Opinion
By Jeff Childers
08-22-23
Good morning, C&C family! It’s Tuesday, and your spirit-boosting roundup includes: Tucker hits it out of the park again in an interview with heterodox military thinker Douglas Macgregor; Lahaina residents finally meet the former vice-president; masks back at historically-black Atlanta college, but C&C doubts it will spread; and a joyful story of internet justice.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🚀 Yesterday, Tucker posted a thrilling hour-long interview with Colonel Douglas Macgregor. It was absolutely fascinating, the kind of interview confirming you’re not crazy after all, a sort of balm for the soul, as it were. Warning: if you start watching, you won’t want to stop. For obvious reasons, given the Colonel’s expertise, the wide-ranging interview focused on Ukraine, but at times also verged into most topics of interest to C&C readers.
In case you aren’t familiar with him, according to his Wikipedia page, Colonel Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army colonel and government official, and is now an author, military consultant, and media commentator. His war experience included leading an early tank battle in the Gulf War and he was a top military planner in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. His 1997 book Breaking the Phalanx argued for radical reforms inside the Army. Macgregor also advised U.S. military strategy during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In other words, Macgregor has more real-world military experience than just about any other war commenter you’ll find infesting social media these days.
Colonel Macgregor is not new to the debate. He has appeared countless times on social media over the last couple years, as a heterodox commenter lending his war veteran perspective on the Proxy War. But this Tucker interview might be his most high-profile interview yet. I think you’ll be surprised at my conclusion.
But first, let’s take a look at a few of the best bits, in case you don’t have time to watch right now.
At Tucker’s prompting, Colonel Macgregor evaluated the current state of the Proxy War. He doesn’t see a lot of bright spots, and for solid reasons:
We’re sending 33 Patriot missiles . These are missiles used to shoot down opposing forces. People in air defense will tell you that you shoot two missiles to make sure you get the target. Well, you run out of our missiles in 2-3 days. You can’t possibly defeat the thousands of projectiles being hurled in your direction. And of course, your radars light up and become targets.
This is a no-win situation.
Although the Russians were not prepared in February 2022 for this kind of war, they are now. And they’re continuing to prepare, which includes continuous mobilization. They’re up to 750,00 troops in and around Ukraine. That number is going to rise in the next year to 1.2 million.
Our intransigence, our demonstrated hatred and hostility toward Moscow and for Russia, has convinced the Russian people — as well as the leadership in Moscow — that they are going to have to fight us, and anyone allied with us.
So they’re preparing for that eventuality. That’s why it’s so important we wake up and understand that what we’ve done has backfired. Whatever we’ve set out to achieve has failed.
What we need to do now is stop this, and come to a settlement (that we may not like). And it needs to happen, and soon, before this thing gets out of control. Eventually, if we keep this up, within the next 6-8 months, we’ll see hundreds of thousands of Russian troops on the Polish border.
Listening to Macgregor’s confident, well-reasoned analysis, which smacked of commonsense expertise, it occurred to me that our strategy in Ukraine was perfect — perfect for the Russians, that is. If Biden had wanted to give Moscow a TED Talk on exactly how to beat NATO, he could never have dreamed up a better — worse — way. Biden has presented the Russians with a limited, slowly escalating engagement, against a corrupt, weak opponent, where NATO’s best weapons systems were gradually introduced, giving the Russians time to adjust, learn, and adapt, while continuously adding vast numbers soldiers — who are all becoming skilled battlefield veterans.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers are not becoming veterans, they are dying in droves. Even if we have a few thousand NATO troops stealthily involved, that’s nothing compared to the incalculable number of Russian troops gaining practical experience in fighting a modern, high-tech kinetic war. It’s a completely different kind of war than anything in human history. As Macgregor noted, in this new kind of war, all units are visible on the battlefield all the time. If something moves, it gets shot at and destroyed.
To fight the war this way was woke incompetence beyond imagination, sheer madness, badly misplaced hubris, possibly the worst and most reckless military strategy ever conceived in the Joint Chiefs’ transsexual, pride-flagged conference rooms — ever.
As I said, it was a jam-packed, tightly-edited, hour-long interview. There’s a lot there. Toward the end, Tucker showed Colonel Macgregor a clip of an American psyoperator who went to work for Ukraine, a man who dresses like a woman, in Ukrainian uniform, who explained how our war generals (and certain folks in the comments) see things:
Fake woman ‘Sarah’ Ashton-Cirillo describes himself as a political operative, now a Ukraine military spokesman
As the two men watched, former Florida resident ‘Sarah’ Cirillo, now a Ukraine army spokesman, explained in the clip (in part):
CIRILLO: “If you look at Putin’s mouth, you’ll notice blood drips from it. He’s a vampire, carrying out genocide against both Ukraine and Russians alike. Vlad Putin bathes in the blood of innocent children and enjoys it. And this is why the dictator of the Russian Federation must be deposed.”
That over-the-top nonsense came from an official Ukrainian military announcement.
After noting the profound irony of a fake woman spouting fake war propaganda, Tucker asked Colonel Macgregor to respond to the trans spokesman’s “Vlad the Vampire” claim. Macgregor’s scathing reply should be pasted on the sides of buses:
We estimate that at least 60,000 children from Ukraine have disappeared, vanished, since this war began. Where are they? What about all of the women who have been sold into prostitution who once lived in Ukraine? This war is a disaster. The people bathing in blood are in Kyiv and Washington, not Moscow.
Was he wrong? If anything, he understated the case. Macgregor didn’t even mention the 400,000 dead Ukrainian men. Where is the Proxy War’s moral high ground actually located? It’s not located in Kyiv or Washington, as the Colonel aptly pointed out.
At the risk of spoiling the clip, here’s how Macgregor finished up, by putting his finger right on the heart of the problem, Biden’s “America last” policy:
The president announced yesterday, on one of these tweets (somebody tweets for him, obviously), that the people that have lost everything hiin Haw, thousands of them, lost everything, are going to receive a one-time payment of $700. Now, I haven’t been to Haw in a long time, if ever, but I know that $700 isn’t going to take care of a family for very long. But in the meantime, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, continue to flow into this black hole called Ukraine.
Which I think is an exercise in fraud, deceit, and criminality, to be blunt. When’s it going to stop? When are we going to take care of Hawaii? Let’s go back to Ohio, where we had the derailment and the chemical spill? 4,000 human beings living in this area, and the water’s still not fit to drink, as I understand it. We wouldn’t even invest the money to move those people to a safer area, even if it meant temporary housing, or permanent housing, until this thing is cleaned up. What have we done?
This is the problem. It is America last. On every level. The last people who are consulted. The last people who are benefitting from anything happening in Washington. This cannot go on. It’s got to end. And I think it will end. But unfortunately, it’s like everything else. We’ll have to be pushed over the cliff, into the abyss. And I think that’s where we’re headed.
On that cheerful note, Tucker concluded the interview.
Here’s my take. That interview looked more than anything like Macgregor’s audition for vice-president. And that is exactly what the Biden Administration fears — which is the silver lining. If I quibbled with anything Macgregor said, it would be his conclusion that we’ll have to reach an absolute disaster before anything changes. Team Biden can’t afford to let the Ukraine war stretch into election season, where the discussion will focus on the undeniable failures of the Proxy War, failures not just on the battlefield, but also in the area of domestic priorities. Biden’s policy inarguably is “America last.”
But what do you think? Is Macgregor vice-presidential material? Or would it be another Admiral Stockdale disaster?
🔥 Two weeks late, at least half of which was “on vacation” (maybe a medical tune-up), Joe Biden arrived in Hawaii yesterday — and Hawaiians were not amused.
Biden’s grand entrance into Lahaina was … not well-received. Warning — adult language in the clip.
Consistent with my point about the Macgregor interview, here’s a Rebel News interview clip with a Lahaina resident who wondered why on Earth Ukraine is getting billions but Biden isn’t stepping up for Hawaii. The Lahaina resident mused about Biden, “So, why aren’t you taking care of whatever you claim to be in charge of, rather than sending out all these funds, and whatever else you guys are sending to Ukraine or anywhere. Take care of here first.”
She ended the clip by saying, “Biden. Yeah, he’s an idiot. Sorry.”
Hawaii may be the bluest state in the country. Now it’s been red-pilled, in the most horrifying, real-life way imaginable. Hawaiians might be painfully liberal, but they’re not stupid. I think “America Last” Biden can kiss Hawaii’s vote goodbye.
😷 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a startling but weirdly unsurprising story yesterday headlined, “Atlanta college reinstates COVID-19 mask mandate as students return to city.”
A week after classes began, historically-black Morris Brown College is now, again, mandating students and employees to wear useless, germ-ridden face masks on campus.
The college’s emergency announcement went out on Sunday.
In its ‘emergency’ weekend notice, the school cited “reports of positive cases among students in the Atlanta University Center” as the rationale for the new mandates. But the Journal-Constitution’s reporters asked Morris Brown President Kevin James for more details. He contradicted Sunday’s emergency notice, saying in an email Monday that the college has received no reports of covid cases on its own campus, but described the new mandates as “precautionary measures.”
Uh huh. Some ‘emergency.’ It’s fair to say these Morris Brown leaders aren’t the nation’s top thinkers. They are hysterical nitwits.
If Morris Brown’s overly-dramatic academics and students want to put on more covid theater, I say good luck to them. But, is Morris Brown just a kooky outlier, or is it a canary in the covid mine? Will face mask mandates spread across the country faster than a new, even more transmissible hyperspace variant?
I doubt it. I know for sure that masking won’t return in Florida, because mandatory face masking at colleges and universities is now illegal, thanks to Florida’s terrific legislature and governor.
And now that mandatory masking is illegal in Florida — as well as some other outposts of sanity — it will be easier than ever to compare relative rates of covid infections in masking areas against rates in non-masking areas. This will be great! I’m actually looking forward to it. We’ll finally have some super-obvious ways to figure out whether masks “work” or not.
And that is the reason why I don’t think masking will spread. They won’t want that kind of evidence.
Finally, if I were a Morris Brown student, I’d be wondering at this point whether my education dollars were well-spent there. The people running that school could mask their brains and no one would notice.
🔥 In truly heartwarming news, a drama played out on social media this week, as an aggrieved Raleigh, North Carolina homeowner offered an $11,000 reward to anyone who could help identify the insane, helmeted bicyclist who burned up his Trump sign in the middle of the night twice. After it was burned down in February, the homeowner replaced his sign, but the same cyclist returned on August 18th to set the exact same fire — a second time.
That was the last straw.
The story is fully reported in a local-news Substack, This Week In the Triangle, in a post headlined “Internet sleuths identify cyclist who set fire to Trump signs at Raleigh home.”
The homeowner’s Nest security camera initially captured the helmeted hooligan arriving by bicycle in the daytime and trying to kick the sign down. You’d think all that biking would have built up his leg muscles, but all his silly leg thrashings were to no avail. When he shamefully failed to kick it down, the camera captured the amateur arsonist’s wee-hours return, this time armed with incendiaries. (A lighter.)
The crowd-sourced identification took less than a week. According to the most recent post, an anonymous Good Samaritan from California did some terrific detective work and identified the little firebug, claiming the reward. Apparently, according to the homeowner, the political pyromaniac was registered democrat James “Jim” White, Jr.
Apparently Mr. White, when he’s not destroying private property, is an avid cyclist who shared three particular bicycle rides to his public Strava account (a biking app), on August 12th, August 15th, and August 18th — the same dates of the kicking, burning, and second burning. All three of Mr. White’s vandalization efforts were captured on video.
Mr. White’s identity was also confirmed by his ugly but distinctive arm tattoo, bike, and helmet:
Reports indicated that Mr. White has now, too late, set his Strava account to ‘private,’ and is also busily taking down all his other social media accounts, which was probably his attorney’s advice. Internet sleuths identified White’s bike as a Salsa Warbird, which retails for $7,699, proving that crime is not only the province of the economically-suppressed.
The $11K reward was also crowd-sourced. I say, great work all around. What about you? Is Mr. White being unfairly punished for his multiple temptations to vandalism? How does his crime compare to entering the Capitol Building? Or, is White a dangerous lunatic who should be in an institution someplace?
I report, you decide.
Have a terrific Tuesday! C&C will return, right on schedule, tomorrow morning with another uplifting roundup.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
