And what “troubling warning signs” does this right-wing culture warrior deem worthy of investigation?
From the article he himself posted:
The state police responded. They investigated. They interviewed the subject. And they felt at the time it was appropriate to have that individual brought in for a mental health evaluation
Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia
The article goes on to explain that the shooter made a generalized threat against his school last June. The threat was identified and reported. The police responded and investigated. The suspect was interviewed and then sent to the hospital for a mental health evaluation. So, on what planet does Mychajliw get the idea that “NO ONE acted”? Did he not read the article he linked to? And why did he bring up supposed investigations of “moms at school board meetings”? Obviously, we know why – he is still clinging to the Covid fights of yore, but I did not see anything in the NPR piece about moms at Conklin, NY school board meetings being investigated? Did you?
So, while Mychajliw – who is gratifyingly out of public office and is now a full-time right-wing professional propagandist – accuses the “left” of focusing on “feelings + ignor[ing] facts” he offers up feelings and ignores facts. Mychajliw says that the shooter was on police and school radar, and then says the school and police failed to “act”. Yet, according to the article he links to, the system involuntarily hospitalized him in the psych ward. The same guy who says facemasks are tyranny is telling you an involuntary psych hold is a lack of action.
The Republicans in this region have literally the most to answer for, yet they are completely absent from this situation, except for Nick Langworthy dropping some flowers off on Jefferson. Not so much as an effort to get their people to donate food or money to the people most directly victimized by a violence that is at least in part fueled by their rhetoric.
But let’s give Mychajliw the benefit of the doubt – that he is truly concerned about liberals substituting feelings for facts. This kid was investigated and held involuntarily for a mental health evaluation due to threats against his school. Yet he was able to purchase and possess the military hardware that enabled him to commit mass murder in a grocery store, and avoid injury from retired Buffalo cop Aaron Salter, Jr.’s gun. Want to eschew “feelings” and talk about facts? Talk about that.
The moment I heard the terrorist was white and wearing fatigues and a vest, I had a thought and I looked at my watch.
It was the 14th.
I immediately knew there’d be a videostream and an idiot’s manifesto of death. The Christchurch template.
14 is a significant symbolic number among American Nazis. It is the shorthand version of the racist great replacement white grievance propaganda that fascist radio and politicians relentlessly feed their audiences, for profit.
An 18 year-old near Binghamton had easy access to military equipment that enabled him to slaughter almost a dozen innocent people. His Naziistic worldview was fueled by a racist hatred that Rupert Murdoch and his media clones have pushed for years.
When The NY Times exposed Tucker Carlson’s malign role in that, he laughed. They all laugh. They laugh as their audience commits slaughter. Then they condemn any pushback as “woke” and “critical race theory”.
If believing that the right to shop at Tops without fear of being mowed down by a racist assassin trumps the right of an 18 year-old kid to own military hardware is “woke”, then I’m woke.
The 2nd Amendment extremists need this information: that Tops has an armed retired cop working security. He engaged the gunman, who is lucky enough to live in a country that offers over-the-counter bullet-proof vests – and was killed by the terrorist’s modified AR-15, a military weapon sold relatively freely here to homicidal children. So, don’t ever let the “good guy with a gun” pseudo-argument pass your lips again.
But I’ve followed what goes on around here enough to tell you this: ‘he’s not from here” and “he’s from Binghamton” is irrelevant. WNY is a hotbed of fascist and Nazi extremism itself and I was fully expecting to be familiar with the name of this terrorist.
We have bad actors and irresponsible media like WBEN right here that get clout and make bank by spreading the same lazy Naziism this shooter espouses. It’s just a coincidence that this murdering Nazi was from Conklin and not Clarence. Of the many problems, Naziism seems to be the biggest one.
Do they care? Look at Tucker here after the Times exposed him (part 1 and part 2). As long as the checks clear, and black people are slaughtered, Tucker and his ilk think it’s all a big LOL.
Dear Comrades! The proletariat of Williamsville have seized power and, through their vanguard party implemented an appropriate dictatorship to bring the bourgeois liberal order to its knees, defenestrate the nobility, and to implement a true worker’s democratic order. Raise the red banner! Cue the Internationale! Long Live the Glorious Revolution!
“I’m just saying I’m embarrassed to be sitting up here with two trustees who, I will say, are nothing short of communists in their ability to vote ‘no’ on this opposition,” Rogers said. “Because this is exactly what we saw happening in communist China, where people were being taken from their homes against their will and placed into quarantine camps.”
I’ve spent some time in communist countries and I can think of a few differences right off the top of my head that would disprove Deb Rogers’ theory about the Trotskyite scum people on her village board who oppose her:
Williamsville has a multi-party democratic board of freely elected trustees. This does not happen under communism, where all political power is held by the ruling party, which sets up sham elections with slates of pre-approved party candidates and the electorate is forced to “vote” by checking a “yes” or “no” box. To my knowledge, this has not yet happened in Williamsville.
Williamsville enjoys free enterprise whereby people are able to start and own businesses, exploit the working class hire people, and compete in the marketplace in an effort to make a profit. Under most communist regimes, private enterprise, if allowed at all, is limited to only the smallest mom & pop stores such as barber shops, small restaurants, jewelry, and art. If permitted, these businesses are forced to pay confiscatory taxes, their ability to hire people is severely limited, and direct competition with state-owned enterprises is strictly regulated if permitted.
Williamsville has a free press and, to my knowledge, the editors and writers of the Amherst Bee are not members of the communist party for which the paper is the official organ.
Williamsville has freedom of speech and all of the other freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of New York and the United States. This is made evident by the way in which Comrade Rogers is free to utter the most obnoxious idiocy without fear of official government sanction therefor.
So we are clear, what Comrade Mayor Rogers is upset about is the idea that people who are suffering from a communicable, transmissible disease, might be ordered by the state to isolate to prevent transmission and epidemic at a place not their home. This is almost exactly like the outcome of the DDR’s Tenth Party Congress in 1981.
Presumably, based on this reported temper tantrum, Comrade Mayor Rogers might consider it to be “communism” for a school to send home a child with lice or strep; that it would be analogous to the Khmer Rouge emptying Phnom Penh of bespectacled citizens and sending them to die in camps for the state Department of Health to ask that people consider other people and take reasonable measures to avoid the preventable spread of infectious diseases, and that the state step in if they refuse.
The proper way for an aggrieved party to seek recourse against what it thinks is a governmental overreach is to file a lawsuit. Oh, look, there’s already one filed. Maybe the nominally “pro-life” bourgeois so-called “Republicans” are happy to have, e.g., an Ebola nurse running around town willy-nilly but that is unlikely to be in the best interests of public health. Then again, public health is a joke anyway, as we don’t have health coverage for every American, and no one gives a crap that we have a Covid positivity rate of 20% locally, or the effect that this has on immunocompromised people and on the economy generally. Glory to the People’s Martyrs who died so you could shop maskless at Target!
For the Village Board of the People’s Republic of Williamsville to pass (or reject) a resolution in opposition to (or support of) a state regulation is an utter and irrelevant waste of time that exists only to let someone grandstand. Comrade Mayor Deb Rogers got her grandstanding moment, and even hurled completely outlandish insults at a couple of trustees who were basically saying that, contrary to the opinions of Titoist bourgeois reactionaries, this was a colossal waste of time and effort. Just like Trotsky and Guevara would have wanted.
Joe Beamer is a young man who wields a degree of political power in Buffalo that is disproportionate to his knowledge and ability. Last Thursday, he allowed our public airwaves to be polluted by disgusting and abhorrent pro-Putinist propaganda, and he let it on without contemporaneous challenge or cross-examination. It was a monologue of disinformation.
Beamer did critique it some minutes later, but that is why the phrase “too little, too late” exists in that syntax.
If you have any doubts about why #WNY has a growing #GQP problem, check out this disgusting snippet of the disinformation @ThejoeBeamer and @WBEN allowed to fill the afternoon drive airwaves in #WNY. pic.twitter.com/pKd8eJQu3n
Let’s be honest: WBEN ceased to be “news” radio a long time ago. It is now an empty shell that barely competes with your Spotify playlist or favorite podcast. WBEN used to be the local home of Rush Limbaugh. Remember him? He was the biggest thing on right-wing talk radio from 1988 until his death, yet he is remembered for nothing. All that hate and bile brought him riches and an empty void of a legacy.
Now, talk radio is made up of Limbaugh clones, none of whom have the smarts or talent to do what he did. It’s all the same dumb tropes and talking points that you now get on Facebook. Calling women “femi-nazis” only gets you so far, especially when you have real-life contemporary nazis threatening the western liberal small-d democratic order.
I don’t listen to WBEN. I don’t need some stranger telling me what to think about things. I don’t need “Charlene from Lancaster” giving her deranged opinion about Vladimir Putin any more than I need “Rambo Jim’s” take on anything. I can make up my own mind by consuming the news from various sources. I don’t watch cable news talk for the same reasons. It is boring.
Last week, however, “Charlene” called up WBEN during Beamer’s time hosting and spewed a vicious, untrue stream of pro-Putin propaganda, which she likely picked up on local Q-Anon bulletin boards or Facebook. To call it unhinged would be a gross understatement. It was sheer insanity, delivered with a self-assured ignorance that is the hallmark of contemporary talk radio and Facebook political discourse. Putin is getting the job done in Ukraine, she said.
Why is it that so many people in western New York in particular are so deeply and shamelessly radicalized on the right? The common denominator is WBEN. Caputo, DiPietro, Mychajliw, Paladino, Aldinger, Dinero, Thompson, the risible “Financial Guys” – just to name a few – all of them share a nexus with WBEN. It is where right-wing ideology goes to grow an audience, to spread propaganda, and to seek legitimacy. I mean, the radio wouldn’t let lies on the air, would it?!
It starts with Grand Island tolls, morphs during the Obama years into the “tea party”, Bauerle declares that Obama is worse than al Qaeda. They go through the Koch-funded “Americans for Prosperity,” then Trumpism, the alt-right, “Groypers“, and anti-mask/anti-vaxxers. It is a straight line that has done so much and worked so lazily to poison our society and political discourse. It has helped to transform the conservative movement writ-large, and the Republican Party, into a local branch of United Russia.
They want to be ruled by an anti-woke dictator. They like Putin because Putin is anti-woke. Putin does not think “black lives matter.” Putin doesn’t “say gay”. Putin hates trans people and gays and lesbians and queer people, too. Like they, Putin has no real use for (((George Soros))) or the (((globalists))). Putin only cancels the libs who dissent from his party line. They like that Putin literally eliminates opponents when he doesn’t put on a show trial and sends them to Siberia. Trump and Putin got along. Trump wishes he could do to critics what Putin does.
This is why Q-addled right-wing talk radio callers praise war crimes and call their victims Nazis – because Putin is right, in two senses of that word. But if you’re a young talk radio host bringing up Ukraine as a topic, you should have enough of a grasp of the subject to cross-examine callers. It’s supposed to be a dialogue, not a soliloquy.
Non-sports talk radio is the gateway to right-wing authoritarianism, and this has been a gradual process over the course of the last 50 years. “Charlene” is a symptom. WBEN is the opiate.
Rick Scott (R-FL) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) inexplicably block the administration’s nominees to oversee American aid to Ukraine. They clap for Zelenskyy on Wednesday and stab him in the back on Thursday. Putin couldn’t ask for more compliant bastards.
Viktor Orban of Hungary, another Tucker Carlson wannabe dictator fave, suddenly finds that his relentless pro-Putinism become a political liability. It’s all smooth sailing while you’re owning the left opposition and denigrating gays and Muslims, but when you spend so much political capital on bowing to – and doing your best to emulate – Putin, that becomes a problem once Putin goes on his psychopathic war-crimes spree through Ukraine.
The alliance between anti-democratic right-wing populist movements in the west and Putin’s expansionist, neo-fascist, one-party mafia state is becoming very stale, very quickly. The creation of these movements may arguably have resulted from domestic economic, racial, and nationalistic grievances, but it has been stoked and cultivated by Moscow in order to destabilize and weaken western societies and democracies.
Freedom and liberty and democracy will always prevail against cheap hate cults. Never bet on fash.
The Covid-19 pandemic has taken over six million lives – one million in the United States alone. Since its outset, there have been an estimated 448 million cases of Covid-19 since late 2019. Fully 17% of those cases and deaths have been in the U.S. This is unfortunate, since the United States has only about 4.25% of the world’s population. We have overperformed in terms of death, misery, and illness.
The global pandemic has wrought havoc upon societies and economies throughout the world. Similarly situated advanced western democracies have all handled the pandemic in different ways, with varying results. As things began to re-open, economies heated back up again. As things began to re-open, some people did not feel comfortable or eager to return to their pre-pandemic jobs.
That post-emergency economic re-invigoration led to inflation not seen since the 80s. Putin’s criminal war to obliterate and subjugate Ukraine is only going to exacerbate everything, although energy prices seem to have stabilized, for now.
Three million refugees have fled Ukraine, most of them to Poland, and in lesser volume to Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova. All of these countries (except Moldova) are in the European Union and are our NATO allies.
Putin thought that he and his active measures over the past 7 years had adequately fractured and weakened western countries, their politics, their economies, their societies, and their alliances. NATO, he thought was weak. The EU, he thought, was feckless. But just as he miscalculated the Ukrainian people’s will to fight and avoid colonization and absorption, he similarly stumbled into awakening a sleepy west. The bickering EU is now united about Ukraine in an unexpected and perhaps unprecedented way. Not even during the Yugoslav conflagration and genocides did the EU act so forcefully and with such unity of purpose.
It was just a few years ago that Donald Trump was stating that NATO was extinct – an anachronism. Certainly, this vocalized doubt played right into the hands of Trump’s BFF Vladimir Putin, but like a lot of things of Trump’s, that hasn’t aged well. Putin managed to do in a couple of weeks what Trump could not do in four years – spur some recalcitrant NATO allies into spending a recommended 2% of GDP on defense. Even Germany sent weapons. Even Orban came on board.
The United Kingdom is doing its bit militarily. Its humanitarian response and willingness to accept Ukrainian refugees, however, is another story altogether. Having imposed sanctions upon itself through its disastrously idiotic, short-sighted, and Russian-spurred, racism-fueled Brexit, Blighty stands alone as a humanitarian afterthought in Europe. The Republic of Ireland, which is further west, smaller, and poorer, is doing more. The United States is completely absent on the Ukrainian refugee issue, to its shame.
This brings us to another issue – for years the same right-wing AM radio agitators have spewed vitriol at refugees fleeing failed Central American mafia states as an “invasion” of unwanted illegal aliens. I challenge anyone to explain to me the difference between a Honduran fleeing for his life from gang warfare, a Syrian fleeing for her life from ISIS or from Russian bombing, and a Ukrainian fleeing for her life from Russian bombing. I challenge these mentally deranged wretches to explain how a young family escaping a failed state in this hemisphere is an “invasion” while we see an actual invasion play out on TV every night in Ukraine.
Where are the Honduran children’s tanks?
Which apartment blocks in El Paso have the Guatemalan women shelled?
These same talk radio and neo-fascist cable news buffoons who equate refugees in the Western Hemisphere as “illegal invaders” almost uniformly express support for Putin. This is a topic briefly covered in this piece.
Let’s be honest – pluralist democracy is out of fashion with a solid third of the country. The Trump personality cult continues on, expressed by the types of people who are seemingly on the march right now in many corners of suburbia – the “freedom truckers” and anti-CRT/LGBTQ+ school board disruptors and OG Covid Deniers / Let’s Go Brandon / FJB / Trump desperados. They are united by a few key tenets, not the least of which include a desire to live under a one-party dictatorship with Donald Trump as president-for-life, and the rest of it amounting to “owning the libs.” While under Trump the “cruelty was the point” now they lazily defend the January 6th insurrection and abandon the principles upon which our government was founded, pledging fealty not to America but to the supreme leader.
To the Trumpists, the supreme leader is the country and the country is the supreme leader. Anyone else is a traitor shitlib communist who must be silenced or owned. This is not hyperbole: I am essentially paraphrasing what I hear from not a few current members of Congress.
On the other side we have the glib leftists who go out of their way to avoid condemnation of Putin and Russia and twist themselves like a pretzel to make it all about how NATO is bad. Literally a week or so ago there was a notice of a communist-led anti-NATO protest here in Buffalo that could not even be bothered to pay lip service to solidarity with Ukrainians – most of them working class people – who are being displaced or killed at the hands of a lunatic dictator. “No war” it said, demanding that NATO cut it out right this minute.
If the last few weeks have taught Europe any lessons, it is just how valuable NATO membership can be to avoid being bombed into the stone age by Russian bombs, missiles, and artillery.
We also have a unique phenomenon, mainly in nominally leftist journalistic cliques – I’m looking at you, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, and Buffalo’s own Matt Taibbi – that is the “anti-anti-Putin”. This hilariously transparent pro-Putinist, right-wing ethos plays itself out in podcasts and videos and Substack posts that do not directly demean the US or NATO or Ukraine, but instead attempt to be clever by demeaning shitlib opposition to Putin and his war. It is Elon Musk mocking the western world’s shock and horror at Russian war crimes. It is clumsy Assadist Tulsi Gabbard giving oxygen to Kremlin propaganda about biological labs. It is the jokes about Greenwald’s “whom I do not support” as echoed by the brilliant Times Pitchbot. The sane western world has no use for this sort of obvious nonsense. At least Trump has the self-awareness to be honest about his love of Putin.
Suffice it to say that it is not the same thing for Google to deplatform RT as it is for Putin to prosecute an anti-war protester for a felony.
One does not have to look too far in the past to remember what Russian oppression feels like to a Romanian, a Hungarian, a Czech or Slovak, or a Pole. Russian tanks rolled through Budapest and Warsaw and Prague all in the last 60 years. Ceausescu was as much a ruthless megalomaniacal madman as Putin. It is Ceausescu’s fate that Putin fears most.
In the few years starting in the summer of 1989, the peoples of Eastern Europe rose up to smash the relentlessly oppressive, illiberal regimes that imprisoned them. How did that start? Hungary – which was ironically then among the more liberal of the Warsaw Pact countries – threw open its border with Austria. This open door in the Iron Curtain resulted in Czechoslovaks and East Germans – who could travel within the Pact countries with relative ease – pouring through Hungary looking to end up in the west. By September it was reality, and within weeks this led to the fall of every communist regime in Europe, in their own time. In the intervening 30 years, Hungary, the DDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria all switched from secret police and command economies to the EU and free markets. Even Hoxha’s hermit Albania is free. Yugoslavia paid for its freedom in blood, and there remains a lot of unfinished business there.
The Soviet Union went away in 1991, and its results have been mixed. Ukraine has yo-yoed between emulating Poland or Belarus in terms of its connections with Russia. Like Croatia in the 90s, Ukraine’s future freedom and democracy is now being paid for in blood. It is no accident that the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia – all three of which shared SSR status with Ukraine in the old days – rushed to join the EU and NATO as quickly as possible. It is because these countries know that to be aligned with Russia is a mistake. These countries understand that Russia’s constant tug-of-war between what were once called the Westernizers and the Slavophiles remains unresolved, and as long as the latter has a shot at power, they remain under threat.
Stated roughly, Yeltsin was not really much of a Westernizer and Putin isn’t really much of a Slavophile, but each played one on TV. In reality, Russia simply traded one mafia state – based on allegiance to the Communist Party – to another based on fealty to the supreme leader. The USSR’s oligarchs didn’t have billions of dollars to spend on London townhomes and megayachts, but the Party’s apparatchiks and “nomenklatura,” enjoyed all of that era’s power, prestige, and perks, (save the occasional purge). The trappings of democracy were mere window-dressing. Russia’s current oligarchs have money and prestige linked directly to their relationship with Putin, and their willingness to serve the state’s needs when called. Never has political or economic power devolved from the Russian elite to the Russian people. Not after 1917, 1924, 1953, or 1991.
Perhaps now is the time for that to happen. Maybe this cataclysm in Ukraine will eventually lead to liberty and democratic change in Russia and her vassal states. Wishful thinking, but maybe Russia will someday decide that building up its own economy and infrastructure is preferable to conquering neighboring states that are minding their own business. Ukraine was never a threat to Russia, but the opposite is true, as we know from 2014 until today.
One hopes that Ukraine will come out on the other side of this war with its territory intact, its government free, and its ability to choose its associations and alliances unfettered by the preferences of malign exterior forces. There is no reason why Ukraine could not be like its western neighbors, but for Russian interference. Russia does not liberate, it subjugates.
When the history is written on this crisis, you’ll be grateful to look back and know that you were on the side of freedom and pluralist democracy and not on the side of neofascist imperialist personality cults. And to those who back the latter, the rest of us will remember.
For how many years now have these narcissistic loons been prattling on about what a big, bad “alpha” Putin is? How often have these cult followers made snide remarks about “betas” and being “cucked” and “snowflakes” that “melt” and similar language that is supposed to somehow portray them as a sort of manly-man “alpha”?
The word for all of it is “projection”.
Let’s look at their Christian nationalist alpha, Vladimir Putin. (Indeed, one preening ex-candidate for NY-24’s Republican nomination, whose claims of intelligence mimic those of Wile E. Coyote, continues to maintain his strident support of Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.)
Putin is no “alpha”. He’s a coward who plays alpha on TV. He’s squirreled away in a bunker in the Urals, and so petrified of Covid, or maybe assassination, that he meets with even his own generals at a 20-meter long table. He has kept other countries subjugated or at bay through threats of Russian military might. While the Russian military has proven itself to be reckless, lawless, and ruthless in Ukraine, it has in many respects also revealed its incompetence. If I was a Russian vassal state, say Belarus or to a lesser degree Serbia, I would be strongly re-thinking my reliance on the promises of the Russian military.
You see, the problem with spending 30 years setting up an authoritarian kleptocracy versus, I dunno, a functional pluralist democratic republic founded on the rule of law, is that the focus is set on billion-dollar dachas and multi-million dollar yachts for oligarchs, apparatchiki, and siloviki as opposed to investment in the boring stuff like functional tires for military vehicles. When an entire system is founded on buying into the dictator’s own delusions, that is not a good foundation upon which to fight a war against a smaller, weaker, but better-trained professional defending force.
But Mychajliw and the rest of the Groyper alt-right are projecting like an IMAX. They spew pre-masticated talk radio swill about the snowflake libs. Underneath all the fake bravado and bit-too-loud bluster, they’re like every other loudmouth bully – insecure little frauds.
Stefan has successfully glommed on to the Covid denial clique that orbits Robby Dinero. Now go back and look at all of Stefan’s carefully-crafted propaganda videos he posted to Twitter over the last couple of years while he was supposed to be doing the people’s business. For a guy who makes a lot of noise about re-opening everything, about unmasking everyone, and about getting back to normal, he sure as hell spent a lot of time filming little movies in his garage. He sure as hell spent a whole lot of time at home, rather than at the office. Fake bravado. Hell, just last week he went on a podcast with the “Financial Guys” (buyerbeware) and appeared via zoom instead of in person because Covid is such a big nothing.
I guess people should pay attention to what they do, and not what they say.
If you don’t get the reference, Google “Lord Haw-Haw“.
Stefan Mychajliw’s Ignorant Symbolism
Literally for weeks, the popular “Tucker Carlson” program on Fox News has gone out of its way to denigrate American democracy, the West, Ukraine and its leadership, and the alliances and treaties that help to make up what we commonly refer to as the free world. That program had instead offered full-throated defense – if not outright support – for the neofascist expansionist terror of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Right-wing populists, for whom Carlson is an avatar, admire Putin because he represents an America they prefer. Ignorant, bellicose, xenophobic, obnoxious, insular, and unfettered by people whose ideology and/or existence does not comport with (nominally) Christian whitehood. Propaganda here matters: “opposition to critical race theory” is substituted for “being racist.” “The election was rigged/stolen” is substituted for “accepting the results of a democratic election.” A Putinist America would be exponentially more intolerant – imprisonment, segregation, abolition, harassment, and annihilation would await anyone who identifies as homosexual, transgender, or in any other way not in compliance with what a kleptomaniacal televangelist would deem to be proper. It is not an accident that the right’s populism has selected the word “woke” – a term born from racial struggle – as its bogeyman. As a contemporary Putinist conservative, being anti-“woke” can be, and is, shorthand for all the things mentioned above, and many more that are not.
He is also one of western New York’s better-known citizens of Ukrainian extraction. He is not ignorant when it comes to symbolism in propaganda. Just go back and look at some of the downright evil and malignant campaign literature he sent around in 2021. Yet, when he appeared on Carlson’s nightly Wonderama of white nationalism, Mychajliw wore a tie with alternating stripes of white, blue, and red.
He was appearing on Carlson’s show to talk about Ukraine, of all things. As someone remarked to me on social media, “Joining us tonight to discuss matters of world security, we welcome Stefan Mychajliw, former no-show Comptroller of Erie County and guy who couldn’t win a seat on a town board despite all his name recognition. Stefan, with your extensive experience in such things, tell us what we ought to know about geopolitics.”
Does he even speak the language?
But I am also someone well-steeped in the minute symbolism rampant in eastern European ethnicity, politics, and culture. I am old enough to remember how, under communism, Croats often preferred Pepsi because its logo was red-white-blue, the colors of the Croatian flag, but without a red star. The flag of the Netherlands and Paraguay were similarly appreciated – a flag with red-white-blue horizontal stripes without a communist symbol would be banned in SFR Yugoslavia as reactionary and anti-revolutionary.
I bring up Yugoslavia not just out of personal experience, but because it was the last place a fascist maniac’s genocidal and expansionist war of choice was fought on European soil.
So, when you’re invited on national cable television to talk about the Russian war against Ukraine on a program that just a few nights before had defended Putin, one would think you would be careful about what you wore and the symbolism it brings. Just last night, Congress was festooned in yellow and blue.
But Mychajliw wore a tie that prominently featured stripes in the order of white-blue-red. This is the order of colors of the flag of the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin. He did so while parroting the Putinist line that all of this is Biden’s fault and Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on Trump’s watch. That’s right, he later mocked “liberal, woke “logic, to which he added the parenthetical “an oxymoron” while himself utilizing a logical fallacy; i.e., post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Mychajliw’s faulty “logic” is, of course, utter nonsense. Trump has been in thrall of Putin since at least Miss Universe 2013. He has never to this day uttered a critical word of Putin, calling his move to invade Ukraine the work of a “savvy” “genius”. Trump spent his entire Presidency denigrating and weakening our alliances with our traditional western democratic allies – NATO and the European Union. It was Ukrainian President Zelenskyy from whom Trump tried to extort a quid-pro-quo to manufacture a false scandal to aid in the 2020 election against Joe Biden.
It is safe to conclude that Trump and his “America First” dogma are no friends of the western political, economic, or military order, and no friend to Ukraine. This ideology instead praises “strongmen” and depots. Tyrants and dictators.
This puts Trumpists and Bannonites like Mychajliw in a sticky situation. Putin’s Russia is their dream – complete political dominance, violent quashing of dissent, power and cash concentrated in a small, pliant elite, and average citizens being so utterly exhausted and demoralized by the futility of trying to demand competent, responsive representative government that it all happens without much fuss. But the illegal, immoral invasion of Ukraine is based on lies not seen since the 1990s in Yugoslavia and 1930s farther west. So how does one reconcile one’s allegiance an ideology that would have America emulate Putin’s Russia while simultaneously condemning that regime’s fascist, eliminationist expansionism?
That’s got to be a tough one. Usually, when these Putinist Americans encounter a problem, they simply pick from their roster of scapegoats. Liberals. Gays. Women. Academics. Teachers. Unions. Immigrants. Black people. Brown people. Asians. Scientists. The educated. Foreigners. “Elites”. George Soros. Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama. Made-up spies, provocateurs, saboteurs. Journalists, etc. ad infinitum. Putin has more of his own – NATO, America, the West, Nazis. It’s all so easy, and the foundation for this continues to be built day by day by the craven and the power-hungry. “Putin ain’t woke!” scream mercenary Erik Prince and propagandist Steve Bannon.
Political symbolism is silent but can scream loudly. I am not suggesting that Mychajliw deliberately chose that tie as a signal of his true allegiance; but what I am saying is that it was, at best, clumsy and more likely sheer, blind ignorance. In his first outing as a professional basement propagandist, he beclowned himself – a Ukrainian-American wearing the Russian flag on his chest and he didn’t know any better. Assholes like he scream bloody murder if your American flag lapel pin isn’t large enough, demanding your obedience to the trappings of jingoism. I am certain that any Ukrainian patriot who saw those colors in that order on Mychajliw’s tie was screaming at the TV.
From personal experience – if a Croatian patriot wore something on TV bearing the colors of the red-blue-white Serbian tricolor between 1991 – 1995, it would be an epic scandal. It can’t be that hard for a Ukrainian to own a tie with blue and yellow in it. Hell, go look at Michael Caputo’s Twitter profile. Try that, next time, or go neutral. Otherwise you look like an ignorant prat who doesn’t know shit about shit.
One of them is a big – sound familiar? – Twitter lawyer loudmouth (and happens to be a big fan of a so-called “neoreactionary” Substack blogger who thinks that American democracy is obsolete and we need a kind of absolute monarchy. It is evil stuff devised to subjugate you.)
Anyway, naturally he’s a big Putin fan, too.
This paragraph really deserves some sort of prize for how it twists and turns. It is astonishing to consider whether America might have a “geopolitical interest” in the largest European country – a nascent democracy – being invaded and subjugated without justification, resulting in over a half-million refugees streaming across the borders of our NATO and EU allies. The allusion to “global finance” is an old trick missing only the word “protocols” or “Rothschild” but suffice it to say that a whole lot of money laundering was done by Russian oligarchs through the purchase of Trump properties. I would like to say that the paragraph shown above makes no sense, but that would be insulting to things that make no sense. This is puerile gibberish, written to appear deep.
See? It’s the Ukrainian people’s fault that they enjoyed a free European life, which was obviously triggering to Russia’s Putin. You’re too stupid to have this galaxy-brained take because you likely don’t have a “cursory understanding” of the world.
And, of course – nonsense.
Bad Takes: Left Edition
In a sea of bad and dumb takes, this one from some left-wing asshole whose family never had to run to the basement during an air raid really takes the cake. This sort of whataboutism is facile, juvenile, and jejune – it is also fundamentally ignorant.
Again, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an unjustified aggression against a neighboring democracy. Ukraine’s only crime is that it hasn’t allowed itself to become a Russian vassal state like Belarus, so Putin will impose that by force.
That Time cover about “bringing Serbs to heel” is not analogous. It is not even from the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia to halt a genocide of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, which somehow remains a topic of much consternation among some of an ignorant ilk.
It is instead from September 11, 1995. Here’s a link to the issue. It has to do with NATO bombings of Serb irregulars in Bosnia who had undertaken a years-long brutal campaign of genocide against Bosniak Muslims and to a lesser degree Croats. Sarajevo remained under siege with indiscriminate shelling and sniping of innocent civilians by Serb troops hiding out in the surrounding mountains. This article in 1995 specifically detailed the process by which the decision had been made, the evidence underlying that decision, and what was being done – that is to say, NATO was targeting military positions held by Bosnian Serbs to terrorize innocent civilians in Sarajevo. All this was two months after the genocidal massacres in Srebrenica. (Those short of memory can go watch “Quo Vadis, Aida?“).
Lazy efforts to equate Russian aggression against Ukraine with NATO’s response to Serbian genocide from 1991 – 1995 only serve to underscore that the deep problem of education in America doesn’t have to do with wokeism or CRT. It has to do with a generation of privilege learning nothing valuable about the world around them and taking their cues instead from extreme propagandists on social media.
To me, it is equally insidious for right-wing populists to turn their backs on western pluralist democracy in favor of white Christian nationalist authoritarianism as it is for left-wing populists to do the same in the name of class war and proletarian dictatorship.
I don’t know about anyone else with a, say Ukrainian or German surname, but my parents came to this country to leave authoritarian, totalitarian dictatorship behind and to join the western world. To have an opportunity to thrive and to be free. To speak their mind, to fly whatever flag they want, speak whatever language they want, and to sing forbidden songs and to freely criticize bad people. I don’t know what other people consider “freedom” to mean, but to me and my parents, it would have looked a lot like what the Ukrainian people are fighting for.
My country and my heritage and what I believe in align with Ukraine’s struggle to stay free a lot more than, say, convoys of underemployed truckers during a supply chain crisis who refuse to wear a mask or get a shot.
So what I am saying is that right now is a time for choosing – are you on the side of the people of Ukraine and their European democratic hopes and dreams, fighting to repel a fascistic onslaught? Or are you on the side of the aggressor and its spy madman dictator? It really is exactly as binary a choice as that.
There are very few things, (if any), that are complicated or thought-provoking about the American right as it exists in 2022. It has been remade in the image of its emperor-god Donald Trump and pays fealty to him by adopting his personal vendettas and fits of pique. Conservatives will, of course, use the culture war, now re-branded as a war on anything perceived as “woke,” as a convenient bridge to its only other reason for being, which is to troll the libs.
Apart from more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and things like deductions for massive SUVs and private jets, that is all that’s left of American conservatism today – further marginalization of the already marginalized, trolling the libs, and doing the Donald’s bidding.
This is not about democracy or geopolitics. This is Donald Trump getting revenge. In the 80s, it might have been a biting Cindy Adams column or “John Barron” calling in a tip to Page Six. Today, it more ominously involves choosing to side with the authoritarian dictator doing a Sudetenland on Ukraine. Crimea war nicht genug wasn’t enough.
You will recall that Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019, (and acquitted in January by his Republican henchmen). The subject matter of that impeachment is not just relevant to, but fully informs, American conservatives’ siding with Putin. Donald Trump is exacting his revenge upon Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not playing ball in 2019.
If there was one person to whom Trump did not want to lose the 2020 election, it was Joe Biden. Trump spent incalculable time and energy recruiting people to assist him in, essentially, making up a series of scandals accusing Biden of corruption in Ukraine for two reasons: 1. wielding the power of the right-wing echo chamber and lazy Washington reporters, it could put a question in voters’ minds about whether Biden was a corrupt gonif and sell-out; and 2. get payback for the exposure of the 2018 Trump campaign’s oddly incestuous relationship with certain Middle Eastern emirates and actors associated with the Russian Federation. What better way to prove the “Russia hoax” than to gin up a Ukrainian one?
In July 2019, on a phone call with Zelensky, Trump attempted to coerce his Ukrainian counterpart to spread lies accusing Biden and his son, Hunter, of various corrupt misdeeds. Trump told Zelensky that he would block the payment of a $400 million package of Congressionally appropriated military aid unless Zelensky played ball.
(Lt. Col. (Ret.) Alexander Vindman, then Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, was on the call and was so alarmed that he blew the whistle on the whole thing – this corrupt attempt by Trump to abuse his power by coercing the Ukrainian President to interfere in an American election through a quid pro quo.)
According to the resolution by the House Intelligence Committee,
[T]he impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection. In furtherance of this scheme, President Trump conditioned official acts on a public announcement by the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, of politically-motivated investigations, including one into President Trump’s domestic political opponent. In pressuring President Zelensky to carry out his demand, President Trump withheld a White House meeting desperately sought by the Ukrainian President, and critical U.S. military assistance to fight Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine
In the end, Trump could not rely on the Ukrainian government to legitimize his corrupt scheme. He was left instead to commission his dutiful personal propagandists to attempt to manufacture the “scandal” through vanity publishers and right-wing cable “news” outlets.
But that is it – the whole explanation for the conservative backing of Putin’s slow-rolling Anschluss of Ukraine is that they are in thrall to Trump, and Trump prefers Putin to Zelensky because Putin knows better how to play to Trump’s myriad weaknesses, and Trump perceives that as respect.
It is all to be rejected and condemned by normal patriotic Americans. We support even the flawed, nascent, unstable democracies.
Just as surely as we would have rejected Lindbergh or the Bund in the 1930s, we reject the Putinist fifth column today.
