Sex can kill!
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When there is something negative about Trump the NYT's and Wapo are always ready with reports but when it is about Durham there is nothing. The bias of the mass media continues and it will only drive them further from having much impact. They are engaged in death by their own hand.+++
John Durham, Almost the Media's Invisible Man
Tim Graham |Posted
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com
One can ever claim that the notion of Trump-Russia collusion and the Mueller investigation were downplayed or ignored by the press. It was the opposite. The story was enormous and incessant.
Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found that from Jan. 20, 2017, through July 20, 2019, the evening newscasts at ABC, CBS and NBC alone devoted an astounding 2,634 minutes to the Trump-Russia narrative.
On Feb. 12, the conservative media reported a "bombshell." Well, the term "bombshell" is almost copyrighted as a journalism term for "Republican scandal deepener."
Special counsel John Durham, tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI's probe into Donald Trump and Russia, reported a client for Hillary Clinton's law firm, Perkins Coie, was monitoring internet traffic at Trump Tower, Trump's Central Park West apartment building and the Executive Office of the President. They wanted information to sell a "narrative" of Trump-Russia collusion.
ABC, CBS and NBC coverage? None. Other networks and major newspapers balked. Then they tiptoed in to deny it meant anything.
From the beginning, liberal partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff have trashed Durham's probe as "tainted" by Trump's desires for an investigation. On ABC in 2019, Schiff denounced it as automatically "illegitimate" because "when you win an election, you don't seek to just prosecute the losing side, but this is what Bill Barr is seeking to do."
Schiff spent four years prosecuting the winning side of the 2016 election. Saying a probe is "tainted" by partisan desire displays an incredible lack of introspection.
While the networks spent more than 2,600-plus minutes on the Trump-Russia narrative, they've done next to nothing on Durham. Let's review just how much coverage Durham has received from the Big Three networks since Attorney General William Barr put him on the case in the spring of 2019.
ABC gave Durham's probe nine mentions over the last two years and nine months. CBS had five. NBC had six.
Many of these were brief mentions. On ABC, they came from Republican panelists on the Sunday show "This Week." On CBS, two came in questions as Trump-hating FBI employee Peter Strzok sold his liberal-hack book on two CBS morning shows. (Has Durham contacted you? No.) On NBC, there was one question to Barr and one mention in 2021 that in his confirmation process, Attorney General Merrick Garland saw no reason to dismiss Durham.
Durham is the anti-Mueller. Nothing he finds is considered newsworthy. The media treats him as "tainted," like he's a news leper. "Unclean! Unclean!" Durham's team isn't loaded with liberal Democrats who leak juicy details to other liberal Democrats in "objective" media.
The media used the Mueller probe to constantly paint a black cloud over Trump's presidency and present it in real time as perpetually doomed -- even when it wasn't. The walls were always "closing in" because that was the song they couldn't stop singing.
And:
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In part this is what is shaking our nation by it's foundational roots:
A 40% Fatherless Nation?
Terry Jeffrey|Posted
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com
In 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II, there were 2,515,427 babies born in this country. Of those babies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 95,700 -- or 3.8% -- were born to unmarried mothers.
The traditional family led by a mother and father was a foundational fact of American culture.
In 1945, the percentage of babies born to unmarried mothers rose to 4.3%. But, by 1946, the first full year after the war, it dropped back down to 3.8%.
The traditional family survived.
Then in the 1950s, the percentage of American babies born to unmarried mothers began to slowly tick upward, hitting 5.2% by the end of that decade.
By 1969, as this column has noted in reviewing these numbers before, 10% of American babies were born to unmarried mothers. In 2008, it surpassed 40%.
In 10 of the last 13 years on record (2008 through 2020), it has surpassed 40% -- and in the three years that it did not surpass 40%, it never dropped below 39.6%.
In fact, in the 13 years from 2008 through 2020, there were 51,138,204 babies born in this country, according to the CDC, and 20,642,649 of those babies (or 40.36%) were born to unmarried mothers.
This country is not headed in the right direction. A generation will soon be coming of age in which a large percentage of the population will have been denied a traditional family life.
What happens when families fall apart or fail to form in the first place? Government, as this column has noted before, gets bigger and takes more control over people's lives.
In 1941, Medicaid, which is a form of welfare, did not exist. "Authorized by Title XIX of the Social Security Act, Medicaid was signed into law in 1965 alongside Medicare," says the program's official website. "All states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories have Medicaid programs designed to provide health coverage for low-income people. Although the Federal government establishes certain parameters for all states to follow, each state administers their Medicaid program differently, resulting in variations in Medicaid coverage across the country."
By July 2021, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, there were 76,705,180 people enrolled in Medicaid. Last fiscal year, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement, the federal government spent $520.58 billion on that program.
When Medicaid was created in 1965, 7.7% of American babies were born to unmarried mothers.
By 2020, according to the CDC's latest birth report, the percentage of American babies born to unmarried mothers had risen to 40.5%.
The percentage born on Medicaid, according to the CDC report, was 42%.
As this column has also noted before, Census Bureau data shows that the traditional family and economic well-being are interconnected. In 2020, according to the bureau, only 4.7% of married couple families in this country lived below the poverty level. But at the same time, 38.1% of female householders with children under 18 and no spouse present lived in poverty, as did 46.2% of female householders with no spouse present and children under 6.
If America continues on a long-term trend in which 40% or more of the babies born each year are born to unmarried mothers and even more than that are born on Medicaid, it is hard to see how this country will prosper.
This nation was built by pioneers who sailed across broad oceans and ventured onto vast prairies, seeking to live their lives self-sufficient and free. They did not want to be dependent on government. They wanted to be independent.
We should teach our children and our grandchildren to emulate those pioneers who gave us this great country.
Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of CNSnews.com.
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The NYT's Station Chief is too occupied with being biased:
Big bad Israel
Patrick Kingsley’s favorite word of opprobrium is “occupied.”
By Jerold S. Auerbach
Ever since he became The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief last year, Patrick Kingsley has been obsessed with Jewish settlers, long the personification of evil for his newspaper. Indeed, the Times identified his focus as “Israel and the occupied territories.” Kingsley has been faithful to his assignment.
Kingsley’s favorite word of opprobrium is “occupied.” Nearly a year ago, in one of his early articles, he identified the Palestinian city of Ramallah as “the hub of the occupied West Bank” and the Palestinian Authority as “the body that oversees parts of the occupied territories.” He has referred to “Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories”; the need for Israel “to organize a systematic vaccine program in the occupied territories”; and its obligation as “an occupying power” to preserve health “within an occupied territory.”
But that was only the beginning. In an article about Israel’s (generous) distribution of coronavirus vaccines to Palestinians, he predictably made repeated references to its “occupied territories.” Writing about a talented Palestinian musician, he noted her popularity in Ramallah—that “hub of the occupied West Bank.” The P.A., for Kingsley, “oversees parts of the occupied territories.” When Israel announced plans for several thousand new settlement housing units, Kingsley cited unnamed sources (other than “most of the international community”) who consider it “a breach of international law.”
It was, therefore, hardly surprising that Kingsley’s most recent rendition (Feb. 13) filled an entire page under the headline “Attacks by Settlers Raise Alarm.” (Settlers, by definition, live in “occupied” territory.) Curiously, the “mob attack,” which occurred last month, was evidently insufficient to prompt full-page—or any—coverage, even by Kingsley, at the time.
But Kingsley (and the Times) compensated for that lack of attention. When there is settler violence, he writes, perpetrators “benefit from a two-tier legal system in which settlers who commit violence are rarely punished,” while Palestinians are arrested. The “impunity of recent settler attacks” segues into his favorite trope: “Most Israeli settlements are considered legal by Israel, and illegal under international law.” His preferred source is Yesh Din, established in 2005 “to protect the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli armed forces’ occupation.” It fancifully describes itself as a “nonpartisan organization.” Kingsley seems persuaded.
To bolster his critique, Kingsley also cites B’Tselem, another left-wing organization that is critical of “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation [that] is inextricably bound up in human-rights violations.” His palpable bias echoes a recent report by Amnesty International that identifies “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity.” Kingsley simply ignores nearly 2 million Arabs who are citizens of Israel with full equal rights.
On the same day as Kingsley’s rant, coincidentally, The Wall Street Journal published a more nuanced article about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by respected Israeli historian Benny Morris. Unlike Kingsley, he recognizes that biblical Judea and Samaria (Jordan’s “West Bank” until the Six-Day War) comprised “the heartland of the biblical kingdom of David and Solomon.” Now, with more than half a million Israelis living there, Morris concludes that Israeli withdrawal is “inconceivable.” He notes “the failure of the charge of apartheid to capture the Israeli reality.”
Patrick Kingsley should take notice.
The striking contrast between Benny Morris’s fact-based analysis and Patrick Kingsley’s palpable bias highlights the reality that “All the News That’s Print to Fit”—the enduring front-page Times motto—is better understood as the news print to fit the Times’ unrelenting criticism of Israel. Obsessed with “settler violence,” Kingsley demonstrates his obliviousness to the historical reality that what he repeatedly misidentifies as Israel’s “occupied territory” comprises biblical Judea and Samaria. It is better understood as Israel’s ancient homeland and, since 1967, its liberated territory.
But for Kingsley and The New York Times, Israelis who live there—the settlers they despise—are the most evil of Jews. Nothing better qualifies him to be its Jerusalem bureau chief.
Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of 12 books, including “Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel (1896-2016).”
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Jewish Louisville mayor candidate: Gunman ‘aimed directly at me’
Craig Greenberg says suspect stormed his campaign headquarters and fired several shots from close range, with one bullet grazing his shirt; ‘We are shaken but safe,’ he says.
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In the Soros Biography I am reading, Soros' goal, among his open society philosophy, includes eliminating national borders, jails, many crimes among other anti-social factors.
'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' Staff and Anti-Israel Bias
A poisonous environment that reflects a global phenomenon.
By Adam Milstein
A recent Heritage Foundation study found strong anti-Israel bias in the social media posts of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) officials at colleges and universities throughout the United States. These officials criticize Israel far more frequently and far more severely than they do China. Their posts about Israel exceed those mentioning China by a factor of three, and almost all of their statements about Israel express condemnation, whereas nearly two-thirds of their comments on China convey praise.
These disturbing findings should surprise no one. U.S. campuses have become hotbeds of hostility toward the state of Israel as well as toward the idea of American exceptionalism, and in the radical religion of the campus, far-left professors are the priests and DEI officers are the choir.
This religion has its orthodoxies: America is systemically racist and defined by perpetual struggle of oppressed against oppressors; “white privilege”—for which Jews should be regarded as an exemplar—is a chief source of oppression, and status-based intersectional categories of victimhood confer both justness and entitlement. Under this neo-Marxist paradigm, there is no hint of irony when officials putatively devoted to fostering “diversity” and “inclusion” instead promote hostility toward Israel or regard as obnoxious the idea that the allegedly privileged Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their ancient homeland.
Alas, this nonsense is not confined to classroom discussions or social media posts. DEI training sessions have resulted in complaints of discrimination against Jews, and radicalized students indoctrinated in this ideology have made campus life more and more unbearable for their Jewish and pro-Israel peers.
A recent poll of students active in Jewish organizations on campus found that 65 percent felt unsafe on campus because of physical or verbal attacks. Half felt the need to conceal their Jewish identity or support for Israel for the sake of their safety. In response to widespread harassment and discrimination directed toward Jewish students, President Donald Trump issued an executive order reiterating that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act protects Jews—just as every other race, color, national origin, and ethnicity—from discrimination at taxpayer-funded universities.
The anti-Semitism infesting many college campuses goes far beyond hate speech. Take the complaint filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law on behalf of Jewish students at the University of Chicago Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It cited numerous cases of pervasive anti-Semitic activity on campus, including criminal activity such as thefts overtly targeting Jews, car vandalism, and other property damage. Universities have a legal and moral duty to prevent such criminality and to respond when it occurs.
The poisonous environment at universities is a global phenomenon. During his previous diplomatic role, one of the authors of the Heritage Foundation study represented the United States in meetings with European Jewish student leaders. Like those in North America, Jewish and pro-Israel students in Europe report a campus climate of open hostility—one so bad that in many cases, they have had to conceal their identity.
From Berlin to Berkeley, many students feel they must purchase their personal safety on campus at the price of divorce from a key part of their Jewish identity, namely, a sense of Jewish peoplehood and a connection with the Jewish homeland. These students feel their university’s environment is telling them: Extirpate Israel and Zionism from your identity, and you’ll go unmolested on your campus; express the contrary at your peril.
Coercing Jews to abandon key aspects of their ethnic or religious identity is nothing new. In fact, it has a name: Anti-Semitism. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo set forth this basic truth in the clearest terms. “Let me go on the record,” he declared, “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Pompeo also rightly recognized that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which runs rampant on campuses and isolates Jewish students, is anti-Semitic.
Fortunately, there are specific steps our schools can take to correct course and restore sanity to campus.
First, universities and school districts should adopt the standard definition of anti-Semitism put forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This “Working Definition of Antisemitism” has been adopted and promoted by the State Department through multiple administrations and is used by other agencies of the federal government. It has also been adopted globally, by thirty-five countries, over 250 provinces and cities and more than 350 educational institutions and other organizations. The IHRA Working Definition sets forth eleven “contemporary examples” of anti-Semitism. These capture both traditional manifestations of Jew-hatred and the more modern targeting of Israel and Zionism.
The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism is a tool of education, not censorship. Its adoption by universities and schools, and critically, its incorporation into educational programs and training, will promote understanding of Israel-hatred and other forms of anti-Semitism. By properly defining and recognizing anti-Semitism, universities will also be better equipped to respond to antisemitic incidents.
Second, universities should dramatically reduce the ever-multiplying throngs of DEI officers. A Heritage survey of sixty-five major universities revealed an average of forty-five DEI staff at each, with 163 at the University of Michigan. Overall, DEI personnel outnumbered staff focused on assisting those with disabilities (ADA compliance) by 4.2 to 1. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, DEI staff outnumbered those focused on students with disabilities by 13.3 to 1. On average, the universities employed 3.4 DEI staff for every 100 tenured or tenure-track professors.
Third, universities should strive—or be required by donors and alumni to strive—for greater ideological balance in their faculty and programs. Genuine “diversity” requires diversity of background and viewpoint. Universities should also evaluate the current state of ideological bias among their faculty and programs. Across the U.S., programs at universities—especially in Middle Eastern Studies Departments—promote blatant anti-American and anti-Israel viewpoints, whitewashing terrorism and suppressing alternative views.
Fourth, universities should find ways to celebrate the contributions of the Jewish people, Jewish history, and the values of Judaism that have contributed so much to the United States and to civilization itself. Since 1980, every president of the United States has declared a period of time for doing exactly this. Each May is presidentially designated as Jewish American Heritage Month, but unlike similar months dedicated to Blacks, Hispanics, and other ethnic groups, there is little programming, educational materials, or awareness of Jewish American Heritage Month. At a time when America’s Jewish heritage is under assault, there is no excuse for neglect.
Let no one imagine that the indoctrination students receive on campus will not affect them when they enter the business world, civil society, or government. A British member of parliament (MP) who fled Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitic Labour Party explained to one of the Heritage study’s authors that the Corbyn disaster was bred on Britain’s university campuses. Nothing was done, said the former Labour MP, because campus culture was dismissed as a matter only for students. When the disease crept into the Labour Party, it was again dismissed, this time as simply the rantings of a far-left fringe. “Finally,” said the MP, “they won; we lost, and I no longer have a political party.”
As Americans, our future depends on the steps we take to correct this today.
This article was originally published in the The National Interest on January 30, 2022, written by Adam Milstein of the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation, James Jay Carafano of The Heritage Foundation, and Elan S. Carr who is a former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism and a visiting fellow at Heritage.
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Hard to say whether blacks have woken up or still remain enslaved to the Democrats who take them for granted. Time will tell.
As Black Voters Sour on Biden, Will They Abandon the Democrats?
Their decades long loyalty to the party was already beginning to show signs of becoming weaker.
By Jason L. Riley
“Why Joe Biden Is Bleeding Black Support” was the headline of a New York magazine article in late January. Not whether, but why. And if the polling since then is indicative, the hemorrhaging continues.
Blacks have been throwing some 80% of their support to Democrats since the late 1960s. Since President Obama left office, however, the party’s grip on this key voting bloc has loosened somewhat. Hillary Clinton’s underperformance among blacks in such swing states as Pennsylvania probably cost her the presidency in 2016, when people in heavily black neighborhoods voted more Republican than they did in 2012.
Democrats normally don’t worry about blacks voting Republican. They just worry about blacks not voting at all. That, too, may be changing. Black voter turnout in 2018 was the highest on record for a midterm election. Yet New York magazine reports that in the House races that year, “Democrats actually won a smaller share of the African American vote than they had in the 2016 presidential election—even as the party’s overall popular-vote edge in the midterm was five points higher than Hillary Clinton’s two years earlier.”
Joe Biden won 92% of black voters in 2020, no doubt benefiting from having been Mr. Obama’s vice president, but it’s been all downhill since then. The president’s job-approval rating among all voters has fallen, but among blacks it has been cratering. An NBC News poll last month found that black support for the president, which stood at 83% last April, had dropped to 64%. A Quinnipiac survey released around the same time showed a 22-point decline in black support for Mr. Biden during his first year in office. And a CNN poll from last week puts black approval of the president’s job performance at just 69%. Democrats know they can’t win elections without much higher levels of black support.
Mr. Biden has been doing what Democrats normally do to buck up black support. He’s resorting to identity politics. He’s promised to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. He supports legislation that would address imaginary voter suppression. He wants to expand the welfare state. If, as the recent polling suggests, this sort of racial pandering no longer works like it used to, America’s making some progress.
The country has witnessed a lot of political norm-breaking in the Donald Trump era. Less black fealty for the Democratic Party could be part of the trend. It’s easy to forget how bad things were for blacks economically during the Obama presidency. Black unemployment didn’t fall below double digits until the third year of Mr. Obama’s second term. Prior to the pandemic, black unemployment under Mr. Trump reached record lows, and black wages rose at a faster rate than white wages. Mr. Obama symbolized racial progress, but you can’t pay the rent with symbolism.
That black experience partly explains why minority support for Mr. Trump ticked up in 2020. It might also explain why blacks have soured on Mr. Biden. Inflation, which the current administration first denied and then played down, is at a 40-year high. Blacks are overrepresented among low-income workers, who are watching prices rise faster than their wages. In addition, the president wants to raise the taxes that Mr. Trump cut and reregulate sectors of the economy that Mr. Trump deregulated. If black voters aren’t eager to return to the pre-Trump economy, who can blame them?
Mr. Biden’s efforts to appease his party’s progressive wing are also costing him black support. Black politicians and activists tend to be far more liberal than the average black voter. On issue after issue—school choice, defunding the police, voter ID, racial preferences—individual black Americans hold more conservative views than the elites who claim to represent them. The political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird argue in a 2020 book, “Steadfast Democrats,” that black partisan loyalty is less issue-based and has to do with social pressure from other blacks. But as the black middle class grows and black interests become less unified and more varied, the solidarity politics we see among black voters will inevitably start to wane, as it has with other racial and ethnic groups.
These are the larger trends that Mr. Biden and his party are up against, and the question is whether Republicans will take advantage of the situation. The Republican National Committee is currently preoccupied with settling scores for Mr. Trump, which could come at the cost of expanding the GOP’s appeal at a time when Democrats look vulnerable. The economic gains we experienced prior to the pandemic were real, and no one benefited more than blacks did. The establishment media mostly ignored the story, but Republicans could do worse than talk about it nonstop between now and November.
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Bret Stephens takes on Ukraine post Putin:
Don’t Wish for a Post-Pax Americana
By Bret Stephens
Who knows, at this writing, what Vladimir Putin will decide to do with the forces he’s massed along Ukraine’s borders?
If Putin backs down, maybe thanks to some face-saving diplomatic formula, the Biden administration will deserve full credit for masterly crisis management: whipping into line our European allies, particularly Germany; thwarting Russian covert operations by leaking details to the media; expanding America’s military presence in frontline NATO states; working on ways to supply Europe with liquefied natural gas; refusing to negotiate at Ukraine’s expense; threatening sanctions against Moscow that, for once, have real teeth.
If Putin doesn’t back down, these were still the right and necessary steps. They just weren’t sufficient.
Either way, the crisis should serve as a tutorial on what the so-called post-Pax Americana world will look like. In a fantasy version of that world — a world in which American power isn’t constantly being called upon to address faraway crises or reassure nervous allies — the United States trades the burdens of being a superpower for the modest but more manageable, affordable and humane ambitions of a normal country.
Our military shrinks to a size adequate for national defense, not global policing. We spend the savings on mending the frayed edges of society.
Our allies stop freeloading off our security guarantees and start spending more on their own defense.
Our foreign policy becomes less arrogant and more collaborative. We lose the illusion that we can, or should, solve other people’s problems, and we free ourselves from the personal sacrifices and moral compromises that go with that illusion.
Our economic policies shift to adapt to a less-globalized world. Instead of depending on China for low-cost manufacturing and labor, we reinvest in American workers and factories and become independent in everything from energy to microchips.
It’s a tempting vision, a left-right marriage of George McGovern’s “Come Home, America” and Donald Trump’s “America First.” It’s also been thought of before: Bob La Follette Jr., the progressive senator from Wisconsin, and Father Charles Coughlin, the antisemitic radio host, shared the same sorts of ideas in the run-up to World War II. They had broad public appeal all the way through Dec. 6, 1941.
What’s wrong with those ideas? For starters, global order is not a self-generating phenomenon. In the absence of Pax Americana, would the United Nations be capable of enforcing rules of the road, like freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, over which as much as one-third of the world’s commercial traffic passes? How about regional alliances, like the European Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations? Don’t count on it.
This has some obvious knock-on effects. It’s an invitation to predatory behavior — precisely of the kind we’re witnessing on Ukraine’s borders and also seeing signs of over the Taiwan Strait. And predatory behavior is rarely satisfied. A Russia that possesses more of Ukraine or a China that seizes Taiwan will each want more. They’ll be in a stronger position to get it.
Another obvious consequence: There will be no peace dividend in a post-Pax Americana world. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the United States today spends historically little on defense — about 3.7 percent of gross domestic product, compared to more than 5 percent in the last year of the Carter administration. But military spending would have to return to Cold War levels for an era in which core U.S. interests were constantly threatened by hostile and confident powers.
We would also find ourselves perplexed and frightened by the behavior of our traditional allies. Instead of having freeloaders, we would enter a world of freelancers, countries aggressively out for themselves, irrespective of American wishes or established norms. Without the assurance of U.S. protection, what would keep a future Japanese government from rapidly fielding a vast nuclear arsenal as a response to China? Why shouldn’t Turkey and Saudi Arabia go nuclear, too, particularly if Iran winds up with a bomb?
A world in which several combustible regions each have multiple nuclear powers in varying configurations of alliance and hostility is a recipe for miscalculation, accident and tragedy.
It’s also not a formula for prosperity. The idea that the United States should aspire to some sort of autarky is divorced from any conceivable economic reality. In a post-Pax Americana world, we would simply have to depend on flows of trade at the mercy of hostile powers and unexpected events.
Most dangerously, the post-Pax Americana world is one in which liberal democracy would wither. This is already happening abroad, from Budapest to Ankara to Mexico City. Why shouldn’t it happen here, too?
Charismatic dictatorships often inspire a current of admiration among democratic publics; it’s why a corner of the progressive left admired the Castro regime in Cuba, just as the new far right is quietly infatuated with Putin. Anyone who says it can’t happen here must have slept through the past five years.
Whatever happens next in Ukraine, it won’t matter as much as the lessons we draw from it. Only the innocent think that an America that turns its back on the world will be left alone in turn.
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