Putin’s American Propagandists Looking Almost as Lame as Putin’s Military
When someone as simple-minded as Sean Hannity can see right through you and effectively expose you as an overt propagandist for a murderous dictator and avowed enemy of freedom, you know your talking points have become way too detached from visible facts. Mind you, Hannity, who lost the primetime king war to Tucker Carlson, has an added incentive to revel in this moment serving as the relatively sane and patriotic voice on a network over-represented in Putin apologists and moral equivalency crackpots.
In the case in question, the Putin hustler du jour was every alt-right populist’s favorite Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard, who visited Hannity’s show to spread the word, a la Colonel Douglas Macgregor, that in spite of everything you are seeing with your own eyes, and in contradiction of the obvious implications of a two-day decapitation strike turning into a month-long Russian casualty quagmire, “Ukraine cannot win this war.”
To fill out the context a little, Hannity was trying to squeeze out of Honolulu Rose a straight answer as to whether the U.S. and the West should provide Ukraine with the weapons they would need to win the war against Putin’s invading forces.
Hannity: Should we give them all — and Europe too — give them the weapons if they’re willing to fight for their country?
Gabbard (after a pause to get her sultry-voiced talking points in order): They can’t win this war, Sean. This is the real world that we live in. It is not — it is not strategically possible to think that Ukraine is going to beat Russia.
Oh really? Sort of like it was impossible for the ragtag Taliban to defeat the United States Armed Forces? — until they did. As Tulsi Gabbard, who was a member of the U.S. Armed Forces, knows perfectly well, victory does not automatically go to the side with the bigger military or the one with the biggest weapons. It goes to the one that stops fighting last, which often means it goes to the side that continues to believe in its cause after the enemy have stopped believing in theirs. After a month of failure to achieve any of its quick-strike objectives in Ukraine; a month of enormous Russian casualties in a war the Russian soldiery clearly does not believe in; a month of dead officers, apparently including a colonel recently killed by his own troops after he led them right into a mass extinction event; a month of increasing global isolation and defiant protests at home; a month of a bloated and blustering tyrant proving to everyone in his own inner circle that he does not know what he is doing and cannot lead Russia to glory — after all that, the ability to “think” that Ukraine is going to beat Russia seems quite a bit greater than it did a month ago, does it not? To everyone, that is, except a Putin propagandist with every vested interest in trying to persuade the world that somehow the war is already over, Ukraine has lost, and all thought of Russian defeat is simply “fake news” from the evil Western media.
“It is not strategically possible to think that Ukraine is going to beat Russia,” says Honolulu Rose. What does that carefully worded sentence even mean?
I will tell you what it means. It means that Tulsi Gabbard is doing what Tucker Carlson and his military expert Douglas Macgregor are doing. She is doing what all propagandists for the other side do during a war. She is trying to break the will of her true side’s enemies by insisting that they are fighting for a lost cause, that they have no hope, and that they must therefore accept “the real world” and surrender.
And remember the context of Gabbard’s comment: Hannity was asking her whether the U.S. and Europe should provide more military support to Ukraine to help them win. So when Honolulu Rose replied that it was “strategically” unthinkable that Ukraine could win, she was saying they could not win even with greater military support from the most powerful military alliance in human history. In other words, when Gabbard and her ilk say things like “Ukraine cannot win,” you must understand that they are really just revealing their dearest wish, turning their eyes to heaven — or wherever traitors against humanity turn their eyes — and praying for their wish to be sealed as the absolute truth. In short, they are indirectly declaring, in defiance of the disturbing uncertainty in their hearts, that they want Ukraine to lose and Putin to win, and therefore demanding that you assure them that their hopes must and will come true. Just as Putin’s humiliation grows each day, such that he is continually trying to shift his stated objectives in order to obscure the obvious truth that he is getting his backside kicked by the little boy next door whose lunch money he tried to steal, so Putin’s team of anti-West propagandists and fan club members are exposing themselves as utterly ridiculous at this moment, still trying to persuade everyone, or at least themselves, that any resistance to the great Vladimir Putin is both unrealistic and suicidal.
There is admittedly some entertainment value in these clowns now, as they sound increasingly like Saddam Hussein’s infamous spokesman mockingly dubbed “Baghdad Bob,” assuring the world that victory was at hand even while the regime he was speaking for was already in ruins. But today our laughs come without any abiding satisfaction, as these desperate propagandists’ hero is still murdering and displacing thousands of innocent people by the day, while Gabbard, Carlson, and the like continue to cheer on the murderer and plead his case.
If you listen to the Hannity clips included in the article linked above, you will notice that at one point, while the host is trying to make the case for helping Ukraine “when you see images of dead women and children,” Gabbard talks over him saying, “I’m not aware of Zelensky sitting down with Putin yet.” As usual with these apologists for thuggery, she brings out the moral equivalency arguments, as though Russia’s brutal tactics cannot be criticized as long as Zelensky refuses to “sit down” and make concessions to Putin. But why is it the invaded nation’s responsibility to stop fighting in defense of its territory and make conciliatory offers to the invading thugs? What claim does Putin have on any inch of Ukrainian territory, or on the future political and diplomatic course of a sovereign nation that has shown no tendency to aggression or incivility toward Russia? By objecting that Zelensky is not stopping the fighting either, Gabbard is proposing to level the moral playing field between attacker and victim, invader and invaded, unjust hostility and legitimate self-defense.
The corpse of the West has been miraculously quickened, however tentatively, by a sense of renewed urgency about the cause of freedom, however poorly defined. Putin’s Western propagandists have been assigned to stand over the stirring body with an anesthetic needle. “Forget about everything,” they assure you as they inject you with their comforting tyrannical certainties, “there is nothing to see here, it’s all just a dream, a futile, silly dream…back to sleep, back to sleep.”
I know it gets good ratings, and money is what Fox News is all about, but seriously, why put (or keep) these servants of anti-West tyranny on the air at all? You might as well just air subtitled recordings of speeches by members of Putin’s regime. At least that would be more honest, and provide a more direct contrast. These fork-tongued subversives and secret allies of the enemy are a much greater threat, as can easily be seen by observing how so many of these people have become favorites of millions of Americans who see them through the Trump cult filter. I have said all along that Donald Trump was a half-witting and half-witted Putin asset, and that the number of Putin apologists and “alt-right” populists around his movement and his administration was the proof of this. We are now seeing, more clearly than ever, how true and how dangerous this is. Gabbard was a special guest at the Republican Party’s most prestigious “conservative” gathering, CPAC, just last month. Carlson remains the top-rated cable news host in America. Douglas Macgregor was a short-list candidate for Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Flynn was Trump’s first choice for that role, and Paul Manafort his campaign chairman. The most vocal pro-Trump new blood Republicans in the U.S. Congress have repeatedly issued pro-Putin talking points deriding Zelensky as the thug in this situation, and his government as the corrupt one. Men and women with dirty hands and dirty souls, doing the dirty work of normalizing and legitimizing global aggression from a Russian dictator, as Trump himself did repeatedly, defending Putin’s interests internationally, ceding global trouble spots to Putin’s control, and directly rejecting Western criticism of Putin’s invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory in 2014 as unrealistic, while supporting Putin’s aggression against that country as serving Russia’s legitimate strategic interests, and his occupation of Crimea as justified by Russia’s investment in “rebuilding” there since the invasion.
Grassroots America has increasingly become a Kremlin-friendly critical mass, thanks to years of effective subversion. We are seeing this effect at work in the American public discussion right now. If there is any hope to be gleaned from this disaster, it is that the increasingly desperate openness of the pro-tyranny voices on the American “right” will gradually reopen the eyes and minds of some decent people who drifted into several years of temporary madness under the sway of the Trump cult, but who are not so far removed from their reason as to be sanguine about shifting their allegiance from an orange idol to a red menace.
