Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, September 12, 2025
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57 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I wanna throw this here so that you see it. I specifically chose to comment on your post because it didn’t feel to me like you were framing him as a good guy. I have a lot of respect for you and feel like I’ve learned a lot from you. Frankly I’m glad you didn’t join in that framing.
Before I go on, let me acknowledge that by training, experience, and the nature of your own brain, you know a lot more about the politics of assassinations and their down stream effects.
Respectfully, what I’m trying to make clear is that for some of us, the situation is already untenable. For some of us, the crackdowns have already been here. For some of us, the authoritarians don’t need any more excuses to crackdown and punish us. There’s even bipartisan support for the idea that we are a problem that can be fixed with our elimination.
You have seen my mental health deteriorating in real time. I’m not the only one and frankly, I’m not even in the worst shape. Kirk’s murder won’t give them any more permission to crack down on people like me. The U.S. is about to ban healthcare for people like me and has already done so in a military context with bipartisan support. The UK is on the verge of instituting a Jim Crow style segregation for Trans people. With, if the rumors are true, a Texas style bounty system for bathroom use. For people like me, the crackdown is not only here, it’s been here. Very similarly for immigrants in the U.S. and UK.
Respectfully, and I absolutely mean it for you, the impact to me of framing this as a tragedy, is because it happened to someone like you: a conservative, straight, white, well-off, Christian man. I don’t care for how I wrote that sentence and I don’t want to imply you share Kirk’s bigotry or evil, just that you share more characteristics with him than you do with me. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s easier for you to imagine yourself as him than it is to imagine yourself like me. For you, it’s a tragedy that will make things worse for people like you. For me it was a Wednesday and things were going to get worse regardless.
Watch Maarva’s speech at the end of Andor S1 again. The rust is already here for me, and it’s not leaving. You and people like you can put your heads down and hope for the best. I have to wonder if I’m going to be attacked if I use the bathroom. The U.S. and UK governments don’t need more permission, they have more than enough widespread support to make my live hell and are already doing so.
Let me reframe this a different way, one I’ve been working hard to avoid here. In one way, Kirk’s murder makes things better for me and people like me; there is one less prominent, effective, person spouting vile hate at us. They have lost one of there most effective soldiers.
I hope this makes sense. I’m trying very hard not to use my normal hyperbolic style. I really do have a lot of respect for you.
Let me add something that is not a main point, and isn’t something I think I’ve seen here. I’m seeming a lot of people talk about Kirk’s murder as a “Riechstag fire” type event. This might be for some groups of people. But for other groups such as trans people and immigrants, the consent has already been manufactured. The government is already cracking down on us and a sufficient amount of people in the U.S. and UK have already agreed to it.
It’s baked it. It’s here. We’re the first. We won’t be the last.
The more I read about the Charlie Kirk assertion, the mor I’m convinced that they will never find the shooter. I’m not sure if it is by design or if the FBI is so chock full of smooth brained sycophants that they don’t have the investigative chops to conduct an investigation like this or if that was all part of the plan.
For those who might handwave this away as conspiracy nonsense, I get it it. I’m right there with you. However, lets face it, Trump has a tack record of staging events scenarios to fool bank inspectors or whomever, to just create a vibe even before he was ever thinking about being president. I hear you, you might argue …. sure he might order workers with bulldozers to move a little dirt around to give the impression that construction is underway … but the murder of an ally?
The man is a psychopath, and he has been mobbed up for decades. What I do know is in the space of a day and a half everyone has totally accepted that the shooter was a liberal Trump hater. No questioning by even the legacy media who should freaking know better. I also think there are really strange thing that revolved around the first assassination that don’t ad up at all and we just all hand waved it away because no one wants to sound like the worst of the freaky morons on the right where everything is a conspiracy. But here we are.
At best they find someone, close in on him or her and the suspect is taken out.
Occom’s razor would point to someone who has suffered a loss or perceived lost as a result of the heated rhetoric thar Mr. Kirk indulged himself in, and that could be a lefty or a righty. But it doesn’t matter now, everyone is sure it was a lefty and that that is how this is all being framed.
But make no mistake, we are in a police state right now.
In other news, my wife who has been participating in local protests in our area where the local Republican party have been leaning on the local businesses to kick out the protesters now has ongoing surveillance in the from of a black unmarked suburban with tinted windows and a driver side spotlight. It just sites there at the place that have been gathering for a few weeks now.
This all quite disturbing.
@Rick DeMent: “’m not sure if it is by design or if the FBI is so chock full of smooth brained sycophants that they don’t have the investigative chops to conduct an investigation like this”
Interesting article in the NY Times this morning about the incredible incompetence at the top of the FBI under Patel and Bongino. Not interesting so much because it tells us anything we didn’t already know or suspect, but really because it means that a lot of long-time FBI agents are so disgusted by what’s happening they’re leaking like crazy…
Grocery inflation highest since 2022 as Trump tariffs pile up (Axios)
The legacy media cannot stall forever its duty to give Trump the full Biden on inflation inflation inflation. Fair is fair.
Will continue having an electoral effect exponentially greater than Third Way word games or someone’s irritation with what someone online said about pronouns, toxic masculinity, and LatinX.
@Rick DeMent: I’ve been thinking about the FBI and law enforcement response, and read the NYT article @wr: mentions.
It would be deeply ironic if the cuts and removals of career employees that we’ve seen across government show their biggest cracks here first. Anyone with a brain knows that you cannot deplete large organizations of massive amounts of institutional knowledge without negative impacts. I submit that this clusterf*ck we’re witnessing is part of that. Even if they eventually do track this person down, this has not been an ideal pursuit.
On that note–the video on the NYT homepage shows the person dropping down off the top of the roof. Who does that? This again points to some level of training or skills.
Prince Harry makes surprise visit to Ukraine pledging support for thousands injured in war (The Guardian)
Diana Spencer’s youngest son, practicing politics the right way. God bless the people of Ukraine, who deserve so much better from their so-called allies.
Kirk taken out by a liberal Trump hater = the unanimous opinion of Trump and his cadre of asshats. Trump going on TV and throwing gasoline on a fire is disgusting, and should be the lede for the legacy media. The coverage/framing SHOULD be on *why* this guy did this thing…something we cannot know until the murderer is captured. The media know this. For crying out loud, the shooter could be a guy whose wife was having an affair with Kirk. And the effort to put Kirk on a pedestal (Trump leading the charge) is also nauseating. He tried to lend an air of intellect to extreme rightwing positions, but so did blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich. At the end of the day, as Beth noted, Kirk preached hate and division, and dared to claim God supported his vitriol. That shouldn’t be sane-washed.
@Jen: Same is true – in spades – at the DOJ. Experienced, dedicated, professional litigators were shown the door for the crime of doing what they were assigned to do: prosecute criminals (J6 cop beaters/rioters, the guy who instigated the riot, the guy who tried to derail the certification of the 2020 election, and the guy who stole classified documents). Hatchet man Emil Bove oversaw the DOJ purge, pulling Pam Bondi’s strings, and Trump stooges Patel and Bongino have done their best to hamstring the FBI because, “the FBI tried to put Trump in prison and he hasn’t forgotten.” Trump is scary as he is; he would be far worse if he was actually intelligent.
Trump said they have the Kirk shooter in custody. I see NYT, in a rare recognition of where we’re at, didn’t report the shooter is in custody, only that Trump said so.
@gVOR10:
Given that they’ve already brought in and then released to other suspects, if this isn’t the guy, then they must be picking up random yahoos off the street.
The latest haphazard ICE operation. Also counterproductive: this time, grabbing South Korean consultants helping set up an electric car battery plant.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/business/economy/hyundai-raid-worker-visas.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Well, the battery’s dead.
On institutional knowledge:
A few years ago one of our biggest competitors in food preparation was acquired by one of our biggest competitors in food distribution. Bad combo for us, right?
Well, the first thing the new management did was fire all the top and mid-level people in the food prep area. Next thing you know, we’re hearing about complaints from their customers. After that, on a BIG food services contest for all the public hospitals in a large state*, the competitor doesn’t even show up with a proposal. We won it virtually by default.
Things got so bad they shut down the food prep business and re-launched it under a new name.
*If you figure there are a lot of patients and all of them eat three times a day, you’d be right. but they also have a big staff, from janitors to high administrators, and all of them are entitled to meals in the employee commissary. Public hospitals are a huge business for their suppliers.
At that, the massive amounts of money they spend on food pales with the money they spend on medication.
@gVOR10: They are holding a press conference, Kash Patel is patting himself on the back, saying they’ve “made historic progress for Charlie” when in fact the shooter’s father apparently turned him in. I’m not sure how much credit the FBI should be taking, TBH.
ETA: Heh,
https://bsky.app/profile/edwinnick.bsky.social/post/3lynhc6cizk2n
@gVOR10: Update – the Gov of Utah says they have an arrest. NYT is now reporting enough detail to believe it’s the right guy. Apparently, far from a professional seeming hit, the guy left a lot of evidence on social media.
@Beth: Its entirely possible that this murder is a Turner Diaries type moment where a racist kills one of their own to help bring about civil war. Everyone is jumping to conclusions that is a left-wing liberal – even stating the TRN on the riffle meant “Trans” when its a brand. The whole world is crazy, just trying to destroy liberty of others.
It appears the guy is not trans. I know! Shock! He appears to be the son of a former LEO, from a deeply religious family of gun nuts. A White boy gamer from Utah.
@HelloWorld:
On Reddit that ‘TRN” thing has perhaps been debunked as the Turkish company TRN does not make 30.06 rounds. However, caveat everything at this stage.
A conservative-leaning woman on twitter said something very accurate about conservative masculinity. She writes that they see it as a rejection of femininity and not an evolution out of boyhood.
This is well put. So much of what the modern right and people like Charlie Kirk are declaring any form of personal growth to be ideological. That’s why they cling to free speech via debate. Nobody grows from a debate. It’s position and policies. In the right/libertarian view: the main point of free speech is for liberals to be tolerant of claims that black people were better off under Jim Crow.
It represents such an empty, feeble version of what freedom and free speech really are, and amounts to a hysterical way of never having to listen for real to other people. It’s a way to pretend you are a man and open-minded, when in fact what you are is terrified of change and difference.
I am finding it difficult to understand why so many people seem to be treating Kirk like a hero. Sure, I understand why Trump and the leaders of the GOP would want to portray him that way, but why would non-politicians see him that way? He was a political activist. It’s not like he had a real job like a plumber or teacher. While his views were not mine, I cant think of any political activist on the left that I would want to canonize. I think it’s an awful thing for his family and friends to go through, just like every other family that loses someone in a traumatic death. The reaction just seems to be way over the top.
Steve
@steve222: One, he died young–that is always going to have an impact. Two, he died essentially “on camera.” There was video, which was replayed. This brings a level of shock to the violence of it all. Three, Republicans *immediately* cast this as an “us v. them” moment, which the media was all to ready to repeat.
This is about to get a LOT more complicated. Get ready for some major gaslighting. The fact that it was a conservative Christian, from a law enforcement family, seems to indicate that maybe the conclusions that were jumped to were premature (but! we still don’t know what the motive was).
@Modulo Myself:
Debates are often exercises in who appears the most confident. One example I always think about is Rick Perry’s infamous “oops” moment. Four years later, Ted Cruz made the exact same mistake as Perry–he listed some government agencies he pledged to get rid of, then forgot the last one. Unlike Perry, however, he never acknowledged the mistake, he never said “oops,” he never looked like a deer in headlights, he just blustered through it. As a result, hardly anyone noticed and it got virtually no coverage.
I’ve watched a few of Kirk’s debates, and he relies heavily on the gish gallop, a practice that is not just tricky to confront, but tends to intimidate the debate opponent; it’s partially psychological warfare, a way of eating away at the opponent’s morale. Mehdi Hasan, who wrote an entire book about debate, has some good pointers on how to deal with gish gallops. But he’s still approaching it from the standpoint of debate as bloodsport.
The association of proper masculinity with aggressiveness and domination has been a theme in right-wing politics for centuries in many countries. Of course, debate isn’t always viewed in that light; it can seem overly pompous, even effete. (Among other things, right-wing masculinity has a distinct anti-intellectual bent, while somewhat paradoxically believing that men are intellectually superior to women.) And there’s especially a risk of that when it comes to figures like Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson, who often seem like pampered nerds who used to be given noogies and stuffed in lockers. That gives them an even greater incentive to bring debates down to the level of brawls. Coupled with their obsession with owning the libs and making them cry (and asserting they’ve succeeded regardless of what happens), they’re always going to be measuring these confrontations in terms of who shouts the loudest and beats their chest the most.
There’s a great thread over at LGM about non-violent resistance/activism.
Most of what I have learned about non-violence is from people of color. Mostly African-Americans, but also Ghandi.
Also, as a teenager I spent a lot of time with “liberalized” Mennonites, who are non-violent. As a group, they spent a lot of time in places where they were ostracized for refusing to be part of any military. They had to move from one country to the next until they came here where they were tolerated, if not welcomed.
So, I learned from them, too.
Non-violence is so often misunderstood as submission. It is not. Read Chavez. Read about John Lewis, or MLK’s mentor. Learn about Bayard Rustin. Though not known for advocacy of non-violence, ask yourself what James Baldwin would say in this moment.
These are the people whose tradition I am proud to stand in.
The superintendent of the Air Force Academy canceled a guest lecture because the speaker had opinions. No more complicated than that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/opinion/poet-air-force-academy-cancellation.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
True loyalty, not subservience, is impossible for a good chunk of the electorate to understand.
The lieutenant general in charge of the Academy did succeed in one area: I bought Paisley Rekdal’s book.
@Kylopod:
He also uses the one-against-many position, which people who don’t understand debate think is bold. I was in a debate in some class at some point where my debate ‘partner’ fled, leaving me to face a group of opponents including a priest. The professor actually seemed to think I’d be at a disadvantage. I went right at the priest, unencumbered by a partner who’d have not been helpful, and mopped the floor with them. Granted the priest was not exactly Aquinas, and like most people who see themselves as authority figures he was completely unprepared for anything off-book.
The quality of any debate tends to rest on the quality of the audience. An audience of fanboys is the easiest sort to impress, and you can of course leverage the vocal reactions of your chosen audience to advantage. IOW, with a stacked audience, control of the stage, and a free hand to gish gallop, or to simply lie, any decent debater can ‘win’ on just about any point.
@Jen: Plus there’s a lot of pressure to not speak ill of the dead, especially in the immediate aftermath. Interviewing his friends and colleagues is a recipe for major spin, of course. I haven’t been able to watch the news.
A 30-year-old projecting his superiority over inexperienced and unprepared teenagers and students is not a “debate,” especially when the primary purpose is to brand and monetize viral videos.
It’s pathetic for so-called liberals like Ezra Klein to whitewash this lazy grifting (by a vitriolic racist, homophobic extremist) into admirable Lincoln-Douglas style discourse. And this is the same Ezra Klein asserting that anti-shutdown Democrats lack spine? Lol where’s his?
Once again, El Taco got played:
So pretty much The Little Vlad gives up nothing, and gains stature by appearing as a statesman, while he also gets rid of some in the opposition. And El Taco gets to crow about it (apologies to real crows).
@DK: It’s puzzling all right. I don’t much care for how much he has engaged the circular firing squad, though.
If Trump can get us to be hostile and suspicious of our allies, and act on that, he’s winning.
I can think of a bunch of reasons for posting something like that. Some of which I would call “strategic”. But it’s not like I know what’s in his head any more than you or anybody else does.
I do note that this is something I will put down in my file of “people doing things whose motives I don’t comprehend and don’t seem to be congruent with other things I know”.
That has been happening a lot lately.
@Kathy: Almost nine years since Hillary described this neofascist Epstein-bestie pedo as Putin’s puppet, right to his face. And it’s still his most devastatingly accurate description.
Congressman mace to introduce resolution to desecrate the US Capitol.
I don’t care how popular he was or how bad an assassination is, you do NOT honor a bigot no matter how Christian he bragged about being or how popular he was.
@Kathy: Hey, cut them a little slack. In this constant onslaught of left wing violence, Kirk is the first martyr they’ve had since Steve Scalise was shot. If they’re going to organize a Reichstag Fire response they have to work with what they’ve got.
@Michael Reynolds:
If confirmed, Megyn Kelly needs to man up and apologize for spreading disinformation. I caught part of her show on youtube yesterday and she went right to blaming a trans individual, or someone who was clearly sympathetic towards Trans individuals.
I think her show is broadcast on Sirius XM (of which I am a subscriber) and they should be embarrassed by her actions.
What a joke of a journalist Megyn Kelly is turning out to be.
@Beth:
Look up Horst Wessel. That might be a more analogous reference to what just happened. The Right is certainly jumping straight into making him a martyr. Flags at half mast, Medal of freedom (I saw those responses coming two days ago, right after Trump’s effusive declaration).
Horst Wessel
No matter that the alleged shooter appears to come from a Republican family whose social media suggest heavy gun culture enthusiasm. The alleged shooter was registered independent. But once again a gun for Christmas is in part of the backstory.
Charlie Kirk ‘killer’ identified as Tyler Robinson after assassination in Utah
______________
Bottomline:
Unregulated guns = bad
Engendered hate culture = bad
Unsupported mental health = bad
Added up = really, really, really bad synergy.
P.S. I don’t think most Americans want civil war.
Well, this is interesting:
NEW: The Messages on the Bullets are From a Video Game
[…] O Bella, Bella Ciao is an anti-fascist anthem used ironically in montages from the game. The series of arrows, which the WSJ reported as signifying “transgender ideology” is actually the controller sequence to drop a 500kg bomb in the game. […]
Seeing “a series of arrows” and immediately assuming it’s some type of gendered typography is just so…sloppy. A lot of media outlets owe the public both corrections and apologies.
@Michael Reynolds:
Paul Campos at LGM has a good post on the motivation of these shooters to which he added a quote from X making a good case the weird messages on the cartridges show the guys a Groyper. I had to look it up. It’s Nick Fuentes bunch who have a real thing against Kirk. If true, I doubt it will penetrate the MAGA hive mind that this is a typical case of bothsides violence, right wing extremist again Dems and right wing extemists against GOPs, bothsides, baby!
@gVOR10: If lil homie was motivated by the Groyper Wars infighting fued between white supremacist Nick Fuentes and white supremacist Charlie Kirk, there will be no retractions and apologies from Trump and conservatives. Republicans will just memory-hole their error, bury Kirk, and move on to their next target per usual.
Either way, trans citizens, organizations, and parents of trans children should file a class-action civil suit against the WSJ, Fox News, and against this week’s peddlers of libelous disinformation and exploitative anti-trans hate — starting with Megyn Kelly, Trump Jr., Stephen Crowder, Gateway Pundit Inc., and JK Rowling among others. What they did yesterday is unhinged, and will be infamous.
This guy is 100% a Groyper and who is to not say the Colorado school shooter is not exactly the same, as they say he was radicalized and had anti Semitic and white supremacy posts…When will the MSM wake up and do some actual journalism. Kirk was killed by a far right extremist. Truly sad, but needs to be reported on accurately regardless of how bizarre it is, and more attention brought towards policing the internet of far right terrorists.
@DK:
Sometimes I’m uncertain whether it was Hillary Clinton in that debate and not Cassandra.
@Kathy: “Now, just imagine if you can. Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office, the next time America faces a crisis. Imagine him being in charge when your jobs and savings are at stake. Is this who you want to lead us in an emergency? Someone thin skinned and quick to anger who’d likely be on Twitter attacking reporters or bringing the whole regulatory system down on his critics when he should be focused on fixing what’s wrong?”
– Hillary Rodham Clinton, 22 June 2016
@Jc:
Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme:
Making sense of our dark new era of extremely online political violence
Of course you can’t monitor everything people in your home do, some slip through the cracks no matter what. But is there no way to notice internet brainrot setting in?
I wouldn’t generalize “young people” as swimming in alt-right content and meaninglessly dressing up in associated Trump/Pepe costumes. That’s a stretch. It’s specific and singular behavior.
Trump and conservatives who rushed to blame “the left” should dust off the apology toolbox.
@DK:
With all due respect to James Carville, just maybe ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ was just a fig leaf this time around?
I believe that ‘it’s the culture wars, stupid’ – immigration, pronouns, DEI, LGTBQ, CRT – was 90% of the reason why Trump was brought back to break all the China (sorry, no pun intended) and yank America back to McKinley or Coolidge.
@Rick DeMent:
I think that as you read even more, that opinion will change. 😉
@al Ameda: I believe that you could change none of the acronyms and culture wars and simply change Kamala Harris into a generic white guy named Kaden Harris, and Trump would be at home in Florida rn rather than uglying up the Oval Office with that gaudy gold. The remodel alone is an impeachable offense.
I’m feeling cautious about declaring Robinson’s politics. Just above me we see people citing some of his engravings as quotations from anti-fascist games and memes.
Isn’t it possible that this young man was somewhat alienated from his parents and culture? Bearing a strange burden of mixed and conflicting beliefs? Not that what he did ok. I find it interesting and informative to try to puzzle things like this out.
Charlie Kirk, I feel sure, ran on masculinity shaming, among other things. Shaming doesn’t go away easily, and provokes reactions.
The old traditions of silent stoicism, such as what my own father did, do not work in today’s world. Not at all. Damage ensues.
If you can believe of the likes of me, I have definitely been in situations where I had no words, no idea how to get my feelings across. I have had to learn, to grow.
I don’t think we know that much about his motives. He could very well be a guy who grew more alienated and angry about Trump and conservatism, and thus ‘political’ in the eyes of his totally non-political gun-owning Trump-loving religious family. And why shouldn’t he angry? Imagine listening to ‘moral’ Christians defend Donald Trump. If I were in that situation, surrounded by those people and at that age, I would have a few dark thoughts about what to do to my family who loves Donald Trump, the Christian rapist and pedophile. Or at least the people allied with Trump.
@DK:
I cannot argue with that point.
Historians and pollsters will sort this out, but I do not think it’s an accident or coincidence that Trump has only defeated Republican men. Yes there are many reasons why Clinton and Harris lost, however I think it’s foolish to dismiss the idea that 2 or 3 percent of the voters will not or would not, vote for a woman under any circumstance.
@DK:
Given Harry had a meeting with King Charles a couple of days ago, and this was obviously co-ordinated with both UK and EU officials, who met him at the station in Kyiv, this is pretty certainly more than just a personal visit.
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper also arrived on the same train, and announced additional UK sanctions on Russia, and additional support for Poland.
While France has stated French aircraft will be deployed in Poland.
If the US seems paralyzed by “the war for Trump’s ear” in DC, and Trump’s own evident reluctance on the matter, Europe and the UK must try to strengthen the Western position.
@Rob1: My thoughts went to Horst Wessel, too…
Meanwhile in Europe, we have actual Russian attack-drones, actually violating actual NATO airspace.
And if anyone thinks 19 or so drones all just went “accidentally” off course, I have some nice ocean-front property in Moscow coming onto the market for your perusal.
If you’re worried that you were feeling a little too happy, headed into the weekend, here’s a description of the Evergreen, CO murderer’s thoroughly evil worldview:
https://www.denverpost.com/2025/09/12/evergreen-high-school-shooter-extremism/
When future historians are sifting over the ruins of our civilization, they will certainly have a lot to puzzle over, trying to understand the existence of things like online forums where wannabe school shooters can trade tips and encouragement.
@Kingdaddy:
This is a problem that has increasingly tasked some persons and groups concerned with the problems of psychotic individuals and “reinforcement networks” in the context of inreasing technological enabled capacity for mass-mayhem.
When (as is soon going to be practicable) you have not just the ability for direct murder, but the distributed capability for mass-murder, or death-inducing mass-scale sabotage, how do you avert that short of a totalitarian panopticon?
It surely worries me.
@JohnSF:
Speaking of Hillary Cassandra Clinton, I’m old enough to remember her being ridiculed by both the Obama and Trump people, for calling for a NATO no-fly-zone over Ukraine way back in 2015-16.
So many unfair or trivial or misguided attacks on Biden, when his haters should be criticizing him and EU electeds for not moving and earth to get Ukraine all they needed and asked for in 2022.
Obama also owes Mitt Romney an apology vis a vis Putin, tbh.
@DK:
In the context of the time, with my historical hat on, I can still see why Hillary Clinton’s view was rejected at the time.
As was that of John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
Germany in particular, but also UK and much of DC analysis was so addicted to “Russia is just a normal international actor”
Wandel durch scheissing handel
Hope deludes.
I liked Biden; but some of his advisors were inclined to incrementalist, “chin-stroking”, calibrationist calculations, and “signalling”, that ended up as operational timidity.
The European problem is that until we have achieved full strategic disconnect from the US, we are limited in our actions.
And achieving such disconnection is a non-trivial problem in implementing trans-national defence policy control structures and capabilies.
Europe is building a defence/munitions capability of massive proportions: but taking the decisions to cut loose from the US on key capabilities, and still more on strategic/operational decision making, is a hard road.
As ascending to Power often is.
But now much of Europe thinks: “De Gaulle was right.”
(Even Brits, and by God that’s an irritating thing to think.)
How goes the conquest of Greenland, the takeover of the Panama Canal, and the subjugation of Canada?
@Kathy:
Not as well as might be hoped, perhaps?
If the US were to move beyond Trumpian MAGA-stroking kayfabe to actual acts in any of those cases, it would induce both Latin America and Europe to full breach.
MAGA may conceive, as some “isolationists” did, that only the US matters, and can master any and all opposition.
And that the “Monroe Doctrine” is some sort of law of physics.
A bit like the “World Series” perhaps?
Political Wire quotes Mediaite as reporting Nick Fuentes has told his followers to refrain from violence. Seems like the least he can do, and inadequate to cover his tracks.
Wow! Trump has lost patience with Putin! Oh no!
What you think, 30 day deadline this time?