Right After The Election

The poster above is is from just one recent controversy involving school curricula that effectively groom children for all the variants of pansexualism. In this particular case,

New Jersey mother Angela Reading revealed she was told she was being 'monitored' by local law enforcement, after airing concerns about posters hanging at the entrance of her seven-year-old's school in North Hanover Township.

Reportedly part of an assignment to create a 'safe space' for students, the colorful art installations contain language that tout different sorts of sexuality, including the virtues of being both 'poly-' and 'pansexual' - all scrawled in children's handwriting.

The added wrinkle is the woman "revealed cops became privy to her since-deleted Facebook post after being tipped [off] by a lieutenant colonel at nearby military base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, who took issue with the post."

The military official - a senior staffer at the New Jersey military base - said that staffers were working with local police to 'monitor the situation' while ensuring 'the continued safety of the entire community.'

In the Chicago area, the private Parker School became immersed in controversy when a Project Veritas reporter posing as a conference attendee interviewed a school administrator:

The video captures the dean talking last week about a visit to Francis W. Parker School by an LGBTQ health organization to discuss queer sexual health with high schoolers.

. . . Parker leaders sent a letter to the school community late Wednesday saying “we are heartbroken that one of our colleague’s words have been severely misrepresented for a malicious purpose.” The letter offered strong support for their faculty and staff and for the school’s “inclusive, LGBTQ+ affirming, and comprehensive approach to sex education.”

The school said the local alderman helped it expand the police presence around its Lincoln Park campus, and it has implemented higher security measures. At least one person marched in front of the school on Thursday to protest the school’s sex ed curriculum.

I was immediately curious to see whether any Parker School parents objected to the LGBTQ visit, which as portrayed in the Project Veritas video didn't say anything about "queer sexual health" but did involve distributing dildos and butt plugs to the students. Apparently there was no mass withdrawal of students by irate parents, and the Parker School website suggests why:

Francis W. Parker School educates students to think and act with empathy, courage and clarity as responsible citizens and leaders in a diverse democratic society and global community.

So the parents are spending as much as $42,300 per year for just the sort of queer sex ed the school provides, and they feel good about it. In fact, per the link above,

Parker leaders sent a letter to the school community late Wednesday saying “we are heartbroken that one of our colleague’s words have been severely misrepresented for a malicious purpose.” The letter offered strong support for their faculty and staff and for the school’s “inclusive, LGBTQ+ affirming, and comprehensive approach to sex education.”

The school said the local alderman helped it expand the police presence around its Lincoln Park campus, and it has implemented higher security measures. At least one person marched in front of the school on Thursday to protest the school’s sex ed curriculum.

As with the Hanover Township controversy, the fact that a school would be grooming pre-teens and teens for pansexualism is represented as a public safety issue, with the groomers portrayed as potential victims who must be protected from concerned parents, who must in turn be monitored by law enforcement.

Again, Admiral Levine themselves weighs in:

Dr. Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, tried to enlist children’s doctors and nurses into the transgender activist movement, urging them to become evangelists and preach the gospel of transgenderism. Anything less would be a betrayal of their profession and science itself, he argued.

Levine, assistant secretary of health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, claimed that there is a large population of biological males who are really female and vice versa, and these people are likely to commit suicide unless doctors pump them with drugs to delay puberty, introduce a hormone disease into their bodies, and perhaps even remove healthy body parts.

. . . He championed “acceptance” as a life-saving message; painted opponents of his ideology as driven by an “agenda” that has “nothing to do with warmth, empathy, compassion, or understanding”; and sent forth the doctors as his new apostles.

. . . Levine painted a dire picture of an oppressed people, citing high rates of suicidal thoughts and attempted suicides. He blamed this predicament on a demonic society, dismissing any notion that transgender identity may contribute to mental health struggles.

It's unfortunate, though, that current controversies over grooming minor children have emerged at the same time as the controversy over Admiral Levine's other high-profile government colleague, Sam Brinton, who is currently sought on two felony warrants for stealing designer luggage from airport baggage carousels. It's worth noting, though, that Brinton, prior to his career as a serial felon, had actually been a high-profile advocate for just the sort of empathetic grooming advocated by Admiral Levine and woke school curricula:

Sam is one of the world’s leading advocates for LGBTQ youth. They are the founder of the 50 Bill 50 States campaign at The Trevor Project to end the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy, first in the United States and then around the globe.

However, even among the gay community there were doubts about the guy:

The criminal case against the activist is damning. Brinton had no checked luggage, precluding this being a case of accidentally taking the wrong bag. Video surveillance captured Brinton removing the suitcase from the carousel and putting the bag’s tag in their handbag before leaving “at a quick pace,” the police complaint read.

While this is a personal calamity for Brinton, the fallout faced by the LGBTQ community could have easily been avoided. The red flags regarding Brinton were overwhelming and obvious to all who cared to see them. Unfortunately, some of America’s top LGBTQ activists and organizations were willfully blind to Brinton’s shortcomings.

This is all a developing story. What I see right now, though, is a misplaced opportunism and premature triumphalism for the current Democrat agenda, which may be misreading the significance of its narrow escape from defeat in the midterms. Clearly pansexualism has become a major part of its current agenda, which has largely departed from traditional leftism centered on the working class. Right now, the focus of the Democrat and never-Trump establishment is driving a stake through Donald Trump's heart, when Trump himself is making this completely unnecessary and a wasted effort.

The problem is that at least as of now, the Republican who looks better for the 2024 nomination is Gov DeSantis, who has already recognized and built a solid record on the grooming issue -- and in fact, this record was part of his convincing November win in Florida. And grooming is a class-based issue, as we see with instances like the support for it at the expensive Parker School. Latins and African-Americans are not on board.

Two Spiritedness And The New American Upper Class

The photo above has caused a stir this morning on several right-wing platforms. "Bonchie" at Red State has the conventonal take:

Notice anything? If you are politically astute and have paid attention to leftwing rhetoric over the last decade or so, what’s wrong with the picture will jump out immediately: Everyone is white.

Well, to be fair, there does appear to be one woman of Asian ancestry, but regardless, I’ve been assured that this ratio of whiteness is proof of systemic racism.

They're represented as the female Capitol press corps, surrounding outgoing Speaker Pelosi. Almost all of them have the exact same hairstyle, the 1960s Joan Baez that Ted Bundy is said to have favored, in which Ms Baez herself is seen at left, altthough what's puzzling is that Ms Baez has moved on, as shown below right. Indeed, they all have somewhat dull facial expressions with phony smiles, and they're all dressed in something like the minimalist upper-class style one might find at a Georgetown soirée, although from their faces, I would think they might be a little dull for that. But then, as an Ivy undergraduate back in the day, I sometimes went to Georgetown soirées, and come to think of it, they'd actually fit just fine.

Anyhow, here's Ms Baez, as the Germans would put it, aktuell. My wife tells me this hairstyle is practical now, and it's favored by the more down-to-earth reality show stars like Minnie Beets on Gold Rush. (On the other hand, we would not find Minnie Beets at a Georgetown soirée, even though Ms Baez attends such things with the likes of Dr Fauci.) Another conundrum as far as I can see is that Speaker Pelosi is anything but minimalist; she's shrill and histrionic, and in fact, her own hairstyle, like her face, is high-maintenance, as we saw when she got a special hair appointment for herself during the COVID lockdowns, when every other barber shop and hair salon was closed.

In fact, I've often wondered if Speaker Pelosi is actually a drag queen, an over-the-top antifeminist caricature, and this goes to another part of the two-spiritedness of the current American upper class. Drag queens are in. They mimic women, but their style is anything but minmalist. Take the case of Sam Brinton, one of the federal government’s first gender non-binary officials, currently sought by authorities on a felony warrant for a second instance of stealing designer luggage from an airport baggage carousel. Would we see Mx Brinton at a Georgetown soirée? As far as I can see, whether the answer is yes or no, there's a contradiction, or as it might be put, a two-spiritdness:

If the answer is yes, he'd be welcome, including in the outfit at left, then why were no gender-non-binary reporters included in the photo with the Speaker? If gender is just a social construct, why exclude biological men who identify as women from the photo? If it's claimed that there are none such in the Capitol press corps, my answer would be you've got to be kidding. They're just in the closet. Why not coax them out? Why the discrimination?

If the answer is no, the invitation lists for Georgetown soirées somehow always inadvertently leave out drag queens, then why the discrimination? And why, if they don't welcome drag queens, do they nevertheless favor shrill and histrionic figures like Speaker Pelosi and Congresswoman Waters?

This is not a stable or sustainable state of affairs.

More On The Left's Two-Spiritedness

I wasn't surprised when Time chose Zelensky as its "person" of the year -- in fact, several days ago, I assumed the choice had already been published, and I just hadn't seen it, Says a lot about Time these days. What struck me most was the kitschiness of the portrait, the Kennedyesque visionary stare into the distance that in fact would have worked 60 years ago, but of course, we're in 2022. The other thing that hit me a moment later was remembering last year's choice for woman of the year, Admiral Levine. President Zelensky is a person; Admiral Levine is a woman, which of course she is not. In fact, Elon Musk just withdrew the Babylon Bee's suspension from Twitter for maintaining just this.

I was briefly tempted to call Time's successive choices inconsistent, but on a moment's reflection, I realized it wasn't inconsistent, it was just two-spirited. Recall that the Old Left saw the Soviet Union as the authoritative manifestation of world socialism, and this lasted at least until Sen Sanders spent his honeymoon there in 1988. (The New Left, of course, was always of a piece with the New Nixon, a remarketing of the same old product).

Around the time of the Soviet Union's fall a few years after Sen Sanders's visit, the leftist mainstream quietly revised its orthodoxy to explain the fall as a result of Soviet betrayal of real socialism, that in fact, authentic socialism had never actually been tried. Thus it's been possible in the most recent development, the Russian invasion of Ukraine complete with the hammer-and-sickle red banner on the tanks, for leftists actually to oppose a foreign and military policy planned and executed by the once authoritative mainifestation of world socialism.

Thus the received doctrine of the now-gentrified left fully embraces both the foreign and domestic policies of the current Democrat administration, an anti-Russian-but-not-Soviet proxy war plus a pansexualist home agenda. Recall that an effectively anti-Soviet proxy war in Viet Nam plus a highly uncertain relationship with the Lumpenproletariat reflected in the 1960s urban riots were what brought down Lyndon Johnson from the Left. Pansexualism wasn't really on the horizon at the time.

The removal of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism as the authoritative model for the Left has had an intriguing result. It's now OK to wage a proxy war against Russia; the old New Left would never have permitted it. But with the disppearance of Soviet Russia as the Leftist model, the threat of world proletarian revolution seems also to have disappeared, justlikethat. Isn't that peculiar?

In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson's position vis-a-vis urban riots in places like Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago was uncertain; he was forced by Michigan Republican Gov George Romney to send federal troops to quell the Detroit riot in 1967, although New Left demonstrations against the Viet Nam war would soon make him decline to seek reelection.

In 2022, the conflict with urban rioters in the Lumpenproletariat has been resolved via an uneasy alliance with the defund-the-police gentry, while the US armed forces, occupied with supervising the Ukraine war from a distance, are also tasked with LGBTQ diversity training.

Isn't this peculiar? It's as though ruthless Marxism-Leninism has been purged from the Left, and working-class revolution is off the table. This in turn has taken leftism back to the bourgeois parlor pursuit it had been before Lenin and resulting in a whole new set of agendas completely unknown to Marx: an alliance of the upper bourgeoisie with the Lumpenproletariat, pansexualist anti-feminism, and neo-Malthusianism replacing popultation growth with climate stability.

And Time almost seems to want to make Zelensky the champion of this gentrified new world. Just wait until the EU tries to limit Ukrainian agriculture in the name of climate. I don't think this is a stable arrangement.

There's A Schism On The Left Over Ukraine

Whittaker Chambers made the point in Witness, almost in passing, that up to the 1920s, German was the language of international socialism. But once the Bolsheviks consolidated power in Russia, that position passed almost immediately to Russian. Chambers's sympathies strike me as having remained with a more German brand of socialism throughout his career as a spy, which may explain his eventual defection. But I think this also reflects a basic conflict on the Left, which might be characterized as the idealists vs the Tankies. According to this site,

A Tankie is an apologist for the violence and crimes against humanity perpetrated by twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist regimes, particularly the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin (1924 - 1953). More broadly, the term may refer to any leftist who is perceived to support or defend authoritarian regimes on the basis that they are enemies of the United States. This can include regimes that are not and do not claim to be communist such as those of Vladimir Putin in Russia and Bashir al-Assad in Syria.

The definition goes on to suggest that Ukraine has always had a special status among leftists over this distinction:

Tankies will often argue for persuasive definitions about genocide regarding the Ukrainian Famine, arguing that Stalin didn't intend for all of those people to starve to death and realizing he is still responsible for not feeding his people. In addition, Timothy Synder's Bloodlands argues that policies were instituted specifically targeting Ukraine to exacerbate the famine which may or may not have arisen from natural causes.

I think the single best US commentator on the Russo-Ukraine War continues to be Markos Moulitsas at the Daily Kos. I linked here last May to his first discussion of Tankies. Yesterday, he brought up Tankies again, remarkably in the context of the New York Times, although he doesn't mention the controversy over Times reporter Walter Duranty's coverup of the 1932 Ukraine famine, which has been renewed as a result of the current war. Nevertheless, Kos argues,

How is it, on the very same day Russia launched 70 ballistic missiles at Ukrainian civilian targets, that launching two guided drones at Russian military targets is considered, by The New York Times, an “escalation”?

. . . Unfortunately, The New York Times is taking its cues from the Biden Administration, which refuses to deliver long-range ATACMS rockets that could, theoretically, strike inside Russian territory. But there’s a difference: the Biden Administration doesn’t want an escalation between Russia and the United States, or anything that would trigger a wider conflagration. They don’t care if Ukraine uses its own weapons to strike Russian territory. We can argue whether that caution makes sense — I don’t think it does, and in any case, the U.S. could always require veto power over Ukrainian ATACMS targets — but it’s totally different than this ignorant take, that any attack on Russian soil is escalatory.

One expects this kind of nonsense from the Tankies, busy these days justifying the authoritarian regimes in Russia, Iran, and China. But The New York Times should do better.

I think Kos is maybe being less precise here than he could be. The odd thing about the current US political alignment is that the far right is as deeply suspicious of Ukraine as some elements of the Left and equally willing to look the other way over the Putin state's authoritarianism. Meanwhile, there seems to be an alignment in policy between neoconservatives, as represented by the Institute for the Study of War, and the US State and Defense Departments in the Biden administration.

In Kos's view, which I think is perceptive, the administration is happy enough with fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, but it's going to err on the side of caution over anything that might cause "escalation". However this might be in conflict with leftist principles -- I see a similarity in anti-Tankie viewpoint between Kos and Whittaker Chambers here -- I think the policy of avoiding escalation is unrealistic. The US, merely in supporting Ukraine, is depleting its own stocks of ammunition and precision weapons, and insofar as squeamishness over escalation prolongs the war -- which it must be doing -- it's defeating its own purpose by making the war unnecessarily expensive.

There also seems to be a stubbornness in the current diplomatic and military establishment to incorporate what we've been learning about the corrupt and ineffective Russian military in our ongoing strategy. The Ukraine war itself has rendered Russia incapable of waging any wider war, depleting its manpower and equipment by as much as half. But there doesn't seem to have been, at least so far, any visible recalibration of risk vs benefit in our overall Russia policy. This isn't how a Reagan would handle these things.

So we're looking at an odd alliance of an anti-Tankie, anti-Stalinist, Whittaker Chambers style left with what ought to be a more assertive neoconservative center, which is in turn aligned against a Trumpist right that's inclined to keep appeasing even the collapsing Putin state, which is itself strangely allied with the Tankie left.

Like the alliance, or attempted alliance, of the leftist gentry class with the Lumpenpoletariat, I don't see how this can succeed over any medium to long term.

Caroline Ellison Spotted In New York

PLEASE CONFIRM: A user claims that they spotted Caroline Ellison at Ground Support Coffee on West Broad in SoHo Manhattan at 8:15 AM. This would mean she is not in Hong Kong and is in NY not in custody. pic.twitter.com/QUduYO9GfZ

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) December 4, 2022

According to this story,

The citizen journalist also shared pictures of messages sent that also said a source was “99%” sure “it’s her.” The message also says there’s an “Alameda person” with her. In addition to the confirmations from the barista behind the counter, there’s also the sighting of a Golden Doodle puppy pictured at the bottom of the ostensible Ellison’s feet. FTX and Alameda executives shared a Golden Doodle pup called “Gopher.” SBF recently tweeted about Gopher before FTX collapsed.

. . . People also shared street maps showing that the coffee and sandwich shop was really close to the New York Attorney’s Office and the FBI. “After a close analysis, she’s snitching on Sam,” one person wrote. Since FTX collapsed, Ellison has been super silent about the situation, while SBF has been doing a media tour and speaking candidly.

The first thing to observe is that this is unconfirmed, and it's entirely speculative. On the other hand, true crime fans like me have seen enough scenes of detectives interviewing perps to know that they sell them on confessions by saying the first one in gets the best deal, and according to this story,

Ellison has been radio silent: no weeping lamentations on social media, no NYT interviews, no on-stage appearances. These approaches have obviously led to dramatically different optics. While Bankman-Fried was callously confessing to Vox that his effective altruism shtick was a front, Ellison was nowhere to be seen. And now it seems that as Bankman-Fried was spending this past weekend with the FT, clumsily walking back his prior statements about not knowing anything about Alameda’s financial health, Ellison was spending her time where it matters: in front of investigators.

. . . Unfortunately for Bankman-Fried, it seems Ellison got there first.

Nevertheless, assuming any of this speculation is true, Ellison would still be a problem for the prosecution, as well as for the conventional narrative. It seems to me that her defense could call any number of witnesses, not least of whom would be new CEO John Ray, to testify that in their judgment, nobody at the FTX condo was above intern level. Ray has already noted in his bankruptcy filing that the people running FTX (I would add "putatively") were "a very small group of inmxperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals", and if this applies to Sam Bankman-Fried, it applies as well to Caroline Ellison. He also said in the filing, "many of the employees of the FTX Group, including some of its senior executives, were not aware of the shortfalls or potential commingling of digital assets", and overall, he has been skeptical of any statements from prior FTX employees about the company's financial operations.

As far as I can tell as a lay observer, I think a judge would also allow Bankman-Fried's defense to cross-examine Ellison on what medications she had been prescribed, for what conditions, and what the potential side effects were. If it were established that she was being treated for adult ADHD, it seems to me that the defense would be entitled to call expert witnesses to testify that symptoms include carelessness, lack of attention to detail, inability to focus, and forgetfulness, which could undermine any specific testimony she might give against Sam, especially if her airhead demeanor we've seen in video clips is what she displays on the witness stand.

So far, the conventional narrative has been that Sam was the criminal mastermind, and Ellison was his dupe. At minimum, Sam is doing precisely what attorneys would tell him not to do, making copious public statements in interviews and on social media that could potentially damage him. However, his statements have been consistent, suggesting he didn't in fact know what was going on, and this in turn is consistent with remarks by John Ray and other informed observers of the FTX "insiders" at the Bahamas condo, that they were inexperienced, unsophisicated, and intern-level.

In that case, we've got to assume someone else was running the show; neither Sam nor Caroline actually knew what do do with the billions at their disposal, and to have either testify against the other is a futile exercise. I continue to think a shadow group was calling the shots, likely associated with the Professors Bankman and Fried, and possibly including the Ellison parents. They were criminals, which means their swindle would eventually be found out, but they were at least smart enough to carry it off for several years, which neither Sam nor Caroline had the actual ability to do.

For now, though, it's in the interest of neither the media nor the prosecution to pursue this line.

"Can Anyone Explain Why This Guy Hasn’t Been Arrested Yet?"

I continue to be amazed that writers on the right-wing blogs are actually paid for their output. Some guy who goes by "Bonchie" at Red State and apparently has a full time job there posed this question about Sam Bankman-Fried yesterday. My only answer has to be that google is your friend. Let's look at equivalent cases. Kenneth Lay's company, Enron, went bankrupt in 2001. It wasn't until 2004 that he was indicted by a grand jury for his role in the company's failure. The decline of Elizabeth Holmes's company, Theranos, began with adverse reporting in 2015. It wasn't until 2018 that a federal grand jury indicted Holmes on fraud charges.

The closest parallel case is Bernard Madoff. On December 10, 2008, Madoff's sons Mark and Andrew told authorities that their father had confessed to them that his firm was a massive Ponzi scheme. According to the Wikipedia entry, "The following day, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Madoff and charged him with one count of securities fraud." However, this was after his reported confession, and by March 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 charges.

Despicable as swindlers are, they're entitled to due process, and these things take time. I don't understand why "Bonchie" couldn't have tried to answer his own question with a little research, which would cost him nothing and take just minutes. On the other hand, if you won't post your own name, you don't have a reputation to maintain.

The main point of "Bonchie's" piece is that Sam is rambling at length about his case, in the specific instance at hand in response to a tweet from Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the 84-year-old Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, although she will revert to ranking member with the new congress. She's best known for living in a mansion well outside her impoverished district in south-central Los Angeles. In the tweets in question, Sam continues to dig himself into a legal hole:

Rep. Waters, and the House Committee on Financial Services:

Once I have finished learning and reviewing what happened, I would feel like it was my duty to appear before the committee and explain.

I'm not sure that will happen by the 13th. But when it does, I will testify. https://t.co/c0P8yKlyQt

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 4, 2022

The consistent thing about all his public statements since the bankruptcy is the sense that he's just woken up from a medicated haze to discover that everything went wrong, and he now has to figure out how this happened. I continue to think that in this, he's actually sincere. His parents and handlers may have convinced him he was the boy genius behind FTX, but as I've kept saying here, there had to have been a shadow organization, almost certainly not in the Bahamas and definitely not in the condo with Sam and Caroline, that actually ran the company, made the trades (or not), set up the celebrity endorsements, and nost important, paid off the likes of Rep Waters.

In this, we need look no farther than the group photo of the congresswoman, Sam, and his dad, Prof Bankman. Bankman is the only one who's grinning into the camera and looks like he's fully engaged.

I think Elon Musk's account of a conversation with Sam, in which Sam is supposed to have sought to invest in Musk's Twitter takeover, is pertinent:

Everyone including major investment banks – everyone was talking about him like he’s walking on water and has a zillion dollars. And that was not my impression – that dude is just, there’s something wrong, and he does not have capital and he will not come through. That was my prediction.

Another article gives additional context to the discussion:

Musk's banker on the Twitter deal, Michael Grimes from Morgan Stanley, told Musk at the time that SBF was offering "at least $3 billion" to help Musk buy Twitter, and wanted to talk about the potential for "social media blockchain integration."

Musk asked Grimes, "Does Sam actually have $3B liquid?"

Yet another source reports on the negotiation,

The text messages disclosed in the court filing do not include any messages from Bankman-Fried to Musk in this time period. They do, however, include one from Musk to Bankman-Fried, asking: "Sorry, who is sending this message?"

It's hard to avoid thinking that Musk moved on an instinctive sense that Sam was being hyped by third parties, that in reality there was "something wrong", and he wasn't going to deal with the guy, especially through dupes, enablers, and ventriloquists.

It's worth noting that in the case of Bernard Madoff, he wasn't arrested until after he acknoledged his guilt to his family and this was reported to the FBI -- but the Securities and Exchange Commission had previously conducted multiple investigations into his business practices but had not uncovered the massive fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried wasn't at that level; too many people who'd met him rated him as "intern level". In fact, it's hard for me to avoid thinking that not only was he overrated as a finance guru, but he was kept under so much medication he was basically not functional.

Yet again, I think he was groomed for this role by his parents and their collaborators. Rather than "effective altruists", they're hard leftists who used a Ponzi scheme to funnel billions to corrupt politicians like Maxine Waters. I suspect this will never get serious investigation or coverage, and the incompetence of the right wing media will simply abet this.

What Is Trump's Legacy?

Now and then I see a piece that reflects on Trump's actual legacy, or perhaps what things might have been like had he won reelection. Last month I covered some revisionist opinion that reexamined his disastrous mistakes on COVID: He imposed lockdowns and extended them when they didn't work; he elevated Dr Fauci, who promptly undermined him in the name of "science"; he sent the hospital ships to New York and LA, which proved laughably unnecessary. In contrast, Gov DeSantis's reputation is rising as a more level-headed leader.

This is especially worth noting as we move into 2023 and are still recovering from lockdowns, the inflationary stimulus payments they generated, and supply chain disruptions from the same source. Although court decisions limited the worst of the the lockdown overreach, it is now accepted in at least some quarters that public health authorities can continue to impose masking, mandate vaccinations, close parks and beaches, and shut down businesses. Trump himself proved utterly feckless in restraining this and allowed Fauci to portray himself as Trump's foil.

The other Trump initiative that's aged poorly has been the effort to de-emphasize NATO and rely on direct negotiations with Putin. According to the New York Times,

Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set.

In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer [2018], they said, Mr. Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States.

Instead,

On Thursday, November 7, 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron deemed NATO “brain dead.” Three years later, here is a dead man in full form!

The Atlantic Alliance is indeed contributing, by its supply to its Ukrainian ally of weapons, ammunition, air intelligence, and officer training, to tearing the reputation of the Russian army to shreds, whose spectacular deficiencies in logistics, equipment, officer corps, training and conduct of operations are now visible to the whole world, neighbors, adversaries, or allies.

With, as a bonus, the destruction of half of Russia's 3,500 operational tanks, 45% of its infantry tanks, 10% of its air force and its fleet, and the volatilization of the majority of its ballistic and cruise missiles (excluding nuclear). The strict financial cost of this support (i.e., excluding the impact of soaring energy prices on the economy, which would probably have been very important even if NATO had not supported Kyiv), is minimal compared to the resources devoted by the Alliance to its defense.

This is certainly not to say that Russia's invasion of Ukraine suddenly slapped President Macron upside the head, and now he sees things clearly. Au contraire,

French President Emmanuel Macron's statement on Saturday that the West should consider how to address Russia's need for security guarantees to end the war in Ukraine has drawn sharp criticism from some quarters, rejecting the option of making concessions to the Kremlin after nearly 10 months of the war.

. . . "This means that one of the essential points we must address -- as President (Vladimir) Putin has always said -- is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia," Macron said.

The problem with Macron's point of view is that there's no guarantee that Putin will ever negotiate in good faith, and he'll use any concessions NATO makes to rebuild his forces and renew the invasion whenever it suits him. This says to me that the West is still working its way through the implcations of the Russo-Ukraine War, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the only stable outcome will need to be the dismantling of the Russian empire.

The problem for Trump is that he's had so little to say about Ukraine since the war began. I think we can take his occasional remarks that Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he'd still been president to mean that he and Putin had an informal understanding that the US would quietly treat the post-2014 borders as fait accompli, and we would also oppose Ukraine joining NATO, in return for which Putin would not invade the rest of Ukraine. In at least Trump's mind, Putin would fear Trump's potential response too much to break this informal agreement.

Subsequent developments have made any such assumption questionable, although Biden's botched withdrawal from Kabul must also have figured into Putin's calculations last winter. Nevertheless, at this point, there's no realistic way the world can quietly return to the post-2014 borders, and no reason it should -- Ukraine at this point looks fully capable of returning to the internationally recognized borders, and it will have the side effect of rendering Russia militarily inconsequential.

A secondary question is how Western intelligence completely missed Russia's military weakness, but if this implicates Bush fils, Obama, and Biden, it also implicates Trump. Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel were both Trump appointees at the CIA, and as far as we can tell, they both missed the actual state of the Russian military as much as any of the others. Had they known, how would this have affected policy? Shouldn't Trump be willing to address this in some way?

Trump has had nothing to offer about this new state of affairs, which if he's reelected in 2024, he or any other president of either party will need to deal with. Given the current state of his public remarks, I'm starting to lose confidence he'll be able to do this.