Tag Archives: Russia

An Immoral Slum Of An Administration

I’ve posted several times about the misuse of political labels and the unfortunate effects of that language misuse. It is especially misleading to call MAGA and Trump “conservative.” They are the antithesis of genuine conservatism, and the ranks of the Never Trumpers are filled with pundits and political figures who are conservative, just not neo-Nazis.

If you need any confirmation of that assertion, read this recent column by George Will.

I almost never find myself in agreement with Will. I not only disagree with a majority of his policy prescriptions, I’m put off by the arrogance and pomposity of much of his writing. That said, when a Republican administration has lost George Will, they’ve lost any connection to intellectually respectable conservatism.

Will doesn’t pull any punches. His first sentence is: ” Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” And he proceeds from there. After repeating the facts that have emerged, he writes that “the killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.”

Will then turns to the “peace” proposal that Trump demanded Ukraine accept, noting Rubio’s initial confession that the proposal had been delivered to an American official by Russia–and that he told members of the Senate that the proposal didn’t represent America’s peace plan. Mere hours later, he reversed himself, taking to social media to assert that the United States had “authored” the plan.

Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.”

Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight. This probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!” Americans are the deceived.

If there was any doubt of the accuracy of Will’s analysis, publication of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) should confirm it. As Heather Cox Richardson has written, it represents a dramatic retreat from the foreign policy goals the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war. The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”

And the document makes it very clear what this administration believes is the true “character of our nation.”

Their vision of “our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age,” and “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and “fourteen words” to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan…

The document is a White supremacist manifesto. It rejects immigration, denounces “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies” that it claims have harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and operated to subsidize our adversaries. It further distances the U.S. from NATO.

The upshot is that the document “reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia.” It characterizes Europe’s current course as one leading to “civilizational erasure” and calls for reassertion of “Western identity,” (by which it clearly means White.)

It may be the most shameful document produced by this “Immoral slum” of an administration.

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JD Vance Spills The Beans

Last Wednesday, I focused on two introductory paragraphs in one of Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters. Today, I want to revisit another paragraph from that same letter, in which Richardson quotes from a speech made by our creepy, faux “Hillbilly” Vice President.

Here’s that quote, from a 2021 interview.

“American conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.

That quote is the very essence of MAGA– the whine of White Christian males who are furious that American culture is depriving them of “ruling class” status, and who are determined to take the country back to the “good old days” when women, Black people and other “inferior” sorts knew our place.

I have previously noted that what Trump, Vance, Musk and the rest of MAGA are trying to do is inconsistent with today’s American culture–a point with which Vance rather obviously agrees. The question is: when politically powerful officials attempt to change the culture–when they embark on a project to reverse cultural changes–can they succeed?

Can this administration fulfill JD Vance’s fondest hope, and return us to the 1950s?

I doubt it, although they are certainly trying. (The recent attack on the Smithsonian Institution is a case on point, as are  efforts to erase the contributions of women and minorities from government websites, and restore Confederates names to national monuments.)

I found an excellent 2020 essay on this point, in a publication called The Minnesota Reformer. It’s worth reading in its entirety. The author suggested that in 2016, Republicans “decided to nominate the man who most loudly voiced their fears, who promised most explicitly to protect them from the cultural changes threatening them.”

Conservatives may argue that with laws such as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, American liberals have indeed used the political system to drive cultural change, but that argument confuses cause with effect. Those laws, while historic, did not drive cultural change, they were the products of cultural changes that had already occurred. The civil rights movement of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, brought into American living rooms by the new technology of television, had made people see things differently, to think about things differently. Only after the civil rights movement changed hearts and minds, after it changed what was deemed culturally acceptable, were the laws changed to reflect that culture.

The essay argues that America’s government, with its constitutional limitations,

is not capable of producing cultural change on the scale that we are witnessing. It can slow such changes, for a while; it can adapt to them and regulate them and in the end it must reflect them, but it cannot create them. Only highly intrusive governments such as Soviet Russia, Communist China, Nazi Germany and revolutionary Iran can force such profound change.

As the writer notes later in the essay, “A government that is large enough, intrusive enough and brutal enough to tamp down cultural change in such an environment is not a government consistent with American traditions.”

JD Vance–a Yale Law “hillbilly”–clearly understands that. So do the (few) intellectuals in the MAGA movement–and so did the authors of Project 2025. Thus, the obvious conclusion: if only “highly intrusive” governments like Russia and Nazi Germany are able to force the changes they want, then America’s constitutional democracy must be replaced with such a government. Trump, Vance, Musk et al are proceeding at a furious pace with an effort to replace America’s admittedly messy and contentious liberal democracy with a fascist regime that will be capable of Vance’s desired “ruthless exercise of power.”

The author of the linked essay suggests that we may be witnessing the last stage of the culture wars, “the deciding battle of a decades-long effort by conservative Americans to enlist government as their champion against cultural changes that they have long fought against.”

Those of us who believe in the American Idea (and applaud the cultural changes consistent with it) simply cannot allow that to happen.

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Never Thought I’d Live To See This…

One of the dubious benefits of living a long time is that you live through really striking cultural and institutional changes. During my lifetime, I’ve seen changes I consider very positive–the expansion of women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, an internet connection to virtually all of human information, ease of global travel…I could go on and on.

But I’m also around to see the backlash to all of that. And even weirder, I’ve lived to see a Republican Party that once rabidly opposed Communism and “the evil empire” embrace authoritarianism and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

A while back, I shared a folk song from the Sixties  that made fun of the John Birch Society and its habit of seeing “commies”  under every bush. (“If mommy is a commie then you’ve got to turn her in.”) Back then, the political Right was focused–frequently far too focused–on the dangers of totalitarianism and authoritarianism and government control of the economy.

If you had told me back then that the GOP would “evolve” into a party of pro-Russian apologists, I’d have asked you what you were smoking. But here we are.

A recent discussion at Persuasion was titled “When Hatred of the Left Becomes Love for Putin,” and contains the following observations:

According to Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will quickly end the war in Ukraine if he is elected, by refusing “a single penny” of aid and effectively forcing the country’s capitulation to Russia. The statement, which followed Orbán’s meeting with Trump last month, is a stark reminder of the extent to which the Trumpified GOP is becoming the anti-Ukraine party, a far cry from early bipartisan support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. And while opposition to aid to Ukraine doesn’t necessarily entail support for Vladimir Putin—common rationales include that the United States must focus on domestic problems or on the more dangerous threat from China, or that Ukraine can’t win and prolonging the war only means more death and suffering—Putin-friendly themes have been increasingly prominent on the right. At this point, pro-Putinism is no longer an undercurrent in right-wing rhetoric: it’s on the surface.

Granted, not all Putin-lovers are similarly motivated.

For some, their hatred of the American left overrides any feelings they have about Putin. Others are more ideological: they oppose the Western liberal project itself. Untangling these different strains is key to explaining why so many on today’s right embrace views that, until recently, would have gotten them branded Kremlin stooges by other conservatives.

The article references Tucker Carlson– his recent, adoring trip to Moscow and his fawning interview of Putin.

The interview was a two-hour lovefest in which Putin and his lies went unchallenged except for some polite pushback on Evan Gershkovich, the American journalist held in Russia on phony spying charges. Then, Carlson topped this with gushy videos extolling the wonders of the Soviet-built Moscow subway and of Russian supermarkets.

And it cited an article from the Federalist published the day after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

Author Christopher Bedford, former head of the Daily Caller News Foundation and a prolific contributor to right-of-center media, not only bluntly stated that “a lot of us hate our elites far more than we hate some foreign dictator” but admitted finding a lot to admire in said dictator—for instance, Putin’s unapologetic defense of Russia’s “religion, culture and history,” while Western elites denigrate and apologize for theirs.

Today’s GOP has abandoned even the remnants of genuine conservatism; today, the party is hysterically “anti-woke”–a cult focused on culture war efforts to return straight White Christian males to social dominance.

It’s hardly news by now that many American right-wingers see Putin’s Russia as the antithesis of Western “wokeness.” This is especially true with regard to sexual and gender norms: I noted the beginnings of this trend in 2013, when several right-wing groups and conservative pundits praised a Russian law censoring “propaganda” of homosexuality. Discussing the phenomenon recently in the context of the GOP’s anti-Ukraine turn, David French pointed to such examples as far-right strategist Steve Bannon’s praise for Putin’s “anti-woke” persona and Russia’s conservative gender politics, or psychologist Jordan Peterson’s suggestion that Russia’s war in Ukraine was partly self-defense against the decadence of “the pathological West.”…

The article notes that, for some Republicans, pro-Putin rhetoric indicates a radical rejection of liberalism, even the classical  liberalism of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. It quotes the “near-panegyric” to Putin in a 2017 speech by Claremont Institute’s Christopher Caldwell at Hillsdale College, and notes that both Claremont and Hillsdale are “intellectual hubs of Trumpist national conservatism.”

Read the entire essay. This isn’t remotely the GOP of my youth…..and it’s scary.

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Flooding The Zone

Times are tough for us Free Speech defenders ….

It’s bad enough that so few Americans understand either the protections or the limitations of the First Amendment’s Free Speech provisions. Fewer still can distinguish between hate speech and hate crimes. And even lawyers dedicated to the protection of our constitutional right to publicly opine and debate recognize the existence of grey zones.

When the Internet first became ubiquitous, I celebrated this new mechanism for expression. I saw it as a welcome new development in the “marketplace of ideas.”  What I didn’t see was its potential for the spread of deliberate propaganda.

Color me disabused.

Steve Bannon coined the phrase that explains what we are seeing: “flooding the zone with shit.” Rather than inventing a story to counter explanations with which one disagrees, the new approach–facilitated by bots and AI– simply produces immense amounts of conflicting and phony “information” which is then uploaded to social media and other sites.  The goal is no longer to make people believe “story A” rather than “story B.” The goal is to create a population that no longer knows what to believe.

It’s a tactic that has infected American politics and made governing close to impossible–but it is not a tactic confined to the U.S. It’s global.

Heather Cox Richardson has summed up the resulting threat:

A report published last week by the European Commission, the body that governs the European Union, says that when X, the company formerly known as Twitter, got rid of its safety standards, Russian disinformation on the site took off. Lies about Russia’s war against Ukraine spread to at least 165 million people in the E.U. and allied countries like the U.S., and garnered at least 16 billion views. The study found that Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook, all owned by Meta, also spread pro-Kremlin propaganda that uses hate speech and boosts extremists.

The report concluded that “the Kremlin’s ongoing disinformation campaign not only forms an integral part of Russia’s military agenda, but also causes risks to public security, fundamental rights and electoral processes” in the E.U. The report’s conclusions also apply to the U.S., where the far right is working to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine by claiming—falsely—that U.S. aid to Ukraine means the Biden administration is neglecting emergencies at home, like the fires last month in Maui.

Russian operatives famously flooded social media with disinformation to influence the 2016 U.S. election, and by 2022 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that China had gotten into the act. Today, analyst Clint Watts of Microsoft reported that in the last year, China has honed its ability to generate artificial images that appear to be U.S. voters, using them to stoke “controversy along racial, economic, and ideological lines.” It uses social media accounts to post divisive, AI-created images that attack political figures and iconic U.S. symbols.

Once upon a time, America could depend upon two large oceans to protect us from threats from abroad. Those days are long gone, and our contemporary isolationists–who refuse to understand, for example, how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could affect us–utterly fail to recognize that opposing our new global reality  doesn’t make it go away.

The internet makes it possible to deliver disinformation on a scale never previously available–or imagined. And it poses a very real problem for those of us who defend freedom of speech, because most of the proposed “remedies” I’ve seen would make things worse.

This nation’s Founders weren’t naive; they understood that ideas are powerful, and that  bad ideas can do real harm. They opted for freedom of speech–defined in our system as freedom from government censorship– because they also recognized that allowing government to decide which ideas could be exchanged would be much more harmful.

I still agree with the Founders’ decision, but even if I didn’t, current communication technology has largely made government control impossible. (I still recall a conversation I had with two students at a Chinese university that had invited me to speak. I asked them about China’s control of the Internet and they laughed, telling me that any “tech savvy” person could evade state controls–and that many did. And that was some 18 years ago.)

At this poiint, we have to depend upon those who manage social media platforms to monitor what their users post, which is why egomaniacs like Elon Musk–who champions a “free speech” he clearly doesn’t understand–are so dangerous.

Ultimately, we will have to depend upon the ability of the public to separate the wheat from the chaff–and the ability to do that requires a level of civic literacy that has thus far eluded us….

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Not The Start Of A Science-Fiction Story…

One of the comforts I had growing up as a bookish nerd was the steady stream of science fiction available –the books and short stories that explored what if? What if in the future X or Y happened? What if there were threats to the continued existence of humans? What if the Earth became uninhabitable? What if there really are aliens “out there”? What if they’re not friendly? What if they are?

These scenarios triggered all sorts of speculation–especially about what an “evolved” future might look like.  (There was a reason that, when the Star Trek franchise came on the scene modeling such a future, so many of us enthusiastically embraced it.)

Unfortunately, when a recent speech by the chief of the UN described not-theoretical existential threats faced by humans on planet Earth, I looked in vain for a Jean-Luc Picard-like figure able  to lead a bunch of not-so evolved humans from chaos into a satisfactory future.

In an alarming assessment, the head of the United Nations warned world leaders Tuesday that nations are “gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction” and aren’t ready or willing to tackle the challenges that threaten humanity’s future — and the planet’s. “Our world is in peril — and paralyzed,” he said.

Speaking at the opening of the General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made sure to emphasize that hope remained. But his remarks reflected a tense and worried world. He cited the war in Ukraine and multiplying conflicts around the world, the climate emergency, the dire financial situation of developing countries and setbacks in U.N. goals for 2030 including an end to extreme poverty and quality education for all children.

He also warned of what he called “a forest of red flags” around new technologies despite promising advances to heal diseases and connect people. Guterres said social media platforms are based on a model “that monetizes outrage, anger and negativity” and buys and sells data “to influence our behavior.” Artificial intelligence he said, “is compromising the integrity of information systems, the media, and indeed democracy itself.”

The world lacks even the beginning of “a global architecture” to deal with the ripples caused by these new technologies because of “geopolitical tensions,” Guterres said.

It’s hard to dispute his analysis.

As Guterres accurately pointed out, geopolitical divisions are steadily undermining the efforts of the U.N. Security Council–not to mention international law, trust in democratic institutions and most forms of international cooperation.

“The divergence between developed and developing countries, between North and South, between the privileged and the rest, is becoming more dangerous by the day,” the secretary-general said. “It is at the root of the geopolitical tensions and lack of trust that poison every area of global cooperation, from vaccines to sanctions to trade

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine not only unleashed a global food crisis–it has worsened divisions among major powers in a way not seen since the Cold War and raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe, either due to accidental mishaps at nuclear plants or (as Putin becomes cornered) via weaponry. Inflation is worldwide. Diseases and pandemics are proliferating.

And looming above every other threat is climate change, and the almost daily reports of  extreme weather it is triggering.

In those long-ago stories I read, this confluence of emergencies would either be countered with scientific innovations, or human ingenuity would allow some portion of humanity to escape our doomed planet and find a new (class M) home.

I hate to be negative, but at least in the short term, I don’t see either of those things happening.

I should hasten to say that I do see evidence that the threat of environmental disaster has incentivized some truly impressive science. Whether those breakthroughs will ameliorate some of the worst of the crisis or are “too little, too late” remains to be seen.

It’s also too early to tell just how much the fat cats who have been massively profiting from fossil fuels (and the legal advantages they’ve managed to buy for themselves) will slow adoption of those breakthroughs….

Science also is producing enormous progress in automation, which–at least in the short term–will displace millions of people from the tasks they are currently performing; that displacement will only add to the existing grievances that are increasingly being expressed through violence, as people unable to cope productively with enormous social, technological and climate change look for someone or some group to blame.

And while we face these and multiple other challenges, our governing institutions are gridlocked by obsolete mechanisms that  empower corrupt and wildly incompetent lawmakers.

The term “a world of hurt” has never been more apt.

Unfortunately, there’s no Federation to come to our rescue….we will have to rescue ourselves.

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