Society in General

How Wokeness Divides and Destroys

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A.J. Rice explains in his American Greatness article BrokeBatch Mountain.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Sam Elliott is not a conformist. The Hollywood legend still thinks for himself and isn’t afraid to say so. How very American.

What exactly is “toxic masculinity?” Is there a corresponding “toxic femininity?” Or is it just another shape-shifting cudgel used against men in the tedious culture wars?

Sam Elliott certainly isn’t toxic. For years, the actor has been a meme representing manliness. Dry humor, courtesy, and gallantry, slow to wrath but by God get out of his way if you stir him to seek justice or vengeance. Everybody loves Sam Elliott.

Most movie fans also love Benedict Cumberbatch from his days as Sherlock Holmes through his turns as Dr. Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Cumberbatch can portray thoughtful weirdness better than anyone else. These are two great and very different actors. They don’t have to agree on everything, or even anything, just because they’re two men at the top of their craft.

Elliott recently appeared on Marc Maron’s podcast and slammed Cumberbatch’s latest film for Netflix, “The Power of the Dog,” for what he calls homosexual themes deconstructing the archetype of the American cowboy. Cumberbatch does play a repressed gay rancher in the 1920s, in a film about the American West that was actually filmed in totalitarian New Zealand. “They’re running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions of homosexuality throughout the movie,” Elliott said of the film.

“The Power of the Dog” was nominated for an astounding 12 Oscars this year. But that doesn’t mean a thing about artistic merit anymore. Recall that during the great moral panic of 2020, the Academy announced that films will not even be considered for awards unless they meet certain racial and gender quotas. With that news, Oscars are no longer signs of quality. They are signs of conformity. They are a super expensive United Colors of Benetton ad.

Elliott is a Democrat but he’s not a conformist. Prior to the Twitter-mob-years, nonconformity was a sign of individuality and strength in a man or woman. His recent comments reveal that the Hollywood legend still thinks for himself and isn’t afraid to say so. How very American.

Cumberbatch, who is a British man playing an American gay cowboy on a movie filmed in New Zealand written and directed by New Zealand’s kooky Jane Campion, has lashed out at Elliott for criticizing the film.

“These people still exist in our world,” Cumberbatch told the British Academy of Film and Television Arts about his “Power of the Dog” character.

“Whether it’s on our doorstep or whether it’s down the road or whether it’s someone we meet in a bar or pub or on the sports field, there is aggression and anger and frustration and an inability to control or know who you are in that moment that causes damage to that person and, as we know, damage to those around them. . . . [There is] no harm in looking at a character to get to the root causes of that.”

“This is a very specific case of repression, but also due to an intolerance for that true identity that Phil is that he can’t fully be,” Cumberbatch added. “The more we look under the hood of toxic masculinity and try to discover the root causes of it, the bigger chances we have of dealing with it when it arises with our children.”

Thank God we didn’t try to win World War II with this mindset.

There is also no harm in criticizing a film for its story choices, its costume choices, its themes, or its lead actor’s failed attempt to come up with a convincing Western American accent. It’s all fair game.

Then there’s the question of authorship and direction. Of late, the Twitter mob has suggested Gal Gadot can’t portray Cleopatra because she isn’t Egyptian. Neither was Cleopatra—she was Macedonian Greek—but why is no one questioning whether Campion can be allowed to write about American cowboys? She certainly isn’t American by any stretch. The mob says non-trans actors are not permitted play trans roles, but here we have a straight man playing a gay American cowboy in a country that’s thousands of miles from America. Hello, double standards.

Is any of what Cumberbatch describes above confined to repressed gay men, or men, at all? Can women not lash out in rage? Can they not stir up trouble and be toxic, too? Ever heard of “Mean Girls” or watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez snark at the capitalism that makes her free and rich? And again, just what is “toxic masculinity,” especially if a fictitious gay rancher can exhibit it and end up winning a trophy for the actor who got richer portraying him while taking swipes at his critics?

Cumberbatch is entitled to promote and defend his film, though the dozen Oscar nominations will do the heavy lifting for him. Elliott is entitled to criticize the film and question why Hollywood keeps deconstructing and destroying icons in the name of pushing its toxic politics on everyone else, under the pen and direction of someone who clearly hates the archetype. No one should be forced to like a movie if it doesn’t suit them, for whatever reason.

As for the film itself, Kirsten Dunst is underused and stares a lot. The color grading is muddy, wasting the power of your 4K HDR television. The pacing is slow. The spare score is reminiscent of a 1960s “Twilight Zone” episode. Cumberbatch’s cowboy speech is uneven. But go ahead and hand it a bunch of trophies for sticking to Hollywood’s political script.

 

 

Truckers Better Representatives Than Congress People

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Sarabeth Matilsky writes at the The Brownstone Institute What the Truckers Want: An Explanation for the Confused.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

There are many legitimate reasons to be cynical in this world, but I’ve decided to assume that my fellow Americans are generally really smart people. And for those of you who are very intelligent yet still “confused” about “What the truckers want,” I offer you this simple essay. My seven-year-old now understands the nuances, so please trust me, you can understand too! Lots of our politicians are in the dark, so this essay is also for them.

The People’s Convoy (not to be confused with various other rallies and truckers’ protests both related and unrelated) left Adelanto, CA, over two weeks ago. They are men and women, Democrats and Republicans and Independents, religious and non-religious, gay and straight, black and white, of many ethnicities. They represent working-class persons in the transportation sector and many others who have been maligned and in many cases lost their jobs due to Covid policies and vaccine mandates.

They represent all Americans, who deserve the rights that our Constitution and Bill of Rights confer.

These truckers and others drove from California to Hagerstown, MD, over a week and a half – and all across the country, from overpasses, at evening rallies, and all along the highways, Americans turned out to cheer them on. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans turned out to show their support for the truckers, and hundreds of thousands if not millions more cheered them on from their homes, unable to be there in person.

All across the country, the truckers drove courteously, cleaned up all their litter and messes, and have requested the attention of our elected officials to correct some simple issues. (There are MANY other problems worthy of our attention, of course, but those presented by the Convoy are basic and simple ones, and must be considered high priority).

Since arriving in the DC area, the People’s Convoy has been working respectfully with law enforcement, circling the DC Beltway at particular times in peaceful protest, and all the time they have been requesting the attention of our elected officials. So far, two small press conferences have yielded mainstream media reporters as confused as our elected officials seem to be.

Here is what the truckers want:

— All Covid Mandates Should Be Rescinded.

— Federal Emergency Powers Should Be Revoked.

Lots of pundits wonder: “Vaccine Mandates are falling everywhere – so why the protests?”

Not to get too technical, but you need to know that the USA “State of Emergency” that authorizes Emergency Powers at various levels of government was signed into place by Trump, and has been renewed by Biden twice now – most recently a few days ago, for another entire year.

The truckers demand that this emergency order be revoked, because while it is in place, some of our Constitutional rights are suspended, and there is no guarantee that the government will stay within bounds; lockdowns in theory could happen at any time again, for similar or different reasons.

And of course, these orders should be rescinded for the obvious reason that there is no emergency.

Additionally, as long as the emergency orders are in effect, there are tens of thousands of American men and women whose jobs have been lost due to unconstitutional vaccine mandates, and they have no legal standing to get them back until we exit this “State of Emergency.” Many of the people who have lost their jobs are skilled professionals in the healthcare, transportation, education and many other sectors.

For example: 1,200 teachers in NYC alone have lost their jobs, and thousands of doctors and nurses and healthcare professionals are similarly out of work, as are tens of thousands of firefighters, pilots, sanitation workers, military members, police officers, and others, all across the country.

Politicians are beginning to admit that the vaccine mandates are and were not at all evidence-based, and this is a step in the right direction toward admitting the wrongdoing perpetuated by our elected and unelected leaders upon the American people. However, it is necessary – in order for us to get back to even a baseline of representative government – to end the State of Emergency.

Ted Cruz rode shotgun in the lead truck for a circuit of the DC beltway yesterday. Just prior to that, he became the first politician to actually show up to meet with the truckers – he joined them in Hagerstown, MD, and spoke to an enormous crowd. I have to say, that although it is important to start somewhere (a politician finally showed up!), the moment that man began his stump speech, he spoke in platitudes, and displayed an understanding of the situation that was entirely focused on his own political aims.

The adults can see through your posturing too! We DO want to be heard, but the very first thing you just tried to do, after two weeks of truckers explaining patiently that this is about freedom for ALL and not partisan politics, is to draw your own partisan lines in the sand and divide us! THEN what did you do? You conveniently forgot that it’s not only mandates we want rescinded, but the State of Emergency that remains in effect, which gives you and all other politicrats unprecedented power.

It made me feel a bit hopeless, that out of all the politicians who are supposed to represent the people of this country, only this one would even show up, and NONE have so far shown any potential for leading us out of this mess even remotely like the leadership displayed by the truckers themselves over the past couple of weeks.

Truckers for Congress! And Senate! And President! Plus, no corporate money of any kind is ever allowed to seep into any politicians’ pockets ever again? I think that would be a start.

I called all of my federal elected officials today, to urge them: be the first Democrat to stand up! Go talk to the truckers! They are right in Hagerstown, less than an hour outside of DC. Do what we elected you to do: go listen to the people. And then you all need to give us our rights back, the ones that should never have been taken from us in the first place, back two years ago this week. Give my kids some reason to hope that by the time they are voting, they will have somebody to vote FOR.

 

 

Biden’s Inflation: He Runs But Can’t Hide

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Let’s review the story about US inflation fed to PC media by Biden and the Dems:

The graph above shows that consumer prices were descending from a peak in 2018 during the last two years of Trump administration.  Prices start rising upon Biden’s taking office and the spike continues prior to Putin’s Ukraine invasion (the period in pale blue titled: “Not Putin.”

Biden also blamed oil companies and their executives because they “don’t want to pump more oil, although they have every capacity to do so. Nothing is slowing them up,” he said in response to criticism that his administration’s canceling of the KeystoneXL pipeline and Executive Order stopping new oilfield leases is to blame. The administration has repeatedly said that the industry has 9,000 approved leases they can tap into at any time.

And to throw more money on the inflationary bonfire, Dems have just passed a 1.5 trillion dollar budget full of outrageous pork.

Jonathon Turley writes at zerohedge When Pigs Fly: Congress Inserts Over 4,000 Pork Earmarks In Spending Bill.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  H/T Tyler Durden

For years, Congress has dispensed with the pretense of informed legislative process when it comes to major bills and appropriations.

The new $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill, however, took the notion of blind legislating to a disgraceful degree. Democratic leadership dumped the almost 3,000 page bill on the members (and the public) on Wednesday with only a couple days to review the massive spending.

That includes over 4,000 pork projects in earmarks.

While Congress disavowed earmarks, the pork-ridden bill shows that both parties have abandoned the pledge. Spending trillions in the last couple years appears to have removed any sense of fiscal responsibility or accountability. We are now over $30 trillion in debt so what are a few pork items — or in Schumer’s case 142 such items. (Some argue that debt is really only $22 trillion and that debt does not matter).

It was a clever move at a perfect time. With Ukraine raging and people traumatized over the war, leadership like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Cal.) kept bringing questions back to $14 billion in aid for Ukraine. Members stressed that there was no time to waste — or in this case to read — before voting.

It is a familiar tactic on pork spending. You can hide an entire drove of pigs behind a single redeeming budget item.

What is most alarming is the level of duplicity. The bill was withheld by leadership to guarantee little time for the members, let alone the public, from seriously considering the specific expenditures. It shows utter contempt for the concept of public deliberation and debate in the legislation. One must accept the word of the leadership and vote in the blind.

In the meantime, even before this package, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget predicted that the debt-to-GDP ratio is at 101% and the total federal debt, including intragovernmental debt, may exceed 120%. Even if debt does not matter (as some have claimed) most citizens oppose pork barrel spending.

All of that is worth discussing but it is hard to have that debate when congressional leaders are dumping massive bills and calling for quick votes on little more than the cover page.

Comment: 

It appears that they know their days in power are numbered, and they are determined to bankrupt the country before the electorate can give them the boot.  Once again Biden is bluffing with Other Peoples’ Money.

 

 

How Broken is US Election Process? Let us count the ways . . .

Posted on by Ron Clutz

John Solomon writes at Just The News Ballot Bombshells: 20 episodes exposing fraud, illegalities and irregularities in 2020 election.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Illegal rule changes, ballot harvesting, Iranian voter hack are among the many now-confirmed serious irregularities, putting the lie to the “perfect election” narrative.

For more than a year, Democrats and their allies in the corporate media have decried what they call the “Big Lie” that America’s 2020 election was flawed or stolen. But almost weekly now, revelations are emerging that the election was, in fact, marred by illegalities, irregularities and mismanagement like former President Donald Trump has argued, leaving a nation increasingly doubting the reliability of its election system.

A recent poll found that 40% of Americans no longer believe in the legitimacy of the winner of either of the last two presidential elections, a stunning number for a country globally held as the gold standard for constitutional republics built on democracy.

The 2020 election results almost certainly won’t be reversed, no matter how widespread the calls for decertification grow. But the opportunity to take the many failures of the last election seriously to improve Americans’ confidence in voting in the 2022 and 2024 elections looms large, experts told Just the News.

Here are 20 of the most important revelations uncovered by Just the News over the last 15 months of reporting, complete with substantiating evidence and links”

1.A Foreign Intrusion. Federal authorities have confirmed that two Iranian nationals successfully hacked into a state computer election system, stole 100,000 voter registrations and used the data to carry out a cyber-intimidation campaign that targeted GOP members of Congress, Trump campaign officials and Democratic voters in the November 2020 election in one of the largest foreign intrusions in U.S. election history. The defendants “were part of a coordinated conspiracy in which Iranian hackers sought to undermine faith and confidence in the U.S. presidential election,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams declared in an indictment.

2.  Alleged Bribery. The former state Supreme Court justice appointed by the Wisconsin Legislature to investigate the 2020 election concluded that millions of dollars in donations to election administrators in five Democrat-heavy municipalities from the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life violated state anti-bribery laws and corrupted election practices by turning public election authorities into liberal get-out-the-vote activists. “The Zuckerberg-funded CTCL/ Zuckerberg 5 scheme would prove to be an effective way to accomplish the partisan effort to ‘turnout’ their desired voters and it was done with the active support of the very people and the governmental institution (WEC) that were supposed to be guarding the Wisconsin elections administrative process from the partisan activities they facilitated,” Justice Michael Gableman wrote.

3. Illegal ballot harvesting in Wisconsin. Gableman also exposed an extensive vote collection operation, known as ballot harvesting, in nursing homes in which third-party activists illegally collected the ballots of vulnerable residents, some of whom lacked the mental or physical capacity to vote or were forbidden from voting by guardianship agreements. State election regulators “unlawfully directed the municipal clerks not to send out the legally required special voting deputies to nursing homes, resulting in many nursing homes’ registered residents voting at 100% rates and many ineligible residents voting, despite a guardianship order or incapacity,” Gableman wrote in his explosive report.

4.  Ballot harvesting probe in the Peach State. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has announced he has opened a criminal investigation into allegations that liberal activists engaged in illegal ballot harvesting, collecting ballots from voters and delivering them in violation of state law. Raffensperger said he is planning to issue subpoenas to identify a whistleblower who admitted he engaged in the operation, and there could be prosecutions. The True the Vote election integrity group says in a formal state complaint that the man, identified as John Doe, admitted his role and identified nonprofits who funded it at $10 per ballot delivered. The watchdog group also claims it has assembled cell phone location records pinpointing the alleged harvesting by as many as 240 activists.

5.  Bad voter signatures? A review of Maricopa County’s mail-in ballots in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election estimated that more than 200,000 ballots with signatures that did not match voter files were counted without being reviewed, more than eight times the number the county acknowledged.

6.  50,000 Arizona ballots called into question. An extensive audit by Arizona’s Senate officially called into question more than 50,000 ballots cast in the 2020 election, including voters who cast ballots from residences they had left. The tally in question is nearly five times the margin of Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

7.  Illegal ballot drop boxes. A Wisconsin judge has ruled the widespread use of ballot drop boxes in 2020 was unlawful, and the state Supreme Court let that ruling stand. That means drop boxes can’t be used in future elections starting in April. It also means that tens of thousands of ballots in the 2020 election were cast unlawfully.

8.  Foreign voters found on Texas rolls. An audit of Texas voter rolls identified nearly 12,000 noncitizens suspected of illegally registering to vote and nearly 600 cases in which ballots may have been cast in the name of a dead resident or by a voter who may also have voted in another state. Officials are now in the process of removing the foreign voters and deciding whether prosecutions are warranted.

9.  Foreign voters found on Georgia rolls. An audit by Georgia’s Secretary of State has identified more than 2,000 suspected foreigners who tried to register to vote in the state, though none reached the point of casting ballots. Raffensperger says prosecutions may be forthcoming.

10.  Unconstitutional mail-in voting. The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court has concluded the state law that opened the door to no-excuse mail-in voting in 2020 was unconstitutional and that mail-in voting can only be enacted by a constitutional amendment. “A constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting can be placed upon our statute books,” the court ruled. About 2.5 million voted by mail in Pennsylvania in 2020, votes now called into question by the ruling.

11. More noncitizen voters. The Gableman investigation in Wisconsin also found noncitizens had made it onto the state voters rolls in violation of state law. The Wisconsin Election Commission failed “to record non-citizens in the WisVote voter database, thereby permitting non-citizens to vote, even though Wisconsin law requires citizenship to vote — all in violation of the Help America Vote Act,” the investigator wrote.

12.  Ballot chain of custody issues. The Georgia Secretary of State’s office has opened an investigation into the handling of drop box ballots last November in one of the state’s Democratic strongholds following a media report that there were problems with chain of custody documentation in DeKalb County.

13.  Fulton County irregularities. Georgia’s handpicked election monitor for Fulton County, the state’s largest voting district, documented two dozen pages of mismanagement and irregularities during vote counting in Atlanta in November 2020, including double-scanning of ballots, insecure transport of ballots and violations of voter privacy. The revelations prompted the state to take steps to possibly put Fulton County in receivership, empowering state officials to run the elections. Most of Fulton County’s election officials have left their jobs.

14.  Errant vote counting. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp referred the audited November 2020 election results in Fulton County to the State Election Board after multiple reviews found three dozen significant problems with absentee ballot counting, including duplicate tallies, math errors and transposed data. Kemp’s referral calls into question hundreds of ballots in the official count.

15. Dirty voter rolls. Michigan’s official state auditor has found that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson failed to adhere to state election law by properly updating and reconciling Michigan’s qualified voter roll. This oversight, according to the audit, increased the risk of ineligible voters casting ballots.

16. Illegal exemptions from voter ID. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled as many as 200,000 voters were allowed to illegally skip voter ID for absentee ballots by claiming they were indefinitely confined by COVID when there was no such legal authority to do so. Biden beat Trump by about 20,000 votes in the state.

17.  Uneven enforcement of election laws. The Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau identified more than 30 problems with the administration of elections in 2020, including unlawful orders and uneven enforcement of the law and urged lawmakers to make sweeping improvements.

18. More illegal harvesting. In Arizona, a half dozen people have already been indicted on charges of illegal harvesting in a probe by Attorney General Mark Brnovich that shows signs of expanding. It comes after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Democrats’ arguments and concluded Arizona’s ban on harvesting was constitutional.

19.  Voter fraud in Michigan. Michigan charged three women in connection with voter fraud schemes, including efforts to cast ballots on behalf of non-consenting nursing home residents.

20. Still more nursing home fraud. In Wisconsin, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling announced his investigators have secured evidence that eight out of 42 residents at a local nursing home had been recorded as casting absentee ballots that their families said was not possible because the residents didn’t possess the cognitive ability to vote.

By following the linked title to the article, you can read in depth reports on these issues.

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Blame for Inflation: What You Need to Know

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Michael Maharrey writes at Peter Schiff’s blog The Inflation Blame Game explaining how we got here and how the culprits are deflecting responsibility by accusing others. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T Tyler Durden

Now inflation is Russia’s fault. Or is it greedy businesses pushing up prices? Maybe a combination of the two.

It seems that government officials and central bankers are looking everywhere for a place to pin the blame for inflation except the one place they need to look — in the mirror.

I’m already seeing headlines about how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing inflation. CBS broadcast this storyline on the first day of the invasion. As Peter Schiff put it in a recent podcast, Russia is the latest “excuse variant” for inflation.

It is true that the Russian invasion and economic sanctions have caused some prices to spike. Oil was over $130 a barrel over the weekend. Copper hit record highs. The price of wheat surged. But this is not necessarily inflationary. Inflation causes a general rise in prices across the board. In this situation, some prices will rise while others fall. As consumers spend more on food and energy, they will cut spending on other goods and services. Ostensibly, those prices will drop.

Inflation — an increase in the money supply — causes prices to rise more generally. It’s the result of more dollars chasing the same number of (or fewer) goods and services. As Peter explained, the culprit is the central bank.

“”What makes the prices go up is when the central bank responds to rising energy prices or rising food prices by printing more money, which is what they are going to do. Because as consumers have to tighten their belts because food is so expensive, because home heating oil and gasoline are so expensive, and they cut back spending on everything else, that causes a recession. And that results in the Fed printing more money, and that’s what’s inflationary.”

So, while the Russian invasion is certainly causing prices to rise, government-created inflation is still churning under the surface. In effect, we’re experiencing a double-whammy of rising prices.

Russia is a handy scapegoat for inflation, but “greedy businesses” continue to be the favorite target of central bankers and politicians. As I’ve explained, the narrative continues to grow because the average American doesn’t understand inflation or basic corporate accounting. That includes a lot of the people writing about inflation in mainstream and left-leaning corporate media.

And for politicians, businesses serve as the perfect scapegoat. Americans are already primed to hate big businesses.

During Jerome Powell’s testimony on Capitol Hill last week, virtually all of the Democrats in both the House and Senate repeated the “businesses are causing inflation” narrative. They talked about “record profits” and claimed businesses didn’t need to pass on higher costs. They also talked about a lack of competition.

This behavior is typical of politicians. They cause a problem and then clamor for even more government intervention to “fix” the problem they caused. They want to use inflation as an excuse to increase government regulation and intervention into the economy. Peter pointed out the irony in these congressional hearings.

“You have the chairman of the Federal Reserve that’s printing all the money fielding questions from the congressmen who are spending all the money that the Federal Reserve is printing. So, these are the two partners in crime that are 100 percent responsible for inflation, and they spend the entire hearing talking about how bad inflation is, what a horrible problem it is, and trying to point fingers at who might be to blame, without anybody accepting responsibility that inflation is not here by accident and inflation is not here because some businesses got greedy. Inflation is here for one reason and one reason only. The government isn’t spending money that it collects in taxes. It’s spending money that the Federal Reserve prints.”

If Congress really wants to do something about inflation, it needs to cut government spending. It needs to quit borrowing money and issuing debt that the Fed has to monetize. But obviously, they don’t want to do that. It’s easier to blame Russia or some greedy business than to do what needs to be done.

President Biden also blames everybody but himself for inflation. During the State of the Union speech, the president took credit for helping the economy grow through various government spending programs. But he went on to say a lot of the progress is being undone by inflation — as if inflation has nothing to do with the spending policies.

Biden ignores a critical part of the equation.

When the government spends money on any economic stimulus program, there is a cost. It either has to be paid for by direct taxation or by running a deficit. When the government runs a deficit, either future taxpayers foot the bill, or more often, the Federal Reserve monetizes the debt, prints money and creates inflation. As Peter put it, the government will pay for this government program one way or another.

“Either directly, through an honest tax, or indirectly through a dishonest tax called inflation. So, if Biden wants to claim credit for all this government spending, then he has to claim responsibility for all the inflation that was required to finance it. He can’t pretend that he gave taxpayers all this great stuff but then inflation came and stole it away from them. The inflation came from government. Government stole it. What the government gives with one hand, it takes with the other. So, Biden through government spending programs with one hand reached out and gave taxpayers some money, and with the other hand, he picked their back pocket through inflation to pay for it. So, you can’t say, ‘I love all this government spending,’ but then pretend that the inflation that was a consequence of that government spending had absolutely nothing to do with that inflation.”

That’s why Biden needs a scapegoat. That’s why members of Congress need a scapegoat. That’s why Jerome Powell and his minions at the Fed need a scapegoat. All of these officials need a scapegoat because they need to shift blame for the inflation that they created.

Not greedy businesses.

Not coronavirus.

Not Russia.

Them.

Green Energy Puts US Electric Grid in Peril

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Matthew Kandrach writes at Real Clear Energy America’s Emerging Energy Crisis. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The warning signs are everywhere. We are stumbling toward an energy crisis that is likely to be far more severe and long-lasting than the upheavals of the 1970s. And no, this isn’t about Russia or Ukraine. This is about the perilous state of the U.S. electricity grid.

If action isn’t taken soon to address the unraveling reliability of the grid, the United States will face the specter of rolling blackouts, factory shutdowns, loss of jobs and soaring electricity bills. Our organization CASE recently released a policy brief highlighting just how dire the situation is.

Events In recent years show how serious the situation is. According To the Wall Street Journal, outages have gone from fewer than two dozen major disruptions in 2000 to more than 180 in 2020. The catastrophic blackouts that gripped Texas for a week in February of last year should have been eye-opening. Now, warnings from regulators, grid operators and utilities suggest far worse is coming.

There’s no getting around it. The nation’s electricity transmission system is growing increasingly undependable. Aging infrastructure, severe weather, and the rapid pivot away from baseload power to intermittent solar and wind are all contributing. Supply chain problems and local opposition to building new power lines and siting renewable projects are also turning into increasingly tall hurdles. Expectations of increased demand driven by electric vehicles are only compounding the challenge.

The energy transition is happening but the question we must ask is how do we responsibly manage it? It’s becoming apparent that the transition to renewables is vastly more difficult and complicated than some believed. Those who want to shut down every coal and natural gas plant ignore that fossil fuels supply 60% of America’s electricity. There’s growing alarm the America’s haphazard approach to the energy transition is taking apart the existing grid and the reliable generating capacity that long underpinned it far faster than we’re adding reliable alternatives.

Coal plants, in particular, are being pushed aside when it’s becoming painfully clear the optionality, fuel security and reliability they offer the grid is still very much needed. If we continue as we are – ditching the well-operating power plants that hold the grid together during severe heat and biting winter cold –we’re only going to exacerbate this crisis of our own making.

The affordability of our power supply also hangs in the balance. Last year, a 17% surge in coal-fired electricity helped shield consumers from rising natural gas prices. As we continue to disassemble the coal fleet, with another 100 gigawatts of coal capacity expected to close by 2030, we’re robbing the grid of an important price shock absorber for when natural gas prices rise. With global demand for gas rising, U.S. exports soaring and the Russian invasion of Ukraine throwing volatility into global energy markets, dismantling fuel optionality is short-sighted and reckless.

Europe’s decision to race away from coal and close much of its nuclear power capacity before having reliable alternatives in place, has left it at the mercy of Russian natural gas imports and soaring global gas prices. Energy security – now more so than since the energy crises of the 1970s – requires careful attention.

The singular, haphazard focus of climate-driven energy policy requires an abrupt rethink.

There remains an opportunity for an energy policy reset – both at the state and federal levels – to tackle this reliability and affordability crisis head on. First, we must recognize the need for dispatchable fuel diversity and fuel security. That must also include a commitment to increasing capacity reserve margins in electricity markets instead of letting them continue to shrink. As we grapple with the complexities of the energy transition and the challenges posed by integrating renewable power and building transmission infrastructure, we need a reliability and affordability insurance policy. The insurance we can provide is recognizing the value of the generating capacity we already have and the importance of dispatchable fuel diversity.

Responsibly navigating the road ahead means building on the shoulders of our existing baseload capacity, not taking it apart.

 

 

Energy Puritans Enable Enemies of Democracies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (Reuters)

Western media has stirred up a puritanical revulsion against carbon-based energy, resulting in calls for prohibition of fossil fuels.  Leaders in western democracies responded with regulations and constraints punishing companies either producing energy or operating supply infrastructure.  This empowers market dominance by sovereign energy nations, some of whom are autocratic, and one of whom just invaded Ukraine.

Author blasts ‘green delusions’ of Western countries that empowered Putin’s energy advantage in Europe.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

‘As the West fell into a hypnotic trance … worshiping a teenager named Greta, Vladimir Putin made his moves,’ Michael Shellenberger wrote

In a Tuesday Substack post headlined, “The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin,” Shellenberger argued Putin understood economics better than his western counterparts, citing the latter’s incapability of understanding the realities of energy production, and questioned how countries like Germany allowed themselves to become so dependent on an authoritarian country.

“How has Vladimir Putin … managed to launch an unprovoked full-scale assault on Ukraine?” Shellenberger wrote. “There is a deep psychological, political and almost civilizational answer to that question: He wants Ukraine to be part of Russia more than the West wants it to be free.”

“Missing from that explanation, though, is a story about material reality and basic economics—two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe,” he added.

Shellenberger pointed to the differences in energy production and consumption between other European countries and Russia, noting that Europe consumed more energy than it produced, while Russia produced more than it consumed.

“The reason Europe didn’t have a muscular deterrent threat to prevent Russian aggression—and in fact prevented the U.S. from getting allies to do more—is that it needs Putin’s oil and gas,” he wrote.

Shellenberger argued that the focus on “Green ideology” made European countries “incapable of understanding the hard realities of energy production,” and that their moves away from natural gas and nuclear energy gave Putin command over Europe’s energy supply.

“As the West fell into a hypnotic trance about healing its relationship with nature, averting climate apocalypse and worshiping a teenager named Greta, Vladimir Putin made his moves,” he wrote, referencing teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg and noting that Putin expanded nuclear energy and oil production in Russia while western countries obsessed over “carbon footprints.”

Shellenberger specifically used Germany shutting down its nuclear energy production as an example and cited figures showing 47% of the natural gas consumed by the European Union in 2021 being exported from Russia.

“The result has been the worst global energy crisis since 1973, driving prices for electricity and gasoline higher around the world. It is a crisis, fundamentally, of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is entirely manufactured,” he wrote.

“Europeans—led by figures like Greta Thunberg and European Green Party leaders, and supported by Americans like John Kerry—believed that a healthy relationship with the Earth requires making energy scarce,” he added. “In service to green ideology, they made the perfect the enemy of the good—and of Ukraine.”

The controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany was halted following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week, something the Biden administration avoided pressing at the request of Germany despite shutting down construction of the planned Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the U.S. immediately after taking office.

In order to counter Russia’s continued dominance over energy markets, Shellenberger implored Biden to have Germany halt any future shutdowns of nuclear reactors and to have the ones previously shut down turned back on, called on Canada and the U.S. to expand their energy production for increased export to Europe, and argued the U.S. needed to expand the construction of nuclear plants rather than shutting them down.

“Putin’s relentless focus on energy reality has left him in a stronger position than he should ever have been allowed to find himself. It’s not too late for the rest of the West to save the world from tyrannical regimes that have been empowered by our own energy superstitions,” he wrote.

See also The Greta/Davos Collusion

And also, about the miniscule contribution of wind and solar to energize the world today:

Many observations are possible by studying these exhibits. For example, some activists insist that passenger air travel is dangerously warming the planet, and ordinary people should stay home, with flights restricted to essential trips by global elites. A glance at the transportation statistics on slide #2 shows Aviation is only 4% of fossil fuel consumption (12% of 34% FF used for transportation). And aviation includes cargo transport, so passenger travel is a fraction of that.

The bulk of FF transport consumption is Road, meaning cars and trucks, which is why some are demanding electric vehicles be the only means of mobility. Yet a look at slide #6 shows that presently only 10% of electricity comes from Wind, Solar and waste fuels. Furthermore, for all of the investment in wind and solar power, slide #7 shows that so called “green energy”` supplies only 2% of the world’s energy needs.

See World of Energy Infographics

Background  Activists Attack Energy Companies, State-owned Producers Benefit

 

 

 

Ukraine couldn’t save Biden’s State of the Union

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Matt Purple writes at American Spectator Ukraine couldn’t save Biden’s State of the Union.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

For a brief moment, Congress seemed united. Then came everything else

“We oppose authoritarianism!” our pundits all cry, before tuning in to watch the American president thunder like a god in front of a room full of clapping animatronic courtiers.

Yes, it is State of the Union season here in America, our most North Korean of political traditions. And while hating on the annual address has become so commonplace as to be almost trite, it’s still difficult not to seethe at the entire imperial spectacle. Remember when Congressman Joe Wilson dared to interrupt a SOTU by shouting “You lie!” after Barack Obama lied about his health reform plan? Wilson was promptly hauled off to a CIA black site, while cable news mandarins shrieked about the end of decorum, civility, life as we knew it.

Still, the State of the Union has admittedly gotten better in recent years. From Wilson’s blasphemy to Nancy Pelosi tearing up Donald Trump’s speech, the possibility of democracy breaking out at one of these things has improved. And so this year we dared to dream. Would Congressman Paul Gosar lunge anime-style towards the podium? Would a Blazing Saddles-style food fight break out over the child tax credit?

Actually, this State of the Union began by looking like it might be even more unified than all the others put together. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, all came together to stand under a single flag — not ours but Ukraine’s. The beginning of Biden’s speech was less State of the Union than State of the Western World, as he lashed out at Vladimir Putin’s inhuman aggression with the most strident rhetoric any president had applied to a dictator since George W. Bush had a go at Saddam Hussein.

The ghost of 2003 was present and accounted for. “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos,” Biden declared. Elsewhere, he referred to the “battle of democracies and autocracies,” exactly the sort of sweeping binary we became accustomed to under Bush 43. Biden did make clear that he wouldn’t send American forces to fight and die in Ukraine, but his rhetoric was still strikingly hawkish.

And it worked: lawmakers clapped and cheered and waved Ukrainian flags.

Then, just as the House chamber was bursting with bonhomie, just as it seemed like even the stone-faced Supreme Court justices might spring up and start ululating Eastern European war chants, a needle scratched against a record. It was on to Biden’s domestic agenda, and the usual fault lines of American politics cracked back open. The American Rescue Plan Act was praised without ever acknowledging the inflation it fed. More electric car charging stations were promised in spite of the strains they’ll create on the power grid. Tax credits were pledged to help weatherize homes even though Barack Obama was supposed to have gotten that done a decade ago.

Biden’s Democratic Party is a self-perpetuating machine: massive amounts of money are spent on problems that don’t get solved which justifies the spending of massive amounts of more money.

So it went Tuesday evening. And in true imperial fashion, no one was allowed to point this out, argue back. (I’m not counting the funeral-home “opposition response,” which can never be won, only survived. And for what it’s worth, I think Governor Kim Reynolds did survive, painting Biden as a 1970s redux and giving airtime to simmering parent anger over education.)

That’s not to say Biden’s speech was entirely devoid of fresh ideas. His plan to fight inflation by strengthening manufacturing seems like a red herring from the real problem of government spending, but it was still interesting. His Made in America agenda occasionally sounds a bit Trumpy. His promise to fund the police was evidence that Democrats are at least trying to move on from their colic phase of 2020. And we shouldn’t sell short that heartfelt support for the people of Ukraine. If Americans can’t agree on much, they can at least agree on this: a nation should never invade another sovereign nation. Period. Fin. Tie it with a bow.

It’s a fine principle and one we’d come to take for granted. Still, it wasn’t enough to save the rest of the hour-long king’s speech. Biden’s presidency is broken, yes, but so is the format of the ritual he partook in. And given that some members of Congress are probably still standing in the House chamber applauding, I doubt it’s going to be fixed anytime soon.

 

 

Gaslighting About Ukraine 24/7

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The media output currently befits the bard’s description  “full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.”  Resonating with me is an article by Terry Paulding at American Thinker It’s Ukraine gaslighting time!  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

They’re all scrambling, visibly uncomfortable, all the pundits coming on all the talk shows on cable news, contradicting one another and stepping on one another’s narrative. The hosts have become so used to having a storyline to parrot that they can’t stand it. They’re practically begging to be told the “right” tack to take! But Ukraine/Russia isn’t following a path that anybody predicted.

Biden and his administration are no help at all, given he’s the one who practically invited Russia to come on in, then got upset about it. It’s not clear whether we’re heading into WW3, watching a mild skirmish that will end soon, whether Putin has lost his marbles or is being crafty and smart, or helping “free” some break-away sections of the country. It’s not clear whether Zelensky is an installed puppet (apparently by the WEF) or the brave patriot he’s currently appearing to be, ready to stand and fight for his country.

The various retired U.S. military generals and other “experts” making the talk show rounds aren’t helping. One lays out the scenario that restricting Russia from the SWIFT banking system will break Putin. Another demands we set up a no-fly zone. Yet another says it’s all historical — that the whole thing started before the year 1000, and we just don’t understand. Another says since Ukraine was in bed with Hitler in WW2, it’s still a hotbed of Nazi sentiment, and Putin is just weeding that out at long last.

We’re told that some of the border provinces are “more Russian than Ukrainian.” We see that the populace is arming itself, picking up guns from local police stations, and there may be a guerrilla war to come. We watch in horror as a tank tramples a car, then we learn — maybe — that it was not a deliberate action. We are also told that the Russian soldiers really don’t want to kill civilians, then we see the bombed-out apartment building. We learn that Russia captured an airfield…but maybe the Ukrainians took it back.

Then someone mentions that when asked to give up their nukes years ago, it’s possible Ukraine hid some at Chernobyl. After all, what better place to keep them? Then we learn that Russia took over that site, and now there is a massive upsurge in detected radiation from it. Um…about that — what’s going on?

Image: Ukraine street scene. YouTube screen grab.

We don’t know what it all means, but it makes us all profoundly uncomfortable. Do we have sympathy for the underdog Ukrainians, when we also know they have a pretty crooked society (think Hunter Biden and Burisma)? Or do we have a little sympathy for Putin, who, after all, has been a relatively mild autocrat in Russia for many years? Or do we heed the rumors that he’s losing it mentally as Biden is?

Then there’s Biden, who has exhibited so profound a lack of leadership that he even bragged intelligence to the Chinese — who turned around and shared it with Putin. Biden has clearly got no idea of a path forward. First, he agreed to Nord Stream, then he did an about-face. He stripped us of the ability to take care of our own energy needs and has been buying from Russia. Therefore, he’s monetarily supporting Russia in its foray against Ukraine, all the while impoverishing the U.S. — not to mention he appears to want to defend Ukraine’s borders but couldn’t care less about our own.

Am I confused? Heck, yeah. Who wouldn’t be? I long for the clarity of someone like Ric Grenell and the strength and knowledge (yes, knowledge) of how to proceed that I’d get from Donald Trump (we wouldn’t be watching war, of course, if he was in charge).

I long for a country that gets its head out of its nether regions, puts the current administration on administrative leave (without pay), and brings back some sanity. I know that will never happen, sadly.

I can read a hundred different stories online. Can, if I want, attend a passionate rally of Ukrainian-Americans in San Francisco, and yell and scream my protest. I know I can go to RT News and get its propaganda. Really, what’s most interesting there is that the comments aren’t censored at all, unlike here in the repressive USA. Not that there’s any unanimity of opinion there, either, but it does make one think.

In the meantime, the story has conveniently supplanted obsessing over COVID. Too bad it won’t supplant inflation, albeit the escalating price at the gas pump will now be conveniently blamed on this war. That’s one storyline, at least, that the leftist cable stations can all agree to push on us as if it were true.

The Crowded Road to Kyiv

Land mines don’t seem to be a factor on the ground in Ukraine, but the media landscape is full of them, planted by legacy broadcasters. Victor Davis Hanson puts up some warning signs in his American Greatness article The Crowded Road to Kyiv  Some examples in italics with my bolds.

One of the oddest commentaries about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the boilerplate reaction that “borders can’t change in modern Europe” or “this does not happen in the 21st century.”

But why in the world should the 21st century be exempt from the pathologies of the past 20 centuries? Are we smarter than the Romans? More innovative than the Florentines? Do we have more savvy leaders than Lincoln or Churchill? Are they more mellifluous than Demosthenes? Does anyone now remember that some 130,000 were slaughtered just 30 years ago in the former Yugoslavia, as NATO planes bombed Belgrade and nuclear America and Russia almost squared off?

Has globalization, the “rules-based order,” the Davos reset elite, the “international community” so improved the very way humans think that they have rendered obsolete the now ossified ancient idea of deterrence?
Will the Kardashians and Beyoncé tweet our pathway to global peace?

So, to the degree Putin believes in a cost-to-benefit analysis that any envisioned invasion will prove profitable, he will invade anywhere he feels the odds favor his agenda. And when he does not—if America or NATO offers a deterrent, if oil is plentiful and cheap, and if Western leaders are sober and strong rather than loud and weak—he will not so gamble. It’s really that simple. Feed Putin a hand, and he will gobble a torso.

Still, the Russians may, we hope, have a hard time of it in Ukraine—if for no other reason than the country is larger than Iraq in both size and population. It has lots of supply conduits across the borders with four NATO countries that can finally begin pouring in weaponry. An invader that cannot stop resupply from third-party neighbors can rarely subdue its target.

So if in a week Putin cannot shock and awe the elite or decapitate the government, he will have a hard time subduing the population. Time is not on his side. Sanctions are worthless in the short term but eventually they can bite.

A couple of questions for Joe Biden: Before he took office, was the United States begging Russia to sell it more oil? After he took office, why was it?

Why did Biden blow-up energy independence? Could not tomorrow Biden reverse course, greenlight the Keystone pipeline, reverse his mindless opposition to the EastMed pipeline that would help allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel to help other allies in southern Europe, and throw open new federal leasing to supply exports of liquid natural gas to Europe?

What is moral, and what amoral: alienating Bernie Sanders and the squad or keeping our allies and ourselves safe from foreign attack? What is so ethical about following the green advice of billionaires like global jet-setter John Kerry at the expense of the middling classes who cannot afford to drive their cars or warm their living rooms?

All this and more have eroded the global fear of the U.S. military. We have all but destroyed American trust in our own armed forces (only 45 percent of the Americans poll great confidence in the military). The woke threat is in addition to spiraling pensions and social justice overhead that make the defense budget lean on actual defense readiness. Enemies did not erode our military’s once feared deterrence, our own top military and civilian leadership did. Time is short, enemies numerous. Can we find any brave soul who will restore the military?

But we also are mired in $30 trillion in debt. We print $2 trillion a year in mockery of inflation. Our major cities are crime-ridden and the streets medieval with the homeless and sidewalk sewers. Race relations are the worst in memory.

We have no southern border. Nearly 50 million residents were not born in our country—and this challenge at a time when we have given up on assimilation and integration. The woke virus has warped racial and ethnic relations and is destroying the idea of meritocracy. We are in the hold of a Jacobin madness, in a top-down elite race to perdition. To praise America’s past is a thought crime. The ignorant, who have no idea of the date when the Civil War began, nonetheless lecture to the nodding that 1619 not 1776 was America’s real foundational date.

So what is NATO? In truth, 25 or so of the 30 nation members are defenseless. They rely on the United States to protect them from enemies in their own backyard. Only the NATO nuclear monopolies of Britain and France offer a deterrent umbrella over both NATO and the EU—on the quiet assurance that a far bigger nuclear American umbrella covers all of them.

We should simply ask those who will meet their promised military commitments to stay, and the others to go quietly in peace and follow the Swiss model. Why are there any U.S. combat troops in Germany? Are they there to protect the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russian attack? To reward Germany for spending less than two percent on defense?

For five years Americans were obsessed not just with Putin, but the left-wing myth that Russians were under all our beds—the tattooed, gap-toothed cruddy villains of Hollywood movies, the supposed Satanic colluders of the Steele dossier, the nefarious bankers who stealthily communicated at night with the White House. So we voluntarily gave up the old Russian triangulation card when we once played dictatorial China off against dictatorial Russia. The Kissingerian principle dictated that neither of the two should ever become closer to one another than either is to us. We gave all that up and instead hung on every word for two years of Bob Mueller, James Comey, and the lunatics at CNN.

Meanwhile, China birthed, and hid the origins of, a virus that destroyed the U.S. economy and undermined our entire culture. Thousands of Chinese are here mostly to aid in expropriating U.S. technical expertise. Add in the Uighurs and the now vanquished Tibet, and China outdoes even Putin in its human rights atrocities. If Ukraine falls, Taiwan will be the third nation that the West “lost” during the Biden Administration.

Obama/Biden Deadly Ukraine Adventures

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at left, meets with U.S. President Joe Biden in the Oval Office on Sept. 1, 2021DOUG MILLS-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Presently Ukraine reality is lost in the fog of war.   Nothing we read or hear can be trusted, especially since the US media, in particular, scrambles to cover the derrieres of several VIPs.  The best analysis I’ve seen comes from Lee Smith writing at the Tablet Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble.  Excerpts in italic with my bolds.

By tying itself to a reckless and dangerous America, the Ukrainians made a blunder that client states will study for years to come

Russian President Vladimir Putin chose this war, Joe Biden said in his Thursday afternoon speech to America regarding the conflict in Ukraine. That is true, but U.S. elites also had something to do with Putin’s ugly and destructive choice—a role that Democrats and Republicans are eager to paper over with noble-sounding rhetoric about the bravery of Ukraine’s badly outgunned military.

Yes, the Ukrainian soldiers standing up to Putin are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a weapon, first against Russia and then against each other, with little consideration for the Ukrainian people who are now paying the price for America’s folly.

Yes, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But the larger answer is that he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening. That’s because for nearly two decades, the U.S. national security establishment under both Democratic and Republican administrations has used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia, and specifically to target Putin.

That Ukraine has allowed itself to be used as a pawn against a powerful neighbor is in part the fault of Kyiv’s reckless and corrupt political class. But Ukraine is not a superpower that owes allies and client-states judicious leadership—that’s the role of the United States. And in that role, the United States has failed Ukraine. More broadly, the use of Ukraine as a goad against enemies domestic and foreign has recklessly damaged the failing yet necessary European security architecture that America spent 75 years building and maintaining.

Ukraine is situated between two greater powers, Russia and the European Union. That makes Ukraine a buffer state. Geopolitical logic dictates that buffer states cultivate and maintain cordial relations with the greater powers that surround them, unless they want to be swallowed up by one of those powers. That’s because siding with one great power against another often leads to catastrophe.

So how did Israel transcend buffer-state status? Because it acquired what is reportedly a large nuclear arsenal with air, land, and sea delivery capabilities—the vaunted nuclear triad—which render it immune to an enemy’s first strike, and ensures, for the time being anyway, that Israel is no longer a stomping ground for empires. Conversely, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for U.S. security guarantees in the event its neighbors, Russia in particular, turned hostile.

Why can’t the American security establishment shoulder responsibility for its role in the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine? Because to discuss American responsibility openly would mean exposing the national security establishment’s role in two separate, destructive coups: the first, in 2014, targeting the government of Ukraine, and the second, starting two years later, the government of the United States.

Coup #1 Against Ukraine Itself

What kind of strategy dictates that a state hand over its security vis-a-vis local actors to a country half the world away? No strategy at all. Ukraine was not able to transcend its natural geography as a buffer state—and worse, a buffer state that failed to take its own existence seriously, which meant that it would continue to make disastrously bad bets. In 2013, the European Union offered Kyiv a trade deal, which many misunderstood as a likely prelude to EU membership. Young Ukrainians very much want to join the EU, because they want access to Europe so they can flee Ukraine, which remains one of the poorest countries on the continent.

When Yanukovych duly reneged on the EU deal, the Obama administration helped organize street demonstrations for what became history’s most tech-savvy and PR-driven regime change operation, marketed to the global public variously as Maidan, EuroMaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, etc. In February 2014, the protests forced Yanukovych into exile in Moscow. Consequently, Nuland and other Obama administration officials worked to assemble a new Ukrainian government friendly to the United States and therefore hostile to Russia.

In late February, the Russians responded to the American soft coup in Ukraine by invading Crimea and eventually annexing it and creating chaos in Eastern Ukraine. The Obama administration declined to arm the Ukrainian government. It was right to avoid conflict with Moscow, though by leaving Kyiv defenseless, it showed that the White House had never fully gamed out all the possible scenarios that might ensue from setting a client state on course for conflict with a great power. Instead, Obama and the Europeans highlighted their deadly miscalculation by imposing sanctions on Moscow for taking advantage of the conditions that Obama and the Europeans had created.

The White House seems to have taken a perverse pride in the death and destruction it helped incite in Eastern Europe. In April 2014, CIA Director John Brennan visited Kyiv, appearing to confirm the agency’s role in the coup. Shortly after came Vice President Biden, who took his own victory lap and counseled the Ukrainians to root out corruption. Naturally, a prominent Ukrainian energy company called Burisma, which was then under investigation for corruption, hired Biden’s son Hunter for protection.

By tying itself to an American administration that had shown itself to be reckless and dangerous, the Ukrainians made a geopolitical blunder that statesmen will study for years to come: A buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept that it was willing to support. Russia then lopped off half of the Donbas region on its border and subjected Ukraine to a grinding, eight-year-long war, intended in large part to underline Russian capacity and Ukrainian and American impotence.

Coup #2 Against America

Ukraine then made a bad situation even worse. When the same people who had left them prey to Putin asked them to take sides in an American domestic political conflict, the Ukrainians enthusiastically signed on—instead of running hard in the opposite direction.

In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign came calling on Ukrainian officials and activists to lend some Slavic authenticity to its Russia collusion narrative targeting Donald Trump. Indeed, Russiagate’s central storyline was about Ukraine. Yes, Trump had supposedly been compromised by a sex tape filmed in Moscow, but Putin’s ostensible reason for helping Trump win the presidency was to get him to drop Ukraine-related sanctions. Here was another chance for Ukraine to stick it to Putin, and gain favor with what it imagined would be the winning party in the American election.

With the CIA’s Brennan and a host of senior FBI and DOJ officials pushing Russiagate into the press—and running an illegal espionage campaign against the Trump team—Ukrainian political figures gladly joined in. Key participants included Kyiv’s ambassador to Washington, who wrote a Trump-Russia piece for the U.S. press, and a member of the Ukrainian parliament who allegedly contributed to the dossier. The collusion narrative was also augmented by Ukrainian American operatives, like Alexandra Chalupa, who was tied into the Democratic Party’s NGO complex. The idea that this game might have consequences for Ukraine’s relations with its more powerful neighbor doesn’t seem to have entered the heads of either the feckless Ukrainians or the American political operatives who cynically used them.

And that was only the beginning. Just as Russiagate seemed to be coming to a close in July 2019, U.S. national security officials injected yet another Ukraine-related narrative into the public sphere to target the American president. This one appears to have been initiated by Ukrainian American White House official Alexander Vindman and his colleague Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst who had served as Vice President Biden’s point man on Ukraine during the Obama administration. When Vindman told Ciaramella about a phone call in which Trump had asked the Ukrainian president for information regarding allegations about the Biden family’s corrupt activities in Kyiv, they called on help from U.S. intelligence services, the State Department, the Pentagon, Democratic Party officials, and the press. Quick, scramble Team Ukraine—Trump is asking questions!

In order to cover up for what the Bidens and perhaps other senior Obama officials had done in Ukraine, a Democratic Congress impeached Trump for trying to figure out what American policymakers had been doing in Ukraine over the past decade. As for the Ukrainians, they again put themselves in the middle of it, when they should have stayed home.

The end result was that the Ukrainians had helped weaken an American president who, unlike Obama, gave them arms to defend themselves against the Russians. More seriously, they reinforced Putin’s view that, especially in partnership with the Democrats, Ukraine did not understand its true place in the world as a buffer state—and would continue to allow themselves to be used as an instrument by policymakers whose combination of narcissism and fecklessness made them particularly prone to dangerous miscalculations.

The 2020 election victory of Joe Biden, a man whose family had been paid by the Ukrainians to protect them, can have done little to quiet Putin’s sense that Ukraine needed to be put in its place before it was used yet again as a weapon against him.

From the perspective of the U.S. national security establishment, Biden’s victory over Trump signaled that its actions in Ukraine would stay hidden. So long as the media continued to bark that the 45th president of the United States is Putin’s stooge, no one would be held accountable for anything. Except, as it turns out, D.C. political operatives aren’t the only people who can make history. Putin can, too. And the people of Ukraine will come out much the worse for both of their efforts.