Opinion

When Russian President Vladimir Putin started openly prepping his invasion of Ukraine a few weeks ago, it was clear that Donald Trump and his biggest stooges saw this as their big moment to get Republican voters on board with their pro-Putin agenda. For years, Trump propagandists like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and Fox News host Tucker Carlson had been seeding the idea of an authoritarian movement that would join Trump supporters in the U.S. with far-right leaders abroad. They clearly envisioned a transnational push to end democracy and replace it with white nationalist autocracies. To this end, Trump made a big show during his presidency of aligning himself with Putin. Bannon repeatedly made trips to Europe to make alliances with far-right parties across the continent. Carlson hosted segments romanticizing Hungary's nationalist leader Viktor Orbán.

When it looked like Putin was about to strike Ukraine and end their fledgling democracy, these men were beside themselves with joy. Bannon gushed about how Putin was "anti-woke." Carlson argued that Putin was an innocent victim of Democratic propaganda. Trump, brimming with admiration, swooned at Putin's "genius" and "savvy." Carlson's pro-Putin bent was so obvious that the Kremlin instructed their own propagandists to use "broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson."

The former president held another of his tiresome rallies last night. I say “tiresome” because it was more of the same spleen and bile.

But he did say something useful to my purposes, which is talking about John Dewey in a world gripped by tyranny. Below is a long interview with Nathan Crick. He wrote Dewey and the New Age of Fascism.

Former president Donald Trump had another of his interminable rallies this weekend. He said the usual things delighting his South Carolina crowd and boring the rest of us into a coma. This time, however, he did add one memorable new line to the script which got people's attention:

As we watch the horrific carnage unfolding in Ukraine and the repressive crack down in Russia, comments like that are all the more chilling. He truly does want to emulate Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. As the Washington Post reported recently, he has repeated his earlier admiration for Kim's "total control" as well:

Inflation is serious, especially when you live paycheck to paycheck. (Today’s top news is inflation rising to its highest point in 40 years. Bloomberg said it peaked on rising gas, food, and housing costs).

Inflation is as complex as it is serious, though. Unfortunately, most press reports simplify it by pegging it to a tiresome media narrative about a Democratic Party heading for the killing floor in the fall.

They’re at it again: Republicans want to raise taxes on poor and working-class Americans, end Social Security and Medicare, jack up pollution and corporate profits, all while continuing to pamper their billionaire donor base.

This time it’s the guy in charge of getting Republican senators elected and re-elected, Florida’s Senator Rick Scott.

In any negotiation to stop Vladimir Putin's unprovoked terror war against the Ukrainian people, may we add one small demand — that he open his borders to anti-Americans here at home?

This article first appeared in Salon.

It was a double-whammy for two of then-President Donald Trump’s biggest patrons, Vladimir Putin and American fossil-fuel billionaires and their industry: the price of oil was too damn low.

Between the pandemic-induced collapse in demand for oil and the price war Saudi Arabia was then fighting with Russia — two of the world’s largest producers — Putin was being pinched badly. And in America, from Pennsylvania to Texas, oil producers were outright losing money on the oil they pumped. Gas prices were at record lows, gutting the profits even of refiners.

That health care is legal under Texas law, but this is election season. Cynics who think politicians will say anything to get reelected have a new, sparkling piece of evidence.

Other people caught doing what the governor and attorney general are doing — Texas public school students, for instance — risk breaking the law. Check out the definition of illegal bullying in the Texas Education Code: “Bullying means a single significant act or a pattern of acts by one or more students directed at another student that exploits an imbalance of power and involves engaging in written or verbal expression, expression through electronic means, or physical conduct …”

Over the weekend, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., threw out an enticing coinage for some of the most flagrant supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Republican Party: The "Putin wing."

Cheney was specifically reacting to Douglas MacGregor, who was appointed to be a senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense by Donald Trump, and on Fox Business said that Russian forces invading Ukraine were being "too gentle." Most folks, however, took Cheney's new term to be much broader than that to encompass Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and any Republicans who were praising Putin before it became suddenly unfashionable to do so approximately two weeks ago. Most of those folks are, reluctantly, claiming disapproval of the invasion of Ukraine, but are likely biding their time until outrage subsides and they can start pushing a pro-Putin line again. Indeed, Carlson has already started to test the waters by accusing the U.S. of victimizing Russia with a "disinformation campaign".

In the end, future historians may well label this the first "social media war," just as Vietnam was the first televised war and the Gulf War of 1991 was the first cable news war.

And as Vladimir Putin's "chosen war" against Ukraine enters its third week, fear and outrage continue to spread across the globe like gangrene. It's increasingly apparent that social media is driving the coverage and providing key information.

The rioters Donald Trump sicced on the Capitol were still tearing the place apart on January 6, 2021, when the folks at Fox News began their effort to minimize the seriousness of the insurrection. Behind the scenes, hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity were frantically texting the White House, begging Trump to call his people back, but on-air, they were vigorously defending the insurrectionists.

"It's not like it's a siege," Fox host Bret Baier said while thousands of Trump supporters literally overran cops, broke windows, and chased terrified members of Congress through the hallways. Various Fox News personalities would go on to claim that Trump's supporters were only there to "peacefully protest" and pinned the blame for the violence on "antifa" infiltrators.

Russian oligarchs are in the news lately. They are the chief targets of global sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Squeezing them will do two things, the thinking goes (as far as I can tell). It will drain Russia’s resources, thus hastening the war’s end. It will put greater pressure on Vladimir Putin, who controls the oligarchs.

At the end of 2020 I thought I had written my last piece about former attorney general William Barr. I had followed his two-year tenure very closely and wrote about it often, always dismayed by what was obviously a very arrogant man who was suffering from a terminal case of Fox News Brain Rot. He would have been more to be pitied than censured if it weren't for the fact that he was running interference for the most powerful man in the country. Now Barr has published the obligatory tell-all about his time in the Trump administration, called "One Damn Thing After Another," and I am compelled to write about him one more time.

Barr's overweening egotism, so flamboyantly displayed in his new book and accompanying promotional appearances, is second only to Donald Trump himself. He has said repeatedly on his book tour that he doesn't care what people think of him and I believe him. After all, when you think as highly of yourself as he does, approbation from others is totally unnecessary.