Opinion

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.

Let’s step back for a moment from the awful human tragedy in Ukraine as the Russian army targets civilians. There is an even bigger issue here. And until we come up with an answer it’s going to continue to plague the world.

It’s an issue that Americans, more than anyone else, should understand. Yet based on all the news and commentary I’ve been reading since the Russian buildup began almost a year ago, this overarching issue is not even on the table.

We learned this week the J6 committee is investigating former President Donald Trump and his advisor John Eastman for the same offense many foot soldiers of the insurrection are charged with.

The committee suspects Trump and Eastman obstructed an official proceeding, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Even against an overwhelming backdrop of relentless GOP book banning and censorship attempts of recent months, Florida's "don't say gay" bill stands out from the crowd.

There are good reasons why the proposed legislation, which passed the Florida Senate on Tuesday, is drawing national attention and condemnation. The bill doesn't just ban teachers from allowing any acknowledgment of LGBTQ people in the classroom, it uses the novel "bounty hunter" system Texas used to ban abortion to allow parents to sue schools if, say, a teacher allows a kid with same-sex parents to talk about it in class. Even Kate McKinnon of "Saturday Night Live" jokingly weighed in on a recent "Weekend Update."

In Russia, though, it has been the subject of intense focus.

Why?

Fox News willed the "People's Convoy" into being. For weeks, the network hyped the "trucker" protest in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, spinning it as a grassroots uprising of ordinary Canadians angry about vaccine mandates and other Covid-19 mitigation policies. In reality, however, it was organized by far-right activists — almost none of whom are actually truckers — whose goal was to exploit pandemic anxieties to recruit more people towards a fascist cause. And that is, of course, why Fox News loved it. And that's why the network spent weeks not only glamorizing the occupation that made life hell in the city for weeks but openly begging their viewers to throw together their own version in the U.S. —except with more violence.

It's a testament to the network's power over its audience that soon there was a "People's Convoy" in the U.S., even though there aren't many vaccine or mask mandates for right-wingers to protest. A growing group of angry right-wingers, led by some big rig trucks, took road trips across the country, in theory to converge on D.C. to send this anti-mandate message. Without actual mandates to protest, however, it swiftly became clear that the real purpose of the convoy was to troll liberals and get attention. Quite literally, organizers declared their intention to be a "huge pain" to the residents of D.C., who have long been demonized in barely coded racist terms in the right-wing press.

Should Vladimir Putin's barbarous war of Russian expansion move beyond the borders of Ukraine into Moldova, Finland, or even Sweden, then expect to hear the name "Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin" far more frequently. A former philosophy professor at Moscow State University, Dugin has combined his obsessions with occultism and the neo-pagan philosophies of European fascists like Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist to derive his fervently nationalistic ideology of "Eurasianism," promulgated in books with torpid titles such as Foundations of Geopolitics and The Fourth Political Theory.

With his disheveled dress and long beard, Dugin affects the appearance of an Orthodox mystic, bearing a not uncoincidental resemblance to the monk Grigori Rasputin. In the West, a philosopher like Dugin expressing admiration for both Satanism and the Waffen-SS would be dismissed as a crank; proclamations that national greatness are to be found in a "genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism" would rightly not endear you to the public at large. In the Russian Federation, however, Dugin is an adviser to high-ranking members of Vladimir Putin's United Russia party. Even more disturbing, according to Foreign Policy, his 1997 Foundations of Geopolitics has been required reading for students at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation for a generation.

At a time when the world is watching a horrific war unfold before our very eyes in Europe, one might expect that a formal speech given by a former president of the United States would be a serious discussion of world events. And if it was a former president who was clearly intent upon running again it would seem to be imperative. To be sure, he might want to give a critique of the current president's politics under those circumstances but they would be carefully considered and heavily couched in rhetoric of national unity, patriotism and support for America's allies. For instance we can look back to a speech given by former vice president Al Gore after 9/11. The election results the previous year were very dubious and there was widespread anticipation that Gore might run again in a rematch in 2004. But beyond expressing support for President George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath, Gore waited for three months before giving any extended remarks. He opened that speech with this:

A lot of people have let me know they wished I had been speaking out on public affairs long before now. But in the aftermath of a very divisive election, I thought it would be graceless to do so and possibly damaging to the nation. And then came September 11th.

Imagine that.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, called for the establishment of a no-fly zone over his country. In a press conference Thursday, he called on NATO member nations to “close the sky.” He asked how many mothers and babies have to die before that decision is made. “If you don’t have the strength to close the sky, give us planes,” he said.

Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master who’s become a democratic reformer, called for intervention, too. “We are witnessing, literally watching live, Putin commit genocide on an industrial scale in Ukraine while the most powerful military alliance in history stands aside.”

Hearing that a House committee thinks Donald Trump and his inner circle “might have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result” is not helpful.

Almost as annoying as Trump’s constant whines about “rigged elections” and voter fraud to justify his loss are reports leaking freely that Trump may be involved in some possible criminal or illegal activity – always adding fuel to a never-starting criminal fire.