While the jackboot on our neck doesn’t seem to be getting any lighter, at least someone says what’s going on out loud. {Direct Rumble Link}
House GOP representative Jim Jordan delivered a speech on the floor today that essentially encapsulates most of the current issues that have become the collective weight from the jackboot. Insofar as congressional speeches have value, this summary from Jordan is quite succinct. WATCH:
Despite the initial fog of war having receded as Russia’s invasion slowly but steadily advances, an onslaught of overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine narratives in traditional and online media has made it difficult for a disinterested observer to ascertain an accurate picture.
Attempting to present a united front, Western leaders and media have coalesced around a narrative largely indistinguishable from Ukraine’s own. That narrative places Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at center stage as he implores the world to defend Ukraine from what he says is not just an assault on his country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also an attack upon the foundations of liberal democracy and its attendant values. While this paints a compelling and emotionally resonant picture for many, a closer examination reveals a canvas with a much murkier picture, one that we must examine closely and carefully in order to determine how to best advance the American national interest in this consequential geopolitical moment.
Let’s begin with Zelenskyy, liberal democracy’s arbiter of the hour. An actor and comedian who founded the successful Ukrainian comedy production company Kvartal 95 Studio, Zelenskyy’s entry into politics was enormously unconventional. In the few years leading up to his campaign, Zelenskyy starred in the political comedy “Servant of the People,” in which he played a schoolteacher unexpectedly elected president after a candid video of him ranting about corruption in the Ukrainian government “went viral.” First airing in 2015, “Servant of the People” was broadcast and promoted by the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1, which is owned by Ukrainian-Israeli-Cypriot oligarch and billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky. (In a statement strongly indicative of his general approach to the law, Kolomoisky once cleverly quipped that “the constitution prohibits double citizenship, but triple citizenship is not forbidden.”)
In 2018, a new political party named Servant of the People after Zelenskyy’s TV show was registered in Ukraine. Hardly a crew of experienced political hands, all of the new party’s original leadership happened to be members of Zelenskyy’s own production company. As Zelenskyy became the party’s presidential candidate, the party and the Zelenskyy campaign openly and controversially received funding and support from Kolomoisky. Having run a campaign that seemed to mirror that of his character in “Servant of the People” (which continued to air throughout his campaign) to an uncanny extent, Zelenskyy trounced incumbent Petro Poroshenko and became Ukraine’s president in 2019.
As might have been predicted considering his having received such open support from Kolomoisky, Zelenskyy’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine, which is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, haven’t amounted to much more than a bad joke. Days after being elected, Zelenskyy chose Ivan Bakanov to lead anti-corruption efforts within Ukraine’s security service. Bakanov is Zelenskyy’s childhood friend as well as the head of Kvartal 95. His chief assistant is the co-founder of Kvartal 95, Sergey Shefir. This questionable collision of Zelenskyy’s political and business interests became all the more troublesome for Zelenskyy in October, when the Pandora Papers revealed Zelenskyy, Bakanov, and Shefir maintain a complex network of offshore shell companies together which appear to have deep links to entities controlled by Zelenskyy’s biggest political benefactor, Ihor Kolomoisky. Since Zelenskyy’s election, Kolomoisky has been sanctioned by the United States for “involvement in significant corruption” such as stealing billions of dollars from the Ukrainian bank that he owned and funneling most of it into real estate and Jewish charities in the United States.
Despite pressure from the United States to do so (along with billions of dollars in aid), Zelenskyy has taken no action against Kolomoisky in Ukraine. Contradicting claims that Zelenskyy has grown increasingly distant from Kolomoisky since taking office, as war tensions were mounting in January, Zelenskyy and his family vacationed at a ski resort where they stayed near where Kolomoisky was also staying, suggesting a meeting between the two may very well have taken place. In early February, Zelenskyy banned three opposition TV stations, and just last week he banned 11 opposition political parties. Taking this record of venality and authoritarianism into account, can Zelenskyy really be taken seriously as a spokesman for the liberal democratic values that purportedly unite the West?
Despite claims that Zelenskyy has united Ukraine, Ukraine remains an ethno-linguistically divided country that, since 2014, has been in a state of conflict with some of its own citizens in the East Ukraine where two separatist republics declared independence and a significant percentage of the population is not just Russian-speaking, but ethnically Russian. When Putin launched his war effort, he declared that he sought to secure the independence of these separatist regions, to secure Russia’s claims to Crimea, and to demilitarize and “denazify” Ukraine. Many have suggested that Putin’s war in Ukraine is only the first salvo in what Putin hopes will become a much larger imperial project, and his “denazification” claims have been met with much confusion, ridicule, and hostility.
More than a month into the war, we can now attempt to reconcile assumptions about Putin’s claims and intentions with his actions on the ground. Russia’s territorial occupation efforts have focused primarily on regions of Ukraine where there is either a significant population of ethnic Russians, or where Russian is the predominant spoken-language. Once Mariupol falls, which seems likely to happen in fairly short order, Russia’s occupation will have successfully finally connected Crimea (which Russia has occupied since 2014) with Russia-proper. If Zelenskyy continues to refuse to surrender after Mariupol falls, we might expect to see Putin initiate an effort to add the Russian-speaking Odessa region in Southern Ukraine to his war tally as well.
Many have responded with ridicule to a Russian general’s statement on Fridaythat their primary war goal has been the “liberation” of the Donbass, a predominant view being that this is merely a concession from Russia that they’ve failed to occupy Kyiv and Chernihiv in the north of Ukraine as quickly as intended. The fact that the Russians haven’t so far dedicated a greater proportion of their warfighting resources towards their assaults on these northern cities, however, may very well indicate that Russia’s efforts in the north actually have been undertaken with the primary intentions of pressuring Kyiv to surrender, as well as keeping Ukraine’s defensive efforts divided between multiple war fronts.
Putin may rightly view the residents of this northern territory as more hostile to Russia than those in the more heavily Russian-speaking east, and therefore consider occupying this region too troublesome. This seeming aversion to seizing territory where a Russian presence is more likely to be seen as unwelcome is notable, as taking it into account could tamper some of the loudly voiced concerns about the scope of Putin’s imperial ambitions, at least in the near-term.
As far as Putin’s claims about the presence of Nazis in Ukraine, while there is likely no small amount of cynicism in Putin’s decision to employ this terminology as part of his propaganda war. Yet a central player in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine since 2014 has been the Azov Battalion, whose members still prominently display symbols associated with the German Third Reich on their uniforms, and has no shortage of members who openly espouse an eliminationist variety of Ukrainian nationalism, which has caused no small amount of embarrassment to some of Ukraine’s Western defenders.
While it is difficult to determine the scope of the Azov Battalion’s operational significance relative to Ukraine’s overall war effort, they are headquartered in Mariupol and have been the primary force responsible for defending Mariupol from Russian occupation. As such, finalizing the occupation of Mariupol will no doubt be trumpeted by Putin as a significant victory in the “denazification” component of his war. Further complicating the Ukrainian Nazi story is the fact that one of the Azov Battalion’s earliest and largest financial backers is the aforementioned Ihor Kolomoisky, and weapons supplied to Ukraine by Israel have ended up in the hands of the Azov Battalion in the past.
When all of these often inconvenient facts are taken into account, conventional narratives on Ukraine are found wanting. The Biden Administration’s dogged insistence on providing Ukraine with what amounts to de facto membership in NATO has ultimately proven to be a colossal strategic error that should have been avoided. Kleptocratic Ukraine is simply too corrupt, too rife with division, and too geographically proximate to Russia to be a valuable partner for the United States and NATO, and pretensions to the contrary have in practice proven to be enormously destabilizing.
When George Washington delivered his immortal Farewell Address, he implored us to adopt as our permanent foreign policy doctrine an avoidance of unnecessary foreign entanglements. As we reflect on the NATO expansion attempts that triggered this war, Americans would be wise to reflect upon Washington’s lofty words anew: “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.”
Establishment media now acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contains information about his dealings with China and connections to “the Big Guy,” has no existential problem. Before the 2020 election, some observers now recall, 51 former intelligence officials proclaimed the laptop was only “Russian disinformation,” and not a single one has now admitted that Biden’s laptop was, in fact, genuine. That refusal is the true bombshell revelation.
The signatories to the October 19, 2020 statement suggesting it was disinformation include former CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and Michael Hayden, as well as former acting CIA directors Mike Morell and John McLaughlin, a host of former CIA officers, National Security Agency officials, and former director of national intelligence James Clapper. The statement adds that “nine additional former IC officers who cannot be named publicly also support the arguments in this letter,” which closes out: “it is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”
For all but the willfully blind, this is a repetition of the Russia hoax, proclaimed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and found false by Robert Mueller’s investigation. As this repetition shows, the vaunted “intelligence community,” like the upper reaches of the FBI and Justice Department, is now a partisan force for the Democrats. True to form, the CIA has also revealed itself as another woke bureaucracy that stands more for “Cisgender Intersectional Agitprop” than proven service on the intelligence front.
“I used to struggle with impostor syndrome, but at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be,” claims an unnamed CIA employee in a recent CIA recruiting video. “I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise,” the CIA star claims. True to form, CIA bosses now believe “diversity is an operational advantage,” and want agents who “look like the U.N.”—not necessarily the best people for the job. Such a woke, partisan CIA could also be compromised.
Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake failed to become CIA director partly because he thought Stalinist spy Alger Hiss might have been innocent. Back in 1980, the CIA hired John Brennan, who in 1976 voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Brennan never should have been allowed through the front door, but he duly rose through the ranks. In 2013, the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, tapped Brennan for CIA director.
If the CIA lets a Gus Hall voter run the place, Americans would do well to wonder what other security risks might be present. It’s a matter of record that the CIA failed to protect America on September 11, 2001. Jump ahead to 2008, when the composite character, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, ran for president promising a fundamental transformation of the United States of America.
His strongest influence was Frank Marshall Davis—disguised as happy-drunk “Frank” in the 1995 bestseller, Dreams from My Father—an African American Communist who spent most of his life defending the all-white Soviet dictatorship. If an outside scholar such as Paul Kengor can identify Davis as a Communist and Soviet agent, so can America’s most powerful intelligence agency. Whatever CIA bosses knew in 2008 they kept to themselves.
One of the composite character’s first actions, in response to complaints from Russia, was to scrap missile defense for U.S. allies Poland and the Czech Republic. In 2012, the composite character told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that “missile defense” could be solved but “it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space.”
When the composite character canceled the missile shield, Mitt Romney said it was a “gift to Russia.” In July 2012, Paul Kengor published The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. Romney failed to deploy the revelations against Obama, but as the Bain Capital candidate said, in what amounted to a direct gift to his opponent, 47 percent of the people were never going to vote for him, anyway.
In 2020, John Brennan and fellow intel bosses recycled Hillary Clinton’s Russia hoax. As this action confirmed, “Our Democracy™” means what the intel community wants it to mean. In 2020 they wanted Joe Biden, and big-bucks Mitt Romney was also going for the price on the Delaware Democrat. After the election, Romney defended Biden as the winner fair and square, with no concern about Biden’s open boast of “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”
In their October 19, 2020 letter, the former intel bosses claim “each of us believes deeply that American citizens should determine the outcome of elections, not foreign governments.” To paraphrase Al Wilson, show intel, that’s the game they play. When caught in a lie, the players simply move on to the next operation.
American citizens don’t vote for intel bosses and the only CIA director to become president is George H. W. Bush. He ran on “no new taxes,” which he then raised anyway, and touted a “new world order” that is nowhere in evidence. Joe Biden ran on higher taxes and, predictably, on his watch the prices of most everything, particularly gasoline, are soaring. Sure enough, on March 21, the Delaware Democrat was talking up a new world order.
“You know, we are at an inflection point,” Biden said. “I believe in the world economy—not just the world economy, in the world. It occurs every three or four generations. As one of—as one of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60—60 million people died between 1900 and 1946. And since then, we’ve established a liberal world order, and that hadn’t happened in a long while. A lot of people dying, but nowhere near the chaos. And now is a time when things are shifting. And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”
Good luck with that.
Why the Sudden Hunter Biden Epiphany at Washington Post?
After largely ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story for 17 months after it was broken by the New York Post, The Washington Post has finally given it some of the attention it deserved. Pictured: Hunter Biden (center) walks to the Marine One helicopter on the Ellipse outside the White House on May 22, 2021. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Just when you thought the Hunter Biden scandals had died in darkness, The Washington Post published more than 6,300 words on March 30 admitting that a notable fraction of his laptop contents was authentic.
Why now? Why not last year? Why did liberal outlets act like everyone expressing concern about Biden was a Trump-adoring kook?
We reported at NewsBusters that the broadcast network morning and evening newscasts went 260 days without mentioning Hunter Biden. (And it was more like 11 months of silence at ABC.) These were the same networks that frantically obsessed over one brief and failed meeting Donald Trump Jr. hosted in Trump Tower in 2016 to discuss negative information on Hillary Clinton.
The one consistent thread in the liberal media’s approach was the notion that all attempts to dig up negative information on Democrats during a campaign are a scandal. But all attempts to dig up negative information on Republicans during a campaign are always the best and the brightest journalism one could find.
Suddenly, the Post reported that Steve Bannon associate Jack Maxey had given it a hard drive from Biden’s laptop contents in June of last year. Maxey told the London Daily Mail that the Post accidentally deleted it, and he provided it again in October. So, it looks like it wasn’t overly eager to confirm the documents, certainly not in the way it confirmed the Donald Trump “Access Hollywood” tape contents in one afternoon.
The Post is also very late to acknowledge the truth in a report from Republican Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin in 2020 on the Biden family’s secretive deals in Communist China. We’re now told that “a Washington Post review confirmed many of the key details and found additional documents showing Biden family interactions with Chinese executives.”
Over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC China Energy and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden. How many news anchors have talked about James Biden?
This bundle included a $1 million retainer for Hunter Biden to represent Patrick Ho, a shady CEFC official who was under investigation for a multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe leaders from Chad and Uganda. Ho was later convicted, but the Post reported that Hunter Biden “appeared to have little role representing Ho in the federal case.”
So, why the million bucks?
But back in September 2020, the Post sounded like a partisan bulletin board on this report. It began one story by reporting Grassley and Johnson “revived attacks” on Joe Biden’s son and “argued his position with a Ukrainian energy company was ‘problematic,’ but the report did not show that it influenced the then-vice president’s behavior or changed the Obama administration’s policy toward Ukraine.”
It doesn’t use this “no proof” standard as it obsesses over every leak from the Jan. 6 congressional kangaroo court.
The Post sounds like a prosecutor when it reports on Trump scandals, and it has routinely sounded like defense lawyers on the Biden family buck-raking.
The obvious gossip about why the Post and The New York Times would suddenly accept and confirm the reality of Hunter Biden’s laptop is because they’ve heard that the Justice Department has confirmed its reality, and they don’t want to look ridiculous if federal charges are lobbed in the probe of Hunter Biden’s finances.
But maybe, just maybe, these papers ought to grant the New York Post some respect for what it reported as reality in real time.
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A blockbuster documentary debuting Tuesday about the 2020 election makes new charges that groups associated with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions to inflate Democratic voter turnout just enough to defeat former President Donald Trump.
Rigged: The Zuckerberg-Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump, produced by the pro-Trump Citizens United Productions and movie maker-activist David Bossie, outlines how the so-called “Zuckerbucks” scheme funneled historic levels of spending to mostly Democratic districts for get-out-the-vote efforts. In Wisconsin, for example, 90% of Zuckerberg’s money went to districts won by Biden.
The movie is debuting today at Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-A-Lago. A six-figure ad buy also kicks in Tuesday to promote sales of the documentary on cable outlets. A website has been set up for orders: $4.99 to watch and $19.99 to watch and receive a DVD.
“It was a rigged election. People have to find out what happened,” said Trump in the movie trailer previewed for Washington Secrets.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz added, “This was the greatest billionaire assault on election integrity we’ve ever seen.”
While other claims of vote-rigging have been hard to prove, the legal Zuckerberg spending of nearly $420 million in the election (nearly twice what the Democratic Party spent in all of 2019 and 2020) is fully documented in reports.
Trump supporters and critics of the scheme believe it helped juice the pro-Joe Biden vote in states such as Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia, where Biden edged Trump by a combined vote of just 43,000.
Several states have moved recently to tighten spending like that from Zuckerberg-backed groups, such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave $419 million through their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to the outlets.
Sold as nonpartisan election funds to help local election boards, much of the funding went to Democratic counties. In Wisconsin, a state-backed investigation found that some $10.3 million from the groups helped boost Democratic votes in the state count that Biden won by 20,686.
The groups spent $45 million in Georgia, where Biden won by 11,779 votes, and $5.1 million in Arizona, where Biden won by 10,457.
In some areas around the country, the Zuckerberg funding pushed per-vote spending by election officials to nearly $5 in Biden-won counties, compared to just over $1 in Trump-won counties, according to a RealClearPolicy report.
“We’ll follow the money and uncover the startling facts behind election 2020,” said Bossie, who hosts and narrates the 40-minute-long Rigged. “In order to answer the question once and for all: What happened? And to ensure it never happens again.”
Concern over the spending has already prompted more than two dozen states to push for bans on outside help for state and federal elections.
Why Energy Security Is National Security
In December 2008, Marine Corps Gen. James Jones (retired) wrote in a Wall Street Journal article that “You can’t use the word energy independence. It is not a valid phrase. It is designed to excite people. But it is simply not going to happen.”
That was a factually unsupported statement then, and remains so. At the time that Jones made this pronouncement, the U.S. Minerals Management Service was estimating that there were approximately 18 billion barrels (BBls) of oil and 77 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas in the Outer Continental Shelf. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that there were at least 10.6 BBls of oil and 8.6 Tcf of gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The potential for U.S. dominance has not abated. Texas, which currently leads U.S. states in oil production, has massive proven oil (11.1 BBls) and gas (93.5 Tcf) reserves. North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Colorado round out the top five in terms of oil production. Crude oil is produced in 32 states. The top five natural gas-producing states are Texas, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
Wyoming leads in coal production, and West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and North Dakota are critical coal-producing states as well. In 2019 it was estimated that Wyoming had 1.4 trillion tons of total coal resources.
The USGS has estimated there are likely 1 billion pounds of known and potential resources of uranium in deposits throughout Texas, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Arizona. Uranium is used in the 93 operable nuclear reactors in the United States, providing 20 percent of the nation’s electricity.
Although the United States led global uranium production in 1980, almost none is being produced domestically today. Almost 50 percent of our uranium fuel supplies now come from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The United States has massive amounts of domestic energy that we can produce right here, thereby creating thousands of jobs and enriching our economy.
In 2018, the United States became the largest crude oil producer in the world, becoming energy independent for the first time in more than 60 years. That feat defied Jones’s predictions from ten years earlier and was accomplished through technological advances, as well as the pursuit of a public policy focused on energy dominance and the recognition that developing domestic energy supplies is always in the best interests of our country.
In just the last year we have gone from a 4 percent surplus of domestic oil and gas production to a 4 percent deficit — a swing of 8 percent in 12 short months. This state of affairs did not happen by accident or because of a lack of readily and economically accessible energy resources. We have more than enough oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium to power this country into the distant future, and the technology to do so, while protecting our environment.
This situation is instead the direct result of the misguided and destructive federal policy decisions that do nothing to protect the environment while empowering Russia to advance its plans for regional and international dominance.
It is important to note that Congress had no involvement with the decision to instantaneously reverse the United States from energy independence back to energy dependence. This loss was not due to a change in the laws that apply to our energy industries. Nor was it because of new developments exposing additional dangers in fracking, oil production, coal mining, or construction of the related infrastructure (such as pipelines or deep-water ports).
We are in this situation for one simple reason: the current administration has chosen to punish America. It has put us last on the world stage, placing an embargo on new energy development here while enriching and empowering Russia to produce even more oil and natural gas to meet world demand, at the very time that Russia is invading the independent country of Ukraine.
Our energy policy, in other words, is not only making us poorer, causing rampant inflation, and weakening our position in the world, it is enriching and empowering one of the few countries on earth that is willing to invade another sovereign nation based on recognizing that the only countries that could stop its advance depend on it for their energy.
This administration was importing 600,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia, an amount that could have easily been replaced by the 800,000 barrels of oil a day to be carried by the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Biden killed with a stroke of his pen on his first day in office. Meanwhile, President Biden has approved billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine.
To be more blunt: we are paying for both sides of the land war currently raging across eastern Europe, all because of the misguided energy policies of this administration.
The U.S. ruling class and their counterparts in Europe have, for the last 30 years, pursued a pact of mutual destruction, hollowing out our core of energy, food, and intellectual independence. We have empowered federal agencies to make law, enforce “laws” that don’t exist, declare millions of acres of land off-limits to access and production, and compromise private property and water rights.
The Biden administration has tried to convince people that we can continue to enjoy our historically high standard of living while destroying everything that makes that standard of living possible.
The world stage is now set: Our “liberal democracies” are dependent on totalitarian and destructive regimes, and the mad dash to try to deflect from that reality has begun. The saber-rattling, the tough talk, and the genuflection to “world order” are designed to gloss over the fact that if Western democracies had not chosen to destroy our energy independence, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.
This is not complicated for those of us who have even the most basic understanding of reality. If you are dependent on another country to supply you with energy, they will control your policy. If you are dependent on another country to supply you with food, they will control your policy. If you are dependent on another country to supply you with everything your society needs to live (pharmaceuticals, etc.), they will control your policy.
Stated even more succinctly: Energy dependence = energy insecurity; energy insecurity = instability; instability = empowerment of rogue nations.
We are not going to get out of this quagmire anytime soon. We can, however, use all of our tools to expose how those energy policies that weaken America will ultimately strengthen countries that are willing to invade another country.
If we want to restrain tyranny, we must produce our own energy. If we want to enable tyrants, we continue down the path of dependence on their energy production.
In the lead-in to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all of the U.S. involvement in the country was operated by bureaucrats and politicians from the U.S. State Dept, CIA, Intelligence Community and Senate. The Pentagon played a far lesser supportive role.
As a consequence of that previous investment, the current U.S response to the Russian “special military operation” has been spearheaded by the same DoS officials, intelligence agencies and politicians. The Ukraine engagement is a political operation using NATO and western allies. As we saw in the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Pentagon is a tool for the politics.
The division between the two interests (Pentagon vs State Dept) surfaces most quickly and easily when things SNAFU, and the blame casting begins. That’s when the division becomes noticeable to the public. The important point to remember is this… despite the involvement of NATO in the current Ukraine response, it is not the Pentagon calling the shots, it’s the state dept.
Earlier today, Army Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee “[Ukraine] is a very protracted conflict.” Milley anticipates many months, if not years, of combat fighting inside Ukraine as Putin carves out the eastern side of the country permanently.
According to Milley, “I think it’s at least measured in years… this is a very extended conflict that Russia has initiated. I think NATO, the U.S., Ukraine and all of the allies and partners supporting Ukraine are going to be involved in this for quite some time,” he said. The nature of Milley’s remarks outlines what will likely become an insurgency/proxy war funded by the United States for years against Russia.
As much as JC Milley is a political figure, Milley is operating his role under the assumption and direction of what the State Dept is creating. As a consequence of that long-term conflict prediction, the Pentagon is recommending several new rotating military bases for U.S. troops in eastern Europe.
It is also critical to recognize what is not being said by those same DoS and U.S. intelligence officials. The absence is deafening. What is not being advanced is any discussion of a diplomatic resolution or negotiated settlement. Milley’s defense request is predicated on a position that no diplomatic solution will be advanced. This is a key part of both General Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s testimony.
Ukraine cannot fight without the United States sending money and weapons. Combine that with Austin and Milley’s statements about Ukraine, and what you quickly see, albeit undiscussed in media, is that a long-term war is baked into this cake. The United States will not allow Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to enter negotiations with Vladimir Putin.
When we review western media statements about Putin not willing to enter “peace talks” with Zelenskyy, keep the testimony from Milley and Austin at the forefront of your mind.
Why would Putin enter any negotiations with Zelenskyy, knowing the U.S. position is to carry out a long-term insurgency war in Ukraine against Russian military forces? What would be the purpose of Putin talking with Zelenskyy when the U.S. is openly saying the Ukraine military will be used by the State Dept. to maintain a conflict against Russian forces?
Russian President Putin knows the only group he could negotiate with are in the United States. However, that truth would expose the puppet strings, so the United States government must play the pretend game.
The position of Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a puppet to the U.S. State Dept and Intelligence Community interests, is inherent in the Pentagon position. If Zelenskyy was free to make decisions, Austin and Milley could not be so assured as to put a timeline on the Ukraine conflict.
This context becomes increasingly important as we look at how the media are positioning all resources to support a protracted war. Anyone who is not 100% pro war in Ukraine, for whatever length of time the DoS/IC determine is needed, is immediately cast as a Putin apologist.
This war emanated from the bowels of politics via U.S. political influence in Ukraine to the extreme. This level of U.S. involvement in Ukraine ultimately triggered Putin to say enough, and he started the “special military operation.” In many ways the operation is not so much against Ukraine – but more against the U.S. involvement in supporting Ukraine against Russia.
Because it started from political origins, the Ukraine conflict will continue to be run from the nerve center of U.S. politics, the U.S. State Dept, the U.S. Senate, and CIA operations. The actual Pentagon involvement will be transport and logistics for State Dept military operations.
Do you remember when the DoS Benghazi mission was attacked, and the Pentagon had no idea there was even a U.S. operational mission taking place in eastern Libya? That same “Operation Zero Footprint” disconnect is what I am describing above. It’s likely the Pentagon has very little idea what the State Department and CIA are doing in Ukraine right now.
This context is also why the propaganda around Ukraine in the United States has been so critical and important. We will see this level of propaganda continue so long as it is the DoS/CIA running the western response to the war.
What makes this conflict a little more interesting, is the need for the U.S. to control the information. We have seen the initial first phases of their control with Big Tech saying they will not permit anything that does not follow the official U.S. government narrative on social media.
Additionally, the State Department launching their own cyber-control division is an extension of this same intent. They are planning for the long-term usefulness of Ukraine as a proxy battle against Russia.
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Websites like CTH, who talk honestly about the background of what is happening in Ukraine, may eventually need to start using coded language in order to share information. There are trillions at stake, and the people who control the events are not going to permit too much exposure.
