Posted by bagchucker on 3/11/2022 11:39:00 AM (view original):
i read every one of these heather cox richardson posts so far

every couple days or whatever

i think i mighta disagreed with her once

she might be my opinion piece go-to

i give her a A

all credit to rsp

Thanks...not so old man.

Douche-o can take all the shots he wants but I don't post her because I agree with everything she says. I post her because it's always an intelligent and well-informed opinion that consistently leads me to learn more. She's thought-provoking to say the least. If you read what she writes you'll find that you come away a little more informed and a little bit smarter without fail, regardless of political preconceptions.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

March 12, 2022 (Saturday)

In our history, the United States has gone through turning points when we have had to adjust our democratic principles to new circumstances. The alternative is to lose those principles to a small group of people who insist that democracy is outdated and must be replaced by a government run by a few leaders or, now, by a single man.

The Declaration of Independence asserted as “self-evident” that all people are created equal and that God and the laws of nature have given them certain fundamental rights. Those include—but are not limited to—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The role of government was to make sure people enjoyed these rights, and thus governments are legitimate only if those they rule consent to that government.

The Founders’ concept that all men were created equal and had a right to consent to the government under which they lived, the heart of the Declaration of Independence, was revolutionary. For all that it excluded Indigenous Americans, Black colonists, and all women, the very idea that men were not born into a certain place in a hierarchy and could create a government that reflected such an idea upended traditional western beliefs.

From the beginning, though, there were plenty of Americans who doubled down on the idea of human hierarchies in which a few superior men should rule the rest. They argued that the Constitution was designed to protect property alone and that as a few men accumulated wealth, they should run things. Permitting those without property to have a say in their government would mean they could demand that the government provide things that might infringe on the rights of property-owners.

These undercurrents have always tossed our republic, but four times in our history, new pressures have brought these two ideas into open conflict. In the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s and in the present, we have had to fit our democracy to new circumstances.

In the 1850s, the pressures of western expansion forced Americans to figure out what, exactly, they wanted the nation to stand for. Northern states, whose mixed economy needed educated workers, and thus widely shared economic and political power, opposed the hierarchical system of human enslavement. Southern states, whose economy rested on the production of raw materials by enslaved workers, opposed equality. Aside from occasional flare-ups, the two systems had muddled along together for sixty years, despite the reality that the enslavers were shrinking farther and farther into the minority as population in the North boomed.

The U.S. acquisition of western land with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo opened the opportunity for enslavers to address their weakening position by dominating the national government. If they could spread enslavement into the new territories, they could overawe the North in Congress and pass laws to make their system national. As South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond put it: "I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal.”’

When Congress, under extraordinary pressure from the pro-southern administration, passed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and letting slavery spread into the West, northerners of all parties woke up to the looming loss of their democratic government. A railroad lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, remembered how northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach---a scythe---a pitchfork---a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver” to push back against the slaveowning oligarchy. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

Slavery apologists urged white voters not to worry about Black Americans held in slavery, but Lincoln urged Americans to come together to protect the Declaration of Independence. "I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop?... If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!”

When voters agreed with Lincoln and elected him to the presidency in 1860, southerners tried to create their own nation based on human inequality. As Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens, soon to be the vice president of the Confederacy, explained in March 1861: “Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

In office, Lincoln reached back to the Declaration—written “four score and seven years ago”— and charged Americans to “resolve that…this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The victory of the United States government in the Civil War ended the power of enslavers in the government, but new crises in the future would revive the conflict between the idea of equality and a nation of hierarchies.

In the 1890s, the rise of industrialism led to the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie celebrated the “contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer,” for although industrialization created “castes,” it created “wonderful material development,” and “while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.” Those at the top were there because of their “special ability,” and anyone seeking a fairer distribution of wealth was a “Socialist or Anarchist…attacking the foundation upon which civilization rests.” Instead, he said, society worked best when a few wealthy men ran the world, for “wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.”

Once again, people of all political parties came together to reclaim American democracy. Although Democrat Grover Cleveland was the first to complain that “corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters,” it was Republican Theodore Roosevelt who is now popularly associated with the development of a government that regulated the excesses of big business. He complained about that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” and ushered in the Progressive Era with government regulation of business to protect the ability of individuals to participate in American society as equals.

The rise of a global economy in the twentieth century repeated the pattern. After socialists took control of Russia in 1917, American men of property insisted that any restrictions on their control of resources or the government were a form of “Bolshevism,” but in the 1930s a worldwide depression brought voters of all parties behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the government to provide a “New Deal for the American people.” His government regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. Then, after Black and Brown veterans coming home from World War II demanded equality, that New Deal government, under Democratic president Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, worked to end racial and, later, gender hierarchies in American society.

Now, once again, we are at an inflection point. The rise of global oligarchs and the internet, which enables those oligarchs to spread disinformation, has made significant numbers of American voters once again slide away from democracy to embrace the idea that the country would work better with a few leaders making the rules for the rest of us. In nineteen states, Republican-dominated legislatures have passed laws that restrict the vote and entrench minority rule, even up to allowing state legislatures to overturn election results. If that is permitted to stand, that minority can choose our president, and it is increasingly backing one single man, one individual, to rule over the rest of us.

If history is any guide, we are at the point when voters of all parties must push back, to say that we do, in fact, believe in the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence, that all people are created equal, and that our government is legitimate only if we have a say in it.

GREAT column!! Thx for posting it up RSP!!!

History.............if ONLY we could actually learn from it!!

POLITICS / NATE JACKSON

Democrats’ Scheme to Win the Midterms

They’ve gerrymandered several states to make retaining their House majority considerably easier.

Two Democrat Redistricting Wins at SCOTUS Might Turn out to Be Pyrrhic Victory for the Left

Arkansas Redistricting Map Challenge Is Dismissed by a Federal Judge

Excerpt from the Sat. Mar. 12 article:

Now, once again, we are at an inflection point. The rise of global oligarchs and the internet, which enables those oligarchs to spread disinformation, has made significant numbers of American voters once again slide away from democracy to embrace the idea that the country would work better with a few leaders making the rules for the rest of us. In nineteen states, Republican-dominated legislatures have passed laws that restrict the vote and entrench minority rule, even up to allowing state legislatures to overturn election results. If that is permitted to stand, that minority can choose our president, and it is increasingly backing one single man, one individual, to rule over the rest of us.

And then there's real life:

County GOP calls for election administrator to be fired after 10,000 mail-in ballots are "found" days past election
KAREN TOWNSEND Mar 08, 2022 6:01 PM ET

Heather Cox Richardson

March 13, 2022 (Sunday)

Russian president Vladimir Putin has asked China for help in his war against Ukraine, according to U.S. officials. Observers see this as a defining moment for China and the direction it wants to take in the twenty-first century. In what might be a sign of how China will react to that request, the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said he had never heard of it. "The high priority now is to prevent the tense situation from escalating or even getting out of control,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russian forces struck a military facility in Ukraine about 15 miles from the Polish border. Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and by the terms of the treaty establishing NATO, “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and the parties will retaliate accordingly.
Biden has repeatedly warned that NATO will respond to any attack on a member country, but Russian state TV continues to insist that no NATO country will actually help another. This assertion has observers concerned that Putin might widen the war to involve NATO, which would give him the legitimacy he needs to justify his war of aggression.
Others say that these events indicate weakness and frustration on Putin’s part. As the Russian invasion has gone more slowly than he had apparently anticipated, the Russian military is firing indiscriminately at civilian targets, evidently trying to terrorize the country into submission. But the troops are underfed and undersupplied, and there appear to be too few of them to subdue Ukraine. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press says that Russia has opened 14 recruitment centers in Syria.
The strike in western Ukraine near the Polish border killed at least 35 people and wounded more than 100. The facility received western arms shipments. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the strike “does not come as a surprise” but “shows…that Vladimir Putin is frustrated by the fact that his forces are not making the kind of progress that he thought that they would make against major cities including Kyiv, that he’s expanding the number of targets, that he’s lashing out and he’s trying to cause damage in every part of the country.”
Sullivan also said that the U.S. is very concerned that Russia will use chemical weapons. It has falsely accused Ukraine and the U.S. of preparing chemical weapons, which might well be a warning that Putin intends to use them himself.
Putin, of course, has used chemical weapons before, most recently against opposition leader Alexei Navalny. His goons also did so on March 4, 2018, in the U.K, in a poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. That poisoning seemed to be a sign that Putin was confident enough in his power that he was willing to kill someone in England and dare then–prime minister Theresa May to do something about it.
What happened next seemed to illustrate Putin’s growing security in the face of weak U.S. and European resistance. May condemned the attack, as did U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But May couldn’t do much because Brexit had isolated England and then-president Trump refused to back her. He promptly fired Tillerson, along with one of Tillerson’s deputies who contradicted the White House version of why Tillerson was out. Russian state TV then warned May not to threaten a country armed with nuclear warheads. And, just about then, Republicans in the House exonerated Trump from “colluding” with Russia in the 2016 election, outright rejecting the evidence and findings of our own intelligence community.
There remains a lot to learn not only about why former president Trump allowed such aggression, but also about why members of the Republican Party were willing to look the other way when U.S. policy under Trump benefited Russia—when the U.S. abruptly withdrew from northern Syria in October 2019, for example, or when Trump withheld money appropriated for Ukraine’s defense to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him rig the 2020 election.
At least part of the answer to that question is the disinformation campaign launched by Russia to undermine our democracy. False stories in the media have divided us and convinced many people in the U.S. of things that are simply lies.
Former representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) released a video today echoing Russia’s false story of “25 to 30 U.S. funded bio labs in Ukraine,” and demanded a ceasefire to secure them.
Later this afternoon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted: "This is preposterous. It's the kind of disinformation operation we've seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.” Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) slammed Gabbard for “parroting false Russian propaganda.”
David Corn of Mother Jones today broke another news story: a Russian government agency distributed a 12-page document to media outlets telling them, “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally….”
The call to feature Carlson is in the section titled “Victory in Information War.”

i love Heather CR

she ain no beauty

but she calls it the way i see it

she has a way of saying



"the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party" for instance

HA!

trump stock

DWAC

go head on check out the chart

war started last week o February

big orange runs again he is gonna get smashed smoked and smithereed

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

March 14, 2022 (Monday)

Today, Russia continued its offensive against Ukraine, striking hard at civilians in Kyiv and Mariupol. The Russian army is gaining ground, but it appears to be sustaining massive losses of personnel and equipment which, in turn, is making leaders focus on grinding Ukraine into submission through sheer brutality.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky will speak virtually to Congress on Wednesday morning. They said: “The Congress remains unwavering in our commitment to supporting Ukraine as they face [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s cruel and diabolical aggression, and to passing legislation to cripple and isolate the Russian economy as well as deliver humanitarian, security and economic assistance to Ukraine. We look forward to the privilege of welcoming President Zelenskyy’s address to the House and Senate and to convey our support to the people of Ukraine as they bravely defend democracy.”

American focus on the horrors unleashed on Ukraine has clarified our own struggle between democracy and authoritarianism here at home.

In the Freedom House 2022 report on the dire threat to global freedom, released last month, authors Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz noted that “democracies are being harmed from within by illiberal forces, including unscrupulous politicians willing to corrupt and shatter the very institutions that brought them to power.” Their primary example was that of the United States, which “has fallen below its traditional peers on key democratic indicators, including [presidential] elections, freedom from improper political influence, and equal treatment of minority groups.”

Repucci and Slipowitz explained that in the U.S. and elsewhere, “Undemocratic leaders and their supporters… have worked to reshape or manipulate political systems, in part by playing on voters’ fears of change in their way of life…. They have promoted the idea that, once in power, their responsibility is only to their own demographic or partisan base, disregarding other interests and segments of society and warping the institutions in their care so as to prolong their rule. Along the way, the democratic principles of pluralism, equality, and accountability—as well as basic stewardship and public service—have been lost, endangering the rights and well-being of all residents.”

To solidify their hold on power, they have spread distrust in elections, as former president Donald Trump famously did in the 2020 election season even before his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, claiming that he would only lose if there were fraud. National, state, and local officials lined up behind Trump to try to overturn the election results, spreading the Big Lie that Biden’s election was illegitimate. The result was the assault on the U.S. Capitol.

That failed, but those who backed it, as Repucci and Slipowitz note, “continue to exert significant influence on the US political system,” while those “who refused to display loyalty to the former leader faced political marginalization, severe intraparty pressure, and outright threats of violence.” They continue to push the lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election and must be stopped before the 2022 midterms.

To that end, after Biden took office, 19 states passed 34 laws restrict­ing access to voting, and six states launched illegitimate partisan reviews of election results. The trend continues: according to the Brennan Center for Justice, an inde­pend­ent, nonpar­tisan law and policy organ­iz­a­tion defending U.S. demo­cracy and justice, as of January 14, 2022, lawmakers in at least 27 states have backed 250 bills with restrict­ive provi­sions. The Big Lie has also led to the replacement of nonpartisan election boards with partisans, changing systems in place for decades.

“It is now impossible to ignore the damage to democracy’s foundations and reputation,” Repucci and Slipowitz wrote in February.

But now, Putin’s war on Ukraine has clarified the contest between democracy and authoritarianism even as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is uncovering just how close we came to our own authoritarian coup.

This confluence is uncomfortable for a number of Republicans, who see Putin’s declared support for traditional values and the implicit white supremacy in that support as part of a global conservative movement they like. Since the 1980s, U.S. evangelicals have embraced Russian Orthodox leaders concerned with the falling birthrate of white people. Since at least 2013, when Putin formally began an attack on LGBTQ rights, sparking outrage in liberal democracies, that embrace has become more widespread. With that attack, Putin claimed he was putting Russia at the forefront of conservative opposition to "genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance" which he said "equals good and evil," goals right-wing Americans applauded.

As Putin has come to represent to them an attack on the secular social norms and civil rights embraced by democracies, Republicans have increasingly openly admired his declared stand for “traditional values.” In 2014, shortly after the Ukrainians rose up and ousted Russian-allied president Viktor Yanukovych, who had been installed with the help of American political operative Paul Manafort, Republicans began to back Putin over then-president Barack Obama. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham praised Putin’s attack on gay rights for protecting children from “the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda,” while Obama and his attorney general “have turned their backs on God and His standards, and many in the Congress are following the administration’s lead. This is shameful.”

Trump’s pressure to shift U.S. foreign policy away from our traditional democratic allies and toward Russia was almost certainly a reflection of the financial benefits of dealing with oligarchs and illicit money, but others undoubtedly were willing to follow because they believed they were defending “traditional values” and children, especially as stories of pedophilia rings flooded the internet.

But now, Putin’s vicious attack on Ukraine has stripped away the unspoken link between “traditional values” and authoritarianism.

Some right-wing leaders nonetheless cannot quit him: Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s monologues are so supportive of Putin they are being replayed on Russian state television, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has called Zelensky a thug and says democratic Ukraine is “incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,” and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were part of a conference in which white nationalists cheered on Putin’s attack on Ukraine and chanted his name.

But others recognize that they have been caught on the wrong side of history. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, Americans believe by a margin of 70 to 11 that Putin is committing war crimes. At the same time, the findings of the January 6 committee reveal that the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party appears to have been willing to overturn our own liberal democracy so long as it could get what it wanted.

A tape today revealed that Cawthorn called into a right-wing talk show on January 6th and said he had brought “multiple weapons” with him that day, suggesting he had known what was planned. Also today, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, appeared to be trying to get ahead of a story about her participation in the events of January 6 when she told her story to the right-wing Free Beacon. It reported: “She did not help organize the White House rally that preceded the riot at the Capitol. She did attend the rally, but got cold and left early. And most importantly, in her view, her involvement with the event has no bearing on the work of her husband, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.”

How will all this play out? Trump’s attorney general William Barr is currently trying to sell his new book on a tour trying to whitewash his own participation in the Big Lie, but while he blamed Trump for trying to overthrow our democracy, he nonetheless suggested he would vote for him if he were the Republican nominee in 2024, “because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party.”

Heather Cox Richardson

March 15, 2022 (Tuesday)

“I want to thank the Russian Academy for this Lifetime Achievement Award.”
That was former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s response to the news that her name was among those of the people Russia sanctioned today, forbidding their entry into Russia and freezing any Russian assets they might have. Clinton, of course, was the one who warned in 2016 that then-candidate Donald Trump would be “[Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s puppet” if he were elected.
What jumped out about that Russian announcement, though, was that it singled out not American lawmakers in general, but Democrats, and for that matter, Democrats who were targets of the right-wing propaganda machine. So the “sanctions” hit President Joe Biden (or, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted, his deceased father, since they missed that the current president is Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.), Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as Psaki. They also covered former secretary of state Clinton and Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, both of whom are private citizens and involved in present-day politics only in that they are targets of the modern right-wing media.
The list made it clear that Putin and his U.S. supporters are engaged in a propaganda campaign.
In contrast, the U.S. extended sanctions today to Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who turned to Putin to shore up his own waning popularity before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and who is now stuck on Putin’s side. The administration also sanctioned Lukashenko’s wife, Halina, and a number of Russians targeted for human rights abuses, along with 11 military leaders.
That the tide is turning against Putin was indicated today by former president Trump’s new tone on the Russian president today. While it was notable that Trump would never criticize Putin, even after his invasion of Ukraine, tonight Trump told Washington Examiner reporter David M. Drucker, “I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”
The leaders of Poland, Czechia, and Slovenia thumbed their noses at Putin today when they visited Kyiv itself by train to show their support for Ukraine. They traveled to the city despite ongoing Russian shelling that has taken countless lives, including those of five journalists documenting the atrocities.
Those atrocities convinced the U.S. Senate today to pass a resolution condemning Putin as a war criminal, while a new U.S. funding bill appropriated an additional $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine.
The attack on democracy at home is not being as clearly condemned.
We are starting to see the effects of Russian money on our own political system. Today, we learned that Russian oligarch Andrey Muraviev has been indicted by a federal grand jury for funneling $1 million in political donations through Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to candidates in the 2018 election. A $50,000 donation apparently went to a political action committee called the “Friends of Ron DeSantis Political Action Committee” in June 2018. After DeSantis won the election, Muraviev and his partner texted congratulatons* to Parnas and Fruman on “victory in Florida.”
Today, the Republican National Committee sued its own email vendor, Salesforce, to try to block it from responding to a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The committee subpoenaed information about fundraising emails sent by Salesforce, soliciting money by lying that the 2020 election had been stolen. The committee is interested in seeing if any of that money actually went to the causes for which it was solicited, and in following how those emails, with their false, inflammatory messages, encouraged the attack on January 6. The RNC says it is suing “in order to protect the constitutional rights of the Republican Party and its millions of supporters.”
The Freedom to Vote Act would stop the flood of dark money into our elections by requiring the disclosure of the identities of any person or organization donating $10,000 or more to campaign activity. But while the Senate easily passed legislation today to make daylight saving time permanent beginning in 2023 by voice vote, it cannot pass voting rights legislation since all Republicans oppose it. (The daylight savings law will now go to the House.)
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky will speak to Congress tomorrow morning and is expected to ask for more help. Lawmakers have expressed frustration that the Biden administration is not, in their view, moving quickly enough to defend Ukraine, and his speech is expected to increase criticism of the Biden administration.
That criticism is coming primarily from Republican lawmakers who, of course, refused to remove Trump when he withheld support for Ukraine in 2019 in an attempt to get Zelensky to attack Joe Biden, but who are now saying that Biden is not defending Ukraine powerfully enough. Their insistence that the U.S. move unilaterally against Russia plays to our natural sympathies for the suffering country of Ukraine, but it is also a back-door attack on Biden’s extraordinarily successful multilateral approach to Russia’s aggression.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) makes decisions only through consensus. By moving without NATO, the U.S. would undercut NATO and the global consensus that Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have taken incredible care to create and that is now crushing the Russian economy and isolating Putin. The administration’s coalition against Putin is extraordinarily delicately balanced, and that balance will collapse if the U.S. heads off on its own in a resurrection of the unilateral action that the U.S. has embraced for the past forty years.
After Zelensky’s address, Biden is expected to announce another $800 million in security assistance from the U.S. to Ukraine, putting the total at $1 billion in the last week and $2 billion total since Biden took office. Biden announced today he will head to Brussels, Belgium, next week to meet with NATO leaders about Russia’s war on Ukraine. He is expected to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to NATO.
*I deliberately misspelled this word because it was triggering Facebook's usual red boldface for when the word is used.

Heather Cox Richardson

March 16, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, Russia’s war on Ukraine gave us a penetrating snapshot of democracy and autocracy.
This morning, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress virtually; his speech was live streamed to the American people. Looking tired, he wore a green military tee shirt and was unshaven, sitting next to a large Ukrainian flag, a visual representation of his besieged country.
Speaking from Kyiv, Zelensky emphasized that he and Ukrainians were fighting to be free, to preserve their democracy, and he reminded Americans of our own declared principles.
“Russia has attacked not just us, not just our land, not just our cities. It went on a brutal offensive against our values, basic human values. It threw tanks and planes against our freedom, against our right to live freely in our own country, choosing our own future, against our desire for happiness, against our national dreams, just like the same dreams you have, you Americans.”
He urged Americans to remember our own darkest days, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and begged for a no-fly zone. Knowing that is unlikely—it would initiate a world war—he asked for planes to protect the skies over Ukraine. He thanked the U.S. and President Joe Biden for their support, but asked for more. In addition to continuing economic sanctions, he called for new institutions and new alliances to respond to provocations more quickly than the world has done for Ukraine.
It is, indeed, unimaginable what destruction Putin has rained down on Ukraine in less than three weeks: just today we learned that Russians deliberately bombed a theater where more than 1000 people, including many children, had taken shelter, apparently revisiting the technique of targeting children and civilians he developed in Chechnya and Syria. Zelensky showed a six-minute video of the destruction in Ukraine, showing how a country that only three weeks ago was full of people just going about their lives has turned into a war zone.
“Peace in your country doesn’t depend anymore only on you and your people,” Zelensky said. “It depends on those next to you and those who are strong. Strong doesn’t mean big. Strong is brave and ready to fight for the life of his citizens and citizens of the world. For human rights, for freedom, for the right to live decently, and to die when your time comes, and not when it’s wanted by someone else, by your neighbor.”
“Today, the Ukrainian people are defending not only Ukraine,” Zelensky said, “we are fighting for the values of Europe and the world, sacrificing our lives in the name of the future. That’s why today the American people are helping not just Ukraine, but Europe and the world to give the planet the life to keep justice in history.” He called attention to how very young he is to be leading the global fight for self-determination, and the extraordinary weight he is bearing. “Now, I am almost 45 years old; today, my age stopped when the hearts of more than 100 children stopped beating. I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths. And this is my main issue as the leader of my people, great Ukrainians.”
“And as the leader of my nation, I am addressing…President Biden, you are the leader of… your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world; being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace. Thank you. Glory to Ukraine. Thank you for your support. Thank you.”
In contrast, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a public speech that Russia specialists saw as the launch of a fascist dictatorship. He continued to defend his invasion of Ukraine and claimed he was in an existential war for his country’s survival. He warned his people that the West was counting on “the so-called fifth column, on national traitors,” to destroy Russia. He identified those people as a culturally weak global elite who did not identify “with our people, not with Russia.” They believe they are better than Russians, he said, and would do anything to keep their lifestyle.
The West, he said, is trying to split Russians and is using that “fifth column” to achieve its goal of destroying Russia. He called for Russians to distinguish true patriots from “scum and traitors”—political opponents and dissidents—and to get rid of the latter like bugs. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
Russia specialist Anne Applebaum tweeted: "Putin's call for a ‘self-purification’ of Russian society can have only one intention: To remind Russians of Stalin and his ‘purges.’ He wants them to be haunted by dark, ancestral memories, to remember their grandparents' stories and to be petrified with fear.” Indeed, Russian authorities promptly launched a crackdown against anyone who showed any sympathy for western culture, beginning with a popular lifestyle blogger who had expressed opposition to the war on Instagram.
Putin’s show of force internally may well reflect his weakness externally. The Pentagon estimates conservatively that the Russians have lost a staggering 7000 soldiers in less than three weeks in the invasion of Ukraine, more than the U.S. lost in 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Officials estimate they have an additional 14,000 to 21,000 injured, out of a deployed fighting force of 150,000. Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration, told New York Times reporters Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, and Eric Schmitt, “Losses like this affect morale and unit cohesion, especially since these soldiers don’t understand why they’re fighting.”
Meanwhile, sanctions imposed by countries around the world are strangling the Russian economy. Reuters today reported that Russia is “on the brink of its first default on international debt since the Bolshevik revolution [of 1917].” A Russian political scientist tweeted: “I have collected some thoughts on the immediate impact of sanctions on the Russian economy.” The short version: “30 years of economic development thrown into the bin.” “All in all, no other economy in the world has experienced anything like this—extreme de-globalization in a matter of days.”
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that sanctions would remain until there is no chance that Russia could ever again launch the sort of invasion Putin has launched against Ukraine. The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Justice launched a task force with Australia, Canada, the European Commission, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and the U.K. to freeze and seize assets of sanctioned oligarchs. The Treasury Department also began today to offer bounties of up to $5 million for information leading to “seizure, restraint, or forfeiture of assets linked to foreign government corruption.”
All but about 40 American companies have pulled out of Russia, according to Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of Popular Information. Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned business in America, is staying put. Political groups affiliated with right-wing billionaire CEO Charles Koch oppose broad sanctions and have suggested the U.S. should remain neutral in the crisis.
Meanwhile, a deepfake video of Zelensky calling for Ukrainians to surrender to Russia made the rounds on social media today. The false video used artificial intelligence to graft words onto Zelensky’s image.
Tonight, Russia specialist Julia Ioffe told MSNBC: “Every time I’m asked by Americans do Russians really believe this stuff… as if we don’t have the same thing happening here. You have 40% of the American population that was convinced in just one year that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election….”
And, indeed, Trump loyalists like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Fox News personality Tucker Carlson continue to echo Russian talking points to undercut Ukraine’s war effort. Media scholar Eric Boehlert noted that “the anti-democratic, authoritarian bonds are becoming tighter as the Trump movement now turns to the Kremlin for its messaging cues. The overlap is undeniable, and the implications are grave.”
Even more striking was white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s encouragement for people to pray for what he called the brave Russian soldiers fighting to "liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States." Fuentes is an extremist but not an isolated one; both Greene and Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) spoke at a recent conference he organized (Greene in person; Gosar virtually), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) took no action to disavow their participation.
After Zelensky spoke today, Biden announced another $800 million in military equipment for Ukraine, including 800 anti-aircraft systems. “What’s at stake here are the principles that the United States and the united nations across the world stand for,” he said. “It’s about freedom. It’s about the right of people to determine their own future.”

Heather Cox Richardson

March 17, 2022 (Thursday)

While Russia’s war on Ukraine continues in all its blistering horror, there are glimmerings that suggest Russia’s position in its assault on Ukraine is weakening. A senior U.S. defense official today told reporters that while there is significant fighting going on, the only major military news is that Russia has now launched more than 1000 missiles at Ukraine. Ukraine’s allies are working on supplying Ukraine with long-range air defense systems. The Pentagon also believes the airspace over Ukraine continues to be contested, and tentatively assesses that the morale of Russian soldiers is flagging.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned again today that Russia appears to be considering using chemical weapons and trying to blame the ensuing destruction on Ukraine. Yesterday, President Joe Biden called Putin a war criminal.
Today China, which was allied with Russia when the war began and initially refused to condemn the assault, today declined to co-sponsor a “humanitarian” resolution with Russia at the United Nations. At the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China joined Russia in vetoing resolutions. Then China abstained. Now it is refusing even to co-sponsor a “humanitarian” resolution.
While Chinese state media continues to indicate friendship for Russia, today it showed a video illustrating the story that Russian troops killed people standing in line for bread in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine.
A German newspaper today reported that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was on a flight on its way to Beijing, but the plane turned around during the flight and returned to Moscow. President Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping are scheduled to talk tomorrow for the first time since November after U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan met with top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi for seven hours in Rome on Monday.
China has not abandoned support for Russia, but it does appear to be rethinking its position as the world condemns the invasion and has acted in concert to isolate Russia effectively from the global economy. Today Russia did in fact make a $117 million interest payment on its debt, avoiding—for now—a default on its debt. For all Putin’s talk of not needing the international financial system, in the end, he chose to honor the debt, and in dollars rather than in the badly devalued rubles he had threatened.
Pieces continue to move elsewhere in the world, too. Uzbekistan today became the first Central Asian country to openly support the territorial integrity of Ukraine and condemn Russia’s "military actions and aggression." The Council of Europe, a human rights organization founded in 1949 and consisting of more than 45 member states, yesterday expelled Russia.
It appears that Putin is reacting to the crisis he has launched by turning on some of his key advisors, including military chief General Roman Gavrilov. Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul reacted to this news: “Putin looks like a panicked leader these days, hardly the smart, strong, savvy leader that others assumed he was.”
Today, the Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force, known as REPO, issued a joint statement committing to “prioritizing our resources and working together to take all available legal steps to find, restrain, freeze, seize, and, where appropriate, confiscate or forfeit the assets of those individuals and entities that have been sanctioned in connection with Russia’s premeditated, unjust, and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the continuing aggression of the Russian regime.”
REPO includes Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.
While a crackdown on illicit money should squeeze oligarchs, it also has the potential to alter our domestic politics. Recent reports show that politics in the U.K. has been awash in Russian money, and it seems likely that such cash has influenced the U.S. as well. This crackdown, along with new regulations about transparency in shell companies, might affect campaign finance.
The Freedom to Vote Act rejected by the Senate this year would have addressed this issue more effectively; it required any person or entity donating more than $10,000 to a campaign be identified. It would also have protected against the voter suppression laws passed last year in 19 Republican-dominated states, which the Texas primary revealed to be as discriminatory as opponents feared: about 13% of mail-in ballots, 23,000 of them, were rejected in a state that in the past rejected about 1%. Officials in counties that lean Democratic rejected mail-in ballots at a higher rate than officials in counties that lean Republican: 15.1% to 9.1%.
Today, the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, permitting the administration to raise tariffs against them. The measure passed by a vote of 424 to 8. The eight votes against the measure came from Republican members Andy Biggs (AZ), Dan Bishop (NC), Lauren Boebert (CO), Matt Gaetz (FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Glenn Grothman (WI), Thomas Massie (KY), and Chip Roy (TX), all staunch Trump supporters.
Meanwhile, the support of certain U.S. lawmakers for Russia in this crisis has been a boon to the Russian president. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is openly pushing Russian talking points, claiming that NATO is supporting Nazis in Ukraine. Russian state TV is replaying Representative Madison Cawthorn’s (R-NC) remarks calling President Zelensky a “thug.”
Today’s other big news came from The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell: the report alleging that Trump lost the 2020 election because of Dominion Voting Systems—a report that Trump used to justify his attempt to overturn the election, including a plan to assume emergency powers—was not written by a volunteer lawyer after the election, as previously understood. In fact, it was written by a senior White House aide, Joanna Miller, who worked for key Trump advisor Peter Navarro. Navarro incorporated the Miller report into one of his own, which he and aides had begun to write two weeks before the election even happened.
That is, it was the White House itself that invented the “report” that the election was stolen, even before the election took place, and then used that report to justify the Big Lie that 19 state legislatures have relied on to restrict voting.
Ukraine’s people are trying to save their democracy from a criminal assault by an autocrat who has perverted his own country’s government, concentrating the nation’s wealth and power in the hands of his cronies, and silencing those who want a say in their government.
That fight is not limited to Ukraine.