Comrades, December is a time of joy and festive gatherings at the famous German Christmas markets. However, the COVID madness has caused the worst in government authority to surface. Not even Santa Claus is immune from the control efforts.
Video has surfaced of Santa Claus being arrested at the Stralsund Christmas Market for the crime of not wearing a mask outdoors in public. WATCH:
Madness, all of it.
Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall
At the Army War College a decade ago, they were pretty insistent on having an actual objective that supports actual American interest when you committed American blood and treasure. Of course, no one in DC ever listens. No matter how many stupid wars we get into, no matter how many times we end up burying a bunch of soldiers and looking like fools, there's always someone in DC ready to send your kid off to Whocaresistan to do something for some reason that no one ever bothers to explain to us, the people who either do or whose kids do the dirty work.
I’m at a loss as to the concrete American objective in Ukraine. When you ask the question – or the reasonable follow-up of, “Fine, and how many Americans dead or maimed is achieving that objective worth to you?” – the best you get is a blank stare. Usually, you get told you love Putin, as if protecting American lives from being wasted on another impulsive crusade is playing into his bloodstained hands. But we must break this cycle of tragic failure by asking these questions, and demanding the answers.
What is the American interest served by intervening in Ukraine against Russian aggression?
And how many dead and maimed Americans are you willing to expend in order to achieve that objective?
These questions are not unfair or unreasonable, and they are certainly not unpatriotic. But the Beltway brigadiers sure get huffy when you dare pose them. And they positively freak out when you suggest that if America is going to commit itself to the defense of another country that we should go through the process of declaring war to do so. But declaring war means having a debate, and the last thing they want is a debate because, as we all know, there is no critical American objective to be achieved by sending our forces to fight Russia over this border dispute.
We’re not supposed to ask the important questions, and that’s sure convenient. Hell, they might have to explain why we have some moral obligation to get our kids killed securing Ukraine’s borders at the same time we have some moral obligation not to secure our own. And there is no good answer. There’s no good answer to any of these questions.
Now, this is where they will motte and bailey you – they state their real position (“We must fight Putin if he further invades Ukraine!”) then, when there is pushback, retreat to a less controversial position (“Why, ‘intervening’ and deterring Russia does not necessarily mean going to war!”). But here’s the reality. Deterrence is just making a fool of yourself if you are not willing to back up your big words. Backing up a Ukrainian red line means young Americans with rifles, and the willingness to fix bayonets if your enemy does not yield. Putin isn’t some Ivy League sissy who doesn’t know an F35 from I395. He understands power, and he’s a serious, though evil, man. Our elite? Not serious.
That includes our current military leadership, who have given us no reason to believe they could competently execute large-scale combat operations against a peer competitor like Russia. People talk like we would win this fight walking away. Why would they think that? If you go to the Army War College today and you ask the aspiring generals, “What is America’s greatest strategic threat today?," half of these colonels will obediently answer “Climate change.” An officer corps that thinks the weather is more dangerous than the People’s Liberation Army is not leading a serious military. A military where a ruined billion-dollar ship’s crew did not have firefighting training, but which you can say with 100% certainly that each crewman had trans awareness training, is not a serious military.
Nor is there any indication we are even ramping up for a fight in Ukraine so that we could back up the saber-rattling. Putin has tens of thousands of troops deployed to attack. What do we have? This is not 1988 when I served in West Germany in the Cold War. V Corps and VII Corps are gone, and we have not revved up a REFORGER-style surge of forces to Ukraine. Our allies? Please. So, what’s our plan? Some airstrikes? Maybe we shoot some missiles? Putin takes the hit, then hits back, hard, and not necessarily in theater either. Does he take out our satellites? Unleash a cyber attack on our infrastructure? It’s up to him – he’s going to be calling the shots and well inside our decision cycle. What do the krauts do when a flurry of hypersonics turns Ramstein airbase into a smoking wasteland? The strudel munchers are going to be terrified and whoever just replaced Merkel is going to tell us we can’t fight from German territory anymore – watch it happen.
So, we lose, and it makes Afghanistan look like a “1” in comparison to the Ukrainian “10” on the “1-10” national humiliation scale. Or maybe we draw and dig in on Ukraine’s version of the DMZ – we’re never going to build up the forces to push Putin’s army out of the territory he took under Obama. And the Chinese will be there taking notes on how we run a conventional fight. They will index our electronic activity, learn our tactics, and note our weaknesses. And they will leverage that all against us when they decide it’s time to annex Taiwan. That is, if they don’t gobble it up while we’re mixing it up in the land of borscht n’ vodka.
I like Ukraine. I worked with Ukrainian soldiers on deployment, and I went there four times to train them. The soldiers are tough patriots. Their generals and their leadership are utterly corrupt. Frankly, the suspicious eagerness to expend other people’s blood in Ukraine seems less like defending American interests than protecting certain Americans’ investments. Cynical? Exactly what has our glorious establishment done in the last five years that would make you expect anything but it to be totally corrupt and incompetent?
I’m no dove; I’m a hawk who’s been burned. I hope the Ukrainians win. I am open to arguments that we should provide them weapons to kill Russians – very open. But I say not one drop of American blood for this ill-considered misadventure. We need to break the elite’s cycle of strategic failure once and for all.
I know the arguments. “We can’t betray an ally!” Except we do not owe Ukraine a defense. Treaties are made through a constitutional procedure that ensures our senators, and therefore the American people, get a say in the weighty decision to commit US lives to the security of another country. No American has the right to bind us to bloodshed in any other manner. Any such promise is void.
Russia is bad. I get that too. I was a VII Corps platoon leader shivering in an assembly area near Stuttgart practicing to help stop the Red Storm back before a lot of these Poser Pattons were born. I want them to lose this conflict. But, like most normal Americans, I am sick of ineffectual interventions based on badness instead of a clear-eyed assessment of American interests. Putin sucks. I hope the Ukrainians paint their soil red with bear blood. But this is not our fight.
“If Putin takes Ukraine, then he’ll be emboldened to threaten our NATO allies!” And when he does, to war we must go. NATO is based on a treaty. We committed. If we wish to uncommit to NATO – an idea that deserves debate – there is a process for that too. But until that happens, if Russia hits our treaty allies, then we must go to war.
But that’s not this situation. We are led by a feeble incompetent who is advised by fools. Our military is broken and has not won a full-spectrum, high-intensity conventional war in decades. And the American people are sick of seeing the lives of their sons and daughters – our amazing warriors – squandered in ill-considered conflicts that our garbage establishment has neither the competence nor, apparently, the intention of winning.
We must say, “No intervention in Ukraine.” This is their country and their fight. That’s just how it is. My test for whether any conflict is worth it is whether I could explain to the mother of a paratrooper from Omaha who just found out her son was killed in action why it was worthwhile. The proud mothers of the boys from the 82nd and 101st killed at Normandy understood. But I could not make that case to them over Ukraine.
This is not our fight. Give the Ukrainians our prayers. Maybe give them weapons. But we should not send our sons and daughters unless our ruling caste can satisfactorily answer these questions:
What is the American interest served by intervening in Ukraine against Russian aggression?
And how many dead and maimed Americans are you willing to expend in order to achieve that objective?
Contestants on the Russian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” are reluctant to ask the audience for help.
When confronted with a difficult question to which his only lifeline is to summon the audience encircled around him, the contestant in the hot seat squirms like a harpooned squid.
Such reluctance is not one of haughty disdain, the contestant doesn’t thrash in his seat convinced the audience has the collective IQ of a pickled gherkin, nor that they, being Russian, have spent the afternoon pickled in Stolichnaya. He’s reluctant to ask for their help because the audience, more often than not, will intentionally provide Dimitri with the wrong answer and sabotage his dreams of winning a million.
Americans are different, eagerly donating their collective brains to Hank’s lascivious pursuit of unearned wealth by handing him the correct answer over 90 percent of the time.
French audiences, being French, are a little more temperamental. The French will happily provide the right answer if they believe the contestant deservestheir help. If Eric asks whether the sun revolves around the Earth his fellow Frenchmen will punish his ignorance with audible glee.
Sociologists think the differences in audience psychology boil down to notions of who deserves what. Americans whoop and holler and share in Hank’s deserved or undeserved success. The French attach conditions to Eric’s success. The Russians, infected with Crab Mentality, that depressingly human tendency to deny to others what one does not have, conspire to sabotage Dimitri.
When observed, crabs trapped in a bucket will attempt escape, only for their fellow crabs to pull them back down into the bucket. The irony: each crab could escape, if only they could first resist pulling down those ahead of them in the queue. Instead, they all perish.
Perhaps the Russian sabotage is borne of a nation whose history is depraved with the politics of envy. The Russian 20th century was one of state-sanctioned envy of and vengeance toward those who stood out from the masses. Marxism, then, is the political expression of crab mentality.
The craven mentality depraving the Russian audience is the same craven mentality beavering through the Doric columns of Western civilization.
For all their talk of “diversity and inclusion,” what the woke really desire is a world in which we celebrate their mediocrities, validate their pathologies, and confirm their absurdities.
Armed with inflated grades, useless degrees, and the hokum of “everyone is gifted,” the woke degrade excellence in elevation of mediocrity. That’s why modern art degrades rather than sweetens, why ugliness and “breaking taboo” are the highest accolades of a modern culture long captive to the grievances of the mediocre.
Envy, as Kierkegaard wrote, is concealed admiration. To envy is to love and admire something so much you wish to destroy it rather than surrender to it.
Through the politics of envy, the woke wish to destroy what they cannot create.
Of course, the professional redeemers drape their envy and vengefulness in the robes of compassion and fairness. They call it “equity.”
Bill de Blasio, the departing mayor of New York, is busily scorching the earth before his exit. De Blasio closed down gifted and talented classes for New York’s brightest children as critics insist such programs “entrench segregation.”
Like all Marxist nothings, equity sounds like a warm compress upon aching limbs. The language is simmered down to the most palatable of soups, spiced with a universal obviousness—only the most callous and pre-modern of humans would refuse such nourishing fare.
After all, if some children are born into bookless homes, to struggling or single parents, who except the wicked would deny those children a little more help to flourish?
De Blasio’s problem with gifted and talented classes is that such classes cater to the “very few.” He claims his “Brilliant NYC” reforms will promote a more “inclusive” model, open to 26 times more children than the current system. By decree, the magic mayor made everyone gifted!
The real problem with such classes is that they contain too many Asian Americans and white kids. Such disparities, according to Ibram X. Kendi, known affectionately here as “Professor Piffle,” means that systemic racism is at play.
Professor Kendi, born the rather unradical Ibram Henry Rogers, sells antiracism for a living. Unsurprisingly, Kendi has a rather loose and thus profitable definition of the “racism” from which he makes his millions.
The reality, as our left-wing friends may one day learn, seldom corresponds to the theories of that famous soap-dodger Karl Marx, or his green-haired goblins of grievance.
Like demented surgeons, progressives first discern the ailment before poking around the body in search of the concomitant symptoms. They pull out organs from one place and stuff those organs where they feel those organs should go.
De Blasio and Kendi don’t look too closely at why Asian American kids and white kids are vastly overrepresented in gifted and talented classes because doing so would dissolve the victimhood narratives which justify their paychecks and their existences.
If they did look beyond their own noses, they’d discover that having two parents at home, and a bookcase or two, are more reliable barometers of school success than the totems of Marxist bumf penned by grievance-mongers and social inadequates. To look too closely would reveal to progressives what they—deep down—know to be true: one’s life chances are largely a result of one’s culture than of one’s environment.
That would explain why, here in Great Britain, British Africans are twice as likely to go to university as are British Caribbeans. That would explain why Nigerian Americans are the most successful immigrant group in America, joined by Korean Americans, Indian Americans, Filipino Americans, Taiwanese Americans, and along with Sri Lankan Americans and Japanese Americans and Ghanian Americans, all of whom do better than their “privileged” white oppressors.
Like all cults, wokeness bypasses the rational side of the brain. When the apocalypse fails to transpire, doomsday cults change the date of the apocalypse rather than change their minds. The true believers cannot look too closely lest their worldview, the sum of their intellectual and aesthetic endeavors, the fount of their emotional and political profits, dissolve on the end of their noses.
What the woke really want is not borne of compassion or fairness. Properly implemented, Equity infuses a cradle-to-grave victimhood narrative profitable to the self-appointed judges of “fairness.”
They’ll explain every difference and every disparity—the immutable facts of life—through lurid narratives of victim and victor, a social horror show in which envy is lionized and vengeance is sacralized.
Dear reader, perhaps you’ve discerned that your humble narrator is no day at the beach. I grew up in a small town in which aspiring to something beyond the “color of standard gray duplicate faces” invited foaming scorn and ridicule. To this day, the utterance “you think you’re better than us” still cuts through me.
And yet, who will benefit from equity? Those whom the professional victim-farmers deem most reliable to entrench their power.
From their first years in school, gifted and talented kids will learn that their beautiful gifts are stolen and that they, through an accident of birth, have no right to the brain between their ears. They’ll drain their days going over and over easier and easier material. They’ll conceal their gifts, obscure their talents, neuter their thoughts, tamp down that limbless feeling that unspeakable wickedness is being subjected upon them, all in the name of “fairness.”
Soon they’ll realize they’re the broken eggs. The tragedy? There’s no omelet.
With fits and starts, we are slowly returning to reality after four years of mass hysteria. Our media-deified, progressive icons are finally being exposed as the deceivers they always were.
From the moment details emerged surrounding Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax, any sane, non-woke person could have recognized he was more than just a pathological liar. Smollett was also a conniving, mean-spirited egoist. He was intent on rescuing his fading acting career by libeling the Chicago police, smearing white Trump supporters as violent racists, and self-servingly advancing the lie of a purported hate crime epidemic against blacks.
To believe Jussie, as so many of the liberal establishment were eager to do, one had to believe from the get-go the utterly unbelievable: MAGA-hatted white racists (and fans of the fading Empire no less) routinely roam liberal Chicago in subfreezing temperatures at 2:00 a.m.. They typically go out, ready for victims, equipped with requisite bleach and representational hangman’s nooses.
You see, before such devils bumped into Jussie Smollett, they had been characteristically on the lookout in their late night and early morning patrols for heroic gay black actors to take out—all unbeknownst to us
The two large white ragers were easily driven off by diminutive Jussie. The black Achilles, sandwich in one hand, cell phone in the other, battled his white Trojan brutes in Homeric fashion. But at a cost: his dueling earned him heroic wounds, real and spiritual.
The hateful Hectors managed to put a noose around poor Jussie’s neck, as he later showed police. They inflicted a supposedly career-threatening small cut below his eye. And as superhuman demons, they even splattered him with bleach that somehow defied the laws of chemistry and did not freeze in that subzero early morning.
Once the con unraveled, and given the media myth that there are millions of racist Trump supporters eager to harm black gays, one wonders why Jussie did not, from the outset, just hire on the cheap any two of the supposed millions of available deplorables, rather than unlikely Nigerian Americans, to better fake his crime?
No matter. Would-be candidate Joe Biden immediately leveraged Smollett to virtue signal his racial bona fides. Kamala Harris claimed it was a modern “lynching.” Everyone from Nancy Pelosi to the CNN/MSNBC crowd treated us to performance-art demonstrations of their outrage. No one has apologized, given the virtual truth of the age that, while fake, “it could have happened.”
Smollett whetted his beak in the overflow of sympathy and adulation. Michelle Obama’s former assistant was a conduit to the highest levels of anguish over Jussie’s victimization. And on and on.
In the end, there was only the beginning: a fraud and faker, who was as obnoxious on the witness stand as he had been over the last three years in siccing the leftwing victimization industry on America.
Think too of the now feet-of-clay, disgraced Cuomo brothers. These were the media darlings who hammed it up on television—as thousands of New Yorkers unnecessarily died in long-term care facilities due to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to redirect COVID-19 patients to share facilities with the elderly and infirm. Once there, the virus wiped out thousands of the elderly and vulnerable—a moral crime that Cuomo did his best either to cover up or massage the statistics downward.
Andrew, the elder and former governor of New York, was an unrepentant bully. He was also apparently a chronic sexual harasser. And Cuomo allegedly hired his staff to write his growing res gestae, likely on state time, and for a ridiculously obscene book advance that all parties to such a contract knew would never be paid by book sales.
For all that, Andrew Cuomo was finally forced to resign from his governorship and is now persona non grata among the once adoring Left. He may face endless lawsuits and perhaps some criminal exposure—as he thinks he can engineer the great American redemptive comeback.
Remember, at his zenith, Lord Cuomo both flattered and insulted an obsequious press in his narcissistic and Emmy-winning press conferences. They were little more than boring, ritual trashings of and rants against Donald Trump. The latter’s crime was apparently sending to New York a hospital ship and a veritable portable hospital. Both went mostly unused.
Many on the Left, by summer 2020, were in mourning that Biden had foolishly promised in advance to appoint as his vice-presidential running mate a black woman, thus robbing the country of Cuomo’s genius.
His brother Chris Cuomo should have been dismissed from CNN long ago. He likely staged a fake video showing his emergence from his COVID “quarantine”—given witnesses had seen him up and about earlier in public while infectious. He lied on air, in denying his role as a journalist-cum-political advisor, in devising ways to use his media arrogance and contacts to save his brother’s hide. And he too was hit with sexual harassment charges.
Both shared a conviction that as leftists they enjoyed nine lives of corruption and deceit—until they ran out.
Do we even now remember the recent mythologies about Kamala Harris, the supposedly dynamic woman of color? Recall, she would supposedly manage Biden’s descending dotage as she prepped to be America’s first female of color Commander-in-Chief?
She kicked off her run for president at an Oakland rally in January 2019 to media accolades. She was billed (as a compliment) to be a female version of Barack Obama. She paraded a similar exotic lineage, as a child of an African American father and an Indian immigrant mother.
In the subsequent primary debates, Harris, the daughter of two parents with doctorates, reinvented her upbringing largely as a victim of racism. In fact, she had parlayed the career advantages of her middle-class youth and educated parents, her looks, her race, her gender, and her well-placed contacts into high office, without any shred of documented achievement. Two now familiar traits soon became evident in her presidential candidacy: Harris knew and wanted to know almost nothing of the issues, and she projected an obnoxious cackling personality, both of which the media claimed were mere smears from right-wing racist and sexist critics.
In the end, Harris too is now back where she began: a myth. She was originally politicized by mentor, paramour, and aging Willie Brown. He jump-started his then young girlfriend by putting her on a number of well-compensated state boards. Soon she was San Francisco city and then county attorney, known mostly for calibrating prosecutorial policy according to the ideology and interests of the influential.
After blowing through millions in campaign funds, Harris dropped out of the presidential race without winning a single delegate. And after ten months of Harris as vice president, a USA/Suffolk poll has her at a mere 28 percent approval rating. That is the lowest among modern vice presidents since the modern age of polling began.
So far, Harris is known largely for three signature performances—serially berating staff and prompting mass resignations, hiring child actors to fake a spontaneous meet and greet to discuss “space,” and her role as our “border czar,” who ostensibly oversaw nearly 2 million illegal aliens streaming across an open border, neither vaccinated nor tested at a time of a surging pandemic.
For now, Joe Biden’s staff leaks that Harris is a bully and a nasty incompetent; her staff counter-leaks that he is a doddering old fool descending into overt senility. Both are correct.
Do we even remember the once ubiquitous Adam Schiff?
At one point, Schiff was being talked up as a dream California congressman, who easily could have been a marquee screenwriter, had Washington not robbed Hollywood of his talents. Schiff’s “minority” report of the House Intelligence Committee, fueled by lies generated by the Fusion GPS Steele dossier, supposedly was the corrective to the Nunes majority report, as if lies could negate the truth.
For over two years, Schiff appeared on television and at press conferences to confirm that Donald Trump was guilty of Russian collusion. The script was always the same. He produced no evidence, no data, no credible witnesses.
Instead, Schiff grimaced in mock outrage, and began his ritual accusations, given the secret sources he had supposedly seen (winking and nodding they were not available to the ignorant hoi polloi). Schiff went on that there was unimpeachable, but always closeted evidence, of “Russian collusion.”
As the Mueller probe collapsed into fantasy—as the FBI Washington hierarchy was insidiously discredited between felony convictions, firings, and resignations, fake FISA warrants, and James Comey’s 245 instances of amnesia under oath; and as Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report damned the very sources Schiff once quoted—Schiff always pivoted to the next “bombshell”: more worried looks, more furrowed brows, more vague reference to mystical “information” that only his committee possessed, but of course could not be made public.
In the end, Schiff ended up as we all knew he would: in Smollett-postmodern fashion claiming that while his former Steele Bible was admittedly full of lies and smears, it didn’t really matter because other undisclosed “evidence” still showed Donald Trump guilty of “Russian collusion”—the pathetic life raft that had once rescued the conceited Schiff from drowning in a sea of warranted congressional obscurity
Black Lives Matter recently jumped the proverbial shark of ridiculousness when it deplored as “racist” holding convicted liar Jussie Smollett to account.
BLM has said little about the record black-on-black murders in many of the nation’s major cities, in part an obvious consequence from its nationwide campaign to “defund” (or, actually, shut down) the police. After the Waukesha mass murdering, BLM, which talks of “black” and “white” as collectives without individuals among them, had nothing to say about the anti-white career criminal who mowed down attendants, including children, at a Christmas parade—other than a minor regional BLM “official” who claimed in poorly hidden glee that such killing might be the start of a “revolution.”
After all the hype, all the corporate shakedown and virtue signaling money, all the charges of white racism, all of Professor Kendi’s $20-30,000 zoom reeducation rants, all the appeasing CEOs, the Mark Milleys and Lloyd Austins, and the legions of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrative bloat, what are we left with? Certainly not a Marshall plan to save the inner city, not an effort to reduce illegitimacy or single-parent households, not new charter schools to give the poor the chance of competitive educations in math, science, literature, and history.
Instead, BLM is revealed as mostly a refined, updated version of Jessie Jackson’s old Operation PUSH con. It has garnered corporate cash that enriched its Marxist founders and hangers-on, helped to feed a crime wave, and led to thousands of increased violent black-on-black deaths in the inner city—while the white liberals who empowered and funded BLM became terrified that the new surge of crime now has reached Beverly Hills, the nation’s tony universities, West Hollywood, and Walnut Creek. White liberals seemed perplexed that non-white criminals somehow did not appreciate that the drivers of car-jacked Range Rovers or upscale shoppers at Louis Vuitton were on the right side and thus deserved exemption for their loud penance.
Do we remember old Joe Biden from Scranton? He was the media fiction who hid his dementia in his basement for a year, spouting that Trump had wrecked everything and he would bring about decency, prosperity, an end to the virus, and “healing.”
The Biden candidacy was one of the most cynical in American history. The unhinged far-Left adopted a befuddled Biden as the respectable veneer necessary to see their hard-core, but stealth socialist agenda finally enacted. Key to a virtual presidency would be virtual voting, as 102 million mail-in and early votes were never subject to the previous standards of authentication and statistical rejection rates of the past—rendering Election Day voting mostly a memory.
Good Joe was billed as the antithesis to the tweeting Bad Trump. Yet he clearly wasn’t. Even Joe’s tweets (e.g., “We are with you, Jussie”) were often more ridiculous.
Within days the “moderate” Joe Biden set in place policies that were guaranteed to begin wrecking the country, to send his polls down into the 30s, to ensure the likely wipe-out of his congressional majorities in 2022, and to make himself and the media who created his myth disliked, and the laughingstock of the country. Trump became unpopular when over 90 percent of media coverage was negative, and the Left concocted a never-ending circus of hoaxes, starting with Russian collusion; but Biden is disliked, despite an obsequious media and weaponized bureaucracies on his side.
We are in the first 10 months of a cognitively challenged president who is deteriorating geometrically not arithmetically, with a vice president in waiting whom the nation fears is more dangerous, even knowing Biden is half-senile. He may be reaching the point of embarrassment at which the media and Left no longer find him useful and begin leaking and staging his exit.
Single-handedly the Biden puppeteers have managed to restore the Trump record of achievement simply by doing the opposite of what Trump did, thereby ensuring their own failure and reminding voters of what once was working.
Biden may end up with the most unrecognized achievement of the modern age: the radical transformation of leftwing Latinos into a conservative majority of fed-up voters—a development that will likely cause the Left to demand an end to open borders on the assumption too many Mexicans and Central Americans are ending up like wizened Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants.
We could add other fallen heroes of the Left who once saturated our recent air waves—Robert Mueller and his dream team that would rid the world of Trump, and the quartet of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They, by their dishonesty, prevarications, and careerism have almost single-handedly tarnished the reputations of the Washington-based intelligence and investigatory agencies. Yet now, the Left has no more need of them. They are already fading from the public awareness, as careerists who managed to erode support from all those who once most readily defended their own institutions.
The lesson of these fallen icons?
They were deified for larger reductionist and anti-Trump agendas. Yet they were also always dispensable when their utility eroded, due to their mediocrity—of such a magnitude that even our American Pravdas could no longer continue to manipulate them for advantage.
The NBC media panel for Meet the Press is absolutely apoplectic about their inability to destroy President Donald Trump and his supportive base of pragmatic, awakened Americans. The pearl-clutching and fear are palpable, as the leftist roundtable contemplates future elections that may deconstruct decades of election control, manipulation, fraud and falsehood.
What the panel of John Heilemann, Marianna Sotomayor, Kimberly Atkins Stohr and Brendan Buck really fear is the pesky system within our constitutional republic we call ‘federalism’. They need to keep their attacks against Donald Trump cast in the role of eliminating baby Hitler simply to avoid confronting the flaws in their own ideological arguments. They fear freedom. They need the collective. Individual liberty is against their own sense of self and purpose.
If you listen through their nonsense (not for the faint of heart), all of the panel apoplexy boils down to individual states in control of their own elections. What they fear is federalism itself, which makes sense when you remind yourself there are two generations of leftists who were taught that collectivism (the we are the world crap), where only one centralized federal government, of all consuming power and authority, should be allowed to make decisions. WATCH:
While it would be fun to debate a group like this, the core of their fear is a diminishing ability to control. As CTH reminds frequently, the need for control is a reaction to fear. This applies in all levels of social society from elections to COVID responses. Elites need control, because at their core they fear the inherent inequity of freedom.
Sally Struthers pleads into the camera for donations to feed the starving child in her arms in Africa… leftists swoon, and the U.N. activates. Meanwhile, some pragmatist watching the commercial leans over to her husband and says, “I wonder why the cameraman didn’t just give the kid a sandwich”?
Control is a reaction to fear. Think in terms of politics and society – the fear behind leftist politics is the fear that someone might withhold things (opportunities, money, whatever) from me. Fear that if you live your life in a way I dislike that it might affect my life. Fear that if you get that job, there will be nothing left for me. Fear that if you make tons of money, it means there’s less money out there for me. So, people who believe in leftist ideologies seek control as a means of trying to create guarantees and safeguards against those circumstances they fear.
The DC UniParty knows exactly how to exploit that fear, and both Democrats and Republicans love to provide those guarantees and safeguards.
Modern “liberals”, leftists, try to control the world and people to enable their comfort and happiness. Which, as we know, is an endless quest. Trying to control others does nothing in the way of making oneself happy. By extension, voting in this mindset so that government can try to control others will also – shocking – not lead to a happier, more comfortable life.
The conservative (and moderate, independent, but for the sake of expediency, the conservative), on the other hand, relies on himself to meet his own needs. And the trade off of being free to live his life as he wishes, is also understanding that he has to make peace with how you live yours. By extension, aware that he wants to be able to hold onto this liberty and freedom forever, the conservative votes accordingly, so that everyone can remain free and in charge of his or her own life.
But here’s the crucial difference, perhaps, particularly where misery on the left stems: The conservative does not worry, so to speak, about you. The conservative knows that you were born with the same access to self-love, self-empowerment, self-determination and self-reliance that we all were, no matter the circumstances into which you were born. (Think about the millions of people this country has allowed to crawl up from poverty into prosperity – the conservative KNOWS this is possible.) And the conservative believes that if you want prosperity, or a good job, or a good education, you can make it happen – but you have to work hard.
The conservative hopes and intends that the free markets bring you all of the affordable and positive opportunities and resources that you need. The conservative also knows that on the other side of that hard work is great reward – material and, more importantly, emotional, spiritual and mental.
The conservative understands that not only is it a waste of time to try to control you, it’s actually impossible. Humans were born to be free. And if we put a roadblock in front of you, you’ll find another way around it. So we see attempts at control as a waste of resources, energy and time at best, and at worst, creating detrimental results that serve to hinder people’s upward mobility or teach dependence. We see much more efficiency, as well as endless opportunity, in leaving you to your own devices. And we want the same in return.
This is where modern democrats misview conservatives as heartless. But really, the conservative believes that there is one and one path only to sustainable success and independence – and that is self-empowerment. All other avenues – welfare, affirmative action, housing loans you can’t actually afford – ultimately risk doing a disservice to people, as they teach dependence on special circumstances, the govt, or arbitrary assistance (that can disappear tomorrow). And the real danger – they will ALWAYS backfire, and leave the recipient in equally or more dire circumstances. Any false improvement will always expire.
The conservative believes in abundance. The liberal believes in scarcity.
The conservative believes man is born free and will be who he is, no matter what arbitrary limitations or rules are put on him. The leftist believes man is perfectible, and by extension, believes a society at large is perfectible, and command and control is justified in the quest to a “perfect” utopian society. (Sounds familiar!)
The conservative tends to be more faithful – and not necessarily in God, but in the ability of the individual to find great strength in himself (or from his God) to get what he needs and to be successful. Therefore the conservative has an outlet for his fear and disappointment – trust and faith in something bigger.
The leftist believes the system must be perfected in order to enable success. Therefore disappointment is channeled as anger and blame at the system. Voids are left to be filled by faith in the govt, which they surely then want to come in and “fix” things.
And therein lie the roots of love and fear respectively. For the conservative, when life presents great struggles, he knows he has the power to surmount them. Happiness stems from internal strength and perseverance. For the modern leftist, when life presents great struggles, the system failed, therefore they were at the mercy of a faulty system, and they believe that only when the system is fixed can their life improve. Happiness is built on systemic contingencies, which they will then seek to control or expect someone else to.
One blames himself. The other blames anyone and everyone but himself.
And there it is. There’s where the meanness comes from. The leftist ideology causes that person to cast anger at the world when things go wrong or appear “unfair.” He constantly chooses only to see the “injustices” – and that makes for a very miserable, mean, blame-casting existence.
One last point that we have seen over and over and over with many (not all) of our leftist friends: Extreme stinginess and cheapness.
In our conservative community growing up, we were always taught that you give when people are in need – make donations to the Red Cross when there’s an earthquake, donate to charity when you can afford it, etc. Even if it’s just $50 here and there – it’s the right thing to do. Conservatives see this as the responsibility that comes with gaining from the capitalistic system; if you happen to benefit greatly from the system, it’s your duty to give back.
The liberal, on the other hand, does not seem to share this same viewpoint, at least not in my experience. They perhaps think this is linked to believing in scarcity, and that your dollar comes at the cost of mine. So it seems that liberals, on some level of consciousness, feel guilty about not being voluntarily charitable. Therefore, to write off their guilt, they outsource their “generosity” to the government by voting for wealth re-distributive policies. Thus, the liberal cheats himself of the joy and addictiveness of direct generosity. (Not to mention – redistributive policies ALWAYS end up disempowering those who they’re meant to help.)
We think the Treehouse is a good armory for those who are doing long distance walking for the sake of our nation. We hope you’ll think so, too. Find yourself a good branch….or just pull up a rock to the campfire.
The Cuban Missile Crisis has gone down in history as an episode of brinksmanship that nearly resulted in nuclear war. One of the details little discussed, however, is that the crisis did not end on account of some brilliant military move by John F. Kennedy, nor did he follow the counsel of generals whowanted to use nuclear weapons.
Instead, Russia agreed to move its nuclear missiles from Cuba, while Americaagreed (quietly) to remove its own nuclear missiles from Turkey.
In other words, not abstract principle or ideology, but the rough parity of the two superpowers and reciprocal measures allowed each side to save face and de-escalate. The diplomatic solution prevailed because it matched the two countries’ mutual interest in avoiding an unintentional and unwinnable nuclear war.
This solution contrasts with the recent beating of war drums over Ukraine. The history of the United States, Russia, and Ukraine has been a complicated one, but, by objective standards, the United States has been responsible for much of the provocation since the end of the Cold War. This provocation flows from the consensus goal of the “foreign policy community” to maintain a “unipolar” world where America is the “sole superpower.”
This framing of American power makes everything our problem. It only became dominant during the Clinton years. As the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the United States under George H.W. Bush and his brilliant Secretary of State, James Baker, assured Russia that it would not expand NATO “one inch eastward.” A short time later, NATO proceeded to expand all the same, first to the former nations of the Warsaw Pact and then, later, to the former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. A weak Russia could do little other than protest.
In the latter part of the George W. Bush Administration, certain figures among American neoconservatives made overtures to expand NATO membership to the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and even far-flung Georgia. This was too much for Russia, now stronger under the leadership of Vladimir Putin.
It helps in foreign policy, as in business, to look at things from an opponent’s perspective. For Russia, its Soviet empire dismembered, weakened by economic shock therapy in the 1990s, and limited in its ability to project power, it seemed the United States, acting through NATO, was surrounding Russia, after having earlier humiliated it.
Russians have a long memory; their politicians freely invoke Russia’s invasion by Napoleon in 1812, wars with Britain and France in the 1853 Crimean War, and then the Nazi menace of 1941, as if these were recent events. Russia has long been fearful of Western invasions fueled by Western ideological fervor.
Thus, under Putin, Russia has exercised its power strategically to set limits on Western influence in its region. In 2008, it shut down an attempt by U.S. ally Georgia to reignite a frozen conflict in the breakaway regions of Ossetia and Abkhazia. Georgia and its western educated leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, quickly learned that their relationship with the West was one-sided; the United States would not go to war to protect Georgia and save it from its own recklessness in attacking Ossetia. And while Russia’s army then looked worse for wear, it did succeed quickly in decimating the well-dressed, but completely incompetent, Georgians.
In 2015, Russia provided forces to support its long-term ally in Syria. With a limited budget, Russian special forces, air power, and anti-air defense systems did much to shore up the Assad regime and turn the tide against ISIS. This sent a strong message that the “international community’s” regime change attempts were not inevitable, and that Russia also had a limited power projection capability allowing it to play the spoiler, maintain its relevance in the Middle East, and stand by its allies.
In 2014, the West did much to foment and support the Maidan revolution, which resulted in a coup against Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader, Victor Yanukovych. After the coup, the new leaders were fiercely anti-Russian, even though most of the eastern half of the country is ethnic Russian, speaks Russian, is almost entirely united with the Russian Orthodox Church, and many have relatives and commercial connections inside Russia.
The prospect of extreme Ukrainian nationalists stamping out the Russian language and Russian culture of the region, as well as interfering with the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, was too much. Like America with its red and blue states, Ukraine was very divided politically, with the Russophone eastern half of the country almost completely supporting Yanukovych and his pro-Russian policies.
Russia again showed its ability to project power in a unique, limited, and efficient way, with its deployment of the “little green men” into Crimea in 2014. There was no bloodshed at this time. Soon, with Russian support, rebels in Donetsk created a separatist republic in the country’s East. A bloody warultimately ended inconclusively, and there are still frequent clashes between the Ukrainian forces and the separatists of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
Before, during, and after this conflict, Ukraine was mired in corruption, from its thoroughly decrepit banking system to its role as the “Star Wars Cantina” of Europe, where western politicos and defense types made a small fortune. There’s a reason Hunter Biden, Paul Manafort, and Mark Penn all found themselves involved in some way in Ukraine of all places.
There’s also a reason Ukraine’s former leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, was eventually indicted and labeled the “gas princess.”
Suddenly, the Western powers are gearing up again for a fight with Russia. The alleged cause is Russia’s deployment inside its own borders of substantial troops adjacent to Ukraine. Nothing else has happened to suggest an impending invasion or the need for additional U.S. actions, other than the recent change of leadership in the White House.
Trump was a skeptic of conflict with Russia, and the establishment spent a lot of energy manipulating him into retreating from this position. Biden, on the other hand, had personal and financial connections to Ukraine, as the guy in charge of the Ukraine portfolio under Obama, and he is particularly hostile to Russia. His military and diplomatic appointments share the basic neoliberal vision of the establishment, which classifies Russia as a backwards authoritarian state, dangerous to western power and western values, including recently minted ones such as gay rights and transgenderism.
The Ukrainian civil war is an unfortunate and brutal conflict, one of many in the long history of fratricidal violence in the borderlands between East and West. It does, however, have absolutely nothing to do with the people of the United States or their welfare and security. If the powers of Western Europe are not interested in going to war over Ukraine, which is right next door, there is even less reason for the United States to do so.
Those now calling for war include figures on the Left and Right, including the unhinged U.S. Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) who said, “I would not rule out American troops on the ground. We don’t rule out first-use nuclear action.” Senator John Kennedy (R-La.), said the United States should threaten to use“full force.” For now, Joe Biden has been more restrained, saying, “there will be severe consequences” if Russia moves on Ukraine—“economic consequences like none he has ever seen.”
What happened to America First?
Even if standing up for Ukraine were worth the price of war with Russia, advocates always seem to ignore the elephant in the room. Russia is the largest nuclear power on earth. Russia is right next door to Ukraine. And Russia has recently loosened its nuclear doctrine to include the right of using nuclear weapons to prevail in a major regional conflict with a powerful adversary, i.e., NATO and the United States.
It’s not clear that the United States would keep any conflict over Ukraine confined to the borders of Ukraine. After all, Russian logistical depots, strategic reserves, and manpower are located in Russia proper. Avoiding them in conducting warfare would give Russia’s substantial conventional capability even more power than it would otherwise have, shielded by the prospect of nuclear escalation if the war touched Russian soil. For the United States and NATO, it is a “lose-lose” scenario.
It is notable that throughout the Cold War, the United States and Russia avoided direct confrontation because of fears of nuclear escalation. But now, with dimmer lights at the helm, it seems all the correct and cautious restraint of the Cold War has been completely forgotten.
This kind of hubris has some precedent. An overly optimistic assessment of American military power contributed to the decision to invade Iraq, which only weakened our country in the long run. Similarly, it is telling that the same national defense establishment that recently lost in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan is so eager to fight a different, presumably more challenging, campaign—this time against a well-armed, technically advanced enemy with a home field advantage.
They do not learn. And their moral calculations are faulty. World war is not justified so school kids in Donetsk speak Ukrainian instead of Russian.
This delusional assessment of risk is not even the worst failure of intelligence in the recent anti-Russia war fever. While America’s leadership does not understand Russia or the Russians, they also deeply misunderstand their own country and countrymen.
Hostility to the government and its personnel has become a more deeply rooted prejudice, extending now, for the first time in many decades, to the military. While previously exempt from anti-government skepticism, the military’s leadership has unwisely curried favor with the unelected leadership class of the government, even as that government has become more hostile to ordinary Americans and more ideological in its goals.
Twenty years ago, the leadership class and the military could depend on the instinctive patriotism of native-born Americans, who tended to serve in the ranks and trusted rhetoric about “national interests” and “stopping aggression.” That trust has been broken by crusades to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the collapse of the multibillion-dollar Afghan army, “two weeks to flatten the curve,” and hysteria over “white rage.” It won’t be rebuilt by a war of choice with Russia.
Most Americans who remembered the Cold War also remembered the end of the Cold War, and the two decades of deliverance from the specter of nuclear annihilation. We know Russia, unlike the Soviet Union, is not supporting a worldwide communist revolution extending to the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, relative to most of the nations of NATO, it is standing up for Christianity andnormality. Its squabbles with its former territories over borders and influence are mostly none of our business, and certainly not enough to justify a war.
Americans may not fully trust Russia, but Russia is mostly irrelevant to our lives.
This leads to a final consideration. For a nation to go to war, that war must be just. That means it must be necessary, a last resort, and have some reasonable chance of success. An American war with Russia over Ukraine has none of these characteristics, just as the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria were each lacking some important element of justice.
The war in Afghanistan took place in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks. Our entry into World War II was preceded by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. A war with Russia, by contrast, would involve the United States taking a side in an ongoing civil war for a nation to whom we have no treaty obligation and little historic connection.
Since so much of Russia’s actions arise from a perception of encirclement and provocation by the West, perhaps, like the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, we can avoid an escalation of the Ukraine conflict and war itself, by scaling back our demands and our rhetoric, which mischaracterize this and nearly every other conflict as the next Munich.
Of course, such a course would require the kind of intelligence, judgment, and historical sense that has been sorely lacking from the foreign policy establishment for the last 30 years.
