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The Ukraine Trap, One Year Later

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Ted Rall
            Though their number is steadily dropping, especially among Republicans, most Americans support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. I have a question for you pro-Ukraine peeps: imagine you were Russian President Vladimir Putin just shy of a year ago. What would you have done in his place?             Putin faced an impossible situation. He knew that an invasion would bring Western sanctions and international opprobrium. Staying out of Ukraine, however, would weaken Russia’s geopolitical position and his political standing. Caught in an updated version of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1979 “Afghan Trap,” he acted like any Russian leader. He chose strength.             The story (now disputed) is that National Security Advisor Brzezinski convinced President Jimmy Carter to covertly support the overthrow of the Soviet-aligned socialist government of Afghanistan and arm the radical-Islamist mujaheddin guerrilla fighters. Determined not to abandon an ally or allow destabilization along its southern border, the USSR was drawn into Brzezinski’s fiendish “Afghan Trap”—an economically ruinous and politically…
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What Police Reform Should Look Like

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Ted Rall
Each high-profile killing by police of an unarmed Black citizen—this week he’s Tyre Nichols, 29, of Memphis—prompts calls to reform the police. But how? We should begin with two questions: What is the police for, currently? What should they be for? Police currently fulfill two primary roles: generating revenue for local municipalities and terrorizing marginalized people. If you’re white, middle- or upper-class, almost all your interactions with law enforcement will come in the form of a traffic stop, most likely in a small town, rather than in a big city, because big cities enjoy strong tax bases, and even more likely in a cash-strapped municipality. Tickets for speeding and equipment violations, both of which can generate fines costing hundreds of dollars each, are by far the most common reason for a traffic stop. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis conducted a fascinating study of North Carolina traffic stops which concluded that “significantly more tickets” were issued when localities experienced…
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DMZ America Podcast #85: Pence’s Classified Documents, Ukraine Slog, Parents Rights & Trans Kids, the Fight to Save Downtowns

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Ted Rall
Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) break down another interesting week in news and current events. Former Vice President Mike Pence, it turns out, also had classified documents left over from his time in office. Is it time to admit that (a) everyone has classified documents and (b) way too much stuff is overclassified and we should just stop caring about this? Now Ukraine wants tanks. But it turns out many of President Zelensky’s top officials were corrupt, so he fired them. Should the U.S. establish a war aim to define what victory looks like? If so, what should it be? Angry parents, including some liberal Democrats, say schools should tell them if their kids are identifying as a different gender in the classroom. Do parents have a right to know that their boy is really a girl? Finally, downtowns are dying as a result of workers no longer going into the office.…
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Hire Back Workers Fired for Refusing Vaccine Mandates

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Ted Rall
            Once every generation or two, a crisis prompts the hysterical demands for quick solutions that lead to unsound decisions. Post-Pearl Harbor, worries about fifth columnists were followed by the deportation of Japanese Americans to internment camps. 9/11 led to two wars, excessive airport security and the privacy-destroying USA-Patriot Act.             The Covid pandemic sparked panic; panic fuels overreaction. Enter vaccine mandates. Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York in October 2021, declared a city-wide vaccine mandate for municipal workers. “This mandate is a bold step that protects our families, friends, and communities, including those that are not yet eligible for the vaccine such as our city’s youngest residents,” he said weeks before expanding the requirement to private-sector workers employed by 184,000 businesses. Similar strictures quickly spread across the nation.             Setting aside the debate between personal autonomy and the public good, it has since become clear that the rationale for the mandates—that unvaccinated people were spreaders—was flawed. Thousands of…
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Burn After Reading: Why Classified Documents Don’t Matter

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Ted Rall
            The strange story at the top of the headlines—the current president and the most recent former president are both the subject of special-counsel investigations for taking home classified documents when they left the White House—rests upon two premises. One is patently false. The other is brazenly silly.             Americans believe their nation exists in a terrifying state of endless peril. Propagandized by popular culture and the media, we imagine that we’re constantly teetering at the precipice of collapse or subjugation, surrounded by clever and ruthless fiendish enemies hellbent on undermining, attacking and ultimately destroying the United States and turning us into their slaves. The era of great invading armies and empire-building is over. In our world, borders are largely settled so empires are built via economic influence rather than territorial gains. Bigger countries bump up against each other at the edges in search of incremental advantage. Fewer nations in history have ever been less at risk than the U.S.…
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May the Second-Best Person Win

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Ted Rall
            Only God and Kevin McCarthy know how long George Santos, the disgraced Republican freshman congressman from Long Island whose antipathy for the truth stands out even by politician standards, will be able to remain in office. If and when he is forced to step down, say, after an explanation for his mysteriously improving financial status finally surfaces, I do know how his seat will be filled. And it’s totally unfair.             There’ll be a special election. But Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat defeated by Santos in November, won’t even be guaranteed a second shot. Party bosses will pick the two candidates—of whom Zimmerman may or may not be one—like it’s 1880.             Zimmerman was cheated. The “George Santos” who beat Zimmerman wasn’t a real person or a real candidate. The voters didn’t have the information they needed to choose their congressman. They were bedazzled by a fraud, seduced by a chimera. At bare minimum, Zimmerman ought to be guaranteed the…
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Say Another Go Ain’t So, Joe

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Ted Rall
            Well, Mr. and Mrs. Biden, the holidays are over. You know, the holidays during which you were going to decide whether or not to run for reelection. So, what did you decide?             This being a democracy, we hope that you came down on the side of the 70% of voters who don’t want you to run in 2024. Even if that figure reflects the feelings of every single Republican (and it probably doesn’t), it includes a lot of Democrats too.             At your age, Mr. President, decision-making can take a little extra time. Let me help you weigh the pros and cons.             Pros: You get to try to beat Donald Trump again. You have some legislative achievements to brag about. You’ll make history as the oldest person to ever run and perhaps win.             Cons: You have low poll numbers—and we may be heading into a recession. You might lose, which would suck, especially if it were…
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How about Equal Time for the Truth?

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Ted Rall
           Mark Twain said: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Ironically, he didn’t. The quotation should correctly be attributed to Jonathan Swift. The lie remains in high orbit.             Even when the truth comes to light, it gets nothing close to the wide distribution of the original disinformation. Liberal and conservative historians agree that the Tonkin Gulf incident, as described to Congress by an LBJ out to lie the country into invading Vietnam, never happened; how many Americans know that? Despite the absence of evidence, 40% of Americans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Corporate media promoted the outlandish theory that Russia bombed its own natural gas pipeline and now admit there’s no way that’s true; even well-read and well-informed news consumers can be forgiven for having missed the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it retractions.             Can we fight the “psyopcracy,” a media environment saturated by sophisticated psychological operations that create an…
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Big Collusion between Big Media and Big Government

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Ted Rall
            An FBI agent contacts Twitter’s head of trust and safety and asks him to censor every mention of a major news story from the social media network on the grounds that the story is false, a result of illegal hacking, or both. Twitter complies, even going so far as to suspend the account of the newspaper that published it. Later, the story—which hacking had nothing to do with—turns out to be accurate.             Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, creates a special direct login platform so that the Department of Homeland Security can directly flag content on the networks in order to request that it be censored. But when political hate groups use Facebook to doxx their ideological enemies—who get murdered as a result—the company is impossible to get hold of.             The FBI routinely hands lists of users the bureau would like to see banned or shadowbanned to Twitter. The government pays Twitter to carry out these…
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Elon Musk, Gender and the War over Pronouns

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Ted Rall
            When you’re trying to get people to change forms of address, you have two options. You can bully them. Or you can convince them.             Coercion can do the job, provided you possess that power. Less than 10 years after the Bolshevik revolution, Soviet citizens were mimicking the practice of pre-revolutionary communists, who called one another “comrade.” That anti-honorific honorific, meant to reinforce the regime’s message that all citizens were equal, vanished along with the collapse of the USSR and its replacement by a capitalist system that claimed nothing of the sort. Conversely, convincing can be easy—when the proposed modification simplifies language. Introduced in the late 1960s and popularized by the 1972 launch of Gloria Steinem’s magazine of the same name, “Ms.” eliminated the guesswork inherent in the Miss/Mrs. binary, which required knowledge of a woman’s marital status and reinforced patriarchy by defining females by their relationship with men. Here, political progress hitched a ride on practicality. Solving the…
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