“The argument made by several recent US administrations that NATO expansion does not pose a threat to Russian security doesn’t pass the sniff test. It assumes that US attitudes toward Russia are benign. They are not and haven’t been for decades. It assumes further that Moscow has no interests except as permitted by the United States. No responsible government will allow an adversary to determine its hierarchy of interests.
By casually meddling in Ukrainian politics in recent years, the United States has effectively incited Russia to undertake its reckless invasion. Putin richly deserves the opprobrium currently being heaped on him. But US policy has been both careless and irresponsible.”
The conflict renders a judgment on post-Cold War US policy. That policy has now culminated in a massive diplomatic failure.
By Andrew Bacevich
For the media and for members of the public more generally, the eruption of war creates an urgent need to affix blame and identify villains. Rendering such judgments helps make sense of an otherwise inexplicable event. It offers assurance that the moral universe remains intact, with a bright line separating good and evil.
That rule certainly applies to the case of the invasion of Ukraine. Russia is the aggressor and President Vladimir Putin a bad guy straight out of central casting: On that point, opinion in the United States and Europe is nearly unanimous. Even in a secular age, we know whose side God is on.
Yet such snap judgments rarely stand the test of history. With the passage of time, moral clarity gives way to ambiguity. Clear-cut narratives take on hitherto unrecognized complexity. Bright lines blur.
World War I illustrates the point. The conflict began with the German Army invading France. When the war finally ended, the victorious Allies charged Germany with “war guilt,” a judgment that accomplished little apart from setting the stage for an even more disastrous conflict two decades later. It turned out that in 1914 there had been plenty of guilt to go around. Among the several nations that participated in that war, none could claim innocence.
A similar rush to judgment regarding Ukraine will inevitably inhibit our understanding of the war’s origins and implications, with potentially dangerous consequences. Yes, Russian aggression deserves widespread condemnation. Yet the United States cannot absolve itself of responsibility for this catastrophe. Indeed, the conflict renders a judgment on post-Cold War US policy. That policy has now culminated in a massive diplomatic failure.
The failure stemmed from two defects that permeate contemporary American statecraft. The first involves hypocrisy and the second a penchant for overreaching.
Condemnations of Putin emphasize his disregard for what US officials like to call a “rules-based international order.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violates ostensibly sacrosanct “norms” that prohibit military aggression and demand respect for national sovereignty.
This is rather rich coming from the United States, to put it mildly. During the post-9/11 war on terror, successive administrations made their own rules and established their own norms — for example, embarking on preventive war in defiance of international opinion. If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a crime — as I believe it to be ― then how should we classify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003?
Putin appears intent on using violence to impose “regime change” in Kyiv, installing his own preferred leadership there. Biden administration officials express outrage at that prospect, and rightly so. Yet coercive regime change undertaken in total disregard of international law has been central to the American playbook in recent decades. Whatever Washington’s professed intentions, democracy, liberal values, and human rights have not prospered, whether in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya.
Perhaps we should not be surprised at such inconsistencies. After all, hypocrisy is endemic to politics, both domestic and international. More troubling is the difficulty US policy makers apparently have in accurately gauging US interests and comparing them with the interests of others. This is where the overreaching occurs.
Consider this simple definition of the phrase “vital interest”: a place or issue worth fighting for. Putin has repeatedly identified Ukraine as a vital Russian interest, and not without reason.
President Biden has been equally clear in indicating that he does not consider Ukraine worth fighting for. That is, it does not qualify as a vital US interest. At the same time, he has refused to concede the legitimacy of Russia’s claim. In concrete terms, he has rejected Putin’s demand that NATO’s eastward march, adding to its ranks various former Soviet republics and allies, should cease without incorporating Ukraine, which Russia deems an essential buffer.
The argument made by several recent US administrations that NATO expansion does not pose a threat to Russian security doesn’t pass the sniff test. It assumes that US attitudes toward Russia are benign. They are not and haven’t been for decades. It assumes further that Moscow has no interests except as permitted by the United States. No responsible government will allow an adversary to determine its hierarchy of interests.
By casually meddling in Ukrainian politics in recent years, the United States has effectively incited Russia to undertake its reckless invasion. Putin richly deserves the opprobrium currently being heaped on him. But US policy has been both careless and irresponsible.
As is so often the case, this is an unnecessary war. But the United States is no more an innocent party than the European countries that in 1914 stumbled into war.
Andrew Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
[From partners in the original war on terrorism, to the enemies that we appear to be today, what went wrong with the US/Russian era of cooperation? We went our separate ways in 2003, when Bush began his vendetta against Saddam Hussain and “Seven countries”, former client states of the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Next, came the first anti-Russian “color revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, followed by a 2nd color revolution in 2014-15…all elements of an economic war against the Russian oil/gas industry (Gazprom), intended to bankrupt Russia by surgically removing key state Ukraine from that supply system, thereby destroying the heart of the Russian economy. “Independent Ukraine” has always been a pauper state, dependent on the generosity of Russia to furnish the base energy needs of its own people, choosing instead, to act as an nonpaying parasite on the Russian suppliers, as the price for allowing Russia to transit gas through Ukraine to the rest of Europe, or else to shut-down.
When Russia chose to pipe its energy around Ukraine in new pipelines, the US waged further economic warfare against every project, promising Europe non-existent American LP Gas to replace the missing fuel. With the American-induced cancellation of both Northstream and Turkstream projects, Russia (Gazprom) had to retrench in Ukraine to continue to service Europe. Further U.S. attempts to strangulate the Russian economy and to isolate Putin run great risk of bringing about world war.]
As the battle of wills and might between Russia and the west over the fate of Ukraine unfolds, there is one key fact to bear in mind: Vladimir Putin has never lost a war. During past conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Crimea over his two decades in power, Putin succeeded by giving his armed forces clear, achievable military objectives that would allow him to declare victory, credibly, in the eyes of the Russian people and a wary, watching world. His latest initiative in Ukraine is unlikely to be any different.
Despite months of military build-up along Ukraine’s borders and repeated warnings from the Biden administration that an incursion could happen at any time, the February 24 pre-dawn bombing campaign that kicked off Europe’s first land war in decades seemed to come as a surprise to many Ukrainians. In major cities across a country the size of the state of Texas, stunned citizens, lulled into complacency by their president’s repeated reassurances that Russia would not invade, watched and listened to the sound of thunderous explosions targeting Ukrainian military bases, airports and command and control centers. Within 24 hours, the conflict spread rapidly, with Russian tanks and troops moving swiftly toward Kyiv, the capital, and fighting around Chernobyl, the site of the disastrous 1986 nuclear reactor meltdown. Shock and awe, Russian style.
In an instant, Russian President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine destroyed the post Cold War security order in Europe—one centered, to Russia’s fury, by an often-expanding NATO alliance. Analysts expect that, once Kyiv falls, the military aggression will give way to a political settlement that puts a Russia-friendly government in place. By February 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was considering an invitation from Moscow to hold “neutrality” talks in neighboring Belarus. If those talks happen, Putin will then be able to pull back troops and end the conflict—while having dealt the West a humiliating blow.
And that, military and Russia experts agree, may be the real point.
Ukraine, of course, is not a NATO member; the possibility that it might join the Alliance some day, as other countries that were once part of the old Soviet bloc have done, is a key issue in the current conflict. Putin’s actions, a brazen defiance in the face of repeated warnings and threats of sanctions from U.S. President Joe Biden and western allies, now make it a certainty, if it wasn’t before, that membership will never happen. Putin’s aggression will also serve as a stark warning to countries formerly part of the Soviet Union of the possible repercussions of getting too cozy with the West.
The post Soviet status quo in Eastern Europe was one “that [Putin] never accepted,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor in chief of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. “It ate at him. He believes Russia was treated [by the West] as a second class citizen after the Soviet Union fell.”
Now, western diplomats and intelligence officials believe, Putin seeks to decapitate the western-leaning leadership in Kyiv headed by Zelensky and replace it with a government that will be loyal to “the new Tsar,” as former Estonian President Toomas Ilves calls Putin. That could happen, U.S. intelligence officials tell Newsweek, within days. Putin does not want, nor does he need, to occupy the entire country to accomplish his greater goals, intelligence analysts and officials say. As Ilves puts it, “He wants a puppet state like Belarus,” another former Soviet province just north of Ukraine, and from which troops poured into Ukraine as the Russian bombing ramped up. With a new reality on the ground in Eastern Europe, Ilves continues, “Putin then wants to rewrite the security rules of the road between him and NATO.”
Ukraine itself appears to share at least part of that view. A statement from Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s presidential chief of staff, and shared with Newsweek by Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, outlined what Kyiv suspected were Moscow’s goals. “The Office of the President of Ukraine believes the Russian federation has two tactical goals—to seize territories and attack the legitimate political leadership of Ukraine in order to spread chaos and [to] install a marionette government that would sign a peace deal on bilateral relations with Russia,” Podolyak said.
A United States that thought it was pivoting to Asia, and focusing on China—a country that is its preeminent rival going forward—has now been dragged back to Eastern Europe, where for centuries so much blood has been spilled. Putin now has the world’s full, undivided attention, in the same way that every Secretary General in the Soviet era did. In chilling televised remarks after the invasion had begun, Putin said, “whoever tries to interfere [in Ukraine] should know that Russia’s response will be immediate, and will lead to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history.”
Russia is now back in the limelight, a nation that is demonstrating, with a display of military might, that it remains a Great Power. Which is precisely where Putin wants his nation to be. He believes Russia should at all times command respect from the rest of the world, “and when it doesn’t command respect, it should command fear,” as Lukyanov of Russia in Global Affairs puts it.
Mission accomplished. As Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary general of NATO and a long time Russia watcher characterized it recently on the CBS podcast Intelligence Matters, “This is [Putin’s] ‘look at me’ moment.”
The West Responds
Within hours of the invasion, the United States and its allies responded by sharply ratcheting up economic sanctions but it’s unclear whether the moves will deter the Russian leader. In a speech announcing the response, Biden said more than half of the West’s high tech exports to Russia would be slashed, “degrading their industrial capacity,” and hurting industries like aerospace and shipbuilding. He’s also freezing the U.S. assets of four additional Russian banks, including VTB, the country’s second largest financial institution, whose CEO is very close to Putin. “This is going to impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time,” Biden said.
The following day, the White House announced it would join the European Union in implementing sanctions against Putin personally. The Russian President is widely thought to be one of the world’s richest men, allegedly hiding much of his wealth in shell companies in various tax havens throughout the world.
How effective the sanctions will be is unclear. Putin, for his part, believes he has effectively made his country sanctions-proof. Russia has over $630 billion in hard currency reserves, and rakes in $14 billion per month in oil and gas exports. As Russia’s ambassador to Sweden, Viktor Tatarintsev, told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet days before the invasion began, when the West ramped up threats of financial penalties in a futile effort to prevent military action, “Excuse my language, but we don’t give a shit about your sanctions.”
Biden, in his remarks the day the invasion began, said he believes Putin may have brought himself a world of trouble by invading Ukraine. “History has shown time and again how swift gains in territory give way to grinding occupation, acts of mass civil disobedience and strategic dead ends,” he said. And in fact, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been training as part of newly formed “territorial defense organizations” set up in order to resist the Russians.
But U.S. intelligence officials privately do not share Biden’s optimism about “mass disobedience.” One official who spoke to Newsweek on background because he is not authorized to speak on the record said, “After the government in Kyiv is dismantled, there will be no opposition within Ukraine for us to support militarily.”
His pessimism is rooted in Putin’s past behavior, most notably when he presided over a scorched earth campaign to brutally put down an insurgency in Chechnya more than 20 years ago. He says, “It’s not realistic to mount an opposition campaign. [Putin] does not value human life the same way that the free world does, hence [Russian troops] will eradicate any opposition en masse.”
Indeed, Putin’s history as a commander in chief of Russia’s military shows that there may be reason to doubt Biden’s optimism that Ukraine will turn into a quagmire for Moscow. Beyond the ruthless campaign to put down Muslim rebels in Chechnya, he hived off the two sections of the former Soviet state of Georgia that he wanted to control in 2008. Then in 2014 he took back Crimea in Ukraine, and set up separatist movements in two heavily Russian provinces in the east, Donetsk and Luhansk. (The day before the February 24th invasion, Putin declared those two provinces were now “independent republics.” )
And on the complex battlefield in Syria, where the U.S. and Russians risked conflict, former President Barack Obama funded opposition rebel groups, including some tied to Al Qaeda, then failed to enforce his own red line after President Basar Al Assad used poison gas on his enemies. Putin sent Russian troops in with one goal: that Assad maintain his grip on power. He remains in office to this day.
The Ultimate Goal
What is Putin’s endgame now? The Russian leader is fueled by rage and seeks revenge against the West for his homeland’s perceived mistreatment, says Peter Rough, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington. The country Putin grew up in, and the one he served as a KGB officer, dissolved in 1991. In its stead came chaos at home, and, in Putin’s view, betrayal from abroad.
The demise of the Soviet Union, he has famously said, “was the most catastrophic geopolitical event of the 20th century” (worse, even, than World War II, in which 20 million Soviet citizens were killed). His resentment over what happened to his country, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, is more widely shared by Russians than many in the West appreciate.
As the Moscow bureau chief for this magazine in the early 2000s, I saw organized crime take over businesses large and small; the country’s finances were in shambles. The government was unable to pay the salaries of a once proud military. I interviewed an Army colonel stationed on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia’s far east, who wept as he confessed he wasn’t able to buy his wife a birthday present a few weeks earlier because he had not been paid his wages in months.
Boris Yeltsin, once the democratic hero who helped bring down the Soviet Union, had turned into a drunken mess as the first freely elected president of Russia; his inner circle was corrupt, enriching themselves as ordinary citizens struggled amidst the post Soviet chaos. On New Year’s Day, at the dawn of the new millennium, Yeltsin stepped down. He was replaced by the man he had named Prime Minister months earlier, Vladimir Putin.
Twenty-two years later, in an extraordinary 55-minute speech to his country on Monday February 21, Putin aired many of his grievances in a way he rarely had publicly before, as a prelude to war. In it, he said, “Ukraine is not a separate country,” and that “Ukrainians and Russians were brethren, one and the same.” Kyiv, in his view, had been ripped unceremoniously from Mother Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved. He then recounted the West’s early promise not to expand NATO.
He recalled how coldly then President Bill Clinton responded to his query, not long after he became President of Russia in 2000, about whether Moscow could ever be a member of NATO. He recalled, bitterly, how he was assured that NATO’s expansion eastward—to include countries that had been members of the Warsaw Pact, Moscow’s former client states—would “only improve their relations with us, even create a belt of states friendly to Russia.
Everything,” Putin said, “turned out exactly the opposite. They were just words.”
How does Putin seek revenge for this betrayal? To the extent he can, he wants to piece together a new Russian Empire. Not necessarily every province of the former Soviet Union, but those parts of the pre-Soviet empire, established by the Tsars, who were largely Russian speaking, orthodox Christian and who looked first to Kyiv, and then later to Moscow, as the political, cultural and spiritual center of the world.
Putin is a nationalist first and foremost. Ukraine, plainly, is central to this vision. But it also includes the countries—former Soviet provinces—that are now effectively Russian client states (Belarus), as well as those Moscow wishes to control yet again: the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia (the latter three are now members of NATO, for whom the alliance is obligated to fight in the event one of them is attacked.) Putin in his pre-invasion speech said it was “madness” that the Baltics were ever allowed to leave the USSR. He has demanded—preposterously—that the Alliance pull back to its 1997 stance, when there were just 16 members, as opposed to 30 today.
Point, Counterpoint
It is for that reason that Biden is moving more NATO troops and materiel into the Baltics. On February 25, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the Alliance would for the first time dispatch troops from the Spearhead Unit of its so-called Response Force—formed in 2014—to member states along the eastern front. NATO describes the Response Force as ”highly ready and technologically advanced.” It consists of 40,000 troops from a variety of NATO countries. Stoltenberg declined to say precisely how many troops would be deployed now.
More deployments are likely in the months ahead. President Biden vowed in no uncertain terms that an attack on a NATO member would trigger Article 5, the provision that maintains any armed attack against one country in the Alliance is considered an attack against all. If Putin moves on the Baltics, or on any NATO members who formerly were part of the Warsaw Pact—like Poland, Romania or Bulgaria, all of which border Ukraine—then Moscow will be at war with NATO.
With the invasion of Ukraine, analysts believe, Putin hoped to shake NATO. He wanted, says Douglas Wise, a former CIA officer and deputy director at the Defense Intelligence Agency, “to further divide our allies, and cement existing fissures and disunity within [the Alliance] and the EU. He also believes he can benefit by humiliating the Western leaders and institutions when they fail to develop credible and practical options to counter his aggression.”
Whether Putin benefits at home for his audacious attack on Ukraine is not yet clear. (There were small protests in major Russian cities in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.) But if creating more stress on NATO was one of his goals, that failed.
The Germans were widely viewed as the weakest link when it came to Russia, because of the two countries’ significant trade ties. And at the outset of the crisis, that skepticism seemed justified. Early on, for example, Estonia wanted to send a batch of old howitizers in its possession to Kyiv. But NATO regulations say that any weaponry given or sold to a non-NATO member must be approved by the country of origin. In this case, that country did not exist: The howitzers had been in possession of the old East Germany. Upon unification, Germany took control of them and ultimately passed them on to Finland, who eventually gave them to Estonia. When Tallinn wanted to send them on to Ukraine, to do its bit to help shore up Kyiv’s defenses, Germany—astonishingly—declined to approve the transfer.
That was followed by Berlin’s deep reluctance to stop the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline linking Germany and Russia, despite pressure to do so from its own ambassador to the U.S., Emily Haber. Following the refusal, Haber wrote a widely publicized cable to new Chancellor Olaf Scholz, saying that the country was gaining a reputation as a bad ally.
To Putin, this must have indicated that his gas-politik was paying huge dividends. But it didn’t last long. Scholz visited Washington in early February and, in a post meeting press conference with Biden, stood by meekly as the president asserted that Nord Stream 2 was dead if Moscow took military action against Ukraine. On cue, hours after the invasion began last month, Germany halted certification of the $11 billion project.
In fact, far from deepening fissures within the alliance, Putin’s Ukraine gambit has had the opposite effect. Former CIA Director and Army General David Petraeus, upon returning from the Munich Security Conference shortly before the invasion, said he had never seen the Alliance so unified since the days when he served at NATO headquarters during the Cold War.
The evident unity among the members of what Biden accurately called the most powerful military alliance in history, has only made the plight of Ukraine more poignant. As the invasion unfolded, a member of the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv, Alexey Goncharenko, begged NATO to impose a no-fly zone, to allow his countrymen to have a fairer fight on the ground. There was zero chance of that happening, because Kyiv wasn’t in the club.
Soon now, its desire to be part of the West will be moot, as Putin’s Russia takes control—little more than 24 hours after the invasion began, Russian forces were already entering the the capital and Kyiv was hit with Russian “cruise or ballistic missiles.” Success is inevitable because Biden and the allies have made it clear that Moscow will not meet military resistance from the West. Over and over Biden has told the American people the U.S. will not fight on the ground in Ukraine. He knows the public has no stomach for it.
If events play out as military analysts now expect, the conflict will end relatively quickly with a negotiated settlement that may cede some territory to Russia, the installation of a new Russia-friendly regime in Kyiv and a partial withdrawal of troops that allows Putin to avoid the quagmire the West so badly wants him sucked into. In doing so, Putin will be able to claim that he dealt a devastating setback to NATO, the main goal of his aggression.
For Putin, the sack of Ukraine will likely mark the endgame in his desire to restore the empire. If it doesn’t, it will mean at some point the world’s two largest nuclear powers will be in a shooting war, with all the risk that entails. With his words and more importantly his actions, Biden is frantically signaling to Putin: this far, but no further. An anxious world hopes the Russian leader, satisfied with victory in Ukraine, will get the message.
In Joe Biden‘s America, attempting to cancel Joe Rogan is just counter-terror policy.
This is because our ruling class—in the name of “defending democracy”—classifies those who question the regime on any matter of consequence as a threat to the homeland, and pledges to pursue them accordingly.
Our ruling elites have engaged in an overt war on wrongthink masquerading as a domestic counter-terror mission since at least January 6, 2021.
Among the greatest contributors to the current “threat environment,” according to the bulletin, is the “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding…COVD-19.”
It would appear the Biden administration considers the ivermectin-hocking, tequila-swigging, Bernie Sanders-supporting Rogan to be public enemy number one on this issue.
Shortly after hosting dissenters from COVID orthodoxy including Drs. Peter McCullough and the then-recently deplatformed Robert Malone on his podcast, Rogan found himself the subject of a cancel campaign contrived by washed-up musicians, non-medical doctors and corporate media whose ratings he has crushed.
This effort was, to put it mildly, disingenuous. We know how seriously to take the administration’s views on COVID “misinformation and disinformation” because by its own standards the White House, and its media mouthpieces, have been the most powerful and prolific purveyors of “misinformation.”
The administration has flip-flopped on virtually every aspect of the coronavirus to positions that its social media adjuncts used to ban people over. It did so not because “the science” has changed, but because the politics have changed.
Biden’s White House says its critics are dangerous—not to the public, but to its rule, as if that rule is equivalent to America or democracy itself, as Dr. Anthony Fauci is to science.
As the DHS bulletin notes, the first key driver of the “heightened threat environment” is the “proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions.”
Never mind what those government institutions themselves have done to sow discord or undermine public trust, like, say, calling for Twitter and Facebook to censor people.
It’s the critics, the dissenters—those with no monopoly on force or multi-trillion-dollar budgets—who are the real scourge.
The bulletin lists as another potential threat “false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud”—perpetuating the narrative of “insurrection” so central to the effort to persecute wrongthinkers, while eliding that Democrats‘ own election integrity-eroding measures destroyed confidence in the system.
Previous Biden-era bulletins similarly focused on COVID-19 and election integrity, but the latest one—in a new twist—also claims that calls for violence have been tied to anger over “the evacuation and resettlement of Afghan nationals following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
So it’s not just questioning the merits of mask and vaccine mandates, or skepticism over the security of mass mail-in elections, but doubts about the wisdom of dropping unvetted refugees from a terror-dominated backwater into the middle of your town that could get you in trouble with the security state.
That strategy calls for confronting long-term contributors to domestic terrorism, including:
enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation…. We will work toward finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.
Linking speech that does not comport with regime orthodoxy to terror, and using that pretext to police thought—with an armed Ministry of Truth operating out of our national security and law enforcement apparatus—therefore manifestly is “counter-terror” policy.
Casting critics as terrorists and threatening to sic the most powerful, pervasive and sophisticated security state in the history of the world on them is of course not about defending democracy or protecting the truth, but intimidating democratic opposition into silence and submission to an official narrative.
The regime evidently believes it must maintain a monopoly over the American mind to maintain a monopoly on power.
Joe Rogan threatened that power, and therefore constituted a danger. The threat was that he elicited insights from guests who challenged the regime’s credibility on all manner of issues related to COVID, and millions of people heard it.
Trump and his allies likewise threatened that power, and therefore constituted a danger. They were—and continue to be—pursued like terrorists, as the House January 6 Committee wields the full force of the federal government to investigate them, surveil their communications and audit their dealings. Why? Trump and his allies called the regime a failure, stated undeniable truths that resonated with Americans to justify that view and supported policies aimed at rectifying said failures that would disempower the ruling elites.
The most meek and unthreatening of January 6 defendants now face extreme, hyper-political prosecutions. They are being made an example of not because they ever posed a credible threat to the regime’s power, but as a signal to the millions of peaceful, patriotic Americans who might—through their collective speech, advocacy and voting.
The same goes for the parents outraged over anti-scientific and detrimental COVID-19 policies, and over critical race theory indoctrination in schools. The Department of Justice threatened to pursue them like jihadists—not because they are jihadists, but because parents awakened to the regime’s corrupt monopoly on the all-important institution of education could break that monopoly and end the careers of the politicians who support it. They must therefore be chilled.
The war on wrongthink is not about left or right. It’s about who rules: a sovereign people or the elites who deign to lord over us.
The ruling class—the “defenders of democracy”—sees citizens on the left and right opposed to its agenda and refuses to address their concerns peaceably. Instead, it calls them terror threats and pursues them using the full power of the public and like-minded private sectors.
The ruling class does not fear misinformation and disinformation. It fears truth, particularly the truth about its own rot, corruption and incompetence, which calls into question its authority.
This leaves us with a question: when everyone, from unorthodox presidents to curious podcasters to caring parents are deemed existential threats to the regime, how strong is the regime?
Russiagate, the collective delusion that Donald Trump was secretly a Russian agent aided and abetted by the Kremlin, the topic of uncountable inches of Washington Post and New York Times copy and the entire primetime lineup of MSNBC, was a dirty trick by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Not just part of it. All of it. One of the most diabolical, successful misinformation campaigns ever concocted.
We already knew that the Steele dossier was garbage. Christopher Steele was paid indirectly by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt, which he did by turning to other Clinton operatives, laundering every outlandish rumor about Trump he could find into an “investigative” document.
He shopped it to the FBI, which couldn’t verify his sources or any of his stories, but the agency dragged out the investigation to cast maximum suspicion on the new president. In the meantime, Steele found willing accomplices in the media to push his propaganda. The dupes at BuzzFeed even decided to print the whole pack of lies, with the flimsy rationale of “Well, why not?”
We got to the point where New York magazine was running a cover story that was one long piece of fan fiction that Trump was secretly a real-life version of “The Americans,” a sleeper agent now seated in the highest office in the land. The Times and Washington Post won a freaking Pulitzer!
A made-up story
Now another piece of Russia, Russia, Russia is kaputski. A computer server operated by Trump’s company was secretly communicating with a Russian firm, claimed Slate magazine and endless Twitter threads of would-be tech experts.
But as special counsel John Durham outlines in his latest indictment, that was just a story made up by tech executive Rodney Joffe, who desperately wanted a job with the Clinton administration. He hacked Trump’s servers, cherry-picked privileged Internet data he had access to, and molded it to look like something nefarious.
He was coached by lawyer Michael Sussmann — who was being paid by the Clinton administration, although he lied about that to investigators. Sussmann goes to the FBI as a “concerned citizen” — not a “Clinton stooge” — to try to get them to bite. The ultimate goal: Be able to leak to the Times that Trump is under official investigation.
Durham “definitely showed that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia,” says Kash Patel, the former chief investigator for the House Intelligence Committee.
Beyond outrageous
Of course, Hillary didn’t get what she wanted — the presidency. But her operatives didn’t stop, going on CNN to give “very concerned” interviews about a theory they knew was bull. All to undermine Trump’s presidency. It would take three years for the Mueller report to finally put the lie to rest, and we’re now, five years out, at the point where Durham is detailing the full conspiracy.
If this had happened to a Democrat, the press would be losing its mind. A candidate for president weaponized the nation’s Justice Department to pursue an investigation into their political opponent based on what they knew were lies. Americans were wiretapped! Some were entrapped for flimsy claims of perjury. The director of the FBI went into the Oval Office to tell the president that there was a sexual rumor floating around, so that it could be promptly leaked to the media. “Outrageous” doesn’t cover it. And still no shame from Hillary Clinton and her supporters, because it’s Donald Trump — anything is fair game to take him down.
All these things we’ve been lectured about over the past four years: Norms being broken, internet misinformation, perversion of government — it was all happening. It was the Democrats who were doing it. Think anyone in the left-wing media will notice?
[The Democrats want total control politically, to carry-out the same old radical left, politically correct agenda, but they often overlook the fact that everything political is reactionary, having more impact through reactions to PC support of the philosophy. Trump’s secret to power has always been his ability to provoke reactions to obvious political outrage, hence, the more radical steps that the liberals take, the more intense the opposition to them becomes. This is seen in the liberal reaction to the Freedom Convoy which advocates violent sabotage of the trucks. The Democrats scream for “Democracy,” on the one hand and advocate brainwashing, rehabilitation even expulsion to any who oppose their political dictates. Consider that there were more adult Americans who didn’t vote, in protest, than either party obtained in the big election. Which side will end up saving our Democratic-Republic?]
The ‘Jesse Watters Primetime’ host gives the tale of the tape in the bout between the left and the Freedom Convoy in his opening monologue.
Jesse Watters said the Freedom Convoy and other grassroots conservative movements show that the “great awakening is happening all across North America” in Friday’s opening monologue of “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
“The establishment is scared,” he said. “Moms have turned against them, Hispanics are turning against them, now blue-collar workers are turning against them. The great awakening is happening all across North America.”
“The continent’s best and brightest aren’t walking through the halls of Washington or Ottawa,” he continued. “It’s like comedian George Burns once said: ‘Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxis and cutting hair.’”
Watters compared the left’s leadership to a bad boss in the workplace, warning that “the people will revolt” if poor leadership affects everyday life.
Powerful liberals attempt to discredit the truckers’ message rather than listen to them, he noted. A CNN analyst tweeted to her followers, “Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks[.]”
The left’s fear stems from what truckers represent: “a threat to their power dynamic,” which Watters dubbed “their biggest fear.”
Protesters demonstrate. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
The Fox News host reported that the truckers have been entirely non-violent, unlike the Black Lives Matter rioters who totaled $2 billion in damages in summer 2020.
“Dozens of lives were lost in the chaos,” he added.
“No, Joe and Kamala aren’t going to bail out these freedom-loving truckers like they did for BLM. Instead, they’re going to make them villains of the story. And apparently, anyone who supports them becomes the enemy, too.”
“The Democrats and the media are fine letting the cartels run wild as they ship poison into the neighborhood here, killing our kids and bringing death and destruction to town. But if you drive a big rig or care about your children’s education, they’re coming for you.”
Graham Colton is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to graham.colton@fox.com and on Twitter: @GrahamGColton.