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Thursday, February 27, 2025
The Heartland Journal Interviews Justin Owens, President CEO Beacon Center of Tennessee
Rod's Comment: The Beacon Center is an organization I support, and I am proud of the work they do in Tennessee. Watch this video to learn what they have accomplished and what issues they are working on now.
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How the Elite rigged Society (and why it’s falling apart) | David Brooks
by Rod Williams, Feb 27, 2025- This is good. In this short video David Brooks speaking before the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship explains what went wrong with society. He says the elites, and he in a self-deprecating humorous way explains that he is a member of the elites, have privatized morality and destroyed the social moral order.
He says the elites also gave us "populist" like Donald Trump and J. D. Vance and Elon Musk. He explains that Trump and his team are not conservative. Conservatives, he says, believe in gradual change, in constitutional governance, and norms. Brooks speaks of the moral and cultural crisis facing America and the importance of embracing humanism in these dark times.
David Brooks is a long-time conservative spokesman, bestselling author, columnist for The New York Times, and a contributor to The Atlantic. He is also a commentator on The PBS Newshour.
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Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Monday, February 24, 2025
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Ukraine had the Audacity to Defend itself when Invaded.
by The Editors, National Review, February 20, 2025- Predictably enough, the Ukrainian government has objected to its exclusion from the peace talks Trump administration officials held with their Russian counterparts this week in Riyadh and, for its trouble, is getting slammed by what is supposed to be its ally, the United States.
In breathtaking remarks to reporters, President Trump poured contempt on Ukraine for its frustration. “But today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Uh, Ukraine didn’t fire Russian missiles at itself or direct a Russian armed column at its own capital in 2022. There’s moral equivalence, and then there’s a total moral inversion.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed back, Trump came back at him harder, calling him a “Dictator without Elections” who “probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”
Ukraine is indeed under martial law at the moment because it’s been invaded by a hostile power and there’s a war on. You don’t need to portray Ukraine as a shining city on a hill to acknowledge that it is much more committed to democracy and the rule of law than is Russia, whose malign autocratic leader Trump never thinks to call “a dictator.”
Needless to say, Ukraine is not the problem here. As far as the Kremlin is concerned, its sins are its existence as a sovereign state with a national identity distinct from Russia’s, and its failure to roll over and accept its assigned role as a defenseless satellite state of Mother Russia.
That a large, partially Russian-speaking neighbor was embracing democracy only compounded its offense in the eyes of the Kremlin, which worried about a potentially dangerous example for its own people.
And so, Ukraine has been twice invaded by a Russia eager to grab its territory and resources and bring it to heel. Since 2014, Ukraine has been subjected to a level of violence and criminality that reflects Russia’s utter contempt for the laws of armed conflict.
The anti-Ukraine influencers and advisers in Trump’s ear contend that Ukraine antagonized Russia by seeking to join the Atlantic Alliance. In reality, Russia’s efforts to destabilize Ukraine began with the January 2005 “Orange Revolution,” in which pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko (who had been “mysteriously” poisoned with dioxin during the campaign) captured the presidency.
By 2010, Yushchenko was replaced by the “non-aligned” (read: pro-Putin) Viktor Yanukovych. But Yanukovych’s efforts to placate the Kremlin soon ran afoul of Ukraine’s parliament. In late 2013, he unilaterally abrogated a deal passed by the Ukrainian Rada that would have established free trade and travel relations with the European Union. Yanukovych’s maneuver ignited protests that culminated in the Maidan Revolution, in which over 100 civilians were killed by security forces before Yanukovych fled to exile in Russia.
It was Ukraine’s integration with the European Union, not NATO, that inflamed Moscow, and it was the ouster of their puppet in Kyiv that occasioned the first invasion of Crimea and the Donbas in early 2014.
The fact that Russia failed in its subsequent attempt to swallow Ukraine whole in 2022 is a testament both to the determination of the country’s defenders as well as Moscow’s atrophied military and dated tactics. But Moscow’s adventurism still poses a real threat to U.S. security and that of its treaty-bound allies on NATO’s frontiers.
It is certainly true, as we noted the other day, that Ukraine isn’t going to get all of its territory back or join NATO. Acknowledging this is cold-eyed realism; humiliating and undercutting an ally, perhaps with worse to come in the form of a sweetheart deal for Moscow, is not.
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Friday, February 21, 2025
A spurious U.S. ‘realism’ about Ukraine flirts with catastrophe
“The Czechs,” murmured Chamberlain. He had lit a cigar and pushed back his chair. “We have rather forgotten about the Czechs.” — “Munich,” by Robert Harris
In Robert Harris’s meticulously researched novel about 1938, the leaders of four nations — Germany, Italy, France, Britain — settled the fate of a fifth, Czechoslovakia. “Realism” dictated its dismemberment.
A Czech official: “The Germans will be able to cut our country in half within a day.” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s aide: “I am not responsible for the realities of geography. ... Ninety percent of your country will remain intact and you will not be invaded.”
Last week in Munich, a city closer to Ukraine than Washington is to Atlanta, Vice President JD Vance told Europeans that the principal security threat they face is insufficient free speech, exemplified particularly by the refusal of other German political parties to govern in coalition with Alternative for Germany, a fascist-adjacent party sympathetic to Ukraine’s would-be executioner, Vladimir Putin.
.... Hours before Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement, an aide told him (per Harris) that Hitler “plans a war of conquest to gain living space for the German people.” Hitler had said so. Chamberlain: “You need to learn a few lessons in political reality.” Realities such as the reluctance of democratic publics to face unpleasant realities. Particularly for the benefit of (as Chamberlain had described the Czechs) people in “a far away country,” “of whom we know nothing.” We know Putin’s thinking about who should be Russians, and what Russia should be. He has told us.
Trump says he does not care “much about anything” other than “peace.” “Peace for our time,” Chamberlain said triumphantly when he landed in London from Munich. Peace lasted 336 days, until Sept. 1, 1939, the first of the European war’s 2,077 days. (Please read it all)
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A Trump outrage that stands apart: The president blames Ukraine for its own brutalization.
... “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump said of the nation that was attacked on Feb. 24, 2022, by a Russian leader who had declared that Ukraine deserved no independence or sovereignty because it wasn’t a “real country.” Vladimir Putin’s casus belli was a chilling act of dehumanization, and it was followed by a brutal assault that would have succeeded but for the brave resistance of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people.
Those are the moral and strategic issues at the center of the conflict. But somehow, in Trump’s monomania, the war is about him. He has said often, with no evidence, that Russia wouldn’t have invaded if he had been president. Now, he’s claiming Ukraine spurned his help and brought this existential fight upon itself.
... The president has effectively made Zelensky his adversary and, implicitly, moved toward open embrace of Russia’s anti-Zelensky line. His words are also likely to leave deep scars in Ukraine. One retired U.S. Army officer who’s working in Kyiv sent me an anguished message on Wednesday: “What the hell is happening in America? From here, we look like we’ve lost our minds. We’re not just losing our standing with current leaders but we’re losing the next generation who are watching and learning that America cannot be trusted.” (Read it all)
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Thursday, February 20, 2025
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