Let me lay this out as clearly as I can, because the noise machine is running at full capacity and the truth is getting buried under an avalanche of propaganda.
The Washington establishment is beating the drums for war with Russia over Ukraine. Every network is running graphics of troop movements. Every pundit is warning about an imminent invasion. Every politician is competing to sound toughest on Putin. It’s a familiar spectacle, one we’ve seen before—before Iraq, before Libya, before every disastrous intervention the permanent war party has cooked up in my lifetime.
But ask yourself: why now? Why this sudden urgency about a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map?
Because Joe Biden’s presidency is collapsing. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a debacle. Inflation is eating paychecks. The border is a sieve. Crime is up. The guy can’t finish a sentence without teleprompters. So the permanent war party needs a new shiny object, something to distract from the rot at home.
And what better than a good old-fashioned foreign menace?
Now look at what we’ve actually been doing on Russia’s border. I’m not talking about rhetoric. I’m talking about actions. Military exercises. Lots of them. Nine major NATO and US exercises in countries that border Russia just in the last year. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine. Ground forces. Air forces. Cyber forces. Naval forces in the Black Sea. Thirty-two countries participating in Sea Breeze 2021. Six thousand troops in Rapid Trident. Fourteen thousand in Spring Storm.
Can you imagine, for one second, how the United States would react if Russia staged a military exercise on our border with Mexico? If Russian warships conducted drills in the Gulf of Mexico? If Russian troops massed in Canada for exercises simulating an invasion of the northern United States?
The outrage would be deafening. The networks would scream. The president would demand action. And yet we expect Russia to treat our provocations on their border as nothing, to smile and accept that NATO’s steady expansion toward their frontier is just friendly cooperation, nothing to worry about.
Russia has not been invaded by a foreign army since 1945. But they remember 1941. They remember twenty million dead. They remember the Nazis marching through Ukraine, welcomed by people who saw them as liberators from Soviet tyranny. And they see us now, arming and training and exercising with the grandsons and granddaughters of those same Nazi collaborators.
The Ukrainians we’re backing still celebrate their SS heritage. There are videos. There are marches. There are monuments. The Azov Battalion uses Nazi iconography. This is not a Russian smear. It’s documented fact.
And yet we’re supposed to believe this is about defending democracy.
Let me tell you what really sticks in my craw. We have hundreds of American citizens locked up for walking into the Capitol on January 6. No weapons. No killed anyone. Just walking in. They’re sitting in federal prisons, some in solitary confinement, awaiting trial or serving sentences longer than people get for assault. The US government is holding more political prisoners right now than Russia is.
Think about that. The country that lectures everyone else about human rights has created its own gulag for people whose crime was believing a lie and acting on it.
And now Biden wants your sons and daughters to risk their lives fighting in Ukraine. His own son sits comfortably, unpunished, despite cashing millions from Burisma while his father was vice president. The same Burisma that Biden bragged about pressuring Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating.
The hypocrisy is staggering. The cynicism is breathtaking. And the American people are supposed to just go along with it, because Russia is the enemy, because Putin is Hitler, because this time it’s different.
It’s never different. It’s always the same. The war party finds a crisis. The media amplifies it. The politicians compete to look tough. And young Americans die in places they can’t find on a map while the people who sent them there cash checks from defense contractors and retire to write memoirs.
I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends.
