in Texas and about alleged corruption while Texas attorney general allowing him to afford $9 million in property purchases on a state government salary while being divorced by his wife and running for US Senate. All the above does make him the perfect candidate to be endorsed by NOT MY pres drumpf/trump as they do have so much in common. This from the New Republic.....
Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton was given an opportunity to address two major scandals that stand to derail his chances against Democrat James Talarico in November. Instead of acknowledging them, he ended the press conference and left the room.
“General, I wanted to give you a chance to respond to state Representative Talarico and his campaign,” a reporter asked Paxton while flanked by over a dozen law officers in cowboy hats during a Tuesday press conference. “They’ve made a lot about the reports that have come out, one in The New York Timesabout you acquiring properties worth—”
“So Jack, can we keep this to law enforcement today?” Paxton interrupted.
“Well, I’m giving you the opportunity to answer the question.”
“We’re here with the sheriffs, I’d like to keep today to law enforcement, so that’s what I’m gonna answer, questions about law enforcement,” Paxton replied.
Paxton was then pressed on a separate scandal just seconds after.
“Will you answer a question about why you voted in Collin County? Clear that up?” the reporter asked, only to be shut down by a staffer immediately while Paxton began to leave, looking visibly uncomfortable.
Wow -- Ken Paxton and his team abruptly shut down a news conference and bail after journalists try to ask him about his various scandals
Paxton refused to answer the questions even as he spoke at a podium with Talarico’s face plastered on it, alongside the caption “Talarico: Handcuffed to his record.”
A Timesreport last week detailed how Paxton—who has been Texas attorney general since 2015—has acquired 15 properties worth $9 million in states like Utah, Hawaii, Florida, and Oklahoma, all on a government salary while in the midst of both a Senate run and a divorce.
Another ProPublica report from earlier this month found that Paxton, who has echoed Trump’s concern with voter fraud, voted using an address he didn’t reside at in six elections in two years. Paxton didn’t really address those allegations at the time of those reports, and he certainly didn’t do so on Tuesday.
HOW sad so many are so insecure they have to assign a gender to our Christian God when one is not assigned in the Bible. When I have been asked if God is male I go with imago dei and tell the questioner to look in a mirror, if they see a man then God is a man, if they see a woman then God is a woman. We are all created in the image of God and I believe this is something we should keep in mind in our encounters and relationships with each other. I believe the world would be a much better place if we did. Oh, and ken paxton, since you like to bring up God, what does the Bible say about adultery? This from Sojourners.....
Ken Paxton and James Talarico are making headlines in unexpected ways in Texas as part of the two political opponents’ campaigns. The political direction of the state is on the line, but a millennia-old theological debate has taken center stage: What is God’s gender?
It’s bold of Paxton to double down on the theologically contentious premise that God is male, a response to Talarico’s declaration on the Texas House floor that “God is nonbinary.” But Talarico is right—God is not exclusively defined as male in scripture.
Let’s start at the beginning, with Genesis 1:27: “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” As we see here, it’s true that the Bible often uses male pronouns to refer to God, but the point of this verse is that God’s image is reflected in different genders. The verse uses what’s called a “merism,” a figure of speech combining two contrasting parts to express totality or completeness. In this case, Genesis describes how humans are all created in God’s image, meaning all genders represent the imago dei.
That’s not the only place in the Hebrew Bible where God shows up as something beyond a distinctly male entity. As God led the Israelites away from Egypt after Pharaoh finally agreed to let them go, “the Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night.” (Exodus 13:21) It’s important to note both the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire are gender-neutral forms that God chose for leading God’s people to safety and the use of the word “Lord” in the same verse. It indicates that, at least as far as the Israelites of this time were concerned, their image of God was not an old, bearded man in the sky, but a guiding spirit with no distinct gender.
As Rabbi Arthur Green notes in “Judaism’s Ten Best Ideas” the term “Y-H-W-H”—a representation of God’s name that many Jewish people consider to be taboo to speak—was later substituted in scripture with the term adonay, meaning “my lord,” about two thousand years ago. This act of pious submission was good in its intent of showing love and reverence to God, but it led people to begin conflating God with images of elderly noblemen. Green describes this conflation as religion sliding into idolatry. The Jewish Publication Society recently published “The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition”, a translation of the Hebrew Bible that begins to address some of these discrepancies.
Rev. Chloe Specht notes that the writers of scripture we are able to identify today were largely men with immense privilege, writing with a hyper-patriarchal cultural lens. “Since the Bible is a tool of God’s self-revelation, it’s important to consider all the ways that God is described in scripture and avoid focusing solely on the masculine pronouns ascribed to God,” Specht wrote. God also refers to Godself with feminine metaphors throughout scripture, including the image of God as a mother bear defending her cubs (Hosea 13:8) and as a mother comforting her child (Isaiah 66:13).
The gender of the Holy Spirit is also ambiguous, with many feminine and genderless representations in scripture. The terms used for “spirit” in the Hebrew Bible are grammatically feminine, though scholars are still debating the contextual gender of God in those instances. In any case, it’s clear that the writers of the Hebrew Bible did not feel the need to stress the masculine gender of God in all forms, opting for a more complex gender representation of the divine. And in Greek, the term used for the Holy Spirit is the gender-neutral, pneuma hagion.
While Jesus was a man, it makes sense that when God chose to enter human life, God picked the gender that would allow Jesus to be taken seriously as a leader in the patriarchal society of the Roman era. But as we’ve seen, the other two members of the trinity have no body and are portrayed with a complex and diverse array of gender.
Given all this, it seems far more likely that God, as a spirit, is at once genderfluid and agender, instead of entirely male from the beginning of time to the present day.
Paxton might insist that God in all forms is male, but those who are steeped in scriptural context and original biblical languages know that to call God entirely male is unbiblical and just fundamentally incorrect. It’s also an unimaginative way to ascribe human traits to a God who we can never know in God’s entirety during our human lifetimes.
Paxton’s claims serve only to reinforce modern conservative conceptualizations of gender while preserving the identity politics of those who align with him. In doing so, he erases the experiences of those who are facing oppression because of their gender instead of seeing and siding with the oppressed, as Jesus calls Christians to do.
Paxton can insist that God is a man all he likes, but he can’t change the teaching of the Bible or the experience of the people he claims to want to represent if elected to the U.S. Senate. To lead well in representing the full range of people who would be his constituents, Paxton would need to take a more Godly approach: embracing all of their genders.
Melania Trump’s approval rating has plummeted. But she’s still making a $40 million documentary about her life, Nia-Malika Henderson says. Read more at the link in bio.
Screenshot of the Goodreads page linked to Geressy’s email address. The page was deleted after we asked him and the Pentagon about it.
THIS is as ridiculous as if NOT MY pres drumpf / trump was going to overhaul Christianity or fascist neo-nazi bibi netanyahu was going to overhaul Judaism or murderous pig mbs was going to overhaul Islam. The sad fact is all four of these people are apostates of their claimed faiths. But just to stay focused on Sec of Defense fascist fotze trunt petie lola hegseth I want to know how he is going to work his mentor, fascist fotze trunt eric j geressy's history of adultery, his fascination with porn involving Asian wife sharing, cuckolding, group sex and "ladyboys" ( Thai transgender women ), his misogyny and his alleged history of domestic violence into the overhaul of the US Military's Chaplain Corp. Considering eric's and petie's reputations one thing becomes clear; birds of a feather do stick together. The chaplins of the US Military's Chaplain Corp are in for the biggest battle of their military faith careers. From Mother Jones and Military Times.....
After the author contacted the Pentagon for comment, he heard from far-right influencer, mouth breather and beardo Jack Posobiec (left).Mother Jones illustration; Jen Golbeck/SOPA/Zuma; Gage Skidmore/Zuma; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Zuma
Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”
That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”
I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.
Calling Geressy “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” Hegseth in March presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy’s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.
I had discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a “currently reading” list that included various books featuring stories about “Asian wife sharing.” These pornographic works, with titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A Cuckold Story,” appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving “ladyboys”—a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.
I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy’s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.
The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: “Geressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.”
Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec’s links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.
Posobiec’s email claimed I have “a history of objectifying women,” and that I had engaged in some kind of misconduct. The email also included questions about my marriage.
Posobiec’s questions suggested one of his “two sources” may have been a real woman with whom I did have a brief relationship nearly a decade ago. Contrary to the email’s depiction, that relationship was perfectly amicable at the time. But it was part of some personal messiness, especially around the end of my first marriage, that is embarrassing.
My first instinct was to laugh this off. Who cares what the Pizzagate guy writes? But getting lied about by someone with 3 million X followers is not that funny. Comet Ping Pong never housed a Democratic pedophilia ring in its basement. But that didn’t make it less dangerous when the restaurant was targeted by QAnon crazies, including a guy who fired an AR-15 into a room that had just been full of kids.
The threatened audience for the smear, clearly, was my peers—and my wife. It seemed meant to scare me into spiking my own story. That is not journalism, but an attack on journalism.
This apparent threat became more explicit as the possible publication date we had given the Pentagon approached. In tweets, Posobiec asked his followers if he should publish a story about mistreatment of women by a “DC-area liberal reporter.” After our possible publication date passed, though, he went quiet.
That left my editors and me with a problem. Here was what we believed to be an attempt to strong-arm Mother Jones, and perhaps an expansion of the administration’s war on the press. This was news. But the development also complicated an already tricky story. And if we delayed publication, or decided the story was not important enough to run, we risked leaving the impression that we, and I, had been intimidated into silence.
We knew that we would not drop the article because of Posobiec’s ploy, nor rush into running it before we were ready. Instead, we did what reporters are supposed to do when confronted with a journalism dilemma: more journalism.
My emails to the Pentagon and Geressy were part of an effort to check the information we had gathered. We wanted their side of the story. My questions went largely unanswered, but I kept asking. I talked to more people. And I worked to verify the information we had.
We had linked the Goodreads account to Geressy based on various pieces of identifying information, including an email address he had used. The account was listed under the username Eric J—Geressy’s middle name is Joseph. At one point, the page noted that Eric J lived in a specific Florida town, which matched Geressy’s known residence. Also, some of the non-erotic books displayed on the account were seemingly of interest to him; they included books, like Hegseth’s The War on Warriors, that mention Geressy’s military service. These titles appeared on the page between 2021 and July of this year.
Screenshot of the Goodreads page linked to Geressy’s email address. The page was deleted after we asked him and the Pentagon about it.
The same email address was also linked to other apps, including Yelp and MyFitnessPal, that appeared to be Geressy’s, along with a MySpace page that includes what looks like a photograph of him.
Geressy declined to comment, and did not confirm he had a Goodreads account. In theory that made it possible, if highly unlikely, that someone could have used his email account, obtained through a hack or other means, to set up the Goodreads account. So we tried to rule out that possibility.
I spoke to Nathaniel Fried, the CEO of OSINT Industries. That’s a British organization whose platform matches personal information such as emails and phone numbers to online accounts; we had relied on this platform to connect Geressy’s email address to the Goodreads account. Fried said that while OSINT can’t tell you for sure who signed up, “it’s 100 percent that that email has an account.” In other words, either Geressy or someone using his email and personal information created the account.
I also asked Amazon, which owns Goodreads, about the account. After much back and forth, the company said it did not currently have a record of an account linked to Geressy, or the email address he appears to have used. But they also said that they do not retain identifying information for deleted Goodreads accounts. Since the account linked to Geressy had been deleted weeks before, right after I reached out to the Pentagon and Geressy for comment, this statement gave us little new information. Overall, Amazon’s carefully parsed response did nothing to refute the connection.
Still, none of that fully bore on the main consideration. That is, whether personal reading tastes, past relationships, or apparent dating habits are worth reporting on. After extensive discussion, we decided that in this case, they are.
For one thing, former national security officials told us that for Pentagon personnel in particular, relationships with foreign partners are a major concern.
Geressy lived in 2016 with a woman who evidence suggests may be a Chinese national. That woman started a limited liability company during that time with a name that references Chinese investment. It was registered at Geressy’s home address, then dissolved a few months later. (I am omitting some specifics to avoid including identifying information.) The Pentagon said that Geressy has never been deemed a security risk. But it did not provide verifiable answers to questions about whether that relationship and company were examined as part of Geressy’s security clearance review. Neither did Geressy.
Geressy has had what appears to be a stormy personal life that has included three marriages. In 1997, a jury acquitted him of a domestic violence charge after an accusation by his then-wife, according to court records.
Email addresses Geressy used, and other identifying information, including his first name and biographical information, also appeared in three data breaches, between 2011 and 2016, of adult websites geared toward finding sexual partners, according to databases that include the hacked data. Those sites are Fling, AdultFriendFinder, which then called itself “the World’s Largest Sex & Swinger Community,” and Ashley Madison, which billed itself as “the most famous name in infidelity.”
The presence of Geressy’s email and other information in these data breaches does not confirm he used these sites, according to cyber researchers.
But as John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer, told Mother Jones, in normal circumstances, a government official who might be involved with such websites and who had romantic relationships with foreigners would draw scrutiny. “It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you,” Sipher said. “It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”
And there is a second point. Geressy is a top official in a Defense Department that has booted trans people from the military based on President Trump’s executive order that argues that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” Geressy is not responsible for trans policy, but he is part of a Pentagon leadership that concerns itself with subordinates’ private lives.
In The War on Warriors, one of the books on the Goodreads page linked to Geressy, Hegesth cited his mentor to support the position that women should not serve in combat roles. “From my perspective,” Hegseth quoted Geressy as saying, circa 2007, “overwhelmingly most females want nothing to do with combat arms.” According to Hegseth, Geressy had argued that the Army had unfairly awarded medals to some women who had served in combat. “If SGM Geressy was a transvestite—or gay, or black, or a woman,” Hegseth wrote, “he would have three Distinguished Service Crosses and be on the front of a Wheaties box.”
The Pentagon is already beset by scandals in which topofficials, most notably Hegseth himself, have been accused of conduct that falls short of the standards it demands of other Defense Department officials and service members. Critics haveargued that for lower-ranking personnel, actions like Hegseth sharing military plans outside of approved channels, or the adultery he acknowledged during confirmation hearings, would result in firing. The racy selections on the Goodreads account linked to Geressy’s email may be comparatively minor. But that a public page listing such titles existed until we flagged it adds to the impression that the department’s leadership is not only hypocritical, but inept.
Hegseth has reacted furiously to reporting on some of his missteps. He has raged over coverage of his sharing of plans for bombing targets in Yemen with a Signal group that included the editor of the Atlantic. (The department’s inspector general reported that Hegseth’s actions could have put US troops at risk.) He fired aides accused of leaking news of a plan to give Elon Musk a top-secret briefing on US war plans versus China. Posobiec’s email came as the Pentagon took an increasingly hostile stance toward the media.
Kingsley Wilson, a former conservative influencer who is the department’s press secretary, told me that she did not speak to Posobiec about my story and did not believe Parnell did either. Posobiec also denied coordinating with the Pentagon. Geressy did not respond to a question about it.
But it came amid broader pushback to our reporting. “This is a garbage story made up of false allegations, decades-old claims that proved untrue, and disgusting innuendo aimed at smearing a man who was awarded the Army’s second-highest military honor for extraordinary heroism in combat,” Parnell said.
That response is consistent with the combative press relations posture of the second Trump administration. Shortly before, when a reporter asked the White House press secretary to identify who had suggested Trump meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, she responded: “Your mom did.”
Similar truculence drives the Defense Department’s recent decision to force outlets that assign reporters to the Pentagon to agree to a policythat bars reporters from revealing news the department does not authorize. Most news organizations refused. (The New York Times recently sued the Pentagon, arguing that the policy violates the First Amendment.) Posobiec is among a group of pro-Trump influencers who accepted the restrictive terms. The result is that the new press corps the Pentagon grants access to is largely composed of far-right activists.
The Pentagon press shop maintains close ties to its newly constituted press corps. Wilson, the department’s press secretary, occasionally appears on a program Posobiec hosts. In an October episode, she thanked him for agreeing to the department’s restrictions. “Now we get to have incredible journalists like yourself who are going to be here in the Pentagon reporting on what the Department of War is doing every single day,” she said.
On Wednesday night, after weeks of silence, I heard from Posobiec again. He said he was “finalizing my story,” and wanted to know if me, my wife, “or your in-laws” wished to comment. His message arrived an hour and forty minutes after I wrote to Geressy, posing some last questions and telling him I was “finalizing this story.”
Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferrednarratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger. It threatens to make us bad at our jobs. It can be harder work to treat people whom we cover critically like complete human beings, people who deserve empathy and a real chance to explain themselves. If the department yanks credentials for tough reporting, if a press secretary just attacks a story without engaging with questions, and if inquiries draw personal attacks, why give spokespeople, or the officials they work for, any opportunity to respond at all?
The answer, I think, is that in journalism, like everywhere else, we should treat people the way we want to be treated. This story, with its weird personal twist, drove home that necessity. By proposing to smear me, Posobiec inadvertently provided a reminder of how responsible reporters ought to act.
I have worked to be fair—and honest. This attempt won’t appease the Pentagon or the people who threatened me. And the choice here, between appearing to be coerced into silence or maybe getting slandered, lacks an option that doesn’t feel shitty.
But what I can control are the standards I aim for. Those are ultimately up to me. But they reflect the values of Mother Jones, and the influence of other journalists, one of whom is my wife. She makes the judgment I’ll live with.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered an overhaul of the military’s Chaplain Corps in a Tuesday video message, saying he intends to “make the Chaplain Corps great again,” by restoring its focus on religious ministry.
“In an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers,” he said in the video, since posted on social media.
Hegseth railed against what he described as “new age notions” in the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide, saying, “it mentions God one time — that’s it. It mentions feelings eleven times. It even mentions playfulness — whatever that is — nine times.” In the video, Hegseth gestured air quotes when he spoke the word, “feelings.”
He said the guide “alienates” religious soldiers “by pushing secular humanism.” As a result, Hegseth said the Army will be “tossing it,” and said that he had a directive that would be signed that day to scrap the guide at once.
The Army’s guide was released in August 2025, and frames spiritual fitness as an important part of force readiness. III Corps pioneered a monthslong study to develop the 112-page document, according to previous reporting by Military Times.
“We are aggressively moving forward with Secretary Hegseth’s intent to discontinue the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide,” Army spokesperson Tony McCormick said on Wednesday.
Hegseth said other new changes include “simplifying the faith and belief coding system,” which he said has “ballooned to over two hundred overly complex faith and belief codes.”
More revisions are forthcoming, he emphasized.
“There will be a top-down cultural shift, putting spiritual wellbeing on the same footing as mental and physical health, as a first step toward creating a supportive environment for our warriors and their souls,” he said.
In response to queries about if the filmed statement constituted formal policy and what changes, if any, had been directed regarding the roles and responsibilities of military chaplains, the Pentagon’s press duty officer on Wednesday said the Pentagon had nothing to add outside of the video.
About Eve Sampson
Eve Sampson is a reporter and former Army officer. She has covered conflict across the world, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
