The USA by a slim margin votes for Fascism, Rascism, Mysogeny, Hate.

[Peter Lemkin]

In 1936 in Munich Chamberlain sold-out Czechoslovakia to Hitler without even consulting with Czechoslovakia - essentially triggering WWII a few months later. Last week V.P. Vance on Km away in Munich stated the Trump Regime's plans to sell-out Ukraine and overturn the entire post-war order and consensus, in soon to be held meetings with Putin, but without participation of Ukraine or any of our (former) European Allies. Trump/Musk/Vance/Project 2025-folks are the new Nazis and the new threat to the USA and the World. We are all in GREAT danger! 'Low-information' voters who do not know history and are easily manipulated by propaganda of 'MAGA' were duped, and their racism/sexism/fake-religiousity/various lies about immigrants and non-white, non-male, wealthy persons. They will get NOTHING Trump promised [and never intended to produce for them]. We are now in the USA in an Autocracy and Oligarchy - with our Democracy RAPIDLY being dismantled. We can not even wait for the midterms [if they are even allowed] - the damage by then will resemble Gaza politically [in total ruin]. European caught on, where only about 40% of American do now. 

Here is an account by a historian on how Munich 2025 went:

F
February 16, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 17
 
The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues around the globe.
At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.
Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.
Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.
After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before upcoming elections on February 23.
After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”
Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted: “It's heartening that today the leaders of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. It's horrifying that today the president and vice-president of the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”
Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of NBC News reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements, policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash immigration and curtail regulation of business.”
Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including Germany’s.
Musk’s involvement in international politics appears to have coincided with his purchase of Twitter in 2022. And indeed, social media has been key to the project of undermining democracy. Russian operatives are now pushing the rise of the far-right in Europe through social media as they did in the United States. Russian president Vladimir Putin has long sought to weaken the democratic alliances of the United States and Europe to enable Russia to take at least parts of Ukraine and possibly other neighboring countries without the formidable resistance that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would present.
Russian state television praised Vance’s speech. One headline read: “Humiliated Europe out for the count. Its American master flogged its old vassals.” Russian pundits recognized that Vance’s turn away from Europe meant a victory for Russia.
Vance’s speech came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told other countries’ defense ministers on Wednesday, February 12, that he wanted to “directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Since 1949, the United States has stood firmly behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that said any attack on one of the signatories to that agreement would be an attack on all. Now, it appears, the U.S. is backing away.
In that speech, Hegseth seemed to move the U.S. toward the ideology of Russian president Vladimir Putin that larger countries can scoop up their smaller neighbors. He echoed Putin’s demands for ending its war against Ukraine, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for Ukraine, thus conceding to Russia two key issues without apparently getting anything in return. He also said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S. focuses on its own borders.
On Wednesday, Trump spoke to Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.
Also on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and offered U.S. support for Ukraine in exchange for half the country’s mineral resources, although it was unclear if the deal the U.S. offered meant future support or only payment for past support. The offer did not, apparently, contain guarantees for future support, and Zelensky rejected it.
On Saturday, while the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators have not been invited either. While the talks are being billed as “early-stage,” the United States is sending Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security advisor Michael Waltz, suggesting haste.
After Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. It said the call had focused on “removing unilateral barriers inherited from the previous U.S. administration, aiming to restore mutually beneficial trade, economic, and investment cooperation.” On Friday, Russia’s central bank warned that the economy is faltering, while Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”
But the U.S. is not speaking with one voice. Republican leaders who support Ukraine are trying to smooth over Trump’s apparent coziness with Russia. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) called out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea. Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Carlson, a former Fox News Channel personality, has expressed admiration for Orbán and Putin.
“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”
Today on Face the Nation, Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said: “There is absolutely no way that Donald Trump will be seen—he will not let himself go down in history as having sold out to Putin. He will not let that happen.” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark said: “I guess Republicans think this is how they manipulate Trump into doing the right thing. But Trump’s been selling out to Putin since Helsinki when he publicly sided with Putin over America’s intelligence community. And he hasn’t stopped selling out since. And the [Republican Party] lets him.”
European leaders reported being blindsided by Trump’s announcement. German leader Scholz on Friday asked Germany’s parliament to declare a state of emergency to support Ukraine, and on Sunday, European leaders met for an impromptu breakfast to discuss European security and Ukraine. Macron invited leaders to Paris on Monday to continue discussions. Representatives of Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark will attend, as will the secretary-general of NATO and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission.
After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”
Proving his point, on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”
Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”
He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”
A year ago today, on February 16, 2024, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died at the hands of Russian authorities in the prison where he was being held on trumped-up charges.
—
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/trump-gender-ideology-sex-pronouns-order-transgender-2d7e54837f5d0651ed0cefa5ea0d6301
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/jd-vance-stuns-munich-conference-with-blistering-attack-on-europes-leaders
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-antisemitic-hate-speech-nazi-propaganda-holocaust-denial/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/jd-vance-alice-weidel-meeting-germany-far-right
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/elon-musk-far-right-germans-proud-past-sins-rcna189281
https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-elon-musk-new-international-reactionary-movement/
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-boosting-far-right-politics-globe-rcna189505
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5147425-german-officials-jd-vance-censorship-munich-speech/
https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/4064113/opening-remarks-by-secretary-of-defense-pete-hegseth-at-ukraine-defense-contact/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/world/europe/ukraine-minerals-us-deal-rejected.html
https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-team-to-start-russia-ukraine-peace-talks-saudi-arabia-putin-zelenskyy/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/16/us-russia-ukraine-war-talks-saudi-arabia/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx242lw21jwo
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-inflation-gdp-growth-2031744
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-be-reintegrated-into-world-economy-if-war-ukraine-ends-orban-says-2025-02-14/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/us/politics/hegseths-wicker-ukraine.html
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-macron-emergency-european-summit-trump-defense-crisis-war-trump-putin-paris/
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/trump-s-ukraine-gamble-forces-germany-into-emergency-action/ar-AA1z2awF
https://www.politico.eu/article/senate-armed-services-chair-roger-wicker-pete-hegseth-war-in-ukraine-russia/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/16/world/alexey-navalny-death-anniversary-yulia-navalnaya-intl/index.html

[Peter Lemkin]

Here is the nightmare scenario we soon will face...

[Peter Lemkin]

This is by writer/speaker/anti-fascist researcher Ruth Ben-Ghiat (lucid@substack.com) It was written ten days ago. I will post some of her more recent analysis and video soon. We are in deep Democracy-Destroying territory. We do NOT have until the midterms to get it back. If we don't make substantial blockage of their actions in the next month or two, there will be no mid-term elections and even if there were, so much damage would have been done I don't even want to go into the scenario. This is DEFCOM 2 now, with DEFCOM 1 only days or a week or two away - when the 'Administration/Putsch' says to the Courts "you and what army are going to enforce your legal rulings against us?!" - at that point it is ONLY people out in the streets, and they are hoping for that to declare Martial Law or the Insurrection Act. Be BRAVE! We are in this together. If you have children, do you want them to grow up in an English-speaking 'Russia' or in the imperfect, but always getting improved and infinitely better than this? The stakes are that high! The problem now is that 60% of people in the USA have only a sixth grade or lower education level. Most do not know history at all. Most think others will 'take care of politics - it is too complex and above my head'. Low-information voters are also the most susceptible to propaganda, and there is more of that than there is 'news/information' by perhaps 50x by volume, The facts and good journalism ARE available, but it takes educated, historically aware persons often to find it - or point it out to low-information voters. Authoritarians, as Trump has said 'just love the uneducated'.
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Here are a few Q1 2025 forecasts, made with this caveat: This is a very volatile time given the Blitzkrieg of executive orders and other actions that seek to quickly transform America and its relations with foreign powers. Many of these actions will stand, but others are already being challenged in court. There will be a tidal wave of litigation in the future that will prevent implementation of some measures.

The point of the volume of these executive and other Republican actions, independent of their individual content, is to stretch our resources thin, make it difficult for us to focus and prioritize, and overwhelm us to the point that we want to give up. The increase in threat and possibilities of physical violence –the release of the Jan. 6 thugs was an effective action in this regard—is also a deterrent to pushback for many people.

There is a logic that unites what is unfolding. I will be writing about some of this for Lucid in the coming weeks, but I wanted you to have the preview.

A unifying theme of the actions taken by the new Donald Trump administration and its Project 2025 and other allies is wrecking the United States as a democratic power, to the benefit of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and other autocratic adversaries, and creating the conditions for the U.S. elites and oligarchs to prosper.

This goes beyond the destruction of democracy as a political system: the kneecapping of public health, disaster response, climate crisis mitigation, and global influence (through the suspension of foreign aid) affect every area of civil society and government. Putin’s dream is to make the United States into a version of 1990s Russia: Trump and his allies seem to be motivated by a similar goal.

I have no words for the multiplying tragedies set into motion, in the fields of science and medicine and climate alone, by the cancellation of NIH funding, the silencing of public communications about disease outbreaks, and the rollback of support for green energy initiatives.

The main immediate aim, of course, is the consolidation of executive authority. America will now experience personalist rule, which is a form of authoritarian governance that rotates around consolidating the leader’s personal grasp on power, with loyalty to him valued way more than competence (as the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Sec. of Defense shows). The purpose of personalist rule is to rearrange government and society to allow the leader and his allies to enrich themselves, and convert institutions into tools of their personal corruption, retribution and revenge schemes.

The leader’s private legal and financial situations also figure into the formulation of national and foreign policy. International affairs are often “privatized,” as personal relationships of autocrats are managed behind the scenes, meaning who is the Secretary of State or the Ambassador can matter less (one reason Trump appointed Marco Rubio, a man he has viewed as “little Marco” in the past, to this key post).

This was the situation with Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin. Berlusconi shut out the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from most dealings with Russia, relying on private visits to manage the deals and the dialogue. I recount this in detail in my book Strongmen, and it is an example to keep in mind when considering Trump’s relationships with Netanyahu, Putin, Kim, Xi, Orban, etc.


Trump and Xi during Trump’s first term. Nicholas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images.

The Trump administration’s assaults on democratic institutions and civic society will boost autocracies and anti-democratic parties around the world. Republicans have long been immersed in transnational networks dedicated to wrecking democracy and now this can be an official part of foreign policy. America will increasingly be part of this autocratic axis.

Jump-starting America’s participation in anti-democratic internationalism is also the rationale for the choice of Tulsi Gabbard as DNI; in this framework, her ties to Hindu nationalism, the Kremlin, and the former Syrian dictatorship are assets, not liabilities. Even if she is not confirmed, look for someone else with similar (if more muted) sympathies to come into that position.

John Sipher, a former CIA agent, and General Michael V. Hayden, former director of the CIA and the NSA write that “chaos, incompetence and a move toward cronyism” will prevail if Gabbard becomes DNI, with “intelligence designed to protect American lives…twisted to fit Mr. Trump’s personal interests.”

These situations will mark governance more generally, to the huge detriment of American power in the world and Americans at home. It’s evident that every destruction of climate policy is a gift to Xi and China, which can move forward with its capture of the energy space, just as rerouting part of the U.S. military to domestic concerns and reducing its presence as a democratic guardian abroad will encourage Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and other leaders to act on their imperialist plans.

We will also witness how authoritarians also promote moral and civic collapse by decreeing the end of quaint democratic ideas of conflicts of interest, professional ethics, respect for differences, and solidarity. The purpose of purges of the civil service is to shift the bureaucratic and governance culture in this direction rapidly.

In the end, authoritarians ask us not just to betray each other, by getting people to see their compatriots as enemies, but to betray ourselves as well. Trump may have used ritual humiliation to complete his ownership of the GOP, but his targets stepped onto that stage voluntarily and accepted their self-abasement as the price of remaining in power.

And even the mightiest supplicants, such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, will find out that no one is safe with a strongman, no matter how much money you give him and how many lies of his you allow to circulate. Elon Musk is an exception due to his high degree of enmeshment for years with the U.S. government (through defense and other contracts), and the unfortunate dependence of that government on his products and inventions, which is a situation independent of Trump.

This is not a pretty picture, but it’s important that we are prepared and understand the logic and just what we are up against as defenders of democracy at home and abroad.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

New post by Mary Trump who knows personally Donald's psychopathology and how it mixes with his political pathology....

At the Fulcrum of History
Pressure is brought to bear
Mary L Trump
Feb 20


[img][imghttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c468607-3698-4902-93da-45c3ed4de309_1806x1164.png[/img]

Zelensky has always known what a pathetic, deviant loser this is.

Every day I ask myself some version of the question “What have we done?” in response to some new indignity, some new horror inflicted upon us by the fascist regime currently in control of every branch of the United States government.
I know, of course. I know what we’ve done. And I know why we’ve done it, but such knowledge brings no comfort as the earth shifts beneath our feet and it feels increasingly like there’s very little to hold onto.
Recently, the United States, according to Reuters, recently sent European leaders a so-called “diplomatic questionnaire” about Ukraine's security, which essentially reads as a test of their willingness to defend Ukraine without U.S. leadership.
The questions weren't just vague, they were insulting. For example, this one:
“Are there any countries you believe would be indispensable, like maybe the United States of America?”
Or
“Specifically, what short-term and long-term resources do you think will be required from the United States?”
Why do I find these questions this insulting? Because we should already know the answers to them. Because it is an inescapable fact that we should have been helping Ukraine with every resource at our disposal since the beginning of Russia’s illegal invasion. I would argue that it is to our eternal shame that the United States under the Biden administration did not do nearly enough to make sure that this war against our ally perpetuated by our enemy ended as soon as humanly possible.
Why suddenly is the United States riddled with such uncertainty about its role in the conflict? That’s simple: it’s because Donald Trump and his corrupt fascist regime are aligned with the agenda of Vladimir Putin and Moscow. This is a travesty. And it’s a travesty that the people in charge, including those at the State Department, care nothing and know nothing about diplomacy and statecraft.
The United States has now pivoted to offloading its responsibilities to our erstwhile allies and is waiting to see who's naive enough to stand for it.

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Donald’s increasingly hostile stance towards Ukraine and continuing appeasement of Putin has European leaders scrambling to respond to yet another reckless move by the United States. Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in Riyadh to attend talks hosted by Saudi Arabia between America and Russia.
Billed as “peace negotiations,” these talks excluded both Ukraine and Ukraine's European allies.
In response, Europe is doubling down on its efforts to counter Donald's intentional foreign policy disaster. On Monday, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark, along with top EU and NATO officials, held an emergency summit in Paris to formulate a response to these alarming, if not unexpected, developments.
Kerr Starmer, Prime Minister of Great Britain said, “Europe must play its role, and I'm prepared to consider committing British forces on the ground alongside others if there is a lasting peace agreement. But there must be a US backstop because a US security guarantee is the only way to effectively deter Russia from attacking Ukraine, again.”
And Danish Prime Minister, Better Frederikesen said, “I am very concerned about making a fast ceasefire because it can give Putin and Russia a better possibility to go back to Russia and to re-ramp and to mobilize again, attack Ukraine or another country in Europe.”
That’s what it’s like to have leaders who understand the gravity and scope of the situation. We, it should go without saying, are not so lucky.
Another meeting was convened in France and participation has been expanded to include Norway, Canada, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Finland, Romania, Sweden, and Belgium, which is to say everybody who cares about the Western Alliance, one of the greatest diplomatic alliances in history, which was created in the wake of the horrors of World War II. Tragically, this alliance no longer includes the United States of America.
French president Emmanuel Macron spoke with Donald before the emergency EU meeting in Paris, but Euro News reports that Donald made it crystal clear: Europe would not have a seat at the negotiating table in Riyadh, as shortsighted and obscene a move as it seems. Macron, however, remained steadfast in his belief that it is untenable for Europe to be excluded from negotiations. This, in part, is because European countries have been in this fight since the beginning, but also because there is so much at stake for them.
In a post on Twitter, Macron wrote:

After bringing together several European leaders, I've just spoken with Donald, and then with President Zelensky, we seek a strong and lasting peace in Ukraine. To achieve this, Russia must end its aggression, and this must be accompanied by strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians. Otherwise, there is a risk that this ceasefire will end up like the Minsk agreements.
We will work on this with all Europeans, Americans, and Ukrainians. This is the key.

That is exactly right. The whole point of Joe Biden’s attempt to isolate Russia after its illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine was to prevent Putin from dictating terms. Now, Donald is doing Putin's bidding, because he doesn't care about Ukraine. He only cares about keeping Vladimir Putin pleased.
Meanwhile, in Riyadh, Donald's people met with Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who is one of the architects of the invasion of Ukraine, and Yuri Shakov, Putin's top foreign policy aide, for more than four hours. The Kremlin, of course, is thrilled with how this is all unfolding. Lavrov said the meeting was productive, while the Russian foreign ministry called it a “very serious conversation,” which is hard to imagine considering Marco Rubio was involved.
During the discussions, Lavrov and top Kremlin officials escalated their demands to Donald's “negotiating “ team, more accurately described as a group of people just taking dictation and handing over Putin’s wish-list to Donald, who will make sure every item is checked off.
Lavrov rejected NATO membership for Ukraine as “not enough,” stating that NATO must go even further and revoke its 2008 promise that Ukraine would eventually be allowed to join the alliance. Lavrov also declared that any NATO troop deployment to Ukraine under any flag would be unacceptable.
In the wake of the discussions, Shakov said that Russia is looking for a full reassessment of its relationship with the United States. This is an alarming development, and one of the things that is so incredibly frustrating here, besides the fact that we are betraying one of our greatest allies, is that we are also betraying Western democracy with these self-serving and destructive moves. Also, many of us have seen this coming since 2016—and probably well before that. Yet, here we are.

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President Volodomyr Zelensky has remained crystal clear himself as to Ukraine’s position on what the future of Ukraine looks like.
“We will have low chance, low chance to survive without support of the United States. I think it's very important, critical, but I mean, I don't want to think about it. Yes, we have to think about it. I don't want to think that we will not be strategic partners. I don't want to think about it because it'll make a pressure on morality of Ukrainians and it will be worse, the thing from the very beginning of the war, but we increased our production that really we really can count on our level of defending industry, but it's not enough.”
This is both tragedy and travesty, and if things go the way that Zelensky believes they very well might, if the United States withdraws from NATO and NATO cannot step up without the support of the United States, it will also be disaster and atrocity. And all of it can be laid at the feet of the traitor, Donald Trump.

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Donald is calling this the grotesque display that occurred in Saudi Arabia a “peace negotiation,” but Zelensky very properly is calling bullshit. He originally had scheduled a visit Saudi Arabia but canceled it when he realized that the United States and Russia planned to meet without giving Ukraine, the aggrieved party, a seat at the negotiating table.

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Instead, Zelensky visited Turkey to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. While at the Ukrainian embassy, he said, “It is critical that any negotiations to end the war are not happening behind the backs of the key parties affected by the Russian aggression.”
Zelensky has also continued to deny Donald's offer for the United States to take 50% ownership of Ukraine's rare earth minerals in exchange, essentially, for nothing. The so-called deal was submitted to Zelensky last Wednesday, and this is what Zelensky had to say about his decision not to sign the agreement.

We cannot forget about the main idea that was in the very beginning that let us protect all that. Help us defend this and we'll make money on this together. And here it's very important that in this shall be a term two protected, and that is the security guarantees. And if we're not given the security guarantees from the United States, I believe that the economic treaty will not work.

Former Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmitri Kba went further: “Why should Europe give away the resources that should fuel its own economy to America? It unequivocally should not.”
This is grotesque. Donald Trump is demanding that Ukraine hand over half of its natural resources to pay for assistance the United States already provided during the Biden administration.
In an official press release sent out by the US Department of State, the following cryptic measures were laid out:

• Establish a consultation mechanism to address irritants to our bilateral relationship with the objective of taking steps necessary to normalize the operation of our respective duplicate matter missions.
  

If you understand what that means, please let me know, because I have absolutely no idea. It sounds like doublespeak to me.
And then this:

• Respective high-level teams to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible in a way that is enduring, sustainable, and acceptable to all sides.
  

Accomplishing that is impossible as long as the victim in all of this is not included in these so-called negotiations.
Next:

• Lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities, which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine.
  

The United States official position is that the only way to secure an illicitly negotiated peace is to give Russia everything it wants—including Ukrainian territory Russia has already captured,
Ukraine, on the other hand, will not only lose said territory, but Donald has made it explicitly clear that he has plans to raid Ukraine's abundant supply of natural resources, including its rare earth minerals.
The unconscionable meeting in Riyadh was a pledge for the parties—again, excluding Ukraine and the EU—to remain engaged to ensure that the agreement between Russia and the United States, which has been agreed to by no other interested parties, moves forward. And this will be entirely at the expense of Ukraine, while its enemy, formerly our enemy, receives the spoils of its illegal war of aggression.
All of this is happening, because one twisted and corrupt man, whom a plurality of American voters so ignominiously put in charge of our once great democracy, who understands nothing and cares about nothing, will wreak whatever untold damage he is capable of unleashing all for the sake of enriching himself.

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The Trump regime will continue to move ahead without allowing for the involvement of Ukraine. The U.S. is already in talks with Russia to plan another meeting about the future of Ukraine and its people, and, to the humiliation of all of us, Putin has extended an invitation for Donald to visit Moscow, which this abject failure of a man will almost certainly accept.
There is some speculation that Donald might join Putin at Red Square this May when Russia commemorates the 80th anniversary of its victory in World War II. The idea that those two traitors to humanity will be allowed to oversee such a commemoration is an obscenity.

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At a press conference held at Mar-a-Lago recently , Donald blamed Ukraine for having been illegally invaded by Russia. He said this because he is insane and he is beholden to malign forces.
Throughout all of this, though, Pres. Zelensky has stood firm, approaching this unfathomable nightmare with as much restraint and diplomacy as he can muster. After Donald’s latest comment, Zelensky addressed the kind of disinformation that originates in Russia and is then repeated ad nauseum by its greatest ally, Donald Trump.

Another story, since we’re talking about percentages, we are seeing a lot of disinformation coming from Russia. We understand this and we have proof that these figures are being discussed between America and Russia. Unfortunately Pres. Trump, with all due respect, for him as the leader of a nation we respect greatly, the American people, is living in this disinformation space.

Donald, responding on his failing social media platform, posted this:

Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn't be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle.
The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.

He escalated tensions further by claiming that Zelenksy is a “dictator without elections,” an incendiary and wildly untrue statement that he later repeated.
This is where we are, this is what we have been reduced to.
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Last week, Christophe Hogan, chairman of the 2025 Munich Security Conference, gave his farewell address at the event on Saturday in which he said the following:
This conference started as a transatlantic conference after the speech of Vice President Vance on Friday. We have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore. I'm very grateful to all those European politicians that spoke out and reaffirmed the values and principles that they are defending. No one did this better than President Zelensky. Let me conclude, and this becomes difficult. . .
Chairman Hogan had to suspend his remarks because he was weeping, as we all should, for the grievous blow struck at the heart of the Western alliance and the fact that that weapon striking the blow is being wielded by the United States of America, once the greatest democracy in human history and a bright light in the fight against tyranny and fascism.
I cannot improve upon Hogan's words, at least those he was capable of uttering, except to say that America’s values and European values are no longer closely aligned. They are not aligned at all. America is in the throes of a fascist movement, and I worry for all of us. But right now, in particular, I worry for our ally Ukraine.

[Peter Lemkin]

February 22, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 23
 
Last night’s Friday Night News Dump was a doozy: Trump has purged the country’s military leadership. He has fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, who Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested got the job only because he is Black, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who was the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whom Hegseth called a “DEI hire.” As soon as he took office, Trump fired U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, giving her just three hours to vacate her home on base. Last night, Trump also fired the Air Force vice chief of staff, General James Slife.
In place of Brown, Trump has said he will nominate Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin”—as in “Razin Caine”—to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is the body of the eight most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense. It advises the president, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council on military matters.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and is the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the secretary of defense.
Caine has held none of the assignments that are required for elevation to this position. His military biography says he was a career F-16 pilot who served on active duty and in the National Guard. Before he retired, he was the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. The law prohibits the elevation of someone at his level to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless the president waives the law because “such action is necessary in the national interest.”
Marshall notes that Trump is “reaching far down the pecking order to someone who isn’t even on active duty in the military for the critical position not only as the chief military advisor to the President…but the key person at the contact point of civilian control over the military.” In Trump’s telling, his support for Caine comes from the military officer’s support for him. “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir,” Trump claims Caine said to him. Trump went on to claim that Caine put on a Make America Great Again hat, despite rules against political messaging on the clothing of active-duty troops.
Trump appears to be purging military officers with the intent of replacing them with loyalists while intimidating others to bow to his demands. It seems worth recalling here that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) stalled the nominations of 451 senior military officers for close to a year in 2023. On February 10, Trump purged the advisory bodies of the military academies for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, saying: “Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years…. We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”
The purge of military leaders wasn’t the only news last night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth indicated he intends to fire the judge advocates general, or JAGs—the military lawyers who administer the military code of justice—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. “Among many other things it’s the military lawyers who determine what is a legal order and what’s not,” Talking Points Memo’s Marshall pointed out. “If you’re planning to give illegal orders they are an obvious obstacle.” “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI,” military specialist Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, “the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the U.S. government.”
National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization of people who served in senior leadership positions in all six military branches, elected federal and state offices, and various government departments and agencies, strongly condemned the firings, and urged “policymakers, elected officials, and the American public to reject efforts to politicize our military.”
Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism. They note that Trump expressed frustration with military leaders during his first term when they resisted illegal orders, saying, as then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley did, that in America “[w]e don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator…. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
Observers note that during his first term, Trump said he wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” apparently unaware that Hitler’s generals tried to kill him and instead imagining they were all fiercely loyal. They also note that authoritarian leader Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union purged his officer corps to make sure it was commanded by those loyal to him.
While the pattern is universal, this is a homegrown version of that universal pattern.
In order to undermine the liberal consensus that supported government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights, reactionaries in the 1950s began to insist that such a government was socialism. A true American, they claimed, was an individual man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for himself and his family.
In contrast to what they believed was the “socialism” of the government, they took as their symbol the mythologized version of the western American cowboy. In the mid-1950s, Americans tuned in to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and The Lone Ranger to see hardworking white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government. In 1959 there were twenty-six westerns on TV, and in a single week in March 1959, eight of the top shows were westerns.
When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, in his white cowboy hat, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, the cowboy image became entwined with the reactionary faction in the party, and Ronald Reagan quite deliberately nurtured that image. Under Reagan, Republicans emphasized that an individual man should run his life however he wished, had a right to use a gun to defend his way of life, and that his way of life was under attack by Black Americans, people of color, and women.
It was an image that fit well with American popular culture, but their cowboy was always a myth: it didn’t reflect the reality that one third of cowboys were Black or men of color, or that cowboys were low-wage workers whose lives mirrored those of eastern factory workers. The real West was a network of family ties and communities, where women won the right to vote significantly before eastern women did, in large part because of their importance to the economy and the education that western people prized.
In the 1990s that individualist cowboy image spurred the militia movement, and over the past forty years it has become tightly bound to the reactionary Republican project to get rid of the government Americans constructed after 1933 to serve the public good. Now it is driving both the purge of women, people of color, and Black Americans from public life and the growing idea that leadership means domination. Trump and Hegseth’s concept of “warfighters” in an American military that doesn’t answer to the law but simply asserts power is the American cowboy hideously warped into fascism.
In a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, on February 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters: “We can talk all we want about values. Values are important. But you can't shoot values. You can't shoot flags and you can't shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power. As much as we may not want to like the world we live in, in some cases, there's nothing like hard power.”
That statement came after a troubling exchange between Hegseth and Senator Angus King (I-ME) during Hegseth’s nomination hearings. King noted that in one of his books, Hegseth had said that soldiers—he referred to them as “our boys”—"should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago." King noted that Hegseth was referring to “the Geneva Conventions,” a set of international rules that try to contain the barbarity of war and outlawed torture, and he wanted Hegseth to explain what he meant when he wrote: "America should fight by its own rules, and we should fight to win or not go in at all."
Hegseth explained that “there are the rules we swear an oath to defend, which are incredibly important, and…then there are those echelons above reality from, you know, corps to division to brigade, to battalion. And by the time it trickles down to a company or a platoon or a squad level, you have a rules of engagement that nobody recognizes.” “So you are saying that the Geneva Convention should not be observed?” King asked. “We follow rules,” Hegseth said. “But we don't need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars. And that's what President Trump understands.”
Hegseth refused to say he would abide by the Geneva Conventions. He refused to condemn torture.
This idea that modern warfare requires torture shines a harsh light on Trump’s January 29 order to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare a 30,000-bed detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to detain migrants Trump called "the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Rather than simply deporting them, he said, “Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.”
Now it appears the White House is moving even beyond turning the military into cowboys with unlimited powers. On Thursday the White House posted on X a 40-second video that purported to be of migrants, in shackles and chains, faceless as the chains clank, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” As Andrew Egger explained in The Bulwark, ASMR videos use video cues to create feelings of relaxation and euphoria, or “tingles.”
No longer is the cruelty of utter domination a necessity for safety, it appears. Now it is a form of sensual pleasure for its own sake. As Jeff Sharlet wrote in Scenes from a Slow Civil War: “Listen to this, the White House is saying. This will make you feel good.” It is, he points out, “a bondage video” in which “[t]he sound of other people’s pain is the intended pleasure.”
Elon Musk posted over the video: “Haha wow,” with an emoji of a troll and a gold medal.
While MAGA seems to have turned an American icon into the basis for a fascist fantasy, President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley, had actually worked as a cowboy and deliberately applied what he believed to be the values of the American West to the country as a whole. He insisted that all Americans must have a “Square Deal”—the equal protection of the laws—that the government must clean up the cities, protect the environment, provide education and healthcare, and stop the wealthy from controlling the government.
And, when Roosevelt learned that American soldiers had engaged in torture in the Philippines, he deplored those acts. He promised that “determined and unswerving effort” was “being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.”
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Notes:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-fires-coast-guard-commandant-over-dei-security-fox-news-reports-2025-01-21/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-administration-evicts-former-coast-guard-linda-fagan-3-hours-rcna190820
https://www.jcs.mil/About/
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/152
https://time.com/7260646/trump-fires-chairman-joint-chiefs-of-staff-other-military-officers/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/dan-caine-trump-joint-chiefs.html
https://apnews.com/article/tuberville-senate-military-holds-b4d4fe19bada70a085208c9d82c35cb5
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/cq-brown-and-friday-night-massacre/681803/
https://www.nsl4a.org/nsl4a-announcements/nsl4a-statement-firing-senior-military-officers
https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4066734/secretary-of-defense-pete-hegseth-press-conference-following-nato-ministers-of/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-instruct-homeland-security-pentagon-prepare-migrant-facility-2025-01-29/
https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-01-14/maine-sen-angus-king-probes-dod-nominees-critiques-of-geneva-conventions