March 21, 2025

March 20, 2025

GOOD IDEA. THAT’LL SHOW TRUMP. Europe Hatches Plans for Ukraine Peacekeepers Without U.S.: Defense chiefs from the ‘coalition of the willing’ discuss how best to put boots on the ground in Ukraine if there is peace. Well, maybe. It’s typical EU BS when you look past the headlines:

Western allies are trying to hash out a bold European idea: sending 10,000 to 30,000 troops to Ukraine to help enforce any eventual peace deal with Russia.

With cease-fire talks continuing with the Kremlin, defense officials from dozens of Western nations met in the U.K. on Thursday to hammer out details of how the so-called “coalition of the willing” led by the U.K. and France could help Ukraine deter Russia from attacking in the future. No U.S. troops would be involved.

The unusual talks—Western military allies getting together without the Americans—are the latest sign of the world’s shifting geopolitics. The pivot in U.S. diplomacy to accommodate Russia has left Western allies struggling with how to help Ukraine find a lasting peace, especially since they lack the military capacity that only the U.S. can bring.

Already, however, discussions among these allies are proving arduous. A major concern is that coalition troops could get sucked into a hot war with Russia without substantial U.S. support to back them up. There is also a debate over whether the Western troops in Ukraine would even be permitted to fire at Russians if there were an incursion.

Peacekeepers who can’t shoot are hostages. You want peacekeepers who can –and will — shoot if you want to actually keep peace. In the words of Keith Laumer, there’s noting so peaceful as a dead troublemaker.

Posted at 10:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Entertain us with your trenchant, witty observations.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THREAD:

Posted at 8:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JOHN LUCAS: Domestic Terrorism Alert: Take this seriously please. “In what I believe is an unprecedented action, the U. S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) has issued a nationwide ‘Threat Advisory’ to all of its personnel who are Tesla owners. Below is a series of screenshots that comprise the complete Threat Advisory. . . . I and other military veterans have never seen anything like this in the U.S. It is more like something that we would see in a foreign country such as Libya, Syria or Afghanistan, warning civilians either to leave or take extreme precautions because of terrorist threats.”

Posted at 7:18 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THIS DOES SEEM TO BE THE PLATFORM. Weirdly, it’s exactly what you’d inculcate if you were trying to program a society for self-destruction.

Posted at 6:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CENSORSHIP:

More:

The documents reveal the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the UK government, and media groups working together to conduct mass censorship under the guise of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.”

AFL obtained the documents through ongoing litigation against the U.S. Department of State’s GEC.

The GEC, which was forced to shut down in December 2024, was originally created to “combat foreign disinformation abroad.”

However, through litigation, AFL exposed that the GEC promoted state-sponsored propaganda, using private media organizations to suppress American speech.

AFL’s litigation also revealed that USAID created an internal “Disinformation Primer,” explicitly praising private sector censorship strategies and recommending further censorship tactics.

More at the thread.

Posted at 5:41 pm by Stephen Green

I’LL TAKE “HEADLINES FROM DECEMBER 11th, 1941” FOR $500, ALEX: Germany turns against America.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

I’M PRETTY SURE THAT WOODY ALLEN DIDN’T INTEND FOR SLEEPER TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR THE FUTURE: Did Joe Biden’s presidency really happen?

The only Biden update that has made waves is the autopen story. A project from the Heritage Foundation has been claiming that Biden and his aides routinely used a machine to add his signature on key documents. Trump then declared that some of Biden’s pardons are void because he hadn’t actually signed them. The media of course called the claim a mad right-wing theory: fact-checkers pointed out that almost all presidents, going back to Thomas Jefferson, have used a signing machine; that the Heritage Foundation was looking at digital files which replicated Biden’s signature as a matter of course; and that Trump himself had used an autopen. (“Only for very unimportant papers,” Trump replied.) When the media gets in such a flap about an outrageous Trump claim, it usually means it’s true.

But the veracity of the autopen story is secondary to its mythic power. It taps into the idea, now widely accepted as correct, that Biden was for years too demented to be president, that his aides effectively ran the country while he doddered about ice cream, and that the media helped cover up the fact that the Commander-in-Chief was not all there.

Now, 60 days into Trump 2.0, the strangest part about Biden is that, even though he’s still alive, he’s abruptly disappeared from the public eye in a way that no other president has. He is Schrödinger’s president – neither dead nor alive, but existing in some liminal space on the edges of our human understanding.

Did Biden’s administration really happen? Or is America so cognitively impaired and inattentive that it cannot remember what occurred just the other day? Don’t think about that for too long, because Donald Trump just did something else.

As the befuddled historian said of Richard Nixon in Sleeper, “Some of us have a theory that he might once have been a President of the United States. But that he did something horrendous, so that all records, everything was wiped out about him. There is nothing in history books. There are no pictures on stamps or money.”

Related:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll