Shortly after assuming the presidency in January 2017, he accused the press of being an “enemy of the American people”. He hasn’t held back from continuing his war on the press in succeeding years.
As an American citizen, and a former journalist at Oregon’s leading newspaper, The Oregonian, I wince every time Trump levels another unseemly attack on the media.
Now, his decision to withdraw funding from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a move endorsed by his sidekick Elon Musk, who has described the media group as “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves,” is angering me even more because it is putting journalists’ lives in danger.
In a sudden, but not out-of-character, slash-and-burn move, the Trump administration sent out an email to employees at Voice of America (VOA) on March 15, 2025 putting them on paid administrative leave “until otherwise notified” and instructing them not to enter the VOA offices or access its internal systems. Radio Free Asia, also funded by the US, has lost its funding as well.
The moves have left exiled Russian journalists working for RFE/RL “high and dry” and at risk of being stranded overseas without any legal status. “If it can’t find funding soon, the company won’t be able to pay its staff and the consequence would potentially put a very large number of journalists who are exiled from authoritarian regimes at grave risk,” a source told The Guardian.
“Many of RFE/RL’s Russian journalists operate from Prague, Riga and Vilnius, with their work visas often tied to their employment,” the Guardian is reporting. “Terminating the broadcaster’s funding would trigger visa expirations, leaving them without legal status within months. Deportation to Russia for any of them would expose them to criminal prosecution. “
According to the Guardian, RFE/RL journalists are regarded as “foreign agents”, making them the target for arrest should they return to Russia.
RFE/RI is suing the Trump administration in an effort to reverse the cancellation of its funding, but its success is uncertain.
In the meantime, if any of the RFE/RI’s journalists suffer harm because of Trump’s actions, the blood will be on his hands.
If you have a few minutes, I’d like to begin by telling you about Edwin Bell Forsythe because his service to our country and his dedication to liberty are instructive.
Forsythe was a true public servant. A devoted Quaker from Moorestown, New Jersey, he served honorably in the House of Representatives as a Republican from 1970 until his death in 1984. I worked for Forsythe and remember keenly his decency and dignity.
Rep. Edwin B. Forsythe and his wife, Mary, at the Capitol.
A continuing reminder of Forsythe is the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville, NJ. The refuge includes over 32,000 acres of coastal salt meadows, uplandbrush and woodlands, and open bays and channels along the New Jersey shore.
At the dedication of that refuge, Ed Welch, Chief Counsel of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, praised Forsythe for his effective leadership, the ability to take divisive controversies and hammer out strong bipartisan compromises in an atmosphere of fairness and civility. “The policy differences between Republicans and Democrats were never ignored, but they were not permitted to obstruct the essential workings of the Committee,” Welch said.
“Ed Forsythe was a man of integrity and principle,” said Rep. William J. Hughes of New Jersey, who served as a Democratic Member of the House of Representatives from 1975 to 1995, “He represented the very best that this nation has to offer, serving quietly but tirelessly and effectively for the people of his district. There was not an ounce of pomposity or pretension in Ed Forsythe. Ed’s unfortunate death has taken from us a great legislator and a fine individual. We have all been enriched by his presence among us.”
”His sensitivity, wisdom and quiet voice of reason will be missed,” added New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean.
In today’s tumultuous political environment, “sensitivity, “wisdom and (a) quiet voice of reason” are sadly missing. Can you name even a handful of members of Congress who are spoken of with such respect today?
In their place we have rancorous, narcissistic exhibitionists focused more on messaging and publicity than on driving good public policy.
In 2015, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, a shape-shifting individual, called Mr. Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” a “kook,” “crazy” and a man who was “unfit for office.” He’s now one of Trump’s most sycophantic defenders when it suits him.
Then there’s Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Despite being a doctor, who’s obligation is “First, do no harm”, he voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has made multiple outrageous medical statements, as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Even Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a supposed moderate, has lost her bearings. A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee for 12 years, she voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard, a politician with a history of troubling statements and actions, to be the Director of National Intelligence, putting American security at risk.
Republican Senator Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, a combat veteran and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in the face of Trump’s threat of supporting a primary competitor, voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. This despite serious allegations of personal misconduct and lack of judgement on his part, as well as minimal executive experience essential to managing a Department of Defense with about 3.4 million civilian and military personnel and an $850 billion annual budget.
The list of weak-kneed Republican members of Congress could go on as the Republican Party has fallen into the trap of slavishly bowing down to President Trump, less because they agree with his erratic pronouncements than because they fear losing their prestigious positions.
House Republicans are no better. In bowing to Trump’s will, they are consciously compromising their authority.
In the midst of all this stands Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who daily declares his fealty not to the constitution, but to an erratic, morally compromised president.
On August 7, 2015, Johnson wrote on Facebook, “The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House.”
These days, don’t count on Johnson to try to put the brakes on any of Trump’s questionable autocratic moves. As Johnson told reporters in January, “There is a new sheriff in town.”
And reveling in his position at the top of the Republican hierarchy stands Donald Trump, who sees himself as a wonder of the world, comparable to the Colossus of Rhodes constructed in homage to Helios, the original god of the Sun in ancient Greek mythology.
Wishing to be unburdened by common standards of decency and respect, Trump has even tried to fire an executive branch ethics watchdog who heads the Office of Special Counsel.
With a brusque two sentence email, the White House Personnel Office leader was dismissed on Feb. 7, 2025, with little more than a “Thank you for your service”. The firing is only on hold because a federal district court issued a temporary order keeping the lawyer in office through a hearing scheduled for Feb. 26, 2025.
The behavior of senior people serving under Trump is no better. Their abandonment of civility is exemplified by “Border Czar” Tom Homan who callously said of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Feb. 17 Newsmax interview, “She’s the dumbest congresswoman ever elected to Congress and she proves that every day.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is no more reticent. A fanatical Trump devotee, he was accused by the chairman of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol of “efforts to spread false information about alleged voter fraud” and encouraging state legislatures to alter the outcome of the 2020 election by appointing alternate electors.
Considered a racist by some of his detractors, Miller was a lead author of the zero tolerance policies that led to immigrant children being separated from their parents during Trump’s first term.
“America is for Americans and Americans only” Miller bellowed at a Madison Square Garden Trump campaign rally on October 27, 2024, “With your vote, you can smash this broken establishment” he concluded.
Trump has also brought into government efforts to indiscriminately hollow out the federal civil service. Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government efficiency, or DOGE, is hacking away with abandon at multiple federal departments. Regardless of what Trump and Musk might say, the goal is not so much to diminish the federal workforce as to replace it with clones of Trump’s most rabid supporters. Meanwhile, Republicans stand idly by.
Affected agencies include the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department oi Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Aviation Administration. The IRS is also expected to lay off thousands of probationary workers in the middle of tax season.
A DOGE purge across the Department of Energy that targeted about 2,000 employees led to embarrassment and a recall when it was discovered that many of them worked on the nation’s critical nuclear weapons programs. The Associated Press noted that the firings came as the National Nuclear Security Administration “is in the midst of a major $750 billion nuclear weapons modernization effort, including new land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, new stealth bombers and new submarine-launched warheads.”
“The goal here is to dismantle the merit system and return the government to the spoils system, awarding the president who gets into office and punish people who worked for the prior administration,” Kevin Owen, a lawyer who represents federal employees in civil service and whistleblower litigation, told the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, issues of privacy and data security are arising. Democrats and tax experts are sounding alarms, for example, about a plan by Elon Musk’s DOGE team to gain access to an IRS system that contains detailed financial information about millions of taxpayers, including their tax returns.
“This is a five-alarm warning,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the IRS, said in a post on X, calling the move an “illegal and blatant power grab.”
Also raising alarms are DOGE moves at the Social Security Administration, where Elon Musk’s team, alleging unsubstantiated concerns about fraud, is reportedly attempting to access reams of sensitive information. The acting head of the SSA, Michelle King, has already resigned over the intrusion. Yet, again, elected Republicans casually ignore the threat.
And I haven’t even begun to address the international chaos emerging under Trump and his servile minions.
Nowhere is this chaos more evident than in Trump’s handing of the Ukraine war. Word of impending negotiations with Russia was, first of all, a shock to Ukraine and America’s European allies.
Then, when negotiations on the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia between the U.S. Delegation, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Russian Delegation led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, conspicuously absent were any representatives from Ukraine or Europe. The move was perceived by both as a slap in the face.
“Making sense of Trump’s plan – if there is one” read the headline of a Kyiv Independent article on the negotiations.
One thing was clear, though. “Decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in address at a Munich Security Conference. “From now on, things will be different…”
On Feb.18, Trump lambasted our European allies and Ukraine for letting the war go on. “Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should’ve ended it in three years,” he said. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
On February 17, Trump went so far in a Truth Social post as to directly insult Zenenskyy , calling him “a modestly successful comedian” and ” A Dictator without Elections”.
” Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump wrote. ” In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do.”
“Trump sold his soul and our country to Putin,” said one commenter. “Hard to believe we’re defending Russia instead of the Ukrainian freedom fighters.
But Russia is likely thrilled by Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine as well as by Vice President Vance’s remarks critical of Europe and supportive of far-right forces on the continent.
“The Kremlin for years has sought to weaken Europe by boosting parties that Mr. Vance argued must be allowed to flourish,” reporter Paul Sonne wrote in the New York Times on February 16. “The same day as his remarks at the conference, Mr. Vance met with the leader of Germany’s extreme right movement, which is contesting national elections this month, boosting a party Russia has sought to legitimize. Moscow has also sought to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, realizing that a destruction of the longstanding Euro-Atlantic alliance from within would lead to a world where Moscow can wield far more power.”
Echoing Sonne, Ian Bond, deputy director of the Center for European Reform in London, commented online, “Some of the most shameful comments uttered by a president in my lifetime. Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”
If Trump’s usual bull in a china shop approach to foreign affairs, complemented by his vice president, leads to the abandonment of Ukraine and a reinvigorated Russia, the risk for Europe will be great and another American threat, China, will be emboldened.
The United States has also inserted itself into a flammable situation with Trump’s proposal that the United States take control of the Gaza Strip and push the Palestinians into other countries, principally Jordan and Egypt. The land by the Mediterranean Sea is a potential French “Riviera,” something that would be worth a “long-term ownership position,” Trump said in early February. Typical of Trump, his vague proposal was an apparent surprise even to his closest advisors and stunned Congressional Republicans.
It was all reminiscent of Trump in his first term trying to convince North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un that his country was ripe for development as a popular destination spotif he gave up his militaristic nuclear weapons program. If you can believe this, Trump even showed him a slick video the White House National Security Council came up with showing what North Korea could become if it concluded a rapprochement with the United States. “They have great beaches,” Trump said.
Where are the members of Congress voicing concerns? Where is today’s Wayne Morse, a vocal critic of the Vietnam war and an outspoken defender of the Constitution’s checks and balances during his 24-year tenure in the U.S. Senate representing Oregon from1945-69?
Fariborz S. Fatemi, who worked on foreign policy issues on the staff of U.S. Sen. Frank Church, told of how Morse frequently went to the floor of the Senate to deliver riveting and informative speeches about the rule of law, separation of powers and how the Senate and the House were slowly giving their powers away to an already powerful executive.
Way back in 2018, Berry Craig, a state AFL-CIO official, saw the relevance of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, to Trump’s behavior. President Lincoln “wanted men who would tell him what he needed to win the war, save the union and put slavery on the road to extinction – not what they thought he wanted to hear,” Craig said. “It’s the opposite with Trump. He demands obsequiousness.”
That’s still true. Instead of strong, valiant, principled members standing up to Trump on myriad issues for their institution, we have toadies worried only about their next election.
That must change.
George Washington, in his 1796 farewell address, cautioned his fellow Americans about the rise of a man like Trump. “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty,” he warned.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said on Fox TV about Trump’s push to control Greenland, “I met with the Danish Ambassador this past week. They said Greenland is not for sale. I said, ‘Everything is for sale.’”
We already know Marco Rubio is. He previously portrayed Trump as “a pathological liar”, a “sniveling coward” and “utterly amoral”. Now Trump’s his best buddy.
So far, the Republican Party, Republican members of Congress and obedient Republican staff seem to be for sale, too. They need to act to protect America from Trump’s lunacies.
Challenging Trump won’t be easy.
In the movie “The Apprentice”, Sebastian Stan portrays a young Donald Trump determined to make his mark in 1970s New York. Reflecting on what he saw in Trump, Stan said in a New York Times story. “What I’ve always seen in his journey, and certainly we were exploring in the film, was the solidifying of a person into stone, the loss of humanity.”
Despite his public efforts to appear amiable and open, Donald J. Trump is a cold-hearted vindictive man who will fight tooth and nail.
Under Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China’smilitary might , including its nuclear capabilities, have been expanding rapidly while it “has demonstrated an increasing willingness to use military coercion and inducements to achieve its aims”, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
China’s dominance in global manufacturing is greater than it’s ever been. Its government subsidies are giving industries leverage to out-compete with American products. It had a nearly $1 trillion trade surplus with the rest of the world in 2024.
China has an aggressive, global spy network and influence operation aimed at expanding and solidifying its power.
China is supporting the Russian war machine and is openly preparing for a war to take over Taiwan.
China is aggressively bullying the Philippines and other countries with its claims on the South China Sea.
The U.S is falling further and further behind China in shipbuilding, threatening maritime security around the world. A new report by the U.S. Trade Representative found, that U.S. international trade is “carried out on vessels made in China, financed by state-owned Chinese institutions, owned by Chinese shipping companies, and reliant on a global maritime and logistics infrastructure increasingly dominated by China.”
All together, China presents a clear and present danger to the United States,
But American consumers continue to subsidize the Community regime by procuring the countries products as though there’s a fire sale, American companies continue strengthening their ties to China and the strongest signal President-elect Donald Trump is sending to China isn’t, “I’m determined to protect American security”, but “Let’s make a deal”.
Nothing illustrates that better than Trump’s words and actions with respect to TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
In April 2024, with bipartisan concern about the national security threat TikTok posed to the United States and its use as a tool to spread misinformation and propaganda, the House of Representatives voted 360 to 58 in the House and the Senate voted 78 to 18 for a bill requiring the sale of the social media platform to a U.S. company or face a shutdown.
Trump actually tried to ban the app himself in his first term by signing an executive order in August 2020 asserting that the app was capturing mass amounts of information about Americans and raising risks for the country.
“These risks are real,” the order said. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information − potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
In March 2024, however, Trump flipped his position, saying he was opposed to banning the app or forcing a sale. “Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Trump said on CNBC . “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
On January 18, TikTok did shut down, but after Trump promised to issue an executive order on Monday to “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect,” it came back up. It announced, “In agreement with our service providers” the company “is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”
The law allows Trump to grant a 90-day reprieve to TikTok, but only if he can certify at that point “evidence of significant progress” toward a sale. During that 90 days, of course, China’s alleged efforts to undermine United States security would continue, an issue of apparently little concern to Trump.
Trump’s inclination to pacify China and TikTok, reminds me of the protests of young Americans against the TikTok shutdown, favoring their personal TikTok addiction over American security. These same self-absorbed young people are likely many of the same people who are sustaining China’s economy by buying massive amounts of cheap fast fashion from Chinese companies like Temu and Shein, despite extensive reports that the apparel hides the dirty laundry of environmental damage and labor exploitation.
Trump’s moves are not, however, going unchallenged.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has urged US companies to halt operations with TikTok. “For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China,” Ricketts said.
Also breaking with Trump, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also issued a stern warning for companies deciding to work with TikTok after its resumption of service. “Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from DOJ, but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs, Cotton posted on X. “Think about it.”
Meanwhile, TikTok’s CEO is planning to attend a Trump victory rally at the Capitol One Arena in Washington, D.C. tonight (Sunday) and is expected to sit on the dais for Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
It’s a good time to remember Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Treblinka in occupied Poland from Sept. 1942 to August 1943. Gitta Sereny, an Austrian born journalist, biographer and historian. wrote “Into That Darkness” based on interviews with Stangl after the war. Trying to understand how he acclimated to running the camp, she asked him how he managed to do it. “It was the small steps. Small compromises,” he said. ” You see, if you can get people to stop believing in absolute right and wrong, you can get them to do anything.”
Americans succumbing to the allure of Chinese goods, American companies allowing their drive for profits to justify strengthening China’s economy and American politicians setting aside their legitimate concerns about the challenges from China are guilty of small steps, too.
Stay tuned.
Addendum
In still engaging wholeheartedly with China, American companies are repeating how so many have responded (or not) to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. According to Foreign Policy, as of 2023, around 800 multinational companies from Western and like-minded countries were still operating in Russia—either because they decided to stay or because they were still generating revenues there despite having pledged to leave. Around 60 percent of those global firms that operated in Russia before the full-scale invasion began in February 2022 still continue to do so. Second, Germany, the United States, and France are—by far—the top three countries of origin for Western firms that retain a presence in Russia, accounting for around half of them.
What is undeniably true , according to Foreign Policy, is that the hundreds of Western firms staying in Russia are helping Moscow finance the war in Ukraine. The data is eye-popping. In 2022 and 2023, firms from the G-7, European Union, and like-minded economies generated around $370 billion in revenues on Russian soil, which was more than Moscow’s military budget over the same period. In the first two years of the war, Western firms transferred more than $11 billion in corporate taxes to Russian state coffers, with Austrian bank Raiffeisen alone accounting for one-tenth of this amount. The data is not available yet for 2024, but a ballpark estimate suggests that Western firms probably paid another $4-6 billion in corporate taxes, bringing the total to roughly $16 billion funneled to the Kremlin since the invasion began.
Remember when America welcomed Ukrainians with open arms and warm hearts when Russia initiated a brutal invasion of Ukraine in 2022?
So much for “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” when Donald Trump takes office again on January 20, 2025.
The United States under President Trump is expected to join Pakistan and Iran in forcefully returning foreigners who have arrived from war-torn countries. And with the fall of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, pressure is likely to grow to repatriate Syrians in the United States under TPS protection
The Costs of War Project is a nonpartisan research project based at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. It seeks to document the direct and indirect human and financial costs of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and related counterterrorism efforts. According to Costs of War, over one million Afghans were forcibly returned from Pakistan and Iran in 2023. Under the current Taliban regime, forced returns to Afghanistan are continuing, despite a non-return advisory from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
“States have a legal and moral responsibility to allow those fleeing Afghanistan to seek safety, and to not forcibly return refugees,” the Refugee Agency says.
Various governments justify this trend of increasing returns to Afghanistan by arguing that active war has subsided since August 2021, when the U.S. initiated a chaotic withdrawal from the country, Costs of War asserts.
Trump has made it crystal clear he plans to repatriate Ukrainians who are in the United States under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. Set up in 1990, the program gave the federal government the ability to grant work permits and deferrals from deportation to nationals of any designated nation going through or recovering from natural or man-made disasters.
An ongoing Ukrainian refugee crisis began in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, with over 6 million refugees fleeing Ukraine across Europe. The United States announced on March 4, 2022, that Ukrainians would be provided Temporary Protected Status (TPS). There are now approximately 50,205 Ukrainian refugees in the United States protected by the TPS program. During the designated TPS period, TPS holders are not removable from the United States and not detainable by DHS based on their immigration status. TPS for Ukrainians was recently extended until April 19, 2025, only three months after Trump’s inauguration.
The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”, which Trump disavowed during the campaign when criticism of it erupted, has resurfaced as a policy driver since Trump’s election. It outlines a plan to end TPS, calling it a program that encourages illegal immigration. If confirmed, Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, would likely will lead the charge to terminate TPS designations and send Ukrainian refugees home to the continuing war and devastation.
Is this what the 76,744,608 people who voted for Trump this time around wanted?
NY Times Book Review interview with Brontez Purnell, 02/25/2024:
NY Times – “What’s the last book that made you cry?”
Purnell – “The newspaper is the only thing I read that makes me cry.”
Excerpts from the Sunday New York Times, Feb. 25, 2024
Predators Leer as Moms Put Girls on Instagram, NY Times
Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more. Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.
“It’s like a candy store 😍😍😍,” one of them wrote.
A record number of people across the country are experiencing homelessness. The federal government’s annual tally last year revealed the highest numbers of unsheltered people since the count began in 2007.
…the principal challenge has come at home, where additional U.S. military assistance to Ukraine has been stymied by Donald Trump-aligned House Republicans who question the importance of Ukraine for American security and in some cases even the centrality of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance itself.
“You feel totally helpless, totally abandoned by authorities and society in general. You feel like nothing,” said Araceli Gatica, a 32-year-old who left San Luis Acatlán, a mountain village in Guerrero (Mexico). A local gang threatened to kill her after she refused to keep paying $200 a month in extortion. She arrived recently with her three children in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, hoping to seek asylum in the U.S.
Bombs that struck houses, markets and bus stations across Sudan, often killing dozens of civilians at once. Ethnic rampages, accompanied by rape and looting, that killed thousands in the western region of Darfur. And a video clip, verified by United Nations officials, that shows Sudanese soldiers parading through the streets of a major city, triumphantly brandishing the decapitated heads of students who were killed on the basis of their ethnicity.
Ms. Haley’s loss in South Carolina follows a string of early defeats. She argued in her speech that the nation needed new leadership in the midst of “a world on fire.” “It seems like our country is falling apart,” she said, adding that she was worried “to my core” for its future. “America will come apart if we make the wrong choices. “
Prominent epidemiologists have estimated that an escalation of the war in Gaza could cause up to 85,000 Palestinian deaths over the next six months from injuries, disease and lack of medical care, in addition to the nearly 30,000 that local authorities have already reported since early October.
And yet, even if parts of society came to terms with natural bodies, the same cannot be said for the natural process of women aging. Wrinkles are the new enemy, and it seems Gen Z — and their younger sisters — are terrified of them. Gen Z-ers are being introduced to the idea of starting treatments early as “preventative” treatment. They are growing up in a culture of social media that promotes the endless pursuit of maintaining youth — and at home, some of them are watching their mothers reject aging with every injectable and serum they can find. But considering the speed at which social media is pushing ever more unattainable beauty standards onto children, it’s time for us to consider our moral obligation to minimizing damage for the next generation.
… increasingly in recent months, scrolling the (Tik Tok) feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space…(T)he malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy acceded to his party’s lunatic anti-Ukraine caucus and said no to a request by Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to address a joint session of Congress, or to bring together House members for a meeting with Zelensky during his current visit to Washington. .
Whatever you think of President Biden, he has been steadfast in his support of Ukraine, unlike the Republican party’s leader, former President Trump, who has been an embarrassing Putin acolyte.
“When he was President, Trump rarely missed a chance to excoriate the nation’s allies and praise its adversaries and parroted Russian talking points on Ukraine,” New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser wrote this week. “After the 2022 invasion, he even went so far as to laud Putin’s strategic “genius.” Just a few days ago, Trump revelled once again in praise from Putin, who has all but endorsed the former President’s campaign to return to the White House in 2024.”
Peace at any price is a fool’s game. As President Theodore Roosevelt put it, “The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first…”
Yesterday, 28 Republican members of Congress, led by Senator J.D. Vance (R- Ohio) ignored this when sending a letter to Shalanda Young, Director, Office of Management and Budget.
The letter asserted, “It would be an absurd abdication of congressional responsibility to grant” the Administration’s request fort additional aid to Ukraine, specifically an August 10, 2023 request for additional supplemental appropriations, in which the Administration asked Congress to provide another $24 billion in security, economic, and humanitarian assistance related to the war in Ukraine.
The Republicans couched their opposition to additional expenditure for the war in Ukraine as opposition to “…an open-ended commitment to supporting the war in Ukraine of an indeterminate nature, based on a strategy that is unclear, to achieve a goal yet to be articulated to the public or the Congress,” but that’s a ruse. The reality is they want to undermine US support for Ukraine.
It all reminds me of the America Firsters and their isolationist pressure against American entry into World War II. “The doctrine that we must enter the wars of Europe in order to defend America will be fatal to our nation if we follow it,” Charles Lindbergh, a leading voice of the America First movement said in 1941.
Lindbergh was wrong then and the 28 Republicans sending the letter to Shalanda Young are wrong now.
Whenever there’s an article about the West supplying more sophisticated and lethal weapons to Ukraine, there’s almost always a reference to hesitation because escalating the conflict could risk a direct confrontation with Russia.
As much as political and military leaders might want to argue against the risk of such a confrontation, the reality on the ground, and in the air, is that it is already occurring.
“Europeans were inspired by the visit of U.S. President Joe Biden to Warsaw and Kyiv in February. Biden reaffirmed that while the United States is far away, it is committed to freedom in Europe—and understands, as we do, that Ukraine is fighting for the freedom of all of us. Ukraine does not want to be at war with Russia. Nor do we. But it has become increasingly clear that Russia decided a long time ago that it is at war with us.”
Evidence of Russian aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere is pervasive.
Over the past several months, heavily armed Russian warplanes have repeatedly violated longstanding agreements with the U.S. by flying dangerously close to American jet fighters over Syria and over U.S. forces working in the country, US officials have said.
Russia and the United States have an agreement recognizing certain zones where the US can operate against ISIL (ISIS) fighters in Syrian areas where neither the U.S. coalition with local Kurdish troops nor the Syrian army exerts full control. Russia came to the aid of Syria’s president, Bashar Al-Assad, in 2015 in the Syrian civil war.
In March, an armed Russian Su-27 Flanker jet fighter crashed into a U.S. Reaper drone after spraying it with jet fuel on Tuesday morning over the Black Sea. The drone fell into international waters in the Black Sea.
Despite established rules designed to prevent any sort of conflict between Russian and U.S. forces operating parallel to one another in Syria, Russian pilots are locking onto U.S. aircraft with their radars and taking other provocative actions on a daily basis, according to officials with U.S. Air Forces Central Command, Task & Purpose news reported on May 2, 2023.
A Russian Su-35 Flanker fighter jet is seen maneuvering unprofessionally within 2,000 feet of a U.S. Air Force fighter jet during an intercept in Coalition Force airspace over Syria on April 18, 2023. (U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Jermaine Ayers).Source: Task & Purpose
“Russian forces have violated deconfliction protocols with Coalition forces almost 100 times in two months, conducting armed overflights of ground forces in Syria 26 times, flying within 500 feet of U.S. aircraft, and in the last week, jamming U.S. aircraft electromagnetic systems,” Air Force Lt Gen Alexus Grynkewich, head of AFCENT, told Task & Purpose. “These behaviors significantly interfere with AFCENT’s ability to execute operations safely and effectively and increase the likelihood of miscalculation.”
According to the Rand Corporation, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley reportedly has kept a list of “U.S. interests and strategic objectives” in the Ukrainian crisis since late 2021 which includes: “contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine.” That has already been violated.
NBC News reported on April 11 that Ukrainian agents have pursued drone attacks inside Belarus and Russia and leaders in Kyiv have considered further targets outside Ukraine, according to recently leaked secret Pentagon documents.
One document marked “Top Secret,” noted attacks allegedly orchestrated by Kyiv on a military airfield outside Minsk, Belarus, and a gas compressor station in the Moscow suburbs.
The increasing tension with Russia may play a part in what appears to be an erosion of American support for Ukraine as the battle goes on.
In WWII, The United States declared War on Japan on Dec. 8, 1941. “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory,” President Roosevelt declared. On December 11, Congress approved a resolution declaring war with Germany. The unconditional surrender of the German Third Reich was signed on Monday, May 7, 1945. Japan signed an official Instrument of surrender on September 2, 1945.
In other words, for almost five years the Americans persevered in the face of a brutal war with international repercussions.
Russia took control of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in March 2014. It escalated the fight in Feb. 2022 when it invaded and occupied larger portions of Ukraine. President Biden declared the attack “unprovoked and unjustified”, issued severe sanctions against top Kremlin officials and began a NATO-led military assistance program to Ukraine. In other words, aggressive U.S. military involvement in the Ukraine war has extended for slightly more than 13 months.
Yet many Americans are already wearying of the conflict.
An April Wall Street Journal poll found that while the number of voters who believe the U.S. is providing the right amount of support has remained stable, at about 35%, more and more think Washington is too involved.
About 38% of voters said the U.S. was doing too much to help Ukraine, a big jump from 6% in March 2022. Meanwhile, only 20% said the U.S. should do more, down from 46% in March 2022.The erosion in support is particularly noticeable among Republicans. About 60% of Republicans said the U.S. was doing too much to support Ukraine, up from 48% in October 2022, compared with just 15% of Democrats. Even 42% of independents said the U.S. was doing too much.
In my view, this erosion of support is a dangerous trend. If we do not see this through Russia will be emboldened, the independence of former Soviet Republics will be threatened, China’s aggressiveness will be encouraged and western influence on the global stage will be challenged.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent French intellectual, explained why he was dodging Russian sniper fire in Ukraine to make a documentary there. “In Ukraine, I had the feeling for the first time that the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren, might collapse,” he said.
Yes, it might… if we lose our will to win in Ukraine.
$20 Billion: The U.S. commitment of military aid to Ukraine under President Biden “to help Ukraine preserve its territorial integrity, secure its borders, and improve interoperability with NATO.”
$420 Billion: Amount of the federal budget that provided benefits to veterans and former career employees of the federal government, both civilian and military, in FY2022, which ended on Sept. 30, 2022.
$36 Billion: Biden payout to the underfunded union-run Central States Pension Fund to shore up more than 200 distressed plans; approved as part of a stimulus bill intended to reduce economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic.
$4.8 Billion: The amount candidates, party committees, leadership PACs and joint fundraising committees spent on the 2022 midterm elections as of Oct. 19, 2022. Campaigns spent almost $1 billion on digital ads alone.
Bodies of Russian soldiers lie outside a school destroyed not far from the center of Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. SERGEY BOBOK/AFP via Getty Images.Source: New York Post, March 2, 2022
Russia’s war in Ukraine is showing that its gotten a lot harder to keep the homefront in the dark.
For a long time after invading Afghanistan in 1979, the Soviet government told its citizens that its soldiers were there fulfilling their duty, building hospitals and schools, planting trees and helping the Afghans build a socialist state. It wasn’t until 1990 that a book written in Russian by Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian Journalist, disclosed the full reality of the brutal, horrific war. I read the book a long time ago, but it is still relevant.
“All we know about this war…is what ‘they’ consider it safe for us to know,” Alexievich wrote in Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. “We have been protected from seeing ourselves as we really are and from the fear that such understanding would bring.”
In an Introduction to a 1992 English translation of Zinky Boys, Larry Heinemann, a college professor and Vietnam vet, wrote of how the book revealed Soviet efforts to keep news of the war and the dead from the people at home:
Letters were heavily censored and photographs were not permitted. So thorough was the censorship that few battlefield photographs by the soldiers survive. Soviet veterans of the war were told bluntly and firmly not to talk about what was going on – a pall of denial by the government not unlike the experience of Vietnam GIs.
The corpses of Soviet soldiers were sent home in sealed zinc coffins, accompanied by military escorts with orders that the coffins not be opened. The families, in their bottomless grief, could never be positively certain that their sons and brothers and husbands were actually dead and their bodies actually present in the coffins.
No explanation for the deaths was given; funerals were conducted at night to keep down the crowds; tombstones were inscribed with the words ‘Died fulfilling his international duty’, which became the euphemism for Killed-in-Action.
Russia also tried to smother information when it seized Crimea and went into eastern Ukraine with unmarked troops in 2014 and 2015.
“Authorities at first denied any involvement, then suggested any Russian soldiers there were on vacation.,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “When Ukraine captured a unit of paratroopers, Russian officials said they had got lost and strayed over the border.”
It’s a lot harder now for Putin and his minions to hide the realities of the Ukraine invasion from the Russian people, including the mothers whose children are dying in the fighting.
Look for Yours, a Ukrainian channel on the Telegram messaging app, is one outlet making sure of that.
Today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal describes the coverage by the channel and a website, run by officials from Ukraine’s interior ministry, in all its horror.
“In one, the body of a man in camouflage uniform lies rigid in a snowy field, with mangled flesh and blood where his face used to be. “Unidentified,” reads the caption…Some pictures and videos on Look for Yours depict gruesome scenes of charred corpses and twisted bodies amid wrecked vehicles. They also show videos of prisoners and identification documents of the captured and dead.
“Unfortunately, it’s not possible to recognize the person in every photograph,” says Viktor Andrusiv, a Ukrainian interior ministry official, speaking in Russian in a video on Look for Yours. “Those are the horrors of war launched by your president.”
The Ukrainian channel shows videos of Russian prisoners, including several saying that their commanders abandoned them and that they had been sent to Belarus for military exercises last month not knowing that they would be invading Ukraine.
On the Look for Yours website, Andrusiv appealed to relatives of Russian soldiers. “Do everything you can to end this war, and so that your children, husbands and sons don’t die in our country,” he said.
Russia has long tried to obscure the extent of its military operations in Ukraine, which included its seizing of Crimea and direct military interventions in eastern Ukraine with unmarked troops in 2014 and 2015.
Authorities at first denied any involvement, then suggested any Russian soldiers there were on vacation. When Ukraine captured a unit of paratroopers, Russian officials said they had got lost and strayed over the border.
John Mueller, in War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (1973), used data principally from the Vietnam and Korean wars to argue that publics will rally behind presidents who go to war, but that these rallies will eventually fade and support for intervention dissipate as home-country casualties mount over time—something known as the casualty aversion hypothesis. “Some historians have argued that the United States lost the Vietnam War not only because casualties mounted but also because television turned the conflict into a “living room war” that exacerbated the public’s casualty sensitivity by making the war’s human costs more vivid.”
Although some have challenged this proposition, the US government believed there were hazards to exposing the public to the reality of war when images of dead GIs were almost entirely forbidden in American media during WWI and WWII.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could now be the “first social media war,” as individuals on the ground in the besieged nation are able to share real-time reports from the frontlines, Peter Sucui argues in Forbes. “That ability to post updates, share videos could help ensure that the first casualty of this war isn’t the truth.”
Reuters has reported how some of social media’s youngest users have experienced the Ukrainian conflict from the front lines on TikTok.
“Videos of people huddling and crying in windowless bomb shelters, explosions blasting through urban settings and missiles streaking across Ukrainian cities took over the app from its usual offerings of fashion, fitness and dance videos. Ukrainian social media influencers uploaded bleak scenes of themselves wrapped in blankets in underground bunkers and army tanks rolling down residential streets…”
Reuters noted that TikTok users have also urged Russian users, in particular, to join anti-war efforts.
Pictures of massacred Ukrainian civilians and dead Russian soldiers lying in the snow on social media may prove to be Putin’s Achilles’ heel.
Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security advisor, had a lucrative $530,000 lobbying contract with Inovo BV, a Netherlands-based consulting firm owned by a Turkish national.
Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s former business partner Rick Gates have pleaded not guilty to federal charges, including failing to register for lobbying they did for Viktor Yanukovych, the thoroughly corrupt former president of Ukraine, and his pro-Russian political party. A popular uprising ousted Yanukovych in 2014.
Anti-government protesters clash with the police at the central Kiev square in the Ukraine
Thousands of Syrians were dead and Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey were hosting Syrian refugees as Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, pursued a war to new heights of brutality.
Syrian refugees.
But the war and refugees weren’t U.S. lobbying firm Brown Lloyd James’ concern. For a fee of $5,000 a month, the firm promoted a positive image for Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma. The firm’s efforts paid off when American Vogue magazine published “A Rose in the Desert”, a fawning article about Asma, her British roots, designer fashions and good works.
“Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.” Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert, Vogue.
The Vogue story praised the Assads as a “wildly democratic” family-focused couple who vacationed in Europe, fostered Christianity, were at ease with American celebrities, made theirs the “safest country in the Middle East,” and wanted to give Syria a “brand essence.”
American lobbying firms and so-called think tanks have shown time and time again that they have no compunction about fronting for vile foreign donors or representing foreign countries trying to minimize criticism of their human rights abuses or advance positions potentially inimical to American interests.
At least 77 U.S. firms have represented 170 governmental or pseudo-governmental entities of the Soviet Union/Russia trying to influence U.S. policy since 1950, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Early this year, the Egyptian government hired Washington, D.C.-based firm Weber Shandwick and then-subsidiary Cassidy & Associates to enhance public perception of Egypt and its intelligence agency.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi
Since Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi took office as president, the internal intelligence agency, Amn al-Watany, has lived up to its reputation for harassing veteran activists, worker organizations, professional unions and what remains of the student activist movement, according to World Politics Review, which analyzes critical global trends. Prominent dissidents—including iconic figures from the 2011 uprisings, such as the leaders of the April 6 Youth Movement—continue to be held in prisons or are subject to surveillance and control by the state security forces.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) governs registration of agents for foreign interests. In its 2017 FARA filings, BLJ Worldwide said it represents the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF) a non-profit based in Hong Kong that describes itself as engaging in promoting relations and facilitating exchanges between China and the United States.
According to the filing, BLJ was very busy promoting China’s interests in the first half of 2017. The firm supported trips to China by reporters from all these U.S. media outlets: Slate; Quartz NFR; The Daily Beast; NBC News; Bloomberg; Businessweek; The New Yorker; The Des Moines Register; the Grand Rapids Free Press; the Chicago Tribune; and Independent Journal Review.
BLJ also hosted a dinner for representatives from CNN, Financial Times, the Economist, Associated Press, Bloomberg and CNBC.
AL-Monitor, which analyzes the trends shaping the future of the Middle East, won the 2017 Online Journalism Award for Explanatory Reporting for a series on how the Gulf States have been throwing money left and right in an effort to undercut Qatar in the eyes of President Donald Trump and undo Obama’s fledgling reconciliation with Iran.
According to Maplight, a non-profit which works to reveal the influence of money in politics, lobbyists for foreign interests gave more than $4.5 million to federal lawmakers and candidates during the 2016 election. Foreign lobbyists and their firms’ political action committees were also responsible for packaging a total of $5.9 million in donations for candidates and party committees, through an influence-enhancing tactic known as “bundling.”
Because the donations come from foreign governments’ U.S.-based lobbyists, they effectively circumvent American laws designed to bar direct foreign donations, Maplight reported. Under federal law, foreign nationals are prohibited from donating to any federal, state, or local campaigns, or political parties. But foreign governments frequently hire U.S. citizens to represent their interests, and those people face no such contribution ban.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, thinks he has a way to address all this. He wants to strengthen FARA. To that end, he has introduced legislation that would substantially increase FARA disclosure requirements.
But in my view the issue isn’t just disclosure. It’s also the willingness of American businesses to put the interests of foreign powers over those of the United States.
As citizens of the United States we should respect others and try to understand different viewpoints, but that doesn’t mean American lobbyists should take foreign money to advance the influence of foreign thugs and undermine U.S. interests.
ThinkingOregon 