Jonah Goldberg begins with Tucker Carlson, who apparently posted …
Tucker Carlson Calls Out The Mainstream Media For Smearing And Celebrating The Capture Of The Whistleblower Who Exposed The Lies About The War In Ukraine
“So this 21 year old Air National Guardsman from Massachusetts is not a whistleblower, CNN explains with the help of the… pic.twitter.com/kU3OHXJ6cd
Contra Tucker, U.S. troops are not fighting in Ukraine—at least according to reporting by the same network from which Carlson draws a paycheck. The handful of special forces personnel there are providing security and the like for diplomatic personnel. Imagine how outraged Tucker would be if diplomats were killed because the Biden “regime” refused to protect our people. And again, on [Jack] Teixeira’s own terms, he was not a “whistleblower” by any normal definition. And just so you grasp the cynical hypocrisy of it, when Reality Winner was exposed, Tucker was appalled.
Tucker Carlson on Reality Winner: “that’s a felony by the way.” https://t.co/YS1Al45PBt pic.twitter.com/rHlBHVwMwp
@JimLaPorta
And then there’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a top lieutenant to Kevin McCarthy:
Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar.
That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.
And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.
Ask yourself who is the real enemy?
A young low level national guardsmen?
Or the…
Someone needs to point out that not only is America not “waging a war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation,” but we are supporting a country that is waging a defensive war against a country that NATO was created to deter. Oh, and by the way, America has never waged a war in a NATO country. But we have supported countries waging war against “nuclear Russia” or “nuclear Russia”-backed forces, among them in Korea, Vietnam, Israel, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan.
Facts come from books, not bongs.
I’d rather not dwell on Greene’s polished vapidity. If Twitter is a sewer, she’s an Americanized Cheuksin, the Korean toilet goddess.
It’s ironic that one of the defenses of Teixeira’s chatroom is that it had members from Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, the “room” where Teixeira, under the nom-de-cyber “OG,” posted the documents was called “Bear-vs-Pig.” In the words of the Post, this was a “snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict.” I’m not entirely sure I buy this given that “Bear” is not exactly a pejorative term for Russia, while “Pig” certainly is for Ukraine, but whatever. The larger takeaway is that these denizens of “Thug Shaker Central”—the super cool name for Teixeira’s little fiefdom—were essentially transnational residents of a realm with precious little fidelity to their own countries.
Or maybe not. But that’s sort of how I see Greene and her ilk. She says the “real enemy” isn’t Russia but the U.S. government. Calling it the “Biden regime” is some tedious marketing of a fundamentally anti-American brain burp of an idea. I’ve given up trying to explain, first to the left (“the Bush regime!” “Regime change starts at home!”) and more recently to the right, that a presidential administration isn’t a “regime.” The U.S. Constitution and our system of government is the regime. I don’t expect Greene to understand such distinctions—or care.
But what Greene is saying is that our real “enemy”—in the context of an actual shooting war—is the Biden administration and anyone who supports it. This “white, male Christian” isn’t a criminal, he’s a victim of the regime.From Steve Bannon to various MAGA remora, there’s a whole cottage industry of tough losers telling us that Vladimir Putin is a manly man standing up for Western values and that “our” real enemies are fellow Americans. One can dismiss these emanations from the “civil war is coming” crowd for only so long before it’s no longer tenable to give them the benefit of the doubt as mere grifters and poltroons. Vladimir Putin despises the West and America. He sees the people saying this stuff as modern day useful idiots.
And the idiots demonstrate their usefulness daily, choosing to argue fellow Americans are literally enemies while calling literal enemies misunderstood friends.In the decade since Mitt Romney said Russia was our No. 1 geopolitical foe, China has arguably eclipsed Russia as a threat. But it hasn’t stopped being a foe. Its enmity has only increased. What has changed is the way many Republicans—who backed Romney to the hilt at the time—think about Russia.
Last month, Donald Trump gave a little “address” in which he said the greatest threat to Western Civilization was America—specifically the woke left, etc.Steven Miller tried to goad me on Twitter to explain what was wrong about Trump’s blame-America-first tirade. I declined to join a food fight on Twitter, but I explained at length here why I thought the whole thing was more trollish than serious.
But, as I wrote (at book length), I do think America’s biggest dangers do come from home. I could reprise all that, but I think Lincoln was pithier:
From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.
Of course, he didn’t have ICBMs and hypersonic missiles to consider. But I think the basic point still stands.
Look, I dislike much, perhaps most, of what these anti-American demagogues hate when it comes to things like the 1619 Project, anti-racism, “wokeness,” etc. But I don’t hate the believers of this, at least not as some abstract group; I just think of them as nothing more than fellow Americans with wrong ideas. Thinking that the “regime” is the “real enemy” is an invitation to disaster, particularly when the people saying it take no care in explaining they aren’t being literal.
If Greene, Miller, and company were serious about the real threat being domestic, they should be horrified and outraged by what Teixeira has done. Why? Because he didn’t do it for America. He did it for fun, for a desperately needed boost of self-esteem. But because he fits a moronic right-wing identity politics check list for who counts as the “real” victims of this “regime,” he’s not a villain. He’s a hero.
Not all men without chests are “Pajama Boys.” Some of them work in the IT department of the Air National Guard.
It’s not very “America First” to buddy up to a dictator who wants to reassemble the Soviet Union (minus the communist parts), which, you’ll recall, was the enemy of the U.S. from the end of World War II until its end.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 