I wish I didn’t have to tell you about this
A story broke a couple of days ago that we all need to know about. But before I tell you what it is, I want you to take a breath. Maybe sit down for this one. Because it is one of the most disturbing and disgusting things to come out of this administration, and that is saying something. Last August, in the warm Pacific waters of Pearl Harbor, the Director of the FBI of the United States of America put on a mask and a snorkel and went for a swim. Navy SEALs led the excursion with two boats, while Patel and nine other people were in the water for a thirty-minute sightseeing swim. The Defense Department, in its own internal emails, called it a “VIP Snorkel.” But it was anything but that. Because approximately forty feet below him, as he snorkeled on this tour, lay hundreds of American sailors and Marines in their final resting place, where they have been since the morning of December 7, 1941. And Kash Patel, the Director of the FBI, decided that he wanted to break every moral, ethical, and military standard and snorkel above their graves.
The story broke earlier this week by the Associated Press, with Jim Mustian, Eric Tucker, and Michael Biesecker pulling government emails through a public records request. The next day, Elizabeth Williamson and Adam Goldman at the New York Times added the details that showed just how grotesque this really was.
Because Patel chose to snorkel above the USS Arizona, a war grave. It has the same legal status as Arlington National Cemetery. Sailors, officers, and Marines are still entombed inside the wreck after they were killed when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, marking the pivotal moment the United States entered World War II. The Arizona had been refueled the day before. She went down with about 1.5 million gallons of oil aboard. A Japanese armor-piercing bomb struck the forward deck at 8:06 in the morning and detonated the ammunition magazine. The explosion had the force of more than a million pounds of gunpowder. The ship sank in nine minutes, and she burned for days. With over a thousand of her sailors still onboard.
And over 80 years later, the wreckage still leaks oil, with the streaks called the “Black Tears of the Arizona.” The Park Service has deliberately chosen not to drain the tanks because doing so would disturb the dead. Daniel Martinez, the National Park Service historian at Pearl Harbor, has said that smelling and seeing the oil at the memorial is like a time machine. It takes you back to that morning and reminds you of the men forever enshrined in the waters below.
I have stood on that memorial many times. My parents took me there as a teenager because they believed it was important for us to pay respect to the people who lost their lives there. We did not go to Pearl Harbor for entertainment. We went to understand and mourn. Years later, I brought my own children on multiple occasions for the same reason, so they too could reflect, learn, and pay respect to the fathers, sons, and grandchildren that so many families never saw again after that fateful day. Hawaii is beautiful. It is one of the most breathtaking places in the world. But Pearl Harbor is different. It was the place where one of the most pivotal and devastating moments in American history happened. It is not a place for swimming or adventure. It is a place where we and future generations learn and remember. We spend our time there thinking about the sailors who ran toward burning ships instead of away from them. About the courage, sacrifice, terror, and chaos of that morning. About the lives that ended there before many of them had even really begun. It takes my breath away to even imagine someone, anyone, snorkeling there like it was some kind of private tourist excursion. That memorial is not a playground for powerful men looking for a unique experience to brag about later over cocktails. It is a cemetery. It is sacred ground. The water above that ship is not just ocean. It is the final resting place of human beings whose families never got to bury them. And maybe that is what disturbed me most when I read the report. Not just the entitlement of it, but the emptiness behind it. Most of us were taught that places like Pearl Harbor demand reverence. That some places are supposed to humble us. But there seems to be an entire class of powerful people in this country now who move through every institution, every tragedy, every sacred space as though it exists for their personal consumption.
The rules around the memorial reflect what is in that water. Snorkeling and diving are prohibited. Visitors are not even allowed to wear swimwear at the memorial. The only people normally permitted in the water are National Park Service and Navy divers conducting annual maintenance surveys, or Navy divers placing the urns of Arizona survivors into the wreck so they can rest with their shipmates. The last survivor to be interred was Lauren Bruner in December 2019. He was the second-to-last man off the ship in 1941. He was burned over two-thirds of his body and crawled hand over hand across a rope to safety. He lived to be ninety-eight years old. His ashes were the forty-fourth and final set placed inside the Arizona by Navy divers.
The only people who legitimately enter that water are the ones tasked with caring for the dead, or with helping bring more of the dead home to rest beside their brothers. Not even family members of the men who died aboard the USS Arizona are allowed into that water. Imagine knowing your family member is still down there beneath the surface. Knowing that some of those men survived the initial bombing only to spend hours, days, and even weeks trapped alive inside the ship, surrounded by darkness, smoke, oil, fire, and twisted steel, banging on the hull for help that could not reach them in time. Imagine carrying that grief through generations, knowing that the closest you could ever physically get to your loved one would be the white memorial suspended quietly above their grave.
That is what makes this so hard to even process emotionally. Because that water is not viewed by most Americans as recreational space. It is viewed as hallowed ground. A military cemetery. That is what so many people instinctively understand is wrong about this. It reflects a level of entitlement and detachment that feels completely incompatible with the reverence that place is supposed to command.
The veterans who saw this story said exactly what needed to be said. William McBride, a Navy veteran and professor emeritus of history at the U.S. Naval Academy, called it “horrifying.” “Snorkeling around Arizona,” McBride said, “is as disrespectful as playing kickball on top of the graves at Arlington.” Hack Albertson is a Marine veteran who is part of the small group from the Paralyzed Veterans of America trained to dive on the Arizona once a year to check on the condition of the wreck. He has been down there. He has seen what is below the water. He told the Associated Press: “It’s like having a bachelor party at a church. It’s hallowed ground. It needs to be treated with the solemnity it deserves.” Rob D’Amico, a former FBI special agent and hostage rescue team operator, was even more direct. “The badge is a responsibility, not a VIP pass.” And about Patel, he said, “the pattern is clear, exotic locations, exclusive access that no member of the public could ever get, and a support staff working overtime to make it happen.”
And then, on top of all of it, there is the cover-up. The FBI never disclosed Patel’s two extra days in Hawaii. It was not on his public schedule, and it only came out through reporters pulling government emails out of agencies that did not want to give them up. And we have to infer that the reason it was omitted is that they knew this was wrong. And they did it anyway because they do not care. Not about traditions, not about this country, and certainly not about our fallen heroes.
And the cover-up continued with Navy spokesperson Captain Jodie Cornell telling the Associated Press that the Navy “was not able to track down who initiated it.” That is the United States Navy, operating out of one of the largest joint military bases in the world, claiming it cannot determine who organized a snorkeling excursion requiring two boats, a SEAL team, and ten participants near one of the most restricted underwater memorial sites in the country. And if they truly cannot figure it out, that is almost as disturbing as the alternative. That means they are participating in this disgusting protection racket around powerful people who increasingly seem to believe rules, traditions, and even sacred spaces simply do not apply to them. Either way, something is deeply wrong here.
Ben Williamson, the FBI’s spokesperson, called the AP’s framing “stupid” and called the swim “a historical tour to honor heroes who died on the USS Arizona, not a party.” A historical tour. They think we are stupid. And they think they can get away with it because, to a real extent, they have been getting away with everything.
This is not Patel’s first scandal. This is the same FBI Director who has repeatedly acted like the rules do not apply to him. The same man accused of using taxpayer-funded planes and government resources for personal convenience. The same man who brought his girlfriend into situations and privileges that previous FBI directors would have understood were completely inappropriate. The same man who has faced allegations of heavy drinking, disappearing from work for stretches of time, and lashing out at journalists when they report on his behavior. And every time another story comes out, the response seems less focused on accountability and more focused on punishing the people who exposed it.
This is who runs the FBI right now. This is who is supposed to be protecting this country from actual threats. And he was reportedly snorkeling above a war grave.
And we have to remember that Kash Patel is not the outlier in this administration. He takes his orders from the man who called those in the military who died in the line of duty, “losers.” In 2018, during a trip to France for the centennial of the end of World War I, Donald Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, where Americans killed in World War I are buried. According to multiple senior staff members who were on that trip, what he said was, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” He also called the U.S. Marines who died at the Battle of Belleau Wood “suckers” for getting killed. The original Atlantic report was attacked as a hoax. Then John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, and the Gold Star father of First Lieutenant Robert Kelly, killed in action in Afghanistan and buried at Arlington, confirmed all of it on the record. Kelly was there. He heard it. And he said it out loud: this is a man who thinks the people who died defending this country are suckers and losers.
Kelly also confirmed that on Memorial Day 2017, standing in Section 60 at Arlington with the graves of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan all around them, Trump turned to him and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” The same man told Kelly that he did not want wounded veterans, including amputees and men in wheelchairs, in his military parade because “it doesn’t look good for me.” This is the man who appointed Kash Patel. This is the man who renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. This is the culture that made a VIP Snorkel above the bones of sailors look like a reasonable way to spend an August afternoon.
This is who they are. This is not a series of unrelated scandals. This is a worldview. They see the people who serve this country, living and dead, as scenery. As props. As losers and suckers. And when they get caught treating sacred ground like a tourist attraction, they smear the reporters who found it, hunt the sources who leaked it, and tell us we are stupid for being upset.
We cannot let this go. We cannot let them keep going. This is the Director of the FBI. He is supposed to be the country’s top law enforcement official. He is supposed to be leading the agency responsible for counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and protecting every American. Every single day he stays in that job, the message gets louder. Sacred sites belong to them. Public resources belong to them. Our military, living and dead, belongs to them. We cannot afford another year of this. We cannot afford another month. We have to keep pushing. We have to keep showing up. We have to make November 2026 the moment we take back Congress and start to stop this. That is the only thing that ends it.
This story, his complete disrespect for our military, took the breath out of my lungs. And I want to speak directly to those who have lost a loved one defending our country, those who sacrificed years of time with spouses, parents, children, and siblings because duty called them away, and those who still carry the grief of someone who never made it home: you and your loved ones deserve better. Our country deserves better.
Kash Patel is a failed human being, and completely unqualified, unserious, and unworthy of the position he holds. The fact that he is in charge of the FBI is due to corrupt and cowardly members of Congress who chose loyalty to a felon over loyalty to their country and the institutions they swore to protect. What has happened, and whatever comes next, is on them.
The past week offers a look into what is to come as we head into November. More desperate people, doing desperate things. I’m already planning my life and my family’s around doing everything in my power to make sure the midterms are where this begins to turn around. It is going to be exhausting, but I am up for the challenge. And I want to thank you all once again for allowing me to do this. Your support in making sure these posts continue reaching new people, your paid subscriptions, and your comments and encouragement are what keep me going and able to do this work during these challenging times. I promise to keep doing this, and more. Even when it feels that we are up against insurmountable odds. We can’t ever give up. We have generations to come counting on us.
And here is what I want to leave you with tonight. While the Trump administration is focused on fighting hard to restrict access to free and fair elections, and swimming in burial grounds, Americans took to the streets today to remind this regime who America really is.
In Selma, Alabama, this morning, thousands of people marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The same bridge where sixty-one years ago, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, peaceful marchers were beaten bloody by Alabama state troopers for trying to win the right to vote. From Selma, they continued to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “How Long, Not Long” speech at the end of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. The stage today was set in front of the Capitol, flanked from behind by statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and civil rights icon Rosa Parks, two tributes erected nearly ninety years apart.
They came in response to the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Since that ruling, conservative states have raced to redraw their maps to eliminate Black political representation. Today’s march was a national day of action. Reverend Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., was there. Shalela Dowdy, a plaintiff in the Alabama redistricting case, told the crowd: “We are not going down without a fight. We are not going down to Jim Crow maps.” Kirk Carrington, seventy-five years old, was a teenager in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965. A white man on a horse with a stick chased him through the streets that day. He was there again this morning. “It’s really just appalling to me and all the young people that marched during the ‘60s, fought hard to get voting rights, equal rights and civil rights. It’s sad that it’s continuing after 60-plus-odd years that we are still fighting for the same thing we fought for back then.” Evan Milligan, the lead plaintiff in the Alabama redistricting case, said: “We have to accept that this is the new reality, whether we like it or not. We don’t have to accept that this will be the reality for the next 10 years or two years or forever.”
It would have been easy for any of the people marching to just accept that this is our new reality. But they didn’t. They spent a Saturday surrounded by thousands of others, marching to demand the right to vote. They did not roll over and give up. They stood together and reminded the people in power that this country still belongs to all of us, not just the wealthy, the connected, or the authoritarian men trying to hollow democracy out from the inside. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: The real reason to visit Pearl Harbor: to learn from the past, and to honor the fallen.
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/28/politics/donald-trump-arlington-cemetery-what-matters/index.html
We still remember Pearl Harbor. A horrendous day that brought USA into WW2 which thank heavens we won , so it is important to not step back there with this totalitarian administration doing its dammdest to overrule all protection rights of the American people. Stand up and shout and Democrat politicians please let’s start hearing your voices loud and clear.
I've been to Pearl Harbor and the memorial (at least for me) is a very solemn place. I can't imagine thinking it's OK to snorkel there.