It’s ironic, but the hate-America-first crowd has another principle: Hate Vladimir Putin second. Of course, how many of them actually hate him as opposed to just effecting the pretense of such is a question. What’s for certain is that you are expected to feel, viscerally, that Vlad is bad. In fact, “Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason.”
So said Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson Tuesday night, warning that the pseudo-elites demanding this anti-Putin passion have consistently harmed Americans with toxic domestic policy and now are harming us again. This time it’s with toxic foreign policy that could embroil us further in the current Eastern European conflict — which could spin out of control.
Carlson then lent the matter perspective, saying that
it might be worth asking yourself, since [this] … is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?
These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that. So why does permanent Washington hate him so much?
One could add that Russia also doesn’t successfully put its propaganda in our schools, bully our businesses into doing its bidding, censor our movies, and threaten to displace us as the world’s dominant power. China does.
Nonetheless, our leaders treat Chinese president Xi Jinping gently. Could this be, just perhaps, because our pseudo-elites get de facto bribes from Beijing? Sorry, Vlad, you gotta’ pay that protection money.
Speaking of which brings us back to Ukraine, which Russia did invade yesterday. “Now, the main thing to know about Ukraine for our purposes is that its leaders once sent millions of dollars to Joe Biden’s family,” Carlson also stated, adding further perspective. “Not surprisingly, Ukraine is now one of Biden’s favorite countries. Biden has pledged to defend Ukraine’s borders even as he opens our borders to the world. That’s how it works. Invading America is called equity; invading Ukraine is a war crime” (video below).
Of course, we hear, incessantly, that siding with Ukraine is a matter of defending “democracy,” an appeal becoming quite clichéd. Yet Ukraine is a democracy a bit like Venezuela is a democracy. Note that the nation’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has imprisoned opposition leaders and just shut down the last remaining opposition TV station earlier this month. This may accord, though, with the Biden administration’s concept of “democracy.”
After all, using our tax money and in violation of law — meaning, contrary to Americans’ will as expressed through their elected representatives — the feds are facilitating invasion U.S.A. by flying massive numbers of illegal aliens into our country’s interior.
Yet the pretense about Democracy™ is matched by that concerning “values” and “sacrifice,” as we’re supposed to make the latter in the former’s name. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said recently, for example, that Joe Biden was standing up for our “democratic values.”
The pseudo-elites are right to speak of “values” because they’re bereft of “virtues” (very different things). Yet what would these values be?
Putting boys in girls’ restrooms? Teaching grade-schoolers about “LGBTQ” sexuality? Making kids hate each other via Critical Race Theory indoctrination? Screaming “racism” to gain political advantage? Becoming apoplectic about a foreign army invading over a foreign border while inviting a different foreign army to invade across your own?
The pseudo-elites don’t specify. But the sacrifice we know more about. Owing to our Russia-Ukraine policy, energy “prices in the United States are about to go way up, and that means that everything you buy will become much more expensive, from the food you eat to the car you drive to the tickets you need to take your family on vacation this summer, assuming you can still afford a vacation by then,” Carlson further stated Tuesday. “You’re about to become measurably poorer…. Joe Biden has admitted this.”
“On the other hand, you’re going to win an important moral victory against dastardly old Vladimir Putin, who is much, much worse than Justin Trudeau, just so you know,” Carlson continued. “It seems like a pretty terrible deal for you and for the United States. Hunter Biden gets a million dollars a year from Ukraine, but you can no longer afford to go out to dinner.”
That’s the point, too. The sacrifice the pseudo-elites nobly talk about in service to the mysterious, ever-unspecified “values” they claim to embrace won’t be borne by them.
It will hit us.
They’ll still have their Xi money, high salaries, pensions, perks, payoffs, and anything else their hearts desire. The pseudo-elites do the posturing — you take the pain.
Meanwhile, they bully Americans into embracing their defending-democracy fantasy by making accusations akin to what Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe recently said explicitly. He claimed in a now-deleted tweet that Tucker Carlson and some other conservatives were praising Putin and that this constituted “aid and comfort” to an “enemy” and therefore meets the definition of “treason” under the Constitution. Coming from the side that scrubs George Washington’s name off schools, that’s rich.
Whatever the pseudo-elites value, America ain’t it. In fact, their treason charge seems an awful lot like projection.
