Our Friday News Analysis | What the World Reads Now!

Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press

By David Brooks, Opinion Columnist
New York Times
2 August 2023

Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.

What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?

We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”

In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.

I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession; we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of college students graduate from the super-elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”
Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”

Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.

Credit...Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times

Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.

After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”

Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.

What is the Side of the Story that is Not Yet Decisive? Edited by Abraham A. van Kempen.

It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face
and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own.

A LONG-SHOT CANDIDATE’S DEFENSE OF TRUMP COULD UNDERMINE THE RULE OF LAW

Vivek Ramaswamy is the lone Republican rival of Donald Trump to wholeheartedly claim the federal indictment is a Democratic attempt to jail the political opposition.

On Thursday, Vivek Ramaswamy, in his campaign bus after a meet and greet in Bettendorf, Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, has gone much further than his Republican rivals in questioning the Justice Department. Credit: Jordan Gale for The New York Times

By Jonathan Weisman
Reporting from Bettendorf and Davenport, Iowa.
Annotated
New York Times
17 June 2023

               “Although it would be easier for someone like me to win this primary or win this election if certain people like Donald Trump were not in the race, that’s not how I want to win,” the biotech millionaire told the Scott County Republican faithful who packed the room on the outskirts of this Mississippi River city.

               “That’s not how we do things in America,” he continued.

               “We are not a country where the party in power should be able to use police force to indict its political opponents.

               And I stand not on the politics but on principle.”

The indictment of Mr. Trump on charges that he mishandled some of the nation’s most sensitive military and nuclear secrets, then flagrantly obstructed law enforcement’s efforts to retrieve them, has put Republican political leaders at a moment of choosing between their oft-stated allegiance to law and order and their sensitivities to the passions of their voters.

“Although it would be easier for someone like me to win this primary or win this election if certain people like Donald Trump were not in the race, that’s not how I want to win,” Mr. Ramaswamy said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. Credit: Jordan Gale for The New York Times

Mr. Ramaswamy has said that while Mr. Trump may have shown some errors of judgment, the Biden administration has dangerously abused its power to block the comeback of a political rival.

In Davenport, he denounced what he called the “politicized persecution through the prosecution” of the enemies of the Biden administration. He promised to pardon Mr. Biden’s victims en masse, whether they be “peaceful protesters” incarcerated for the attack on the Capitol or Mr. Trump.

In an interview on his well-appointed campaign bus, the candidate was circumspect. He agreed that his call for every candidate to pre-emptively promise a pardon to Mr. Trump could breed lawlessness. However, he concluded that his offer was defensible because it was narrowly tailored to only the charges laid out in the special counsel’s indictment. The deal would be off if other offenses, such as the transmission of national security secrets to foreign powers, emerged in a trial.

He also said he wanted to make “sure that I’m not contributing to a problem that I worry deeply about,” the erosion of the rule of law.

“The thought crosses my mind, but I think the facts are plain,” he said: President Biden has indicted the front-running challenger of the opposing party to thwart his rise.

Mr. Ramaswamy flew to Miami on the morning of Mr. Trump’s arraignment to announce before the television crews assembled at the federal courthouse that he had submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for all communications between the White House and the Justice Department’s leadership and between Justice Department leadership and Mr. Smith.

Mr. Ramaswamy does have a law degree from Yale, though he made his wealth not in law but in finance and biotechnology. Nonetheless, he speaks with absolute certainty when he rails against the validity of the federal grand jury’s indictment, which he said “reeks of politicization.” He said the Presidential Records Act, not the Espionage Act, is the governing legal authority over former presidents, and the records act gives broad latitude to former presidents to retain documents from their years in the White House.

That reasoning has been dismissed by more experienced Republican legal minds, such as Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, and the retired appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig. Judge Luttig wrote on Twitter on the day of Mr. Trump’s arraignment, “There is not an Attorney General of either party who would not have brought today’s charges against the former president.”

Asked about those judgments, Mr. Ramaswamy said he would have to examine the words of people like Mr. Barr and Mr. Luttig more closely. But he offered another defense of his attacks on the legal system: Republican voters already believe them.

               “To recognize a reality that other leaders are reluctant to recognize is not trust-enhancing for our institutions,” he said.

Though he may be following the passions of the voters, not leading them, Mr. Ramaswamy insisted that his stand was principled, not political.

               “I will be deeply disappointed if Donald Trump cannot run because of these politicized charges against him,” he said.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s denunciation of the indictment is only the latest stand in a campaign predicated on his belief that the former president’s “America First” agenda does not belong to Mr. Trump but to the American people — and that he has the intelligence and guts to take it much farther than Mr. Trump ever could.

If Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and Mr. Trump’s closest competitor, is “Trumpism without Trump,” Mr. Ramaswamy puts himself forward as Trumpism squared. If Mr. Trump drops out, Mr. Ramaswamy intends to be the alternative.

Read the full article by Jonathan Weisman: A Long-Shot Candidate’s Defense of Trump Could Undermine the Rule Of Law.

Jonathan Weisman is a Chicago-based political correspondent, veteran journalist, and author of the novel “No. 4 Imperial Lane” and the nonfiction book “(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.” His career in journalism stretches back 30 years. More about Jonathan Weisman

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Editor’s Update | Vivek Ramaswamy, who has gained ground in recent polls but remains well behind Trump and DeSantis, called the indictment “un-American” and said he would pardon Trump if elected.

He sought to absolve Mr. Trump of any responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and reiterated his previous promise that, if elected, he would pardon Mr. Trump.

               “The corrupt federal police just won’t stop until they’ve achieved their mission: eliminate Trump,” and added,

              “The fundamental cause was citizens’ systematic and pervasive censorship in the year leading up to it.

               If you tell people they can’t speak, that’s when they scream. If you tell them not to shout, they tear things apart,” Ramaswamy said.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

2 August 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

There have been more developments today surrounding yesterday’s indictment of former president Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding as he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in office over the wishes of the American people.

Observers today called out the part of the indictment that describes how Trump and Co-Conspirator 4, who appears to be Jeffrey Clark, the man Trump wanted to make attorney general, intended to use the military to quell any protests against Trump’s overturning of the election results. When warned that staying in power would lead to “riots in every major city in the United States,” Co-Conspirator 4 replied, “Well…that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

The Insurrection Act of 1807 permits the president to use the military to enforce domestic laws, invoking martial law. Trump’s allies urged him to do just that to stay in power.

Read Heather Cox Richardson’s 2 August letter in its entirety here.

US SHOULD WORK FOR 'REGIME CHANGE' IN RUSSIA – JOHN BOLTON

A coup in Moscow is the only way for Washington to achieve its goals in Europe, the former national security adviser says

5 October 2022
HomeWorld News

Former US National Security Adviser John Bolton. © JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP

On Wednesday, former White House national security adviser John Bolton insisted that only "regime change" in Moscow can achieve long-term US objectives in Europe. He proposed funding Russian "dissidents" who could join mid-level officers to overthrow President Vladimir Putin in a coup.

               "There is no long-term prospect for peace and security in Europe without regime change in Russia," Bolton argued in an article titled "Putin Must Go," published by the online journal 1945.

               Change "must involve far more than simply replacing Putin," according to Bolton.

               "The whole regime must go."

Bolton opened the article by quoting President Joe Biden, who said in March, "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power." Biden's aides had scrambled to walk that back, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken arguing that "we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia – or anywhere else, for that matter."

However, The next day, Biden insisted he wasn't backpedaling and that his remarks were not "articulating a policy change" but "expressing moral outrage… and I make no apologies for it."

While serving as President Donald Trump's national security adviser, Bolton championed regime-change policies for Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran – and derailed Trump's diplomacy with North Korea, after which he was dismissed in September 2019. Yet the official US position on Havana, Caracas, and Tehran has not changed since Biden took office.

The Kremlin reacted to Biden's remarks by calling him a "victim of many delusions." Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the question of who should be in power in Russia is not up to any US citizen but for Russians to decide.

               "Carefully assisting Russian dissidents to pursue regime change might just be the answer," Bolton argued, in a twist to Peskov's logic.

               "The key is for Russians themselves to exacerbate divisions among those with absolute authority, the siloviki...

               Once regime coherence and solidarity shatter, change is possible."

Bolton claimed that "Russians are already discussing it, quietly, for obvious reasons" and brushed off concerns that Russia is a nuclear power, saying "that is no more an argument against seeking regime change than against assisting Ukrainian self-defense."

He also accused Moscow of subverting the US government "for many decades" and blowing up its Nord Stream pipeline.

"Washington's obvious strategic objective is having Russia aligned with the West, a fit candidate for NATO, as we hoped after the Soviet Union's breakup," Bolton argued. The US goal "of a peaceful and secure Europe… remains central to our national interests. This is no time to be shy," he concluded.

An outspoken neoconservative who believes in American unilateralism, Bolton held government positions under Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

The Biden administration claims that Iran plotted to have John Bolton assassinated.

US SENATOR REPEATS CALL TO ASSASSINATE PUTIN

Republican hawk stands by his scandalous call for the Russian president to be ‘taken out’ by any means necessary

HomeWorld News
16 March 2022

© AP / Jose Luis Magana

US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) is undeterred by the backlash over his suggestion earlier this month that someone should assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’s ramping up his violent political rhetoric amid the Ukraine crisis.

               “I hope he will be taken out, one way or the other,” Graham told reporters on Wednesday in Washington.

               “I don’t care how they take him out. I don’t care if we send him to The Hague and try him. I just want him to go.”

Graham confirmed that he sees murdering Putin as a desirable option for removing the Russian president, just as he implied in a 3 March Twitter post in which he asked, “Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?”

At the time, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced the “hysterical stirring-up” of anti-Russian sentiment in the US, calling it a “Russophobic meltdown.”

On Wednesday, the notoriously hawkish senator confirmed that he was calling for Putin to be assassinated.

“It’s time for him to go,” Graham said of Putin. “He’s a war criminal. I wish somebody had taken Hitler out in the ’30s. So yes, Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate leader. He is a war criminal.”

Russian people are “going to have zero future” if they continue to follow Putin, Graham argued, adding that if the US continues efforts to help Ukraine defend itself while imposing sanctions to “strangle the Russian economy,” forces within Russia will rise to end the crisis.

               “I think the world is better off without Putin – the sooner, the better, and I don’t care how we do it.”

Graham’s comments came amid escalating anti-Putin rhetoric in Washington. President Joe Biden called Putin a “war criminal” for the first time on Wednesday, the day after the Senate backed a resolution labeling the Russian president that way.

Moscow sent troops into Ukraine on 24 February, claiming that Russia must demilitarize and “denazify” the government in Kyiv after it refused to resolve the Donbas conflict peacefully and sought nuclear weapons and NATO membership. Ukraine has blasted the move as an “unprovoked” attack and insisted it had no intention of reclaiming the Donbas region by force.

Moscow has repeatedly denied accusations of indiscriminate attacks on Ukrainian cities, saying Russian forces only strike military targets. The Kremlin rebuked Biden for calling Putin a war criminal, saying that such comments from the American head of state are “unacceptable and unforgivable.”

RUSSIA REACTS TO US SENATOR’S PUTIN ASSASSINATION PLEA

Senator Lindsey Graham’s call for a plot to kill the Russian president is “unacceptable and outrageous,” the Russian ambassador to the US said.

HomeWorld News
4 March 2022

The Death of Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate - painting by Vincenzo Camuccini (1771-1844) Napoli, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte. © Getty Images / Leemage

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham pleaded on Thursday for “somebody in Russia” to “step up to the plate” and assassinate President Vladimir Putin, who would thus do the country and the world “a great service.” The Russian ambassador to Washington has rebuked the remarks, calling them “unacceptable and outrageous.”

The South Carolina senator advocated assassinating Putin during an appearance on Fox News and cited historical examples of plots to kill famous political leaders, including Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler.

               “Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” Graham inquired.

               “The only way this … ends, my friend, is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”

Commenting on the remarks, Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov called them “unacceptable and outrageous.”He said it showed that “Russophobia and hatred in the United States towards Russia” had gone off-scale and asserted that Graham was de facto advocating an act of terrorism to further Washington’s political goals.

The Russian diplomat added that Moscow was fearful for the future of the American nation, considering that people like the senator were at its helm.

Attempts to kill foreign leaders are not unheard of in US foreign policy. Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro was arguably the most famous example. He was targeted by multiple plots hatched by the CIA, as revealed by the Church Committee in the 1970s.

A more recent example was Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. NATO airstrikes personally targeted him during the bloc’s 2011 air campaign to destroy the country’s military and secure a victory for anti-government forces. The rebels ultimately captured him after an airstrike hit his fleeing motorcade, and he was summarily executed.

UNPLEASANT ANNOUNCEMENT

A "Russian Dissent" contributor is arrested

BY Matt Taibbi
Racket News
2 August 2023

Roughly a week ago, we here at Racket got bad news from our partners at the Substack site "Russian Dissent."

Boris Kagarlitsky, a soft-spoken academic and writer I met in the nineties who is a primary contributor to the "Dissent" site, has been arrested by the FSB. I called Russia today, and an initial report in the Moscow Times is accurate: Boris has been removed to a facility in Syktyvkar, in the republic of Komi, 1300 kilometers from his home in Moscow. The offense is supposedly "justifying terrorism," based on a short, unremarkable article he wrote on Telegram last October.

Boris has supporters in Moscow and a lawyer. We're trying to arrange additional aid and will have more information soon.

Our world grows more ridiculous by the hour.

Read more: Unpleasant Announcement

UKRAINE’S FRONT LINE IS “HORROR, GENOCIDE, SLAUGHTER,” SAYS IRISH “RAMBO,” WHO IS LEAVING AFTER 17 MONTHS

By Richard Abelson
The Gateway Pundit
17 July 2023

Click here to watch the video (5 minutes, 13 seconds)

Byrne and a fellow volunteer had decided to leave Ukraine after experiencing “the final straw” that nearly got him killed: an encounter with a Russian tank.

“We were told there was a Russian trench line, and our job is to go into the trenches and clear them out and hold them until the auxiliary units come, and then we go back.” Byrne said his unit, consisting of 40 Ukrainians, Americans, and Britons, was taken to an area near the front or ‘Zero Line’ with no air cover or drones. A pair of Ukrainian tanks withdrew, leaving them with no support.

When they saw another tank approaching, they assumed it was friendly – but it was a Russian tank, which opened fire on their position. “Those who survived took cover in the woods,” Sparks reports. The dramatic footage recorded of the Irishman’s body camera documents the incident.

The volunteers were rescued by a Ukranian Humvee pick-up under fire as the enemy tank began to chase them. “Now we have the tank coming out, starting to chase us. And that’s terrifying when you see a big T-72 coming for you, and you’re in a Humvee pick-up. Yeah, it’s like a hot knife through butter. You’re finished. So, again, all of us are screaming, drive the Humvee, drive the Humvee. I was going mental.”

Byrne saw a Russian shell sail over their heads. “We are not supposed to be alive. I mean, we were closer than close to death. It was closer than close. It was f***** up.”

Sparks spoke to Byrne at a shelter for international volunteers run by New Zealander Pastor Owen Panoma, who called the protection “a source of some sort of support, you know, to sit there, where are you from? You got kids? You know, basically to take their mind off the war.”

Many of the volunteers are haunted by what they have been through, Panoma says: “They sleep talk. They scream. At night-time, you come out to go to the toilet, ‘You guys alright?’ and the guys wake up. You know, they don’t realize what they’re doing. They may not be aware of what they’re doing because it’s quiet here. Out there, it’s not.”

SCOTT RITTER 2-MINUTE TOPIC: WAR OF ATTRITION FAVORS RUSSIA

Click here to watch War of Attrition Favors Russia (3 minutes, 19 seconds)

               “Thank you, Major Scott Ritter & Co. for all you do, and have done, in the Patriotic Service of our great nation! As insightful as ever. Thanks again.”

               “Thank you, Maj. Scott Ritter. It's hard to find genuine reporting on the realities of this wasteful war!”

               “One can feel somewhat sorry for Ukrainians forced against their will to fight.”

               “My greatest heartache is for any Russian soldiers that get killed by an unjust conflict Russia had no choice but to fight.”

               “Thank you for all you do for peace!”

               “Thank you, Scott for exposing a one-sided [EU-US/NATO] biased view. I now understand how this war works.”

               “You are a very smart man.”

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EDITORIAL | Our world grows more ridiculous by the hour? I’ve seen it crazier. It’s bad but not that bad. There isn’t a nuclear crater in anybody’s backyard yet, other than once in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own.

Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again,
playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part.

Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face,
and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.”

Eugene Peterson
The Message

So, what’s in store for all of us on Planet Earth?

1. Let’s live each day without the fear of a nuclear holocaust.
2. We must reconcile the racial hatred among the ‘White’ Ukrainians (descendants of Aryan and Viking stock) who treat the ‘Black’ Ukrainians (descendants of Slavic Russians) as trash.
3. Ukraine must heal itself from ultra-radical nationalism.
4. We must honor, respect, and dignify the referendum in the Donbas, affirming that 80 percent of its population wants to be an integral part of Mother Russia.
5. We must encourage multilateral trade and structural integrity between the Russian Federation, the European Union, and the rest of the world, enriching the sovereign nation of Ukraine as the primary conduit between East and West.
6. The EU-US/NATO Axis should cease hindering Russian-Ukrainian cooperation.
7. The regime in Kyiv must change according to the will of the 80 percent of Ukrainians who want an end to Kyiv’s madness.
8. Hopefully, the Ukrainians won’t hang Zelensky and his wife the way Italians hanged Mussolini and his mistress.

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Our Wednesday News Analysis | 'Judea vs ‘Fantasy Israel: Ilan Pappe on the Collapse of Israeli Pillars and Opportunities for Palestine,' 2 August 2023.

The Evangelical Pope| 'Building A New World,' 31 July 2023.

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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of the Building the Bridge Foundation, The Hague.