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Did DeSantis Join the GOP’s Isolationism Caucus?

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis

Mark Twain’s famous quip of history seldom repeating but at least rhyming comes to the fore once again.  The isolationism of William Jennings Bryan (failed 3-time Democratic presidential candidate), Eugene Debs (socialist), Charles Lindbergh (1940-1, America First Committee), and the 1960’s anti-war left has found a home in some of the boisterous ranks of the GOP.  Now, must we add Ron DeSantis to the list of people dipping their toe in the tepid water of today’s isolationism, a form of reflexive non-interventionism?

Recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis declared on Tucker Carlson that Ukraine is not a “vital” interest of the US when he said, “While the U.S. has many vital national interests . . . becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them” (see below).  He had the nerve to incoherently call it a “territorial dispute”.  Putin’s stumbling blitzkrieg in February and March of 2022 had more than the Donbas in his sights.  It was an attempted seizure of the whole country.  Mere territorial dispute?

r/CombatFootage - Russian Military Column near Kiev approximately 30 km long
Russian tanks and other vehicles on the road to Kyiv, February 2022.

First, Trump senses the popularity of the new isolationism too and seeks to exploit it by using the banal canard of domestic problems leaving little room for a superpower foreign policy: “The Democrats are sending another $40 billion to Ukraine, yet America’s parents are struggling to even feed their children” (see below).  If the presence of starving children in America is an argument against our involvement in the world, Spain would still control much of the Caribbean and the Philippines; the Panama Canal would have remained the unfinished and overgrown mess that Ferdinand de Lesseps left it; the Kaiser would be free to redraw the map of Europe; Hitler might have turned London into another one of his vacation retreats; and a free-ranging USSR would still have a hammerlock on Eastern Europe with an array of Third World proxy satraps menacing our borders and access to rare earths.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley is more forthright in his isolationism when he said in a February speech before the Heritage Foundation, “We should cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine until our European allies step up.”  Again, “I don’t think we should give any more funding right now” (See below).  He talks as if stopping naked aggression on the continent of Europe is not in our interests all by itself, as if 104,812 US deaths and 552,117 total casualties in 1940’s Europe were wasted.

Is DeSantis beginning his transition into Charles Lindbergh, to join the other trans-Lindberghs in the House GOP’s neo-Squad (move over AOC for Gaetz and company) and their supporting cast of huckster pundits.  Lindbergh was noted for his advocacy of neutrality from the start of the war in 1939 until Japanese naval aircraft turned Pearl Harbor into a burning hulk.  Isolationism works until it doesn’t.

Charles Lindbergh's - September 11, 1941 Des Moines Speech - YouTube
Charles Lindbergh making a speech before the non-interventionist American First Committee in Des Moines, Ia., September 11, 1941.

That Metternich of the right, Matt Gaetz, in a display of thundering obtuseness in 2021, proclaimed to Gen. Mark Milley, “We are an Atlantic power. . . .”  Right there, Gaetz made us a regional power, and as one, incoherently, we ought not support Ukraine.  His latest concoction is the “Ukraine Fatigue Resolution” which demands a halt to further military and financial aid to Ukraine (see below).

It joins the ranks of other stoppages to US intervention such as the Democrats’ abandonment of South Vietnam.  They got us in – JFK, LBJ – and now enthralled by the 60’s neo-Marxist New Left, they were determined to desert the South Vietnamese.  After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, a Democrat-led Congress approved an end to funding slated for August of that year.  As things in the South heated up in 1975 under a full-scale North Vietnamese invasion, they rejected any more assistance to our beleaguered ally.  The communist North Vietnamese flag flew atop the presidential palace in Saigon.

And let us not forget Biden’s August 2021 bugout from Afghanistan.  A new flag flies over Kabul.  It was an expression of the same phenomena: get out, stop supporting, end the intervention, cease the “forever wars”.  They always, though, seem to end in the same manner: quarter million boat people, reeducation camps, genocidal atrocities, calamities in adjacent countries, and years of subsequent US feebleness and fickleness.

The Florida tin-hat Metternich is not even playing checkers as Putin, Xi, and the mullahs play chess.  A key to playing chess is understanding the linkages of moves.  Such as, a bugout of Afghanistan led to Putin’s 2022 imitation of the North Vietnamese brazen assault on the South back in 1975, and a Ukraine bugout would be a green flag for Xi to cross the Taiwan Strait.  I’m not sure if the GOP’s neo-Squad in Congress can even conceive of the connection between a surrender in Ukraine and Xi’s plans for Taiwan.  They sure as heck make hay of the consequences of Biden’s bugout of Afghanistan.  Bugouts are bugouts regardless of whether they are under the donkey or elephant banner.

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Three members of the GOP’s neo-Squad (l to r): Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

With his finger up in the proverbial popular winds, DeSantis joins Trump and the GOP’s neo-Squad in falling under the spell of a new Vietnam Syndrome.  Remember it?  It referred to a period of pathological fear of US intervention after the fall of Saigon.  What did that give us?  The world became a meaner place with a massive Soviet military buildup and rabid Soviet adventurism all around us.  Then the over year-long humiliation of the US by the Iranian mullahs after taking American embassy personnel hostage in 1979-80.  We wrung our hands, proved flagrant incompetence in a failed rescue mission, and had to wait till Reagan was sworn into office in January 1981.

They all talk of peace.  Matt Gaetz does.  In his surrender resolution, he blusters, “. . . the United States . . . urges all combatants to reach a peace agreement.”  Of course, the simultaneous cutoff of assistance to Ukraine will guarantee a peace agreement . . . under Putin’s terms.  That’s not peace; it sets the stage for the conquest of the Baltic republics and Taiwan.  It’s Munich 1938 and Czechoslovakia 1939 all over again.  That’s right, Gaetz, prove that you have a spine by showing that you don’t have one.

Neville Chamberlain, making his infamous "peace in our time" address in September 1938.
Neville Chamberlain, making his infamous “peace in our time” address in September 1938 after the Munich Conference, an exercise in appeasement. (Photo: Central Press/Getty Images)

A new Vietnam syndrome – the “forever war” syndrome – has gripped the dim bulbs in the GOP, my party.  It is disheartening to witness the normally level-headed, like DiSantis, become so infatuated with willful historical blindness.

From the “Ukrainian crisis” to the war in Ukraine - Cartooning for Peace

RogerG

Read more here:

* “DeSantis saying Ukraine support is not ‘vital’ national interest sparks backlash in GOP”, Jack Forest, CNN, 3/15/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/politics/desantis-republicans-ukraine-aid/index.html

* For Matt Gaetz’s Ukraine fatigue Resolution go to his website: “Matt Gaetz Leads 11 Lawmakers in Introduction of ‘Ukraine Fatigue’ Resolution to Halt U.S. Aid to Ukraine” at https://gaetz.house.gov/media/press-releases/matt-gaetz-leads-11-lawmakers-introduction-ukraine-fatigue-resolution-halt-us

* Charles Lindbergh’s speeches against US intervention in Europe can be found here: “Two Historic Speeches: October 13, 1939 & August 4, 1940” at http://charleslindbergh.com/americanfirst/speech3.asp

* “Josh Hawley’s U-Turn on Military Aid to Ukraine”, John McCormack, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/josh-hawleys-u-turn-on-military-aid-to-ukraine/

* “The two biggest 2024 Republican names would mean bad news for Ukraine”, Stephen Collinson, CNN, 3/15/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/15/politics/2024-republicans-trump-desantis-ukraine/index.html

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The Cause of Our Discontents

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Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.

“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.

Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”.  Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide.  Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.”  She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”  Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries.  It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain.  That reality captures the essence of the current impasse.  The root of our disjunction is cultural.  A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.

The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding.  Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other.  One leaped from the other as if it had the plague.  The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes.  Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”  Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence.  The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.

The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it.  Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution.  Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia.  Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted.  Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order.  For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).

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Antonio Gramsci

Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric).  Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams.  He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism.  A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.

The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:

“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them.  It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors.  It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.  It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”

Truckers Shutting Down DC To Protest The Federal Government And Its "Bulls**t"
Truckers descend on DC in 2022.

So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively.  They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters.  It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed.  Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government.  It’s systemic in the culture, they say.  Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort.  Today, they succeeded for the most part.

The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.  The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore.  The evidence is all around.  TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population.  Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension.  MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts.  Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”.  DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.

An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children.  All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity.  We’re back to a new Jim Crow.

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The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous.  Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.).  The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion.  Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places.  Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.

California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin.  An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.

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A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions.  The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive.  Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side.  You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion.  Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times.  Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.

After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst.  Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear.  The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view.  LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness.  A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate.  For them, there is no debate.

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Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut.  In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.”  Where have we heard that before?  End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.

The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible.  At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature.  The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:

“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths.  Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”

Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths.  We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable.  That’s dangerous.  It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity.  People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed.  Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.

The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”.  Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban.  The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution.  Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity.  A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.

Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery.  Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?

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RogerG

Read more here:

* Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” is an excellent place to start research into our current predicament.

* “Biography of Antonio Gramsci”, Nicki Lia Cole, PHD, ThoughtCo.com, 8/14/2019, at https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471

* An additional concise survey of the life and influence of Antonio Gramsci can be found here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

* A brief account of the philosophy of Princeton’s Robert P. George can be found here: “The Georgian Way”, Andrew T. Walker, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, National Review Magazine, 3/6/2023

* The struggle in the NY Times newsroom is captured here: “All the News That’s Fit to Debate”, Madeine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 3/20/2023

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The GOP’s TPAC Suicide Squadron for 2024

Steve Bannon blasts Murdochs, Fox News in fiery CPAC speech | The Hill
Steve Bannon at CPAC 2023

CPAC may be turning into a pure Trump personality cult.  The first “C” in the anacronym stands for conservative, but truth in advertising demands that it be replaced by a “T” for Trump Political Action Committee – TPAC.  If Steve Bannon’s recent speech before the group is any indication, and the thunderous reception that it received, the Trump hero-worship brigades are fully prepared to torpedo the GOP’s chances in 2024 and saddle us with more of the looney left in the seats of power.

Watch a portion of the Bannon speech in the link below.

Bannon is nuts, and so is the TPAC audience.  If the numbers in a recent poll are reasonably accurate, 43% of registered Republicans support Trump as the party’s nominee.  43% of Republicans equates to 12% of all registered voters because 40% of all party registrations nationwide are Democrats versus 29% Republicans.  Do the math.  43% of 29% equals roughly 12%.

A good portion of that 12% are diehards for an intensely polarizing figure.  Let’s say half of the 12% are zealous true-believers (only-Trumpers) which reduces the kamikaze recruits to 6% of all registered voters.  Trump only gets more polarizing as he pushes a “stop the steal” story that he can’t prove in court and mires others who were sympathetic into more legal trouble for lending some credence to it.

Trial Lawyer Richard on Twitter: "I think they'll follow him until his downfall. Richard Nixon ...

Dominion v. Fox News is only one case in point.  The network and its primetime lineup should be applauded for their honesty rather than castigated by a fanatic like Bannon.  The depositions and disclosures of Fox News internal communications in court forces me to partly reevaluate some of my earlier criticisms of Fox’s celebrity pundits.  Those disclosures further confirm the out-of-their-mind emotional state of that 6%.  The Bannon audience at TPAC, if it’s typical of the cranks attracted to Trump, can only lead the party to more dismal electoral performance – 2018, 2020, and the red wave of 2022 turning into a ripple.

The attacks on Paul Ryan are particularly galling.  Somehow, the low-tax/small-government/free-market philosophy of every Republican from Coolidge to Reagan as represented by Ryan is besmirched by ad hominem attacks by the cult’s agitators.  It’s just that Ryan won’t pledge fealty to Trump, and that list of dissenters from Trump megalomania has only grown as more people cross paths with the alleged demi-god.  Now, we must add Fox News to the ever-lengthening enemy’s list.  How many more dissenters from Trump worship must there be before the TPAC crowd begins to question their slavish devotion to a self-absorbed and octogenarian adolescent.

Facebook Shuts Down Pro-Trump 'Stop the Steal' Group | Time

Ryan promises not to attend the Republican convention if Trump is the nominee.  I’ll leave the presidential line on the ballot blank if he once again bamboozles the party into the nomination.  The argument that it’s a binary choice has worn its welcome.

Trump is a loser.  He turns off more than he turns on.  His electoral performance over three elections is proof.  The only way for him to deny the numbers is to label them as fraud without the proof to convince a judge and jury, let alone a majority of the electorate in a presidential contest.  At a certain point, Trump is just embarrassing.  Embarrassment doth not make a winner.

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RogerG

* “CPAC Crowd Stands and Cheers as Raging Steve Bannon Vows to Bring Down Fox News: ‘We’re Going To Fight You Every Step Of The Way!’”, Mediaite, 3/3/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cpac-crowd-stands-and-cheers-as-raging-steve-bannon-vows-to-bring-down-fox-news-we-re-going-to-fight-you-every-step-of-the-way/ar-AA18cqic?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=e82b976dd18142c187e4f85ded29053a&ei=32

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The Cultural Commanding Heights Do Not Like the Hinterlands

A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)

“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities

Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).

Joel Kotkin quoted in NYTimes OpEd About 2020 Election - Joel Kotkin
Joel Klotkin

They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology.  Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs.  Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.

Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop.  Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first.  They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.

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It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science.  Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact.  Here’s some “What’s” to ponder.  What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency?  What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy?  What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored?  No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.  The model is only as good as its designer.  Artificial intelligence isn’t immune.  On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.

One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density.  No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality.  Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical.  These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions.  What does that mean?  It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber.  A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon.  Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.

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A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.
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A sea of solar panels in Portugal.

And guess what?  You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme.  If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended.  More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc.  The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.

That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out.  The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles.  Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley?  I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools.  California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.

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California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide.  Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence.  But a counterrevolution is kicking in.  In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes.  Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year.  So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.

Europe isn’t alone.  African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy.  The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.

Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips.  Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them.  Occasionally, colonists rise up.  Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?

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The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.
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Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)

Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.

RogerG

Read more here:

* Much thanks to Joel Klotkin for his research in “Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide”, Joel Klotkin, National Review Online, 3/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/energy-colonialism-will-worsen-the-urban-rural-divide/

* “’Yellow Vests’: The elites talk about the end of the world, when we talk about the end of the month”, Le Monde, 11/24/2018, at https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/11/24/gilets-jaunes-les-elites-parlent-de-fin-du-monde-quand-nous-on-parle-de-fin-du-mois_5387968_823448.html

* “Farmers’ Protest in Netherlands Reflects Rise of Popular Revolts in Europe”, National Catholic Register, 7/29/2022, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/farmers-protest-in-netherlands-reflects-rise-of-popular-revolts-in-europe

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Josh Hawley, the New Neville Chamberlain . . . or John Kerry

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Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Mo.)

It was said of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the 1930’s that he was naïve, that he really didn’t comprehend what he was up against in Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler.  A career in business, consensual government, Parliamentary debate, and compromise among political actors and parties didn’t prepare him for dealing with the time’s new brutal, totalitarian utopians like Hitler – more street thug, but with a vision, than anything.  Mistaking the chancellor for opposition mp’s in the House of Commons led to appeasement and a goon’s growing appetite for more in Czechoslovakia, Poland, lebensraum, and six years of the bloodiest war in history.

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British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waving the piece of paper with Hitler’s signature announcing “peace in our time” after his arrival at the airport in London in 1938.

Chamberlain was honest but naïve.  In contrast, Sen. Josh Hawley’s Russian appeasement is grounded in reasoning so confusing and disjointed that a person can be excused for questioning his sanity or drawing the conclusion that it’s pure demagoguery.  In sum, it’s a thought process that might sell in a schoolyard to people who still believe in the Easter bunny.

Hawley is following in the footsteps of John Kerry, erstwhile Democratic candidate for president in 2004.  In a 2004 March debate (see below), Kerry declared, “[I] actually did vote for the $87 billion [$87 billion Iraq War appropriation] before I voted against it.”  Kerry was sending reassurances to the dominant left wing of the Democratic Party.  Here’s Hawley expressing his own flip-flop in support for Ukraine (see below):

February 24, 2022 – “Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine and invasion of its territory must be met with strong American resolve.”

February 24, 2023 – “I would just say to Republicans: You can either be the party of Ukraine and the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country.”  Adding, “It’s time to say to the Europeans: No more welfare for Europeans.”  Shortly before these comments, he said more succinctly, “I don’t think we should give any more funding right now.”

Il était une fois en Amérique : 2004, John Kerry le Français
John Kerry, Democrat presidential nominee in 2004.

What to make of that Hawley hash?  One year passes and he’s ready to act like the Democrat-led Congress of 1973 when they approved a cut-off of funds for military operations in Indochina (see below).  It could simply be the pandering demagogue that resides in many a politician’s soul.  He’s certainly got his nose in the air and is picking up the scent of the reinvigorated isolationist right.

It doesn’t make any more sense after dissecting his meandering rationalizations.  We can’t support Ukraine and address a train derailment?  What?  Are we Guatemala?  This is a policy pronouncement groping for a justification.

The thought-funk doesn’t get any clearer as he bounces from complaints about Europeans not doing more, to amazingly suggesting that the Ukrainian success means . . . end the support.  Got it?  It doesn’t make any more sense to me either.  Do I need to say it?  Ukraine’s successes can be greatly attributed to our willingness to keep them in the field with the weapons and munitions to grind down the Kremlin boss’s Wehrmacht (see below for an excellent piece on the Russian losses and failures), and all the while sending a signal to Xi that taking Taiwan won’t be made easier by the influence of the trembling knees of appeasers like Josh Hawley.

Illustrative photo from open sources
Destroyed Russian tanks and vehicles piled in Ukraine.

Let’s face it, the posture may be more of the schoolyard at work: Biden’s for it so we must be against it.  To be fair, I find the Left’s totemistic virtue-signaling with the Ukrainian flag flying from dorm windows, like the Viet Cong flag of yesteryear, chintzily exhibitionistic.  Still, I don’t care how they get there, or how they express it, so long as they continue to support sticking a thumb in the eye of one of Xi Jinping’s allies.

It’s stunning to find the Right more like Chamberlain or Code Pink than Theodore Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan.  This may come as news to the isolationistic right, but this isn’t 1814 when it took three weeks for the letter announcing the end of the War of 1812 to reach New Orleans after the battle had been fought.  Oceans no longer insulate us from the world’s travails, especially if they’re patrolled by Putin’s and the PLA’s navies or leaped by tribesmen and disgruntled urban jihadis who decide to express their hate by seizing airliners.  ICBM’s, hypersonics, jet aircraft, prosperous economies, super cargo ships, the space domain, satellites, trade, and modern communications should remind anyone that the security value of oceans has long been downgraded.

Specifically Designed To Track ‘Unpredictable’ Hypersonic Missiles, US Military Is Ready With A ...
Hypersonic flight path compared to a conventional missile over an ocean.

Like it or not, the world is interconnected, and so are human endeavors.  Fecklessness in international relations isn’t a virtue.  Appeasement toward Russia diminishes the value of any bellicosity toward the CCP.  Deterrence becomes a dead word.  The “pivot” to Asia will be imperiled, not enhanced, by a retreat in Ukraine.

The Roman general Vegetius was famous for writing, “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum” – if you want peace, prepare for war.  I don’t know where appeasement fits into the equation.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* Hawley’s 2022 stance on Ukraine was uncovered in a Tweet by the reporter John McCormack on Feb. 24, 2022 at https://twitter.com/McCormackJohn/status/1496878265138806784

* John Kerry’s Iraq War flip-flop can be found here: “Kerry discusses $87 billion comment”, CNN, 9/30/2004, at https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/30/kerry.comment/

* “Josh Hawley’s U-Turn on Military Aid to Ukraine”, John McCormack, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/josh-hawleys-u-turn-on-military-aid-to-ukraine/?utm_source=recirc-&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

* US congressional actions to restrict and prohibit military actions in Indochina can be found here: “Congressional Restrictions on U.S. Military Operations in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Somalia, and Kosovo: Funding and Non-Funding Approaches”, Congressional Research Service, 1/16/2007, at https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/RL33803.pdf

* Excellent piece on Russia’s losses and failures in the Ukraine War: “Russia’s Winter Offensive Is Criminally Incompetent”, Mark Antonio Wright, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/russias-winter-offensive-is-criminally-incompetent/?utm_source=recirc-&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

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The GOP Needs to Get Its House in Order

May be an image of one or more people, people standing and text that says 'Thank You, Lord JESUS, PRES PRESIDENT TRUMP TRUMG © Getty Images North America'

The ancients had much to say about hypocrisy and willful blindness in respect to problems.  The prophet Isaiah admonished King Hezekiah on his deathbed (2Kings 20:1, NIV), “Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”  And then there is this famous line against pretense from Luke’s gospel (6:42, NIV):

“How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

The Left – meaning today’s progressives and liberals – is nearly beyond redemption, philosophically and in many cases behaviorally.  Its neo-Marxist collectivism is a national suicide pact. But a sizeable element of the Right is similarly proving itself unworthy.  It is immersed in a performative style of politics, a politics as therapy – “Stick it to the libs, I feel better” – that lacks direction other than the desire to humiliate the other side in staged mini-dramas.  They may get an emotional rush from the rhetoric and theatrical antics but it is repulsive to large swaths of the nation’s electorate.  Principally for this reason, the last three election cycles have proven to be disappointments for those of a more conservative disposition.

Call it the Trump contagion.  It entered the GOP’s bloodstream in 2015 and is proving resistant to cure.  Trump still conjures a 43% plurality, 15 points better than second-place DeSantis, among Republican voters in the latest Fox News poll (see below).  43% are hungry for a four-peat of disappointment – to add to 2018, 2020, and 2022.  Einstein’s famous insanity formulation keeps coming to mind.  This large faction of Republicans remains oblivious to the fact that a candidate that survives them may not, and increasingly will not, survive the general electorate if the party’s base continues to choose candidates based on theatrics and their longings for an emotional release in their politics.  The hardheaded on the Right need to understand one inescapable fact: first, as a party, to accomplish anything, you’ve got to win . . . the general!  The stalwarts might celebrate victory in the intraparty feud in spring but after the dust settles in November, the donkey-party Left will still be making policy in the seats of power.

The contagion has overtaken the official GOP apparatus in some red/purple states.  The effect of the takeover is turning some purple states blue.  In places where it is deeply embedded, the infected exhibit the tendencies of those immersed in the blue bubbles, only this time, in a red one.  Secure in the cloister of others like them, they are awkward when forced to confront people who disagree and promptly jump to condemnation.  It’s true for both silos.  Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers”, Hillary’s “deplorables”, and ritual abuse of the word “establishment” and “elites” by Fox News’s primetime “populists”, and Trump’s litany of juvenile insults?

Professor Alberto Coll of DePaul University School of Law, and an astute critic of today’s defunct civic education, is concerned about the decline of the republican civic virtues of prudence, deliberation, and moderation (see below).  They are most fundamentally missing from K-12 and have been drummed out of higher ed, increasingly replaced by habitual Marxist oppressor-shaming.  It’s an ideology more at home as a bankrupt theology with its unexaminable assumptions and heaven-on-earth end state.  Not surprisingly, they behave much like jihadis with their statue-toppling, silencings on campuses, itinerant mobs, and the forcible injection of their ideology into all facets of the culture.

The Left’s inhumanity has elicited an analogous reaction on the Right.  Gone is any semblance of prudence.  Prudence dictates the recognition of complexities, consequences, and trade-offs.  Instead, everything seems so simple in a constant branding of everyone as either evil (them) or good (us).

The Left’s infantilism shows as an attempt to facetiously adduce cause from correlation: socio-economic stats are unequal among identity groups therefore bigotry is at fault, or so they assume.  If they can’t find sufficient numbers of bigots, they’ll make it airily “systemic”, which leads them right into the strawman fallacy.  It’s ludicrous.

The Right sometimes stumbles into the “systemic” quicksand.  They have a vocabulary of vague pejoratives to feed their obsessions such as the aforementioned “establishment” and “elites”.  Anyone who has been around too long in the public arena is automatically suspect by that logic, especially if previously identified as one by the movement’s carnival barkers (Hello, primetime Fox News.).  The terms encourage an instant distrust of credentials so academics, scholars, people in the professions, political figures, and leaders in business and civil society that disagree with them are summarily rejected.  It’s another form of bigotry, something familiar to Antifa and Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and The Squad in their usual hivemind.

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Deliberation goes the way of prudence.  Adults don’t display it. It begins with listening which is clearly absent from the halls of Congress.  Have you seen the expansive number of empty seats on C-SPAN during speeches on the House and Senate floors?  People talk past each other in party-approved talking points.  The kids don’t see it modeled by adults in their media, or in their schools’ curriculums that refuse to establish a good grounding in language, the best of Western literature (Bible, Shakespeare), history, philosophy, and logic. They’ve been turned into vehicles for the voguish neo-Marxist orthodoxy.

I must admit that it’s hard on deliberation when one party – the Democrats – is committed to a revolution as complete as anything begun in 1917 Petrograd (see below about Antonio Gramsci).

As for moderation, what do you think after prudence and deliberation have been kicked to the wayside?  The socialism of AOC becomes mainstream Democrat, and the kookery of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Gaetz/Boebert/Trump clique seizes the reins of a Republican House caucus with the narrowest of majorities.  43% of the Republican base and the nearly entire elected Democratic Party, and maybe three-quarters of the Dem base, stand athwart each other separated with firehoses spewing rhetorical slime.

Since 57% of the Republican base retains some attachment to reality, the country’s hopes for a functioning republic reside with them.  A pushback may have begun with Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp.  He courageously stood against the Georgia state GOP that backed his opponent in the primary and went on to thump the Trump-backed shill in the primary and the odious Stacey Abrams in the general by 7.5 points.  The victory means that the guy has street cred.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp makes remarks during a visit to Adventure Outdoors gun shop in Smyrna, Ga., January 5, 2022. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Reuters)

He warned big donors in the Georgians First Leadership Committee at a recent luncheon, “. . . we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future.”  “Infrastructure” is a $10 word for a Trump-crazed state central committee.  The state party’s chairman, David Shafer, was so humiliated by the defeat of the committee/Trump-endorsed choices up and down the ballot in the party’s primary that he’s given up pursuing another term.  The state committee’s stance was stupid on steroids.  Shafer and his endorsements may be simpatico with Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene but not to a huge majority of registered Republicans, let alone the general electorate.  Successful politics is about addition, and not subtraction and performance-art politics. It means that the public wants good and safe schools, the potholes to be filled, crime to be defeated, and the sewers and garbage collection to function as billed.  “Owning the libs” won’t suffice.

The same is true for the Trump fanatics officially running the GOP in states like Arizona.  The writer Dan McLaughlin put it succinctly when he wrote, “It’s time to take the party back from the party.” Kemp is doing his part (see below).

The fallout from the 2022 elections is a siren-call warning to the GOP.  Of course, the country appears evenly divided when one of the parties weakens its standing with choices lathered in the general odium of Trump and sloganeering psychodramas.  The Democrats’ problem is the neo-Marxist Democratic Party and a hash that they’ve made of parts of the country under their control.  The Republicans have the Trump millstone around their neck. Given that dynamic, of course we have parity . . . of foolishness.

A few examples illustrate the reflexive Republican foot-shooting that makes it easier on the neo-Marxist Democrats thereby levelling the playing field in a country overwhelmingly not fond of the hammer and sickle.  In one heavily Republican Ohio congressional district, the Trump-endorsed/Q-Anon-dabbling J. R. Majewski lost in the general.  Moving over to a Michigan House race, Joe Gibbs beat incumbent Peter Meijir in a Republican primary campaign wallowing on Meijir’s vote to impeach Trump, only to lose in the general by double digits.  In Washington State, the Republican incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler narrowly lost to Joe Kent in the primary with her vote to impeach Trump a key factor.  Kent, saddled with ties to white nationalists and other elements of the unhinged right, and fully immersed in the hyperbolic language of the Trump caucus, lost in the general.  No wonder that the expected red wave turned into scattered rain drops.

Republicans, if you don’t like rule by a commissariat, field better candidates with an eye to winning elections.  Try that.  Dah!  Send Trump packing, and for his cadre of groupies, grow up and follow Mick Jagger’s advice: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

May be a cartoon of indoor

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Young Americans Are Increasingly Ungrateful. Here’s What to Do about It”, Alberto Coll, National Review Online, 2/26/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/young-americans-are-increasingly-ungrateful-heres-what-to-do-about-it/

* “Fox News Poll: Trump, DeSantis top 2024 Republican preference”, Dana Blanton, Fox News, 2/26/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fox-news-poll-trump-desantis-top-2024-republican-preference/ar-AA17X7hn

* “Brian Kemp: Time for the Georgia GOP to Leave the Georgia GOP”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review Online, 2/23/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brian-kemp-time-for-the-georgia-gop-to-leave-the-georgia-gop/

* “Kemp moves to take command of GOP, leaving state party behind”, Greg Bluestein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/23/23, at https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/kemp-moves-to-take-command-of-gop-leaving-state-party-behind/H6EYBMRZDFFCXBYNPPP3PY4WQA/

* An excellent summary of the influence of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci of the 1920’s and 30’s on today’s neo-Marxism in the Democratic Party and the commanding heights of the culture can be read here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

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Zealotry and Incomprehensibility on the Right

Trump walkout of Dem infrastructure meeting seemed 'planned,' Mollie Hemingway says | Fox News
Molly Hemingway and Donald Trump

In the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus of the first century AD, zealots were the fourth and final of the Jewish religious sects in the Roman province of Palestine of his time.  Today, we know the word to mean firebrands.  They are understood to be absolutely committed, blinded to alternative knowledge, and can be monomaniacal to such an extent that the restraints of compassion and reason are stunted.

Million MAGA March, Trump rally today: Thousands rally in DC; updates
Thousands of Trump supporters at a November 2020 Trump rally shortly after Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. (photo: USA Today)

Firebrands are frequently blinkered and susceptible to committing atrocities and stumbling into big blunders.  A class of fanatic, newly enthused by the late 19th century’s initial and facile discoveries in the science of heredity, appeared as devotees of eugenics: breed a better human as you would a hunting dog.  Enthusiasts were everywhere in the period from the US Supreme Court (Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”, Buck v. Bell, 1927) to Germany’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) of the 1920’s and 30’s (see below).

In 1940, the fate of the wife of the journalist and writer Joseph Roth, Friedl Reichler, would be swallowed in the mania for the pseudoscience.  Suffering from schizophrenia, she was institutionalized, and there she was in an asylum waiting to be rounded up in the Nazi euthanasia campaign of that year.  She and fellow patients were gathered, transported to a camp, stripped naked, and marched into a gas chamber.

Aktion T4, The Nazi Program That Slaughtered 300,000 Disabled People
Boys with Down Syndrome at Dachau who were to be euthanized (l); the graves of the victims of the Aktion T4 euthanasia campaign outside the Hadamar Institute, one of the killing centers.

What makes a person an active participant in abject brutality?  Mark Twain may have gotten it right when he wrote:

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

In my mind, it’s incomprehensible, but incomprehensibility is a common feature of our politics.  A version has settled on the outskirts of the right in this moment.  It has infected even normally sensible people.  I admired Victor Davis Hanson until he exhibited signs of the disability.  Since the case for the support of Ukraine is so strong, I’ve often wondered why he is a Ukraine skeptic till I listened to his podcast interview with Iddo Netanyahu, the brother of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (see below).  Hanson and Iddo are simpatico on Ukraine.

Iddo and Hanson believe the war is unwinnable for Ukraine.  So, they’re eager to advise cutting a deal.  What kind of deal?  They don’t say, nor how to get there without Putin’s concurrence.  While they both reach the same conclusion, they probably unknowingly arrive at it from different angles.  Iddo is an Israeli patriot with Israel’s precarious national security concerns in a very dangerous neighborhood at the forefront of his mind.  Understandable.  I would like to think that Hanson is an American patriot with an equal understanding of our unique responsibilities and interests as a global superpower.  Last I checked, Israel isn’t part of NATO; we are, and should be.  The interests of a superpower and a nation facing local existential threats often diverge because the circumstances of the two nations are so different.  Hanson shows no sign of recognizing the distinction.

Israeli attack on Syria suffering from earthquake devastation: fired ...
Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, February 2023
Russians building army base at Syria's Palmyra site
Russian base outside Palmyra, Syria

The Russians in Syria to prop up Assad illustrate our divergent interests.  Israel needs Russian acquiescence to strike Hezbollah targets in the country.  Iddo’s desire not to say anything to threaten the delicate relationship would make him circumspect on Ukraine.  The US isn’t shackled by the need to cater to Putin’s sensibilities and whims.  In fact, we didn’t worry about it when a large force of Russian mercenaries and Syrian fighters assaulted a small American post in northern Syria in 2018 resulting in 200 Wagner Group Russians dead from American firepower.  A superpower must behave differently from a regional power.

American special forces in Manbij, Syria, near the border with Turkey, this month.
American special forces in Manbij, Syria, near the border with Turkey, February 2018. (photo: Mauricio Lima, The New York Times)

By circumstance, our stance on Ukraine needs to be different from Israel’s.  Hanson doesn’t get it, and neither does some of the other unhinged elements on the right. Hugh Hewitt got a full blast of the fringe-right’s kookiness during his radio talk show earlier this week (see below).  He may have filtered callers to concentrate on critics of his pro-Ukraine position.  Many sounded awfully similar to Rush Limbaugh’s seminar callers, but from the right.  Rush noticed that they would lie about their affiliations and rigidly recite from a uniform set of talking points.  Hewitt’s callers were monotonous with some variation of the same bullet points in opposition to support for Ukraine: (1) we’re ignoring our problems; (2) we should be spending the money on ourselves; (3) we’re depleting our stock of munitions and weaponry; (4) we can’t afford it; (5) Biden is a bad man; (6) the war is made endless with our involvement; (7) we have no interest there; and (8) the Russians have nukes so we ought to be afraid.

One person or group doesn’t have to be orchestrating the callers.  More feasibly, the monotony shows a slavish devotion to a narrow cast of sources.  Suspect influencers include the self-styled “populists” on Fox News primetime, the Gaetz/Boebert/MTG wing of the Republican caucus, and a selected chorus of online sources feeding their biases.

Fox's Tucker Carlson Questions Sending Aid to Ukraine

Among the guiding lights on the right is Molly Hemingway, a guest on the same Hewitt episode and exhibiting no more coherence than the callers.  Stock Hemingway complaints were our prolonging of the war (another WWI) and the exhaustion of our stockpile of weapons and munitions.  Neither holds water.  A hamstrung military industrial supply chain is a call to unshackle it, not an excuse to leave Ukraine dangling.  Increasing our industrial capacity is something we have to do anyway if we are to follow Molly’s advice to take on the CCP.

Her fear of another WWI is actually a call for the appeasement of Putin since our only real leverage is with Ukraine.  We can force them to the bargaining table because they are dependent on us.  The idiosyncrasies of the Kremlin’s rule and the marketability of Putin’s fossil fuels diminish our clout on the boss.  Besides, sanctions and near-uniform international condemnation did nothing to dissuade the invasion or prevent his inhuman conduct of the war.

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Victims of Russian atrocities in body bags in Bucha, Ukraine, 2022

The loopy right is guilelessly borrowing the Left’s playbook from the Vietnam War era.  At the time, peace, peace, peace, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate was the drumbeat without much thought of a balanced settlement or how to get there.  Really, the Peace Movement just wanted us out of South Vietnam which left the South Vietnamese in the same situation as the shortsighted right would leave Ukraine.  War-game it.  Its practical effect is appeasement.  When will we finally show signs of learning that the actual consequence of appeasing aggressive dictators is a shattering of deterrence for other blustery assailants on the world’s stage?  The world becoming the equivalent of South Chicago will only increase Prozac sales.

All the other arguments are equally specious.  We can’t afford something that is less than a rounding error in the bloating federal debt?  We could spend it on ourselves, but on what, and with what effect?  More money for the folks that gave us the War on Poverty and our inner-city war zones?  Yes, we could spend it on other things, maybe even efficaciously, rather than give the Ukrainians the wherewithal to resist on the front lines in the battle against the Axis of Evil so we won’t have to in Poland or the Fulda Gap.

You know, we could do both – help distressed Americans and Ukraine – by actually showing some guts in reforming our bankrupting entitlements.  Don’t talk of selective spending restraint while avoiding the big elephant in the room – entitlements!  The talk is risible.

The Ukraine skeptics often complain of the lack of an “end game” in Ukraine.  Really?  Do they have one in their gung-ho pivot to confront the CCP?  If it is to stop and corral the CCP, why wouldn’t that be good enough in regard to Putin?  Putin being forced to withdraw from the Ukraine, with Putin in caged retirement at some dacha as icing on the cake, are indeed pleasant thoughts.

The incoherence is astounding, about as muddled as the thinking of the peaceniks in the revolving door between the 1960’s Anti-War and 1980’s Nuclear Freeze Movements.  Move over Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and David Dellinger (of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), Trump barges in and co-opts the rhetoric.  Trump has his nose in the air, like any demagogue, and gets a whiff of anti-Ukraine fever on the right as anti-South Vietnam dementia was all over the New Left of the 1960’s.  “Warmongers” and “teetering on the brink of World War Three” could have just as easily dripped from the mouth of Abbie Hoffman in one of his rants on the Berkely campus as it did Trump on Tuesday (February 21, see below).

Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Protestors demanding to end the war on Vietnam
Sixties anti-war protest

Trump tries to not completely turn off his audience on the right by magically trying to square his circle of bombast.  Out of the other side of his mouth he blurts “peace through strength”, not explaining how “strength” is not the language of a “warmonger”.  He leaves us with the hollow “right kind of leadership” – meaning his – to lather over the discrepancy.  His silver tongue will magically transform Putin into a monk.  He, the Great Trump, will talk Putin into niceness.  Doesn’t this sound a bit delusional?

Even more flummoxing to a sane person is an honest accounting of Trump’s past, which shows him to be a “warmonger” yesterday as he condemns the “warmonger” of today, all the while trumpeting the warmonger’s “peace through strength” line.  Got that?  It’s rhetorical hash to stake out an identity among an element of the party blinded by fury.  To be blunt, the gambit is Trump’s usual performance art as politics.

The caterwauling will only embolden Putin and cut Ukraine off at the knees.  Don’t ever complain about Biden’s Afghanistan debacle when you are prepared to create one in Ukraine.

May be a cartoon

RogerG

Read more here:

* Nazi euthanasia campaign: “Aktion T4, The Nazi Program That Slaughtered 300,000 Disabled People”, Richard Stockton, ATI, 6/3/2021, at https://allthatsinteresting.com/aktion-t4-program

* Victor Davis Hanson’s interview with Iddo Netanyahu: https://victorhanson.com/from-the-sea-of-galilee-iddo-netanyahu-on-israeli-politics/

* The unhinged right was on abundant display in High Hewitt’s show on Tuesday (2/21): https://hughhewitt.com/todays-podcast-325/

* Donald’s latest video comment on Ukraine from 2/21/23: “Trump: In My Next Term, The Warmongers, Failures, And Frauds In Our National Security Establishment Will Be Gone”, Tim Haines, Real Clear Politics, 2/21/23, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/02/21/trump_in_my_next_term_the_warmongers_failures_and_frauds_in_our_national_security_establishment_will_be_gone.html

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The Sudden Crusade Against Disinformation; Drought; and the Inner Totalitarian

Lake Mead near the Hoover dam, seen from the Arizona side of the dam near Boulder City, Nev., July 19, 2022. (photo: David Becker/Reuters)
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma, Wa. (photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Why the sudden crusade against “disinformation”?  Is our time plagued by a singular onrush of lying and deceit?  Really?  According to today’s referees of language – who themselves could be mired in modern cultural/political manias – disinformation is “false information that is spread deliberately and often covertly to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (Merriam-Webster).  Slanting the truth or even outright falsehoods has been the stuff of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a little Dale Carnegie lingo) since people discovered other people.  Moses’s biblical admonition against “bearing false witness” covers the topic quite nicely.

For years, some people insisted that taxing the rich at towering rates leads to more revenue, as if people blindly and willingly, like lemmings, lay themselves prostrate before the IRS.  Does the British “brain drain” from high-tax Britain to elsewhere in the Anglosphere of the 1950’s to 1970’s remind you of anything?  Tax havens in the Bahamas?  For years, even today, some continue to persist in the belief that socialism leads to prosperity despite its long record of failure.  Eugenics, at one time, was all the craze even as it treated people as if they were draft animals.  I could go on.  So, where’s the sudden crisis in bad information?  Dis- and its cousin misinformation have been around as long as humans had the capacity for speech.  Now the Southwest is in the midst of a harrowing drought.  Watch the “disinformation” smears muddy the waters in how to deal with it.

Picture

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Honestly, cut to the chase, this jihad against “disinformation” is actually a massive censorship campaign.  By what standard are the Cassandras of disinformation labeling some opinions or factual claims fraudulent?  As it turns out, these arbiters of truth are partisans who rely on partisans.  It’s mental gunk relying on mental gunk to produce more mental gunk in order to control what people say.  GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

GIGO case in point: Valerie Wirtschafter of Brookings and her piece, “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims” (see below), where she proclaims that the podcast world is too free, with much too much “disinformation”.  Where’s she been?  The advertising industry would never have been around to launch so many successful Madison Avenue careers without exaggerations and falsehoods.  Coke and Pepsi lambasted each other for years with disinformation.  Watch any Superbowl’s commercial breaks for your daily diet of disinformation.  Joe McCarthy (Sen, Wisc., 1950’s) and the Socialist International would be minor footnotes in history without mis- and disinformation.  It’s been the motivation for wars and invasions and the rhetorical bedrock for politicians in their climb up the greasy pole . . . forever.  And, all of a sudden, “Dr.” Wirtschafter discovered it’s a problem.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science
Valerie Wirtschafter

Come on, these are biased people who don’t like what other people have to say.  People like Wirtschafter hide behind the aura of other people’s credentials, their government positions, or undeserved media respectability to engineer a “study” to silence still others.  To her, the government is always right, and so are the scribblers and mouths that populate the Big Media newsrooms, anyone mentally messaged in endless lecture halls like hers all the way to her “PhD”, and the millennials and Gen-Z’ers filling the cubicles of Snopes and PolitiFact.

Snopes and PolitiFact have been scandalous in their interventions in our political brawls.  If it was up to them, we’d never know that there is a strong possibility that COVID-19 came out of a Communist Chinese lab.  We’d continue to shutter the schools not knowing that children face a near non-existent threat while ignoring the long-term damage to their emotional and mental development.  We’d still be suffocating behind masks, not knowing that masking has little effect in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus.  We’d never know that the vaccines don’t stop the spread of the bug or that natural immunity is just as good (see below).  Much that we now know to be true about the pandemic would have been strangled in the crib.

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Thanks to the people whom Wirtschafter trusts, businesses would still be closed and a couple of adult generations would continue to be nurtured on the idea that they shouldn’t have to go to work.  Snopes and PolitiFact would paste as “true” any mention of the low unemployment rate, leaving a below-average labor participation rate lying on the cutting room floor.  The low unemployment rate talk is empty absent any discussion of the emaciated labor pool from which the number is calculated.  The high portion of employed (and conversely the low number unemployed, hence the low unemployment rate) is drawn from a worker pool that shrunk after the federal government started bribing a good portion of current and potential worker force out of the labor pool with extended pandemic benefits.  The money spigot wasn’t shut off till the damage was done.  Often referred to as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and I Quit Movement, Gen-Z’ers and others have discovered that living in Dad’s basement and receiving a government check (er, debit card) ain’t so bad (see below).  Bringing it up might incur the wrath of the self-deputized disinformation bounty hunters.

Should we pay for pajama boy’s college?

Partisan-laced industries abound in this age of institutionalized political correctness.  Stifling voices is the name of the game in the anti-disinformation industry.  Though, how can we see our way clearly on existential threats such as the drought in the Southwest when discussion is monitored by the disinformation police?  Having long experience with the lefty tendencies of the classroom and faculty lounge, the kinds of people admired by Wirtschafter, there exists among this group a psychomotor tick for totalitarian lifestyle control.  That’s the reason for the affection for the buzzword “conservation” and the knee-jerk suspicion about individual freedom.  Any talk of increasing the general water supply so people can be free in their daily lives will be met with a smirk.

Let me send Wirtschafter, Snopes and PolitiFact into a tizzy by mentioning a piece by Ed Ring of the California Policy Center, “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit” (see below).  He lays out the practical possibility that more than conservation is necessary to stave off disaster for states like California: the supply of water has to be increased.  But don’t bring that up at the next Sierra Club confab or among the chattering classes attending a Wirtschafter soiree.

Ring points out a number of options to increase supply, even while taking into account the climate-change bugaboo.  Climate change doesn’t mean that California will be the newest Sahara Desert in a century.  Precipitation will still fluctuate in a wet season and over time and present opportunities to expand supply.  One is the installation of French drains underneath the subsurface gravel beds of the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta’s natural channels.  It would capture a portion of the excess flows (flood waters) that flush into SF Bay.  The water could then be stored in off-stream reservoirs and delivered to users and/or utilized to recharge the depleted aquifers of California’s Great Central Valley.  French drains, think about it.

Expanding and upgrading wastewater reclamation could be an additional route to take.  Even if only for non-potable uses such as landscaping or ag irrigation, it would free large quantities of potable sources for human consumption.  Of course, that would require budgetary restraint in not wasting money on zany efforts to kill off the next generation in unbridled and subsidized abortions, or turn the state into a parent-free sanctuary for teen sexual mutilation (transgenderism), or find new ways to ladle cash to new and old “oppressed” classes, or drive businesses out of the state in hyper-regulation and -taxation, or sink more public and private money into the thankless task of making unsustainable “sustainable” energy “sustainable”.  Keep it simple: just try to maintain water pressure at the faucet.

Desalination is another option if the state can keep its militant eco-utopians and NIMBY’s at bay.  It’s expensive, like any of the other options, but, honestly, can you think of a wiser use of taxpayer moneys than the provision of something so important that three days without it brings death?  However, I suspect that the inner totalitarian of the conservation-only legion has too great a grip on the minds in Sacramento.  These busybodies are just too obsessed with telling other people how to live, and conservation fits the bill.  Yep, the inner totalitarian has a grip on power in the state.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate Photos dated 9/-/1981
1981 Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests in California organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate. (Photo: Steve Ringman/The Chronicle)

California has an aged 20-million-person water delivery system in a 39-million-person state.  Granted, people are leaving so, who knows, maybe its population will eventually come to match its outdated supply.  Still, if opportunities aren’t grasped, it’ll be a bumpy ride of brown lawns, metered restrictions and fines, and more of the Great Central Valley resembling the Sudan.  Droughts should be anticipated in dry-summer climates but California would rather play the role of woke crusader.  With the disinformation inquisition in full swing, you’ll never know that the anguish could have been avoided.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims”, Dr. Valerie Wirtschafter, Brookings Institute, 2/2023, at https://www.brookings.edu/essay/audible-reckoning-how-top-political-podcasters-spread-unsubstantiated-and-false-claims/

* A critique of the Wirtschafter study can be found here: “The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Is Only One Part of a Larger Scandal”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review Online, 2/23/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-disinformation-industry-is-only-one-part-of-a-far-larger-media-scandal/

* Dr. Fauci admits to limited effectiveness of the vaccine in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses: “Fauci Changes His Public Tune on Covid Vaccines”, Joel Zinberg, director of Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well-being Initiative, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/fauci-changes-his-public-tune-on-covid-vaccines/

* Excellent piece on unemployment and the labor participation rate: “Unemployment Is Low, But So Is The Labor Force Participation Rate — What’s Going On In The U.S. Labor Market?”, Q.ai, Forbes, 1/23/23, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/25/unemployment-is-low-but-so-is-the-labor-force-participation-rate—whats-going-on-in-the-us-labor-market/?sh=5ad8aff1244e

* “Inside the rise of ‘antiwork,’ a worker’s strike that wants to turn the labor shortage into a new American Dream”, Juliana Kaplan and Andy Kiersz, Insider, 11/25/21, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-antiwork-workers-quit-dont-work-strike-better-conditions-2021-11#:~:text=1%20The%20%22antiwork%22%20movement%20is%20rapidly%20growing%2C%20as,and%20what%20it%20means%20about%20the%20American%20Dream.

* “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit”, Ed Ring, California Policy Center, in National Review Online, 2/13/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/how-california-can-solve-the-colorado-water-deficit/

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The California Housing Crisis: The Intersectionality of Hypocrisy and Central Planning

A professional basketball player in a jersey that says Golden State Warriors.
Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry, in an April 21, 2022, game in Denver, has voiced his opposition to townhomes near his San Francisco Bay Area mansion. (David Zalubowski / Associated Press)

Have you heard this?  Steph Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors doesn’t want a 1.5 acre, 16-unit “affordable” townhouse development near his $30 million mansion in the exclusive Bay Area community of Atherton (see below).  It’s too easy to expose the obvious hypocrisy given the guy’s outspoken progressive views.  Rich people of lefty inclinations seem to run away from their lefty beliefs as soon as the consequences get too close.  But Curry has legitimate concerns of safety and privacy for a celebrity like himself and his family.  The bigger issue, though, isn’t affordable housing in a state woefully deficient of it.  It’s the central planning that inherently comes with lefty/progressive thinking of the type running the show in California.

It’s borrowed from Stalin, a fellow lefty.  He abandoned his orthodox seminary as a young man and radicalized himself into an atheist revolutionary.  Off went the priestly frock and traditional beliefs and on came the drive to build the utopia on totalitarianism in league with a clique of fellow bomb throwers and statue topplers.  Sound familiar?  Portland?  Almost any urban complex or campus in the so-called golden state?  Central planning is one of the quintessential expressions of totalitarianism.

Stalin 5 Year Plan poster | Year plan, Propaganda posters, Travel posters
Soviet poster proclaiming the Five-Year Plan of industrialization.

Now in control, to Stalin, the utopia means industrialization at breakneck speed no matter the cost and turmoil to people’s lives.  Sound similar to “zero carbon”, the Green New Deal, Biden announcing the end of fossil fuels, Newson and his one-party state destroying energy production and herding the entire population of the state into ev’s?  As for Stalin, he ordered more steel from his politburo to Gosplan (state economic planning agency) who then gets the furnaces billowing at full blast to produce more of something that few can and want to use.  It piles in heaps outside the foundries.

Ditto for Governor Newsom and housing.  Not enough affordable housing?  He ordered the regional governments in the state (like SoCal Area Governments – SCAG – for instance) to create precise plans for more “affordable housing”.  Atherton, within ABAG (Assoc. of Bay Area Governments), did its part with 348 new housing units – 16 of which are to be plunked down next to the Curry estate.

Aerial Photography Atherton - Airview Online
Aerial view of Atherton, Ca.
Atherton Homes | Floor plans, Atherton, House styles
New home development in Atherton with bungalows starting from between a stripped-down $620,000 to three-quarters of a million.
Steph and Ayesha Curry are selling their Mediterranean-style estate in Walnut Creek for $3.2 million.
The $3.2 million mansion sold by Steph Curry and wife.
Il campione della Nba Stephen Curry acquista una villa da 31 milioni in California — idealista/news
Rear view of Curry’s new $31 million mansion in Atherton, Ca

That’s how central planning works.  Need something like cheaper housing? Well, just order it as Stalin did steel, while ignoring the Russian realities of the absence of a trained workforce, the infrastructure for a supply chain, whether the stuff is any good, the absence of contingent enterprises that could use it.  Equally oblivious as Newsom is, the land in question in Atherton probably goes for $8 million per acre. Do the math: $12 million for the land and sixteen “affordable” units at $250,000 each will bring in . . . wait for it . . . $4 million.  Oops, it doesn’t add up.

Watch “affordable housing” turn into “unaffordable housing”.  To cover just land costs, each unit will have to go for $750,000.  Add other incidentals like labor, engineering, materials, energy (fuel, electricity, etc.), the inevitable California delays, fees, taxes, and approvals, and you’re back to California’s housing crisis.  Stalin ended up with the world’s largest steel ingot and crappy tractors.  Newsom commands cheaper housing and ends up with fewer units and a huge subsidy bill to fund from the depleted state, county, and municipal treasuries and the state’s beleaguered taxpayers.  My bet: the units don’t get built.

Don’t worry, Steph.  The state’s buffoonish central planning and incompetence will protect you.

The housing situation won’t improve because the political eco-system for development in the state hasn’t changed.  It’s the same one that caused the problem.  Layer upon layer of bureaucracy smothers the housing industry. Powerful interest groups perch like vultures waiting to pounce.  EIR’s and EIS’s and related “public” hearings filled with NIMBY’s and the state’s militant eco-utopians make a mockery of the process.  CEQA, the Coastal Commission, the planning agencies in every jurisdiction in the state, the overlay of air quality management districts throughout the state, Cal. Fish and Game, USFWS, and their endangered species lists are poised to tear their claws into the project.

Critically Endangered Insects Make History at San Diego Zoo - Times of San Diego
The endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect (female). Photo Courtesy San Diego Zoo.

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California NIMBYs don't love their children | OC Housing News

To tell the truth, the state has a housing crisis because it wants one.  They must want it, or they’re insane.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense must know that punishing a behavior, like building more housing, will mean less of the behavior.  It’s been the reality since the eco-industrial complex discovered the Delta Smelt, the Tipton Kangaroo Rat, and the evil of humans attempting to live better.

It gets worse.  Newsom’s affordable housing imperial decree is ready to clash with a recent California court’s decree extending California Endangered Species Act protections to invertebrates – i.e., insects (see below).  Californios will quickly learn that bumble bees count more than anything affordable in the state.  Karl Marx was wrong about much, but he got one thing right: “. . . history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Stalin’s central planning created the Holodomor and dekulakization which devastated the Ukraine, the Donbas, the Russian peasantry and agriculture, and created the stirrings of the bloody purges in the hunt for “wreckers”.  Newsom thinks that he can wave the magic wand of an imperial decree and, voilà, “affordable housing” appears.  Just announce it and it will be so.  Forget about Marx’s tragedy stage; the state quickly jumped to farce.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “NBA’s Steph Curry joins neighbors in opposing affordable-housing plan for ritzy Atherton”, Howard Blume, LA Times, 2/3/23, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-03/nba-star-steph-curry-fights-affordable-housing-atherton

* “California court ruling opens door for protection of insects as endangered species”, Liz Kimbrough, Mongabay, 6/2/22, at https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/california-court-ruling-opens-door-for-protection-of-insects-as-endangered-species/

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Victor Davis Hanson, What Happened to You?

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I was an avid follower of Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast.  I appreciated his astute observations on the state of play in the country.  But lately, I’ve discerned derangement when it comes to Ukraine.  It’s the same mania that has a grip on the loonier fringes of the right.  Why did some Republican congresspeople stand in still defiance of Zelensky in his December 2022 speech to Congress?  Why do some mouthpieces of the right’s chattering classes (Tucker Carlson for instance) never miss an opportunity to smear Zelensky and Ukraine?  It’s so very odd given the fact that the talk emanating from this faction is chock full of complaints about Ukraine but is glaringly empty of any suggestions as to what we should do in response to one nation attempting a blatant conquest of another on a continent historically beset with near-apocalyptic conflagrations.  It’s a bitch session without any practical suggestions.

Video shows Marjorie Taylor Greene 'didn't applaud' Zelensky's speech to Congress | indy100
Marjorie Taylor Greene stands motionless as others clap during Zelensky speech to Congress in December 2022.

The behavior boggles the mind.  Not since Saddam Hussein barged into Kuwait, or the Wehrmacht’s 1930’s plunge into Czechoslovakia and Poland, has the world experienced such naked aggression as this.  Gauging by the reaction of neighbors and some adamantly neutral nations – Sweden and Finland – something very big had happened when Putin unleashed his military forces on Kyiv.  Sweden, a country that during the Cold War had its fighter jets on the tarmac simultaneously facing east and west, is rushing to the arms of NATO.  Finland, since Stalin’s time a strictly nonpartisan pacifist nation, has declared its intention to join the alliance as well.  The already skittish Baltics are in a panic, and rightly so.  Yet, for people like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s the Alfred E. Neuman line of Mad Magazine fame, “What- Me Worry?”  More than that, they seem to have stocked up on a supply of broad coarse brushes and buckets of tar to lather on Zelensky and Ukraine.

I got a full dose of VDH’s mental state in regard to Ukraine in his February 9 podcast (see below).  It was full of vitriol about Ukraine and Zelensky but nary a word about what he would propose to counter a brazen act of conquest on a continent already the scene of the world’s two greatest bloodbaths that were ignited by nearly identical aggressions – Belgium/France 1914, 1930’s Austria/Czechoslovakia/Poland.  The lambast included a characterization of Zelensky as an ingrate, but by a standard that would make Churchill one.  Hanson’s depiction of the comparative weights (population, economy, nuclear weapons, etc.) of the two sides, while superficially correct, isn’t dispositive of the end result if history is any guide.  From the battlefields of Plataea, Marathon, and Salamis of ancient Greece to the jungles of Vietnam and the mountainous uplands of Afghanistan, small forces with esprit de corps and allies can defeat a much bigger one.  Hanson clearly knows this, so why does he suggest that the Ukrainian defeat is inevitable?  Once again, it boggles the mind.

Ancient Greece timeline | Timetoast timelines
Greeks defeat the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC.
Mujahideen Waiting for Soviet Army | Afghan-Soviet war 1979-… | Flickr
Mujahideen fighters in position against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

Far from it, Ukraine could gain the upper hand in this thing.  The question then will be: who got worn down?  One French estimate puts Putin’s losses at around 250,000 since he started the invasion (see below), not to mention the hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men who have fled.

Hanson’s trump card, though, is the Russian possession of nuclear weapons.  That somehow makes Putin unbeatable, which does more to explain why the Kim family of North Korea and the mullahs of Iran want them.  But the problem with a nuclear arsenal was the same one during the Cold War: use them and you’re done.  Mutually assured destruction either though a nuclear response, prolonged siege of sanctions and isolation, a forever red-dot bullseye on Putin’s forehead, or a Milosevich-type prosecution at the Hague awaits the Kremlin.  Remember, victims and survivors of holocausts are unrelenting in their pursuit of the perps.  Two names illustrate the point: Simon Wiesenthal and his pursuit of Nazis and Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann (and many others) in 1960.  Use a nuke, tactical or otherwise, and Putin will have a life of sleepless nights.  Don’t you think that he knows this?  Who wants to share space in history books with Heinrich Himmler?

May be an image of text that says '7 JEURNAL 20189 CREATORS.COM This is ALL UKRAINE'S FAULT... UKRAINE RAINE @Ramireztoons RUSSIA michaelpramirez.com'

But here’s the rub with Hanson’s rant: none of his points about Ukraine make much sense outside a reference to American domestic politics.  A faction of the right judges almost every issue in light of its relation to Trump.  A Ukrainian energy company hired Hunter.  Trump’s “perfect” phone call – which honestly wasn’t perfect, nor illegal, nor impeachable – was with Zelensky.  Some Ukrainian policymakers favored Hillary, which isn’t unusual since all nations with a gun to their head – like Ukraine – nuzzle up to the likely winner of the leadership post of the big dog that can save them.  Heck, everyone including Trump thought he was going to lose in 2016.

Ironically, we also play the election-interference game in places like Israel, post-Soviet Russia, and elsewhere.  It’s therefore hardly surprising, even if illegal, for foreigners to interfere in our domestic politics.

Then there’s the notorious ex-Ukrainian US Colonel Vidman whose testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearing helped lead to the spurious abuse-of-power charge.  See, you paint enough anti-Trump stuff on Ukraine and Trump sycophants begin to view Ukrainians as outside their tribe.  Sure, it’s sophomoric, “the politics of the junior-high lunchroom” (see below), but it works as an important signifier for those who have difficulty constructing a coherent thought on their own.

Impeachment witness Alexander Vindman says in op-ed 'doing what's right matters'
Colonel Vidman in testimony in impeachment hearing of Pres. Trump in 2020.

So, we are experiencing the sophomoric thinking that goes along with the sophomoric behavior of the Trump influence on our current political scene.  VDH dips his toe into this pond scum.

VDH, I’ve got your complaints.  Now, what do we do?  If all is so bad about Ukraine, what do you propose that we do about bald-faced, naked aggression on the continent of Europe?  Are America’s other problems truly a justification for standing idly by?  Do we restrain ourselves till we have solved our border problems, opened up ANWR, created more entitlements, corrected our birth dearth and declining labor participation rate, etc.?  It seems strange to hold foreign policy hostage to success at solving every other internal problem.  It’s essentially an argument for not having a foreign policy.

It still comes down to one question: what do we do?  Do nothing?  If we choose to take that route, prepare for conquest in the world’s other tinderboxes.  I wonder how that will sit with Xi as he makes his preparations for swallowing Taiwan.  Don’t ever bring up Biden’s Afghanistan debacle if you’re willing to create a Ukraine one.

Negotiations could end this imbroglio, but it can’t be under a prostrate Ukraine for that will only sanction subjugation with words.  If the goal is to deter this kind of behavior, Putin’s forces must suffer on the battlefield.  Ukrainians are proving quite adept at providing that.  Keep them in the fight and give them the wherewithal in the form of tanks, fighter aircraft, Patriot batteries, whatever, to make Putin see the negotiating table as his only practical way out.  Make Ukraine a too hard of a nut to crack for him.

Ukraine destroy Russian tank with drone in 'extraordinary' footage | World | News | Express.co.uk
Ukrainian soldier launches drone to destroy a Russian tank (r).

Additionally, talks at the stage of a near Ukrainian defeat after we starved them of supplies will be an inspiration for Xi.  The CCP armed forces invade and take Taiwan, then negotiate a new Hong Kong style status for the island to seem moderate, which in due course will morph into full incorporation into the regime.  Bye, bye Taiwan, to go along with the addition of the new Russian province of Ukraine.  It’s Churchill’s world crisis of 1939 all over again.

My bet is that we’ll get every bit of that international horror after this unhinged talk runs its course, and our domestic situation will still be a mess.  Reversing our decrepit culture and corrupting entitlements is a much more monumental task than shipping Abrams tanks to Ukraine.  Think about it, VDH: an unsafe and wracked USA compounded by an unsafe and wracked world.  That is the ultimate conclusion that we’re left drawing from your harangue on Ukraine.

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RogerG

See and read more here:

* Feb. 9 VDH podcast “Our Broken Kaleidoscope” on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/5pmfHJqJDIRkbZuRqZyRIE

* “EU estimates Russian casualties in Ukraine at 250,000 killed and wounded”, Yahoo News, Jan. 4, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/eu-estimates-russian-casualties-ukraine-183600085.html

* “Why Progressives Can’t Quit Their Masks”, Kevin D. Williamson, Nation Review Online, Feb. 13, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/why-progressives-cant-quit-their-masks/