Archive for 2025

February 5, 2025

SO FAR, INDEED:

Posted at 11:11 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Feb 5th, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Feb 5th, 2025

FASTER, PLEASE: The American Brezhnev era is over.

Since 9/11, Washington has spent billions of dollars promoting “democratic norms” abroad. The policy mirrored the late Soviet Union’s attempts to promote communism in countries outside Moscow’s direct control, as witnessed under the leadership Leonid Brezhnev. And now at last it appears to have ended, following Donald Trump’s executive orders and yesterday’s State Department takeover of the United States Agency for International Development.

This American Brezhnev policy has had a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland effect: democratically elected leaders such as Ukraine’s ill-fated Viktor Yanukovych could be violently overthrown in the name of democracy.  Over the past quarter century, countries such as Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Romania, have at one time or another been deemed insufficiently “democratic” (i.e. insufficiently in thrall to the dictates of Washington) and thus found themselves the target of sanctions and none-too-subtle propaganda campaigns. Under Joe Biden, such efforts were redoubled as “protecting democracy” became the leitmotif of American strategy at home and abroad.

Brezhnev 2.0 would not be possible without the scores of “independent media” outlets that receive funding from agencies such as USAID or from the constellation of “non-governmental organizations,” or NGOs, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. NED’s first president, Allen Weinstein, famously bragged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.” Now Donald Trump has frozen all manner of foreign assistance. And by defunding media projects, Trump has deprived Washington’s empire builders and their disciples of a crucial weapon in their project of overthrowing regimes deemed insufficiently pliable.

Trump’s funding freeze is one of those rare occasions when the prerogatives of the national security state are actually being challenged. As expected, the media is going bananas—after all, in the US, the priorities of the media and the national security state are often one and the same. Doubt it? Consider the current smear campaign aimed at former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard conducted by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, the New York Times editorial board and Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

If American media outlets can be relied on to tee up the propaganda at home, government-and NGO- funded media outlets carry Washington’s water abroad. Allegedly independent media outlets such as CivilNet in Armenia, New Voice of Ukraine, the Kyiv Post and Magyar Hang in Hungary exist not because of domestic demand, but because they serve Washington’s political agenda.

Last year, both VDH and Niall Ferguson discussed DC being trapped in the Brezhnev era. At the moment, particularly given the breakneak speed at which the Trump administration is moving, it appears to be Morning in America again, to coin a phrase. And speaking of which!

This is also highly reminiscent of when Reagan himself replaced the portrait of Thomas Jefferson with Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room on the very first day of his administration, as symbolism that there wasn’t just a new sheriff in town, he had a very different worldview than those — of both parties — who held the office for the previous half century.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 5th, 2025

LEE SMITH: The End of ‘Palestine.’

Yesterday, President Donald Trump single-handedly collapsed the most destructive idea of the last hundred years—Palestine. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Trump said he was going to move 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza. And just like that, he broke the long spell that had captured generations of world leaders, peace activists, and Middle East terror masters alike, who had paradoxically come to regard the repeated failure and haunting secondary consequences of the idea of joint Arab Muslim and Jewish statehood in the same small piece of land as proof of its necessity.

Palestine was a misshapen idea from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the U.N.’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.

Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.

Trump said, enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode.

I’m curious to see how Trump’s seemingly off the cuff remark plays out, but as Scott Adams notes:

 

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 5th, 2025

JIM TREACHER: Biden’s State Dept. Gave $25K to Ecuadorian Drag Queens.

I absolutely love the reaction to all these revelations of ridiculously wasteful spending. The Biden administration was utterly corrupt. Grandpa Joe has dementia, so the neighborhood kids were running around the house after nabbing the keys to the liquor cabinet.

Now Americans are finally learning how badly their hard-earned money has been wasted, and they’re justifiably pissed off at their self-appointed betters. That includes my favorite government agency of all: the State Department.

Ryan King and Josh Christenson, NY Post:

An LGBTQ group in Ecuador tapped into a $25,000 grant from the Biden State Department to produce a two-day drag workshop intended to promote diversity and inclusion abroad…

Fundacion Dialogo Diverso, a nongovernmental organization that aims to promote democracy and the “LGBTIQ+ population” of the South American country, organized the drag show and published footage of it last July.

The State Department footed some of the bill for the show through its Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration, for which the nonprofit thanked the department.

Why did the Biden administration fund a two-day Ecuadorian drag workshop? Because it wasn’t three days.

And yes, there’s video.

Think of the children, America’s Newspaper of Record reminds us!

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Feb 5th, 2025

SO EVERYTHING POLITICO HAS PUBLISHED IS NOW SUSPECT:

Posted at 4:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Feb 5th, 2025

DOES DATA REPUBLICAN EVER SLEEP?

I’ve been too busy to play around with this new tool but it might be her best yet.

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green on Feb 5th, 2025