Opinion and Commentary since 2003
Here you are.
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.
Same goes for Londongrad Tories and the UKIP champions of Brexit – a scheme whereby the UK imposed sanctions on itself. Same goes for Le Pen. Same goes for Mattini. Same goes for Trump and his cult. Same goes for AfD. Same goes for FPÖ.
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.
So, we have Putin’s useful idiots on the right, who would re-make America in Russia’s image. Nothing would own the libs more than a domestic version of OMON special police banning free speech or a megalomaniacal President-for-life having his mildest critics murdered, tortured, or exiled. And we have Putin’s useful idiots on the left, who do his bidding by blaming America for Putin’s invasion and demanding the weakening of the western democracies’ defensive alliance.
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.
I guess this touched a nerve.
Siri: show an example of narcissistic rage pic.twitter.com/rJ0D32kA2t
— WNYmedia Network (@wnymedia) March 4, 2022
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.
I watched Ukrainian President Zelensky challenge Putin. Come meet me. Face-to-face. What are you afraid of? Talk to me. I’m a man – not 30 meters away at a ridiculous table, but within arm’s reach. He invited the press to his bunker and brought a chair to sit and answer whatever questions came his way. It is Zelensky who shows courage and strength while Putin – nominal “alpha – cowers and hides behind his insane ruthlessness and mentally deranged propaganda.
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” (buyer beware) 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.
Stefan Mychajliw is not much. He’s a failed TV reporter, failed commentator, failed PR guy, failed Comptroller, and failed candidate for everything from Congress to a town supervisorship. Obviously, his myriad failures make him qualified to do little else except join a right-wing propaganda firm. After all, who can forget how successful he was in his effort to equate Hamburg’s lovable Randy Hoak with Antifa’s black bloc? What a resume.
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.
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
NY-24 Follies
There’s a lot to unpack as Chris Jacobs, who on January 6, 2021 voted to put an end to the American democratic process, continues to tack hard right, but there is a small number of ambitious people who think Jacobs’ Trumpism is too leftist for their taste.
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.
So, as we see Republicans and their dutiful propagandists praise Putin and denounce Ukraine, we must eschew any impulse to analyze this deeply and instead pay attention to the easy answers; the bleeding obvious.
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
House Intelligence Committee Report
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.
You read that right. Untie the hand you keep fastened behind your backs come election time. The other side fights dirty. They lie. They exploit deep prejudices and fears. They break the law, they break the rules. They make stuff up.
This is your 2021 election take. The analysis of what happened last night in Erie County, New York does not lend itself to easy or quick or lighthearted takes. (I have nothing to offer about any other races anywhere else in the world).
The right in this country is still poisoned by Trump and has jettisoned any pretense of holding policy positions in favor of sloganeering, jingoism, and culture war bullshit. To the extent that Democrats have an enrollment advantage here, it isn’t indicative of a monolith. There are a lot of racist, right-wing, Trumper, WBEN listening “Democrats” out there who just need to see the word “socialist” or a slogan like “defund the police” or be incited by the WengerBauerleBellavia axis of disinformation to vote (R) (or (R) adjacent, like BB).
Yes, it is good that Hardwick won but it should not have even been in question, based on the utter lack of a campaign from his opponent.
(On this point, especial and specific denunciation goes out to that narcissistic toxic avatar of reverse-Midas-touches, Nate McMurray and his dopey henchpeople. If McMurray has proven one thing it is that he has taken the pulse of some the fuck other place and applied it to WNY, and gets it wrong time and time again. Call me when he gets elected to something without the help of a local fascist or when he doesn’t defame good candidates like Kevin Hardwick by regurgitating Republican or Eagan talking points whilst simultaneously trying further to burnish some novel leftist bona fides.)
Yes, it is good that Hoak won and finally that horrific creep who ran against him is out of public office. Hopefully in perpetuity.
But turn to Garcia and Brown. It seems as if you can never run too far right around here and be punished, but if one runs too far left you get destroyed.
Garcia’s ad linking Walton and Beaty as two black female socialist cop-firers was nothing less than racist. It was not a dogwhistle, it was blatant. Brown’s messaging against Walton was similar. She is an “other”. She is not one of us.
“Never count a Buffalonian out” yelled the guy from Jamaica, Queens at a woman born in Buffalo who’s lived and struggled here all her life.
Beaty will literally abolish the police, said Garcia, despite the fact that she is police and outranked him at any given moment.
As to Beaty, if she loses, she was defeated by good old-fashioned racism and misogyny. She is head and shoulders more qualified than any of her opponents.
As to Walton, I think she ran a clean and issues-driven, people-driven campaign and she deserves kudos for that. Unfortunately, that works much better in a primary (especially if your opponent sits it out) than it does in a general. Once you challenge the establishment (writ large – not any specific one) in any way – everyone from developers to city employees – you’re going to catch hell and your path is much steeper. Brown played up people’s fears against Walton and it worked. She was not well-funded when he decided to run this write-in, and she lost an opportunity to define herself before her opponent did it for her.
But here’s what I want to be really really deeply taken in by Democrats in this area. The issue isn’t whether Jeremy Zellner fucked something up or whether the DSA people should take things over. That – and the people who continue to exploit any available factionalism – is an epic distraction that, itself, fucks us up.
The Republicans and the right in this region prove time and time again that it’s ok to just lie, defame, and break rule after rule. And? They are a monolith. Use city cops in your ads? Sure! City workers using city stuff on city time to help BB? Go for it! Kim Beaty the cop wants to abolish the police? Run it!
Beaty went negative against Garcia and brought up some obtuse stuff about his company being shady. Walton and WFP did their best to remind people of accusations and evidence of BB’s relentless and longstanding corruption.
OK, but if Democrats did what Republicans routinely do, we would (and should) non-stop over and over show violent images of the Trumper Q-Anon army storming the Capitol on 1/6 and linking Garcia (and Brown and Mychajliw and Dixon etc. ad infinitum) to the people who would overturn our elections and democracy itself.
Same with Walton – BB wants Republican help? He should wear 1/6 and Paladino’s racist words and all of it.
If Democrats want to win we need to take the fucking gloves off and stop pussyfooting around what these people are. Stefan Mychajliw? He’s a nazi. John Garcia? He’s a racist. Byron Brown? He’s a corrupt puppet of deep-pocketed developers. They all of them get support from the likes of guys who routinely refer to black people as less than human. All of them are in a symbiotic relationship with the people who would destroy America itself – the insurrectionists and the cop-killers and the traitors.
Fucking say it.
There are eight stages of genocide, according to “Genocide Watch.” Among them are “us vs. them” classification of preferred and targeted groups and symbolization of the targeted group through imposition (e.g., yellow star) and the exploitation of stereotypes or unique cultural attributes.
We focus here on “dehumanization”
In this stage, the perpetrating power begins to equate the targeted group or groups to sub-human status. Members of groups are likened to animals, vermin, insects, and/or diseases. Dehumanization allows average people to overcome the normal human revulsion against murder. At this stage, hate propaganda is in print and other media are used to vilify the victim group. To combat dehumanization, incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech. This rhetoric is harmful and can lead to the killing of hundreds of thousands. Local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech and make it culturally unacceptable.
Just this week, Stefan Mychajliw thought it necessary within the context of a *checks notes* town supervisor race to play around a bit with some dehumanizing genocidal language. For a guy who once made a big deal about his family’s travails through the Holomodor and emigration westward and then northward, it would ordinarily be counterintuitive for him to take on the language of genocide perpetration. Yet, believe it or not, here we are.
It is not enough to ignore Mychajliw’s incitement. It is important to highlight it and to condemn it for what it is.
India Walton. AOC. Radical socialist Randy Hoak. Three comrades endorsed by the Working Families Party. Their mission: defund police and raise taxes in NYS $94 billion. They want to infest Buffalo and Hamburg. Their candidate survey: “how will you CO-GOVERN with WFP?” Co-govern? pic.twitter.com/OGROboe15n
— Stefan Mychajliw (@StefanMychajliw) October 26, 2021
Hamburg homeowners: want your property values to plummet? Want the value of your home to sink like a rock? Radical socialist Randy Hoak will infest Hamburg by building low income apartments in your neighborhood. Here’s a direct quote from his Working Families Party questionnaire. pic.twitter.com/LXBvoU3qKo
— Stefan Mychajliw (@StefanMychajliw) October 25, 2021
Those are two tweets sent from Mychajliw’s official, verified Twitter account (I urge you to report them to Twitter for targeted hate speech against a group) within a day of each other. Mychajliw is attacking his opponent for suggesting that it would be good to re-evaluate zoning regulations in the town to allow for more multi-family housing. Mychajliw’s reaction to this is literally to call this an “infestation”.
One does not talk about an influx of people as an “infestation” unless one intends to dehumanize those people in such a way as to direct hatred at them. After all, whom do you call for an “infestation”?
The exterminator.
This is not hyperbole. This is a local Republican who once had aspirations to serve as County Executive or in Congress suggesting that a zoning change to allow for minority or low-income people to move into a town is an “infestation”.
Mychajliw’s antics cannot be chalked up to culture warrior banter anymore. This isn’t funny. This isn’t something to take lightly or to disregard. It cannot be stressed strongly enough that we have here a local prominent Republican running for office who refers to entire classes of people – poor, minorities, immigrants, refugees – you name it – as parasites or vermin.
The next time Mychajliw sells you some story about how his grandpappy went AWOL from the Wehrmacht, ask him why he feels comfortable using Nazi terminology to describe his fellow Americans who happen to be less white or less well-off than he.
In his risibly facile Op-Ed, Mychajliw wrote,
What I have is a love for the promise of America, and a loathing for those who seek to destroy it.
Mychajliw should look in the mirror, and loathe what he sees glaring back at him.
Byron Brown is running a scorched-Earth campaign of lies and mud against India Walton, the woman who defeated him in the Democratic primary for Mayor of Buffalo. Brown’s campaign is seemingly managed by the Buffalo News’ editorial board.
Walton is the only Democrat in that race, and hers will be the only name on any ballot for that office. She has good and novel ideas about running a poor city that has been run by the current Mayor’s vast, entrenched political machine for 16 years. Despite hyperventilation to the contrary, Walton’s experience managing a large municipal organization is essentially equal to what Byron Brown’s was in 2005. Arguably more. (Citistat, anyone?)
Lots of talk about my opponent’s “experience.”
— India Walton For Buffalo (@Indiawaltonbflo) October 24, 2021
Has he worked a 12-hour night shift? Struggled with poverty? Gotten free from an abusive marriage?
No. He’s been a politician his whole life.
All that “experience” and he can’t address lead poisoning or childhood poverty? Please.
In June, Democratic voters in the city of Buffalo decided it was time for a change, but Byron Brown could not be bothered simply to concede. He has instead aligned himself with the rich, the connected, and the right-wing. Faced with an end to his tenure that is earlier than he anticipated, but by no means premature, every chit and every favor is being called. In his desperation, he forgets himself.
But that is not what this is about. We are not here to contemplate Byron Brown’s alignment with the Buffalo power structure with which he has always had a symbiotic, mutually beneficial existence. Consider, for a moment, if the occupant of the mayor’s office put the least fortunate and powerful first. That is the inherent appeal of India Walton and what she stands for.
Instead, we have been treated to a crash education. What we have learned in the last several days is that the Republican Party in Erie County – the party of authoritarian cult and insurrection – has completely jettisoned any pretense of conservative small government values in favor of a platform of grift, lies, and racism. We are here to talk about nominal Comptroller candidate Lynne Dixon, sheriff candidate John Garcia and – of all things – Hamburg supervisor candidate Stefan Mychajliw.
As you may be aware, early voting in Erie County started on Saturday, October 23rd and runs through Halloween. (Polling places are listed here). I cannot urge you strongly enough to please vote for Kevin Hardwick for Comptroller, Kimberly Beaty for Sheriff, and Randy Hoak for Hamburg Supervisor. Hoak and Beaty each has an inspiring story, history, and platform. They are both exceptionally good and qualified candidates in their own rights. As for the office of Comptroller, few people know more about county government than Kevin Hardwick, and even fewer care as much as he about its proper functioning.
We are here instead to condemn the clumsy and stupid lies of Lynne Dixon, and to denounce the blatantly racist prevarication and propaganda from Garcia and Mychajliw.
Ken Kruly has covered Dixon’s rank idiocy quite well:
It is not unusual for some people in politics to drop scurrilous attack materials or ads near the end of a campaign when such action leaves little time for a responsible response from the candidate being attacked. Such is the case with a mailer delivered today, Friday, October 22nd, the day before early voting starts.
Republican-Conservative candidate for Erie County Comptroller Lynne Dixon did just that today, sending out a mailer to Buffalo Democrats suggesting that her Democratic opponent, Kevin Hardwick, is a “pro-Trump Conservative.” How ironic that is sent just as the Buffalo News on their website has posted an editorial endorsing Hardwick. The editorial says that Dixon “sets herself apart from the current comptroller in style and temperament …” NOT.
Ken Kruly in an email blog
Suffice it to say that Donald Trump is what finally convinced Hardwick to leave that fetid cesspool of a “Republican” party, and Dixon – (whose daughter Erin can, this year, spare me her semi-coherent, overwrought direct messages) – is the Trumper di tutti Trumpists. She offers nothing but lies and the Mychajliw continuum of failure, absence, and mediocrity.
Garcia is the successor whom long-embattled incumbent Sheriff Howard has hand-picked for himself. Just this past week, Garcia began airing this ad (FB). I won’t embed it here because I think that it is, frankly, evil.
It starts out with stock imagery of Black Lives Matter protests from 2020, which happened in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. It portrays only images of rioting and cities burning with someone holding up a “defund the police” sign. The ad states that “socialism” is what brought about those images, which is laughably idiotic.
If we’re being temporally accurate, after all, the protests we saw in 2020 occurred under the current right-wing malign incompetence of Byron Brown and Tim Howard.
Predictably, the imagery in Garcia’s ad changes to a side-by-side black-and-white picture of India Walton (against whom Garcia is not running) and Kim Beaty. There are exactly two things about Walton and Beaty that are similar, and one of them is that they’re each the endorsed Democrat for public office. Garcia accuses Beaty and Walton of an intent to “dismantle the pillars of community protection in Erie County.”
So, are we to believe that Garcia has just randomly lumped in two completely unrelated candidates for office – both of whom happen to be women of color – to accuse them of planning to get rid of police departments? His ad says that you have to vote for him to prevent Erie County from becoming “another failed socialist public safety experiment.” Garcia’s inclusion of Walton in his ad is that old Republican standby of gratuitous fearmongering, misogyny, and racism. He sets Ms. Beaty adjacent to Ms. Walton to smear them both to his audience as women of color. The intended audience is racists and misogynists. Gotta turn out the base.
Garcia is implicitly endorsing excessive force and police brutality for people who like to see that sort of thing happen to minorities. With his racist lies, Garcia in one stroke disqualifies himself for any office whatsoever. Ever.
Now let us turn to Stefan Mychajliw, whose expulsion from the public sector will be especially gratifying. Mychajliw has all but abandoned the job for which taxpayers pay him big bucks in order to troll the libs on Twitter full time. His only platform is the culture war. His abandonment of his elected post has enabled him to traipse around the east coast cosplaying as a more ethnic Jim Jordan.
Mychajliw, who has lived in Hamburg for about two minutes, has literally nothing to run on so he attacks his opponent, Randy Hoak, as some sort of socialist. (I’m detecting a weak theme). But Mychajliw, who for a couple of years has been flirting with white nationalism, finally settled on a race to run – in Hamburg. But as the Buffalo News wrings its hands over India Walton’s qualifications, it ignores the fact that Stefan Mychajliw is barely qualified to be Stefan Mychajliw.
Now, at last, Mychajliw tells on himself. Pursuing white nationalist Trump voters is easier when you are one.
Radical Socialist Randy Hoak trashed Hamburg for being too white. This Working Families Party endorsed extremist has a solution. His exact words and mission as Supervisor: “at the end or four years we have a significant increase in the number of people of color in our town.” pic.twitter.com/H4v9CcQXE4
— Stefan Mychajliw (@StefanMychajliw) October 20, 2021
Someone leaked something to Stefan, and he pulled a quote so out of context it is almost meaningless. Stefan’s point here is clear, however – it is to scare whitey, full stop. Mychajliw, perpetually out of substance or ideas, accuses Hoak of – what, exactly? Respecting America’s diversity?
The Buffalo News got a hold of the elected Comptroller and he tried unsuccessfully to backpedal.
When asked if he has any problem with people of color moving into Hamburg, Mychajliw said, “No. That question should be asked of Randy Hoak. He’s the one who brought up the issue in this race.”
No. Mychajliw outs himself as having a problem with people of color moving to Hamburg, and he is trying to pander to other townsfolk who do. Most likely, it’s both. If, as he claims, Mychajliw is for diversity, then why would he cherry-pick part of something Hoak said that is pro-diversity and then attack him over it? The supposed logic only works if you’re a moron and a fraud.
The list of reasons to relegate Mychajliw to the private sector is deep and wide. His campaign disclosures reveal unpopularity and incompetence so significant that it likely crosses the line into illegality.
No wonder his own family members won’t vote for him. The people closest to him know what he is.
Between Dixon’s defamation, Garcia’s racism and misogyny, and Mychajliw’s no-show, no-ethics race-baiting, WNY can do much better with Hardwick, Beaty, and Hoak. It seems like this year is a unique opportunity to leave a lot of really bad prejudices and malign politicians behind.
Reluctant campaigner Byron Brown denigrates the qualifications of Democratic Nominee India Walton.
Yet India Walton is literally the only candidate who was able to get her name on the November mayoral ballot.
Tell me more, Mayor Brown, about how inexperienced and unprepared she is. Because she’s been cleaning your clock since at least June 22, 2021. March 25th, if we want to go by the filing deadline.
During the Democratic Mayoral primary campaign, incumbent Byron Brown pretended as if it wasn’t happening. He did not campaign. He refused to debate his opponent. He refused even to acknowledge her existence or to use her name as part of his ill-fated “rose garden strategy“. Indeed, every act and omission of the absent Brown for Mayor primary campaign was designed to keep turnout low.
India Walton won that campaign because she worked hard and treated it – and the Democratic voters in the city of Buffalo – seriously. She campaigned. She showed up.
You don’t earn a fifth term by telling your voters to stay home.
Byron Brown’s rose garden strategy was, frankly, insulting to the electorate and his constituency. They didn’t show up so he naturally lost. Not only because he did not show up, but because he has always been little more than a caretaker mayor. (Example: if you’re the mayor of a city famous for snow and you can’t plow side streets until days after a storm, you’re not going to be some sort of beloved figure.)
Now that Brown lost, he has suddenly decided to take India Walton seriously. He deigned to debate her (as well as a couple of other write-in candidates no one’s heard of). At that debate, he said:
I am the only qualified candidate to be Mayor on this stage.
— Mayor Byron W. Brown (@byronwbrown) September 9, 2021
He is? He created a brand-new, bespoke little political party line for himself and submitted petitions months too late. He lucked out for a week or so, but on Thursday the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and the NY Supreme Court’s 4th Appellate Division overturned the lower courts and ruled that he blew a perfectly reasonable and legal deadline and that his name and party line would not be on the November ballot. As a matter of fact, if Brown had taken the primary race seriously and done his little “Buffalo Party” petitions months ago to meet the deadline, he’d have been fine.
He messed it up because he is not qualified to be on the ballot, on the debate stage, or in City Hall, frankly. The developers and fatcats who support him can do their worst, but ultimately they’re funding a write-in campaign that quickly became startling in its blatant illegality.
Byron Brown has had 15 years to become an iconic mayor who would deserve to remain in that role indefinitely. Almost every positive thing that Buffalo has to tout has happened around him or in spite of him. It is state money and county money and federal money, people, and politicians who have helped to improve Buffalo since 2006.
The big appeal of India Walton, which most of her detractors don’t seem to get, is that Byron Brown’s City Hall remains mired in a uniquely Buffalonian nostalgic hangover from the good old days. It’s the 21st Century and it’s high time the city had a leadership that looked out for all Buffalonians, and not just the ones with deep pockets and wallets perpetually opened for “Brown for Buffalo” and his other various political clubs and entities. It’s time City Hall worked well and efficiently for everyone equally, fueled more by excellence rather than patronage.