Author: admin

In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, carrying 102 passengers—an assortment of religious separatists seeking a new home where they could freely practice their faith and other individuals lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in the New World. After a treacherous and uncomfortable crossing that lasted 66 days, they dropped anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, far north of their intended destination at the mouth of the Hudson River. One month later, the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims, as they are now commonly known, began the work of establishing a village at Plymouth.

Throughout that first brutal winter, most of the colonists remained on board the ship, where they suffered from exposure, scurvy and outbreaks of contagious disease. Only half of the Mayflower’s original passengers and crew lived to see their first New England spring. In March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received an astonishing visit from an Abenaki Indian who greeted them in English. Several days later, he returned with another Native American, Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants. He also helped the settlers forge an alliance with the Wampanoag, a local tribe, which would endure for more than 50 years and tragically remains one of the sole examples of harmony between European colonists and Native Americans.

In November 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved successful, Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony’s Native American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit. Now remembered as American’s “first Thanksgiving”—although the Pilgrims themselves may not have used the term at the time—the festival lasted for three days. While no record exists of the historic banquet’s exact menu, the Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow wrote in his journal that Governor Bradford sent four men on a “fowling” mission in preparation for the event, and that the Wampanoag guests arrived bearing five deer. Historians have suggested that many of the dishes were likely prepared using traditional Native American spices and cooking methods. Because the Pilgrims had no oven and the Mayflower’s sugar supply had dwindled by the fall of 1621, the meal did not feature pies, cakes or other desserts, which have become a hallmark of contemporary celebrations.

Lobster, seal and swans were also said to be on the Pilgrims’ menu.

Thanksgiving Becomes an Official Holiday

Pilgrims held their second Thanksgiving celebration in 1623 to mark the end of a long drought that had threatened the year’s harvest and prompted Governor Bradford to call for a religious fast. Days of fasting and thanksgiving on an annual or occasional basis became common practice in other New England settlements as well.

During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress designated one or more days of thanksgiving a year, and in 1789 George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by the national government of the United States; in it, he called upon Americans to express their gratitude for the happy conclusion to the country’s war of independence and the successful ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His successors John Adams and James Madison also designated days of thanks during their presidencies.

In 1817, New York became the first of several states to officially adopt an annual Thanksgiving holiday; each celebrated it on a different day, however, and the American South remained largely unfamiliar with the tradition. In 1827, the noted magazine editor and prolific writer Sarah Josepha Hale, launched a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. For 36 years, she published numerous editorials and sent scores of letters to governors, senators, presidents and other politicians.

Abraham Lincoln finally heeded her request in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, in a proclamation entreating all Americans to ask God to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” and to “heal the wounds of the nation.”

He scheduled Thanksgiving for the final Thursday in November, and it was celebrated on that day every year until 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week in an attempt to spur retail sales during the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s plan, known derisively as Franksgiving, was met with passionate opposition, and in 1941 the president reluctantly signed a bill making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November.

Thanksgiving Controversies

For some scholars, the jury is still out on whether the feast at Plymouth really constituted the first Thanksgiving in the United States. Indeed, historians have recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America that predate the Pilgrims’ celebration.

In 1565, for instance, the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilé invited members of the local Timucua tribe to a dinner in St. Augustine, Florida, after holding a mass to thank God for his crew’s safe arrival.

On December 4, 1619, when 38 British settlers reached a site known as Berkeley Hundred on the banks of Virginia’s James River, they read a proclamation designating the date as “a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

Some Native Americans and others take issue with how the Thanksgiving story is presented to the American public, and especially to schoolchildren.

In their view, the traditional narrative paints a deceptively sunny portrait of relations between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people, masking the long and bloody history of conflict between Native Americans and European settlers that resulted in the deaths of millions.

Since 1970, protesters have gathered on the day designated as Thanksgiving at the top of Cole’s Hill, which overlooks Plymouth Rock, to commemorate a “National Day of Mourning.” Similar events are held in other parts of the country.

Thanksgiving’s Ancient Origins

Although the American concept of Thanksgiving developed in the colonies of New England, its roots can be traced back to the other side of the Atlantic. Both the Separatists who came over on the Mayflower and the Puritans who arrived soon after brought with them a tradition of providential holidays—days of fasting during difficult or pivotal moments and days of feasting and celebration to thank God in times of plenty.

As an annual celebration of the harvest and its bounty, moreover, Thanksgiving falls under a category of festivals that spans cultures, continents and millennia.

In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans feasted and paid tribute to their gods after the fall harvest. Thanksgiving also bears a resemblance to the ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. Finally, historians have noted that Native Americans had a rich tradition of commemorating the fall harvest with feasting and merrymaking long before Europeans set foot on their shores.

When most Americans think of the first Thanksgiving, their minds probably turn to a semi-mythical 17th-century feast shared by pilgrims and Native Americans. Fewer may know that the modern version of a nation-wide Thanksgiving holiday didn’t actually come about until the late 19th century.

It was 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise,” the culmination of a 36-year campaign started by so-called “mother” or “godmother” of Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale.

Born on a New Hampshire farm in 1788, Hale was known as the “Lady Editor” of Godey’s Lady’s Book, a periodical founded by the “plump, benign” publisher Louis Godey and “[b]y far the most phenomenally successful of any magazine issued before the Civil War,” as TIME put it in 1930.

Under her leadership, the publication popularized white wedding dresses and Christmas trees, trends often credited to Britain’s Queen Victoria. In the magazine’s pages, Hale swore by the wrinkle-busting power of applying brown butcher paper soaked in apple vinegar to the forehead and described pigeons as “about the only bird in New England worth cooking.”

TIME also characterized her as “a crusader urging the admission of women to the practice of medicine, more thorough female education, foreign missions,” while Fortune‘s columnist John Chamberlain wrote that “she was annoyed by the menial position of pre-Civil War women and proceeded to put the flattering term ‘domestic science’ into the language” in the magazine’s A History of American Business.

She even helped finance the all-female Vassar College, founded in 1861. But she did not believe in women’s suffrage, nor did she believe that women could do all professions just as well as men. Rather, as a widow and mother of five children, she believed that a high-quality education was essential to preparing women for “the most important vocation on earth…that of the Christian mother in the nursery.”

Her lobbying effort to make Thanksgiving holiday can be traced back to a passage of her 1827 novel Northwood. “We have too few holidays,” she wrote. “Thanksgiving like the Fourth of July should be a national festival observed by all the people … as an exponent of our republican institutions.” According to Melanie Kirkpatrick’s history of the occasion, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience, in addition to publishing editorials in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Hale would promote her campaign by publishing Thanksgiving-themed poems, tales of families happily dining together, and recipes for autumnal fare like roast turkey, pumpkin pie and sweet potato pudding, to make people hunger for a day when they could eat all of these delicious foods.

She also launched a letter-writing campaign to members of Congress, governors and Presidents. President Zachary Taylor said around 1849 that it was up to the states to decide when and whether to declare a Thanksgiving holiday; in that period, such a holiday was often celebrated anywhere from September to December, depending on the place.

Some politicians thought the “day of public thanksgiving and prayer” declared by George Washington in 1789 violated the separation of church and state. And some in the South saw Thanksgiving as “another manifestation of intrusive, New England moralism,” according to Ryan P. Jordan’s Church, State, and Race: The Discourse of American Religious Liberty, 1750-1900. That’s one reason why Virginia Governor Henry Wise said he would not support this “theatrical national claptrap that is Thanksgiving.”

But, in a Sept. 28, 1863 letter to President Abraham Lincoln, Hale argued the other side. She made the case that a “National and fixed Union Festival” should occur on the last Thursday of November, annually, because the last Thursday of November was when George Washington had declared the first national Thanksgiving in 1789.

On Oct. 3, Lincoln issued the proclamation designating “the last Thursday of November” as a day of Thanksgiving, arguing in several newspaper editorials that, “in the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, the American people should take some time for gratitude.”

Next, Hale turned her efforts to making Thanksgiving a law of the land through an act of Congress—but she passed away in 1879 at the age of 91. It would be more than 60 years until President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a joint resolution, passed by Congress, which took into account years when there are five Thursdays in November and declared the fourth Thursday of the month a Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Sarah’s parents were strong advocates for education of both sexes. Therefore, Hale was taught well beyond the normal age for a woman. Later, she married a lawyer David Hale, who supported her in all scholarly endeavors. Sadly, her husband died after only nine years of marriage, leaving Hale a widow with five children. She turned to poetry as a form of income.  Her most famous book, titled Poems for Our Children included a beloved story from her childhood. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was instantly a popular nursey rhyme. In 1837, she became the editor of the Godey’s Lady’s Book. Her work with the magazine made her one of the most influential voices in the 19^th century. Her columns covered everything from women’s education to child rearing.

Hale also used her platform to support other causes, including abolishing slavery and, later, colonization (freeing African Americans and sending them to Africa). While working as editor, she raised money for various historic sites. Hale helped to preserve George Washington’s home and financially supported the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument. Her work in historic preservation has stood the test of time, as both sites are still open to public.

Hale has been criticized heavily for her support of gender roles. As an editor, she encouraged women to focus their efforts in the domestic realm. A proper woman, to Hale not only managed the home but she also imparted religion to her children. Godey’s Lady Book was widely known for its conservative views for much of the 19^th century. Additionally, Hale did not support the women’s suffrage movement because she believed that women’s participation in politics would limit their influence in the home. However, Hale did use the magazine to advocate for the education of women and the rights of women as property owners. Hale retired as editor in 1877 and died two years later at the age of 92.

So, as you sit down to dinner this Thanksgiving, take a moment to raise your glass and toast the grandmother of Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Hale.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/03/14/mexico-indicts-5-men-turned-over-by-cartel-for-killing-americans/?sh=5d210cce146c

Mexico Indicts 5 Men Turned Over By Cartel For Killing Americans

Nicholas Reimann, Forbes Staff 

A Mexican court indicted five men accused of kidnapping and killing Americans earlier this month, days after a wing of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel left the men tied up on a Matamoros street along with a sign blaming them for the killings, according to a local prosecutor, in an incident that has flamed tensions between the U.S. and its southern neighbor.

The men—who have only been identified by their given names and a last initial—have been charged with kidnapping and international homicide, the attorney general’s office in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas said in a statement.

Prosecutors and the cartel say the men carried out the attack and kidnapping on four Americans who crossed from Brownsville, Texas, into Matamoros on March 3—killing two and injuring one, while a female bystander was also killed.

The men have acknowledged they were involved in the attack but claim they did not shoot the Americans, according to the Wall Street Journal.

What prompted the attack remains unclear, but an apology letter the cartel left alongside the tied up suspects suggested it was done by mistake.

Prosecutors said the men will remain in custody for the next six months as the investigation proceeds.

The Americans reportedly ventured into Mexico so the lone uninjured survivor—LaTavia Washington McGee—could get a tummy tuck cosmetic procedure, while three men traveled with her to drive and aid her recovery.

The FBI said the Americans quickly found themselves under fire after crossing the border, and were pulled from their rental van into another vehicle that fled the scene.

Authorities found the Americans four days later at a safe-house outside Matamoros, where two of the men—Zindell Brown and Shaeed Woodard—were found dead and Eric James Williams was discovered with gunshot wounds to his legs.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has vowed the Justice Department will be “ruthless” in pursuing those responsible for the attack, though no one has been charged in the U.S. as of yet.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador blasted Republican lawmakers last week after they suggested sending the U.S. military to Mexico to combat cartels, saying: “We are not a protectorate of the United States, nor a colony of the United States.”

The president insisted at a news conference that “Mexico is safer than the United States,” even though the country’s murder rate—28 per 100,000 people—is four times higher than the United States, according to the World Bank.

Folks, what if I told you this same situation happened in our past and that our response was to send our military into Mexico?

That is exactly what happened 100 years ago.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/pershings-mexican-expedition

General Pershing’s Mexican Expedition to capture Pancho Villa predates his World War I career

By Magdalena Mieri and Erin Blasco,

The small American town of Columbus, New Mexico, was the site of a major event 100 years ago.

On March 9, 1916, spurred by events in the Mexican Revolution, General Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s forces attacked the camp of the 13th Cavalry Regiment.

Who was this Pancho Villa?

Pancho Villa (1878-1923) was a famed Mexican revolutionary and guerilla leader.

Born Doroteo Arango on June 5, 1878, in Río Grande, Mexico. Villa helped out on his parents’ farm. After his father’s death, he became head of the household and shot a man who was harassing one of his sisters. He fled, but was caught and imprisoned. Villa escaped again and later became a bandit.

While living as a fugitive, Villa joined Francisco Madero’s successful uprising against the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Because of his skills as a fighter and a leader he was made a colonel.

Another rebellion removed Madero from power in 1912 and Villa was almost executed for his efforts to defend the former government. He fled to the United States for a time, but he later returned to Mexico and formed his own military force known as Division del Norte (Division of the North).

He joined forces with other revolutionaries Venustiano Carranza and Emiliano Zapata (“Better to die on your feet than to live a lifetime on your knees”) to overthrow Victoriano Huerta.

The different forces were not wholly successful at working together, and Villa and Carranza became rivals((Like rival Cartel gangs today).

For a number of years, he was involved in a series of clashes with other Mexican military groups and even fought with U.S. troops from 1916 to 1917.

In reaction to these attacks, President Woodrow Wilson appointed General John Pershing as commander of a U.S. Army expeditionary force that was to capture Villa and police the U.S.-Mexico border.

Called the Punitive Expedition at the time, this was just the beginning of a lengthy search for Villa that never resulted in his capture, now known as the Mexican Expedition. It took place March 14, 1916, to February 7, 1917.

Why did Villa attack? It’s complicated, but here’s a quick summary. The Mexican Revolution was an uprising that impacted the social, economic, and political life of both Mexico and the United States.

The United States had become heavily invested in Mexican mining, railroads, and oil operations and protected these investments through military and political interventions in Mexico.

In support of their people, Mexican revolutionary leaders sought land reforms and the nationalization of these operations. At one time, President Wilson supported Villa and then later withdrew support. Angered by the reversal, Villa attacked.

In January 1916, he kidnapped 18 Americans from a Mexican train and slaughtered them. A few weeks later, in March 1916, Villa led an army of about 1,500 guerillas across the border to stage a brutal raid against the small American town of Columbus, New Mexico. Villa and his men killed 19 people and left the town in flames.

According to an article in Prologue magazine, published by the U.S. National Archives, “Why Villa chose Columbus as a target for his most daring raid is unclear. The small town had only one hotel, a few stores, some adobe houses, and a population of 350 Americans and Mexicans.”

It was the Columbus attack that moved President Wilson to take military action.

General John Pershing is better known for his leadership during World War I, but the part of Pershing’s military career spent in Mexico is very interesting.

Pershing’s command was closest to Columbus, New Mexico, when the attack happened. His forces were to include “two columns that included infantry, cavalry, field artillery, engineers, the First Aero Squadron with eight airplanes, field hospitals, wagon and ambulance companies, and signal detachments,” according to the article in Prologue magazine. 

Photos in the collection of the Library of Congress include shots of American soldiers preparing to depart on “scouting expeditions” by plane, baking bread in “field kitchens,” and posing on motorcycles.

So who was this General John Pershing? A Missouri boy!

General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing began his rise through the ranks of the U.S. Army with distinguished service in the Spanish-American War and the Philippines.

After leading U.S. forces in pursuit of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, Pershing served as commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) during World War I.

Pershing was born in 1860 near the small Missouri town of Laclede, in North central Missouri near Chillicothe.

While still a teenager, he got a job teaching at a school for African American students. After seeing an advertisement for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Pershing applied and won acceptance in 1882. He graduated four years later, ranking 30th in a class of 77.

Pershing spent the first years of his military fighting in U.S. campaigns against the Apache and Sioux Native Americans in New Mexico, Arizona and other outposts in the West.

In Montana, he was promoted to first lieutenant of the 10th Cavalry, becoming one of the first white officers to command an all-Black regiment. Pershing often expressed praise and admiration for the Black soldiers he commanded, which may have earned him the nickname “Black Jack”—although an alternative theory holds it was due to his strict attitude toward discipline.

After spending several years teaching military science and tactics at the University of Nebraska (where he also obtained his law degree) and returning to West Point as an instructor, Pershing headed to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War.

In 1898, he and the 10th Cavalry Regiment fought bravely in the Battles of Santiago and San Juan Hill alongside Theodore Roosevelt and his “Rough Riders.” Pershing earned a Silver Star for his service and was promoted to the rank of captain.

After the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War, Pershing sailed for the Philippines, where he led American soldiers in repeated efforts to subdue the rebellious Moro tribes.

In 1906, Roosevelt (now president) promoted Pershing to brigadier general, vaulting him over more than 800 other more senior officers.

After another tour in the Philippines from 1906-13, Pershing returned to the United States, where he was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco and placed in command of the Army’s 8th Brigade.

In August 1915, while Pershing and his men were on assignment in Fort Bliss, Texas to defend the southern border from attacks by Mexican bandits, a fire broke out at the Presidio. Pershing’s wife, Helen Frances, and three daughters died of smoke inhalation; only his son, Warren, survived.

Devastated by the loss, Pershing threw himself into his work. In March 1916, President Woodrow Wilson tasked him with leading an expedition of nearly 12,000 soldiers into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa, whose forces had recently raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico.

Pershing’s forces were restricted by U.S. unwillingness to incite war with Mexico (sound familiar?). Even though Villa remained at large after nearly a year’s pursuit, Pershing earned Wilson’s praise for his handling of the expedition.

On February 5, 1917, the expedition officially ended. Though Villa was never captured, General Pershing’s men were exposed to military training.

The author of the Prologue magazine article points out that “Many of the same men who served with Pershing in Mexico accompanied him to France.”

After General Pershing’s forces left, the Mexican Revolution continued. Between 500,000 and one million Mexicans fled the violence and turmoil of the revolution and immigrated to the United States in search of work and safe living conditions. (Sound familiar?)

Decades later, in the 1960s, revolutionary leaders such as Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa became inspiring symbols in struggles for social equality and political rights for many Mexican Americans.

So, there you have it folks. History repeats itself once again and we have learned absolutely nothing.

Side note: After the United States entered World War I in 1917, Wilson bypassed five other major-generals to appoint Pershing as commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). U.S. armed forces expanded quickly during the conflict, and Pershing was tasked with turning some 2 million relatively inexperienced troops into a professional fighting force. Soon after he arrived in France with the first AEF troops in June 1917, Germany defeated Russia, freeing up large numbers of German soldiers to face the Allies on the Western Front.

https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2020/08/when-and-why-the-democratic-and-republican-parties-switched-platforms.html?m=1

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

When and Why the Democratic and Republican Parties Switch Platforms?

The title of “Democrat” has its beginnings in the South, going back to the founding of the Democratic-Republican Party in 1791 by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It held to small-government principles and distrusted the national government, and foreign policy was a major issue. (sound familiar?)

After being the dominant party in U.S. politics from 1800 to 1828, the Democratic-Republicans split into two factions in 1828: the Federalist National Republicans and the Jacksonians Democrats.

Jacksonianism appears as a political impulse tied to slavery, the subjugation of Indians, and the celebration of white supremacy—so much so that scholars have dismissed the phrase “Jacksonian Democracy” as a contradiction in terms.

The Whig Party was a political party formed in 1834 by opponents of President Andrew Jackson and his Jacksonian Democrats, launching the ‘two-party system.’

Led by Henry Clay, the name “Whigs” was derived from the English antimonarchist party and was an attempt to portray President  Jackson as “King Andrew.” 

Whigs tended to be wealthy and had an aristocratic background. Most Whigs were based in New England and in New York. 

While Jacksonian Democrats painted the Whigs as the party of the aristocracy, they managed to win support from diverse economic groups and elect two presidents: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor. The other two Whig presidents, John Tyler and Millard Fillmore, gained office as Vice Presidents next in the line of succession.

The Democrats and Whigs were evenly balanced in the 1830s and 1840s; however, by 1854, the Whig party disbanded. Other opposition parties emerged, but the Democrats were dominant.

Northern Democrats were in serious opposition to Southern Democrats on the issue of slavery.

Northern Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas, believed in Popular Sovereignty—letting the people of the territories vote on slavery. The Southern Democrats (known as “Dixiecrats”), reflecting the views of the late John C. Calhoun, insisted slavery was national.

The Democrats controlled the national government from 1852 until 1860, and Presidents Pierce and Buchanan were friendly to Southern interests. In the North, the newly formed anti-slavery Republican Party came to power and dominated the electoral college.

In the 1860 presidential election, the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln. Still, the divide among Democrats led to the nomination of two candidates: John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky represented Southern Democrats, and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois represented Northern Democrats. Nevertheless, the Republicans had a majority of the electoral vote regardless of how the opposition split or joined together, and Abraham Lincoln was elected.

The National Union Party (1864–1865), the temporary name used by the Republican Party, was created by the merger of the Republican Party, Unionist Party, and War Democrats.

After 1865, Republicans, who dominated northern states, orchestrated an ambitious expansion of federal power, helping to fund the transcontinental railroad, the state university system, and the settlement of the West by homesteaders, and instating a national currency and protective tariff.

Democrats, who dominated the South, opposed these measures. After the Civil War, Republicans passed laws that granted protections for freed blacks and advanced social justice; again, Democrats largely opposed these expansions of power.

Fast forward to 1936. Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt won reelection that year on the strength of the New Deal, a set of Depression-remedying reforms including regulation of financial institutions, the founding of welfare and pension programs, infrastructure development, and more.

 Roosevelt won in a landslide against Republican Alf Landon, who opposed these exercises of federal power.

So, sometime between the late 1860s and 1936, the Democratic party of small government became the party of big government, and the Republican party of big government became rhetorically committed to curbing federal power. How did this switch happen?

The transition to the parties’ flipping may be contributed to the turn of the 20th century when a highly influential Democrat named William Jennings Bryan blurred party lines by emphasizing the government’s role in ensuring social justice through expansions of federal power — traditionally, a Republican stance.

Republicans didn’t immediately adopt the opposite position of favoring limited government. Instead, for a couple of decades, both parties had promised an augmented federal government devoted in various ways to the cause of social justice. Only gradually did Republican rhetoric drift to the counterarguments. The party’s small-government platform was cemented in the 1930s with its heated opposition to the New Deal.

But why did William Jennings Bryan and other turn-of-the-century Democrats start advocating for big government? Democrats, like Republicans, were trying to win the West. The admission of new western states to the union in the post-Civil War era created a new voting bloc, and both parties vied for its attention.

Democrats seized upon a way of ingratiating themselves to western voters: Republican federal expansions in the 1860s and 1870s had turned out favorable to big businesses based in the northeast, such as banks, railroads, and manufacturers, while small-time farmers like those who had gone west received very little. Both parties tried to exploit the discontent generated by promising the little guy some of the federal largesse that had already gone to the business sector. From then on, Democrats stuck with this stance — favoring federally funded social programs and benefits — while Republicans were gradually driven to the counterposition of hands-off government.

From a business perspective, the loyalties of the parties did not really switch. Although the rhetoric and, to a degree, the policies of the parties do switch places, their core supporters don’t — which is to say, the Republicans remain, throughout, the party of bigger businesses; it’s just that in the earlier era bigger companies want bigger government and in the later era they don’t.

In other words, earlier on, businesses needed things that only a bigger government could provide, such as infrastructure development, a currency, and tariffs. Once these things were in place, a small, hands-off government became better for business.

In conclusion, President Abraham Lincoln’s political philosophy today would actually be democratic, not republican.

https://www.studentsofhistory.com/ideologies-flip-Democratic-Republican-parties

In its early years, the Republican Party was considered quite liberal, while the Democrats were known for staunch conservatism. This is the exact opposite of how each party would be described today. This change did not happen overnight, however. Instead, it was a slow set of changes and policies that caused the great switch.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Republicans controlled the majority of northern states. The party sought to expand the United States, encouraged settlement of the west, and helped to fund the transcontinental railroad and state universities. Additionally, because of growing tension over slavery, many Republicans became abolitionists who argued against slavery.

Democrats represented a range of views but shared a commitment to Thomas Jefferson’s concept of an agrarian (farming) society. They viewed the central government as the enemy of individual liberty.  (how things have changed!)

Because most Democrats were in southern states, they fought to keep slavery legal.

As the war came to a close, the Republican Party controlled the government and used its power to protect formerly enslaved people and guarantee them civil rights. This included the three Reconstruction Amendments, which won Republicans the loyalty (and vote) of America’s Black population. Unsurprisingly, most Democrats disapproved of these measures.

However, a change had begun in the Republican Party following the Civil War. Northern industrialists had grown rich from the war, and many entered politics afterwards. These new wealthy politicians did not see much sense in supporting the rights of Black Americans when the nation was still largely white.

By the 1870s, many in the Republican Party felt that they had done enough for Black citizens and stopped all efforts to reform the southern states.

The south was left to the white Democrats and their oppressive policies towards Black citizens after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction. With the end of Reconstruction, the “Solid South” voted for Democratic presidential candidates for the next 44 years.

Almost 60 years later, the Great Depression became a catalyst for a massive political shake up. The Republican Party had continued to be dominated by wealthy businessmen, which meant that they had come to favor laissez-faire policies that supported big business.

These policies were effective when the economy was booming, but were disastrous when it wasn’t.

When the economy crashed in 1929, the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, opted not to intervene, earning him and his party the ire of the American public.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, sensed the need for change. He campaigned on a promise of government intervention, financial assistance, and concern for the welfare of the people.

He won the 1932 election by a landslide. It was FDR’s campaign policies that caused a major shift in party ideologies.

Republicans opposed everything about FDR’s government. Primarily, they saw the growth of large government as harmful to the federalist foundation of the nation. This too has come to define the ideals of the Republican Party.

The Civil Rights Movement

Race and equality began to return to the center of politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Race did not necessarily fall into a party viewpoint at this point; instead, it was more of a regional issue.

Southern Democrats and Republicans both opposed the early Civil Rights Movement, while Northern Democrats and Republicans began to support legislation as the movement picked up steam.

In 1964, Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. In the 1964 election, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater publicly opposed the new law, arguing that it expanded the power of the federal government to a dangerous level.

It was this argument that led to a final, decisive switch. Black voters, who had historically been loyal to the Republican Party because of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, had already been switching to the Democratic Party.

However, upon hearing Goldwater’s argument against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the majority of Black voters left the Republican Party in favor of the Democrats.

They saw the Democratic Party as advocates for equality and justice, while the Republicans were too concerned with keeping the status quo in America.

As the 60s and 70s continued, Democrats sought reform in other places, such as abortion and school prayer. White southern Democrats began to resent how much the Democratic Party was intervening into the rights of the people.

By the 1980s, white southern Democrats had become Republicans, and the majority of the south was now Republican. The Republican Party now is solidly conservative while the Democratic Party is the liberal one.

So, there you have it folks. A little history of how the Democrats and Republicans switch party platforms.

OK Folks, here is our topic today. Two questions.

As a white US Citizen, do you think you should pay reparations to all black US citizens because of the practice of slavery in the US prior to the Civil war?

If your answer is yes, then should the Democratic Party be held accountable as well for being the party of slavery prior to the Civil War?

These two questions have now come to the forefront.

If you are going to hold all white US citizens accountable for slavery, then you cannot exempt the Democratic Party from the same history.

It also works the other way. If you aren’t responsible for reparations, then how can the Democratic Party be responsible for its past history?

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3879164-florida-lawmakers-bill-would-get-rid-of-the-democratic-party/

Florida Democrats took on tremendous losses last election cycle, and now a Republican state lawmaker wants to eliminate the party entirely with a bill filed Tuesday.

“The Ultimate Cancel Act” (SB 1248), sponsored by state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R-Spring Hill), would cancel the filings of any political party that supported slavery during the Civil War.

“The Democrat party adopted pro-slavery stances in their party platforms and this bill says that if you have done that in the past, then the Secretary of State shall de-certify and get rid of the party,” Ingoglia said. 

If the controversial bill were approved, voters registered with any “canceled” party would become non-party-affiliated voters.

“It would be interesting to find out if those voters who are now de-certified choose to go back to the party now that they know that they were the party that was advocating for the issue of slavery,” Ingoglia said.

Any “canceled” party could register again, but the name of the organization must be substantially different from the name of any other party that was previously registered with the department.

The proposal is drawing widespread criticism from Democrats.

“Shame on the Republican Party for initiating legislation of this magnitude. This is what a dictator does,” newly elected Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried said. 

 “It’s a complete and absolute abuse, and it’s unconstitutional. This bill will go nowhere. It is meritless. It deserves zero airtime and frankly, it’s a distraction from the Republicans’ failed policies,” House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell said.

When asked if he thought the bill would get any traction in the upcoming session, Ingoglia said, “I guess we’re gonna see, aren’t we?”

Ingoglia said he has not spoken to the governor or legislative leaders about the bill.

The Florida Democratic Party issued the following statement:

“Presenting a bill that would disenfranchise 5 million voters is both unconstitutional and unserious. Under Ron DeSantis, Senator Ingoglia is using his office to push bills that are nothing more than publicity stunts instead of focusing on the issues that matter most to Floridians, such as reforming property insurance, addressing housing affordability and combating climate change.

“The sooner DeSantis and his puppets in the legislature learn that Florida is a Democratic Republic and not a Banana Republic, the better it will be for all Floridians.”

The governor’s office declined to comment on the legislation. Legislative leaders in the House and Senate have yet to express interest in taking up the bill during the upcoming session. If this were to become law, it would take effect in July 2023.

Incidentally, the Republican and Democratic parties didn’t always hold the stances they do today. 

The Republican Party organized in 1792 and was “the direct ancestor of the present Democratic Party.”

Essentially, the parties switched platforms over time.  between the 1860s and 1936,” the (Democratic) party of small government became the party of big government, and the (Republican) party of big government became committed to curbing federal power.”

https://okcfox.com/news/nation-world/florida-gop-introduces-ultimate-cancel-act-state-democratic-party-blaise-ingoglia-senator-representative-slavery-involuntary-servitude-politics-division-elections-immediately-cancel-filings

by LENNY COHEN | The National Desk

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (TND) — The Democratic Party is all but dead in Florida — no Democrat holds a statewide office — and now a state senator who was chairman of the Florida Republican Party is trying to kill it entirely.

 As I state earlier, Sen. Blaise Ingoglia’s Bill, SB1248 — “The Ultimate Cancel Act” —“requires the Division of Elections to immediately cancel the filings of a political party if certain conditions exist.”

Among those conditions: “If the party’s platform has previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude.”

Southern Democrats wanted to continue slavery during the Civil War. Florida seceded from the U.S. when Republican Abraham Lincoln became president. That was well over 150 years ago.

If passed, the new law would take effect July 1 and the Florida Democratic Party would have to reregister;

by filing a certificate showing a copy of its constitution, bylaws, and rules and regulations.

Also, “The name of the organization must be substantially different from the name of any other party previously registered with the department.

And, “The filing may not be submitted later than 6 months before any election in which the political party seeking to register wishes to nominate candidates for public office.

Ingoglia is quoted as saying, For years now, leftist activists have been trying to ‘cancel’ people and companies for things they have said or done in the past,” Ingoglia explained. “This includes the removal of statues and memorials and the renaming of buildings. Using this standard, it would be hypocritical not to cancel the Democrat Party itself for the same reason.

Well folks, there it is. He is pointing out the hypocrisy of our elected officials, just like you and I have been saying on our previous shows.

So now let’s look at the flip side to this issue of accountability.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/40

Sponsor:	Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18] (Introduced 01/04/2021)
Committees:	House – Judiciary

Summary for H.R.40. 

Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act

This bill establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. The commission shall examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.

The commission shall identify (1) the role of the federal and state governments in supporting the institution of slavery, (2) forms of discrimination in the public and private sectors against freed slaves and their descendants, and (3) lingering negative effects of slavery on living African Americans and society.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/19/congress-reparations-bill-slave-descendants-1370402

Heather Caygle contributed to this report.

In January of 2021, House Democratic leaders committed to a floor vote for legislation to study reparations for the descendants of slaves — a historic move for the black community after the party sidestepped the debate for decades.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters that Democrats plan to vote on the bill, which he said would “look at how we try to compensate for the extraordinary racism and denigration” that African Americans have long faced.

“I think that’s a very serious issue and we need to look at it,” Hoyer said.

The bill, drafted by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), would create a commission to look at a “national apology” for slavery and discrimination against African Americans, potentially including compensation.

Jackson Lee’s bill received a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee — the chamber’s first hearing on reparations in a decade.

The proposal is largely backed by the Congressional Black Caucus, though some senior members fear it could alienate moderate voters and the idea has divided the caucus along generational lines.

House passage of the bill would be a momentous event, though it’s unlikely to be considered in the Republican-controlled Senate; Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has rejected the idea of reparations.

“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” McConnell said. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African-American president.”

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries blasted McConnell on Wednesday, saying he has “zero credibility” on the issue.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11818693/California-moves-closer-paying-reparations-black-people-task-force-decides-to.html

By HELENA KELLY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

Black Californians could be in line for $360,000 each as part of the state’s plan to dish out ‘reparations’ to descendants of slaves.   

Secretary of State Shirley Weber told a meeting today that California must ‘admit its sins and change the narrative,’ to pave the way for initiatives similar to ones already being considered in other states. 

But there has been no detail about how the $650 billion project will be funded amid concerns over California’s growing deficit which is expected to worsen due to a jobs blood bath in its tax-generating Silicon Valley.

A nine-member ‘reparations taskforce’ was set up in 2020 by California Governor Gavin Newsom following nationwide protests for racial justice in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. 

Previous estimates suggested the payments could be as much as $220,000 each for the state’s 1.8 million black citizens. 

But in a meeting on Friday, the taskforce indicated the cheques could actually be as high as $350,000 as they seek to compensate Black citizens for generations of discriminatory practices. 

There have been difficulties from the start around how the state could accurately measure the harms suffered by its black citizens.

And local residents voiced concerns about how the money would be paid in practice. 

One man wearing a top hat told the meeting that the money must be made in cash payments direct to black citizens.

‘There is only one thing that would stimulate this economy – and I need you to spread the word what you heard – and that one thing is capital, money, reparations,’ he told the meeting.

‘That will stimulate the economy for the millions of blacks in California.

‘There is only one thing that would stop our children busting into these liquor stores and grocery stores, stealing junk food and different things and that’s reparations.’

In California, white families are roughly six times wealthier than their black counterparts. 

The taskforce is considering a model which would use the state’s racial wealth gap to measure how much descendants of slaves had lost.

A conservative estimate would mean the state owed $636.7 billion to its black citizens.

The taskforce has until July 1 to publish its recommendations and outline exactly how the reparations will be made. 

It will then be up to lawmakers to decide whether to adopt them. 

The idea of giving reparations to black citizens has become popular across America, with cities including Boston, Massachusetts, St Paul, Minnesota, and St Louis, Missouri, as well as the California cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, among those to have set up similar task forces. 

Evanston, Illinois, in 2021 became the first US city to provide reparations to its Black residents, including giving housing grants.

So, there it is folks. Back to our original questions.

1. As a white US Citizen, do you think you should pay reparations to all black US citizens because of the practice of slavery in the US prior to the Civil war?
2. If your answer is yes, then should the Democratic Party be held accountable as well for being the party of slavery prior to the Civil War?

I personally think both political parties have lost their minds. If this nonsense continues, where will it stop? Shall we go all the way back to the Crusades and hold all Christians accountable for their war on Muslims? If so, do we owe all Muslims reparations?

By Hal Brands

Imagine a scenario in which, a year or two or three from now, the world is shaken by war from Europe to the Pacific. The idea isn’t as absurd as you may think. Not in decades has the US faced such prospects of near-term military confrontation in several separate theaters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has ignited Europe’s largest conflict in generations and provoked a great-power proxy fight. In East Asia, the chances of war are growing, as the tensions precipitated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August demonstrated. In the Middle East, the US may have to choose between fighting Iran and accepting it as a nuclear threshold state.

Put these crises together and you have the makings of a Eurasian World War. 

Nightmare scenarios usually don’t materialize, of course. It is possible that none of these situations will pull the US into war, and the most plausible timelines toward conflict vary by region.

But the thought exercise demonstrates just how pervasive the danger of major war has become. It also reminds us that today’s crises are more deeply interrelated than they appear.

America’s enemies may not be formally allied, but they are aligned in a critical area — the Eurasian heartland — and in critical ways. An overstretched US cannot react to one problem without considering the impact on its ability to deal with others.

The demands on American statecraft will be severe, as Washington confronts an array of problems it can’t easily walk away from and certainly can’t afford to see escalate all at once.

In some ways, America’s predicament resembles the period before World War II. Leave aside that no US rival has committed aggression or atrocity on the scale of the Axis powers — although China’s repression of its people and Putin’s murderous war in Ukraine are haunting echoes of that past.

Leave aside, also, that Putin’s brutal bumbling in Ukraine presently looks more like an imitation of Benito Mussolini than of Adolf Hitler. The basic patterns of geopolitics look painfully familiar.

Then as now, the international system was being battered from many directions.

Japan was seeking dominance in the Far East. In July of 1940 the United States imposed an embargo on all exports of aviation fuel, iron and scrap steel to Japan. The Japanese continue to expand into French Indo-China and the United States responded by imposing a complete embargo on the export of all grades of iron and scrap iron.

Japan now signed an agreement with Germany and Italy. This provided that the three powers would assist each other with all political, economic, and military means if one of them were attacked. Sound familiar folks?

Roosevelt now froze all Japanese assets in the United States and enforced a trade embargo. The greatest loss to Japan was the inability to get oil; they imported 80% of their oil from the US. They could fix this problem though, by expanding into the Dutch East Indies, which had huge oil fields.

FDR’s final step was to move our Pacific fleet from its base in San Diego, to a new base of operations, Pearl Harbor. Not at all unlike our current situation of Biden increasing our military presence in Central Europe.

Japan now decides to attack the United States. Is this what Russia and China are currently contemplating?

Hitler’s Germany was bidding for control in Europe and beyond. Mussolini’s Italy was making a bloody push for empire in the Mediterranean and Africa.

The Soviet Union would ultimately end up fighting Hitler — but only after helping him carve up Eastern Europe.

There was little affection among these revisionist states. The differing racist ideologies that motivated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were fundamentally incompatible.

Although Berlin, Rome and Tokyo did sign their Tripartite Pact in 1940, multidirectional mistrust ensured that this was little more than a loose agreement to blow up the existing order and build separate empires amid the rubble.

Yet if the Axis powers made cynical partners, there was a deep, destructive synergy among the programs of radical expansion they pursued.

The dictators supported each other at critical moments: Mussolini’s backing aided Hitler’s bloodless conquest of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938.

Advances by one fascist power emboldened the others: Germany’s romp through Western Europe in 1940 helped persuade Japan to push into Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the expense of a defeated France, a desperate Britain and a distracted America.

Then as now, a democratic great-power facing trouble everywhere struggled to act decisively anywhere. During the late 1930s, Britain hesitated to draw a hard line against Germany while facing simultaneous threats from Italy and Japan.

The US had similar problems amid worsening crises in Europe and Asia. “I simply have not got enough Navy to go round,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1941.

Even wartime mobilization didn’t fully solve this problem. From beginning to end, a fight against multiple antagonists forced the Allies to make agonizing trade-offs. It didn’t take a fully integrated alliance of totalitarian adversaries to throw the democracies off balance — and create the gravest, most generalized crisis of global security the world has seen.

In the 1930s, Western leaders struggled to foresee how quickly regional crises could cause a global meltdown.

It’s not news that autocratic powers have been building up their militaries and coercing their neighbors. What is new is that all these challenges are threatening to turn violent.

Eastern Europe is aflame thanks to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the culmination of a generation-long campaign to restore Russian primacy from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea.

A successful blitzkrieg back in February might have given Russia a commanding position in Eastern Europe and invited new oppression of exposed North Atlantic Treaty Organization states.

Russian blunders and Ukrainian resistance averted that scenario. But even a diminished Russia will have plenty of ability to make trouble, and the Ukraine conflict is far from over.

Both Ukraine and Russia have ambitious aims.

Kyiv seeks the liberation of all occupied territory, including Crimea; Moscow aims to turn Ukraine into an impoverished, vassal state. The war has also unleashed a ferocious contest in great-power coercion.

Washington and its allies are giving Ukraine guns, money and intelligence to bleed Putin’s army; they are battering the Russian economy through sanctions. Moscow has used energy coercion to make the war more painful for Europe; it has threatened nuclear escalation in hopes of limiting its losses on the battlefield by limiting Western support for Ukraine.

Putin seems to believe he can coerce his enemies into quitting before he suffers a major defeat, while the US is acting as though it can deter Putin from escalating long enough for Ukraine to prevail.

The result of all this is a violent, unstable equilibrium, one that cannot hold forever as committed participants pursue irreconcilable goals.

Meanwhile, the countdown to conflict may have begun in the Taiwan Strait.

Beijing used Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan as pretext for aggressive military exercises that foretell a higher baseline of regional tension. Chinese officials surely prefer to achieve their goals — controlling Taiwan and pushing the US out of the Western Pacific — without a major war.

It is possible that Putin’s bloody mess in Ukraine has made Chinese President Xi Jinping more cautious about using force. Yet a three-decade military buildup has undoubtedly given Xi a far better shot at subduing Taiwan if he chooses.

In fact, Xi may have to use force to get what he wants: The odds of Taipei peacefully submitting to a totalitarian China decrease each year, while the US and its allies appear increasingly intent on blocking Beijing’s bid for regional dominance.

President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, recently said that the US is in “the early years of a decisive decade” in its competition with Beijing.

There is vigorous debate in Washington over when the threat of Chinese aggression will become most critical; even the most worried observers think a showdown is at least two to three years away.

Yet the risk of war is rising as China’s determination to upend the East Asian balance smacks into its rivals’ determination to uphold it.

Then there is the perpetually flammable Middle East, a region Americans would love to ignore. The ongoing, intermittently violent contest between Washington and Tehran nearly exploded in 2019 and early 2020, after a sequence beginning with US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement and culminating with the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike.

Iran’s advances in uranium enrichment have reportedly given it the ability to make a nuclear weapon in short order. The US and Israel must therefore consider whether more coercive methods are needed to prevent Iran from crossing this red line. A crisis could come quickly — in months — if negotiations to revive the nuclear agreement conclusively fail. 

War between the US and its rivals is not inevitable in any of these theaters. It is a distinct possibility in all of them.

When multiple regions implode at once, they can bring the global order crashing down. Europe, the Persian Gulf and East Asia collectively form the strategic core of the larger theater — Eurasia — that has been the focal point of global politics in the modern era. By sowing upheaval within their regions, the revisionists are shaking several pillars of the system at once.

Simply by pursuing their own agendas, moreover, they create openings for the others to exploit. Feverish tensions with China and Russia force Washington to tread carefully with Iran. Biden’s administration must be wary of provoking Xi while it is tangling with Putin.

To be sure, America’s rivals are uncertain friends. Xi hasn’t rescued Putin from his quagmire in Ukraine; if China, Russia and Iran did push the US out of Eurasia, they might fall out among themselves. But none can accomplish its aims without successfully confronting a superpower, which gives them an overriding incentive to align.

Americans may not see the China-Russia relationship as an alliance, but that’s mostly because it lacks the explicit mutual-defense guarantees that have characterized US alliances since World War II.

Even so, the relationship has many attributes of an alliance: arms sales and military exercises; growing ties in defense technologies; cooperation to maintain autocratic stability in Central Asia.

It also involves a tacit non-aggression pact that frees Beijing and Moscow to focus on the US rather than worrying about each other. A crucial reason the risk of war is growing on both sides of Eurasia is that America’s two great-power adversaries can now fight “back to back.”

Iran is not in the same weight class as Russia and China, but it is part of this loose revisionist axis. Russia and Iran fought together to save Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, while China helped run interference at the UN Security Council.

China and Russia have periodically shielded Tehran from US pressure, delaying or diluting sanctions and selling Iran arms.

This cooperation is becoming more pointed. Tehran conducted trilateral naval exercises with Moscow and Beijing after its tensions with Washington spiked in 2019; signed a 25-year strategic partnership with China in 2021; and provided Russia with hundreds of military drones for use in Ukraine.

Tehran’s assistance to Russia underscores something vital: China may not want to get involved in Ukraine. Yet if Xi feared that Russia was nearing a military collapse that could cause a political collapse in Moscow, he might feel pressure to provide economic aid and military supplies despite the threat of American wrath.

Don’t expect Russia, Iran and China to commit suicide for one another, but don’t think they will be indifferent to one another’s fate.

Once again folks, history is repeating itself.

https://www.thecentersquare.com/opinion/op-ed-who-is-really-running-the-republic/article_702b6524-08e4-11ec-926f-03a26f5d2faf.html

Op-Ed: Who is really running the republic?

• William Haupt III | The Center Square contributor

…..When President Joe Biden speaks, it’s hard not to recall President Abraham Lincoln’s famous refrain, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” As we watch our nation continue to implode, it’s critical we solve the mystery: who is in charge in Washington?

Since the DNC obviously won’t let Biden appear in public without his shadow Vice President Kamala Harris, Americans should be deeply concerned who is running their republic?

In 2006 when the DNC needed to revitalize their electorate, John Kerry came up with a plan to bury the GOP for decades and steal the hearts of the liberal media.

He handpicked a little known party loyalist from the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama, for their Democratic candidate in the 2008 election.

Since Obama’s only claim to fame was his work as an ethnic community organizer in Chicago, he needed a crash course in U.S. government. So, John Kerry chose longtime Washington political insider, leftist Susan Rice, to tutor him. And she cloned him into a leftist Beltway hack.

“Nobody knows everything. Not even me. I learn something new everyday.”

– Barack Obama

Outspoken loose cannon Susan Rice, who had no political background, began her political career as a National Security consultant and Secretary of African affairs under President Bill Clinton. She was not only assigned to train Obama, but was ordered to stick with him like glue while he was in office.

An aggressive opportunist, Rice rose quickly through the progressive ranks. Obama made her his Secretary to the UN.

In 2013, he appointed her National Security Adviser, making her one of the key figures in Washington. That high profile position exposed her tactlessness and arrogance.

In late 2020, over 200 progressive black women activist leaders wrote a letter to Biden’s campaign mandating he choose a black woman as a running mate if he was nominated. They scribed, “It is time that black women are appointed to the highest positions in the federal government today.”

Biden and the DNC, hungry for a victory, also felt having any black woman on the ticket would bring out the black voters that had remained home in 2016. After months of looking under every rock in America for a black woman candidate, Biden had two finalists: Senator Kamala Harris, and Susan Rice.

With many politically savvy black women in America such as Condoleezza Rice, Vivian Childs, and Candace Owens, Harris and Susan Rice were the least qualified to be VP. This proved that the left has no concern for America since Biden is stumbling daily and his VP could be the president any day!

Susan Rice’s record made her unelectable. She claimed the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans was in response to an internet video when it was a planned terror attack.

She helped release five terrorists from Gitmo. A grand jury investigation found Susan Rice used her office to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016.

She also unmasked key American security informers. She defended the Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who was convicted of desertion while he was stationed in Afghanistan!

Although the DNC was not pleased with Harris’s personal and political baggage, or Susan Rice’s pious rudeness and use of “off color language,” they reluctantly told Biden to choose Harris. Rice’s record and her guttural crassness were non-presidential, and they had much bigger plans for her.

While UN diplomats and U.S. officials who dealt with Susan Rice felt she had learned a great deal about foreign policy “theory” at Stanford, she won no popularity contests with foreign dignitaries or UN diplomats.

The UN Security Council claimed she was “undiplomatic, uncouth, and disrespectful.”

“These f****ing people we’re dealing with will never get the f****ing big picture right!”

– Susan Rice

Rice grew up in Washington D.C. hoping to be the first black woman senator in Congress. Step father Alfred Fitt, an attorney at the Congressional Budget Office, helped her gain prominence in Washington. She became known as a “merciless go-to” dedicated beltway progressive Democrat.

John Kerry also grew up in Washington, D.C. He’s been an insider for his party since 1982. It was Kerry who brought Susan Rice with him into the Obama Camp to assimilate Obama into the leftist Washington “good ol boys club.” Both Kerry and Rice steered the Obama regime for eight years.

It is no secret that Joe Biden’s entire administration is made up of Obama retreads. That was the plan by the DNC long before he was gifted the nomination. The same two key players who helped to snowball Obama though eight disreputable years in the oval office are babysitting Joe Biden and VP Harris as well.

Kerry and Rice influenced Obama to reorientate the progressive electorate from union members, ethnic minorities, and less educated blue collar workers to more affluent constituencies.

These young liberal white-collar professionals were influenced by liberal teachers and universities to support programs such as Obamacare, the climate hoax, redistribution of wealth and class envy.

Plato said, “The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Today Biden is a fading shell of a moderate who was against busing, supported strict incarceration, against federally funded abortion and affirmative action.

Again, it is Rice who was assigned the duty to baby-sit Biden and orchestrate progressive policy for him. Additionally, she has the dubious honor to reinvent the very unpopular, under-qualified, Kamala Harris.

Biden’s transformation from moderate liability to a card-carrying progressive was well planned and executed by a consortium of Washington insiders headed by John Kerry and Susan Rice.

They will continue to prop Biden up and feed him cue cards until his surrogate in training, VP Kamala Harris, is ready to assume command. This will give them another progressive marionette for eight years.

Rice leads the group of key D.C. progressives, including John Kerry, Valerie Jarrett, Janet Yellen, Avril Haines and Ron Klain, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary Antony Blinken.

They will force progressive policy on America as long as the GOP allows them to run Washington.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/grenell-calls-susan-rice-the-shadow-president-and-no-one-is-paying-attention

By Edmund DeMarche | Fox News

 Richard Grenell, the former acting director of National Intelligence under President Trump, said in an interview with CPAC that he believes Susan Rice has assumed the role of a “shadow president.”

Rice, who served as national security adviser under President Obama, was tapped by President Biden to take charge of the White House Domestic Policy Council. It is in that role that Grenell believes she is exerting her influence.

“Biden is too weak to stop the progressive left from taking over… [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] does not understand what’s going on…We have a shadow president in Susan Rice and no one is paying attention,” he said.

Rice is one of the many officials from the Obama administration that landed jobs in the Biden White House. There was speculation that she would be his running mate and when that never materialized, secretary of state.

She is among the wealthiest individuals in the Biden White House, with a net worth estimated to be at least $37.9 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. She resigned last December from her role as a member of the board of directors at Netflix.

Grenell was interviewed by Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, Mercedes Schlapp, his wife and former White House director of strategic communications for the Trump administration.

He said that it is apparent that Biden’s effort to placate the far-left in his party while dealing with significant foreign policy concerns is leading to more headaches.

He said Rice’s expertise is in foreign policy, not domestic policy. He called her appointment a signal that “all of our foreign policy will be treated like domestic policy.”

“The foreign policy mess that they are creating is a mess because they are placating the far-left domestically,” he said. (Grenell predicted in January that he believed Rice would be calling the shots.)

So, who is this Susan Rice? To a lot of you, the name sounds familiar. However,as time passes we tend to forget about people and move on to the next thing dominating the national news.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/12/susan-rice-domestic-policy-profile-00038938

By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO, ADAM CANCRYN, DANIEL LIPPMAN and LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ

For more than a year, Democratic lawmakers and like-minded advocates have pleaded with Joe Biden to create a “gun czar” to address the epidemic of violence.

Each time, the president’s team pushed back with force, contending it has the perfect person already in place, someone with command over the issue and extraordinary access to the president himself.

That person is Susan Rice.

As director of the Domestic Policy Council, Rice leads a team of roughly a dozen staffers examining ways to push through modest gun reforms should Congress again falter, and explore new executive orders even if lawmakers succeed.

Her ascendence to the role of point person on guns marks the latest chunk of policy turf over which she has claimed jurisdiction, joining a sprawling portfolio that stretches from policing and racial justice to student loan debt, immigration and health care policy, including a prime piece of protecting abortion rights.

The scope of her fiefdom is as remarkable as how she managed to secure it.

Having shunned a public-facing role, Rice has relied on a combination of internal maneuvering and bureaucratic know-how to place herself at the nerve center of some of the fiercest debates in Washington. And she’s further cemented her status with the president in the process.

Rice and Biden meet multiple times a week. As the president prepared for his recent prime-time address on guns, she joined him on several occasions in his residence. Senior aides say Biden’s trust in her is so profound that she can see him whenever she needs to.

“I’ve seen it,” a recently departed senior White House official said of the relationship. “You see it in the meetings. You see how he talks about her in meetings even when she’s not around.”

In interviews with 21 current and 13 former White House and administration staffers, along with two dozen officials on Capitol Hill and from across the party and advocacy worlds, Rice is described as an underappreciated political operator, a pragmatist consumed with putting points on the board, and a process obsessed micromanager. She personally goes through and edits her staff’s typos in the memos they draft.

Rice’s elevated stature in the West Wing has come with fierce loyalty from colleagues and praise so superlative-laden that it borders on deification.

More recently, it has led to speculation inside the White House that she will succeed Ron Klain should he leave the chief of staff post.

Rice has privately told people in recent days that she has no interest in the job, describing herself as a policy person at heart.

“There is a reason that she is the only person in American history to have led both the White House’s National Security Council and its Domestic Policy Council,” Klain said. “She has unique talents, intellect, and determination to get results.”

But her style has also irritated lawmakers and high-ranking officials on Capitol Hill. To some former colleagues and outside advocates, Rice has come to personify a kind of risk-averse, incremental approach to policy-making that they fear falls far short of addressing the country’s needs — and will ill-serve Democrats in the midterms and elections beyond.

“Rice is seen as a domestic policy lightweight and a block to any good things that happen to cross her desk,” said the leader of one progressive organization, who asked to withhold their name out of fear of angering Rice and the White House. “So, everybody who wants to do big things has a vested interest in her desk being as empty as possible.”

Regardless of one’s views on her, Rice’s rise resembles one of the great tales in modern politics. She was too hot to touch even for some in her own party by the end of the Obama years, having become the chief protagonist in Republicans’ investigations into the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

…..In less than two years time, she’s become one of the more influential domestic policy operatives of her generation, sparking another question: What will be her encore?

“I’ve been in the Cabinet. I’ve been national security adviser, I’ve been domestic policy adviser. I feel pretty good about my professional trajectory. And if I leave government and never come back, and do other things that challenge me in different ways, that’s good,” Rice said in a rare interview.

“If I feel a need to come back, and there’s a role I think I can contribute to and I’m excited about doing it, I leave open that possibility, too,” she added. “I honestly haven’t answered for myself the question of … is this the last thing I want to do in government or not? And I don’t feel any sense of urgency to answer that.”

---

Rice is a creature of Washington. She grew up in the nation’s capital and was the valedictorian at her private girls’ school there before attending Stanford University and becoming a Rhodes Scholar.

International affairs always seemed to be her calling. During the Clinton years, she served on the National Security Council.

And when Barack Obama was elected, she moved to New York to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. She was poised to be Obama’s nominee for Secretary of State to replace Hillary Clinton but withdrew from consideration amid fear the confirmation process would become a vehicle for relitigating Benghazi.

Even before the 2020 vice president search, her foreign policy experience was still being sought: Rice helped informally advise a handful of Democratic presidential candidates running in the primary, including Vice president Harris, taking their frequent calls and responding to questions about national security.

The idea for her to take all that history and pivot to domestic policy was first broached in conversations during the Biden transition about what type of role she could conceivably play, either in the Cabinet or elsewhere in the White House.

The concerns were obvious. She had three decades of experience in international affairs. There would be a learning curve. But those who’ve worked closely with her viewed Rice as possessing the right skill set.

“The most important element of this job is the ability to move the process within the government and that is the hardest part. That is the part that requires the most experience and expertise,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who headed the DPC (Domestic Policy Council) under Obama, helped lead the Biden transition and spoke with Rice when she considered the position. “This is somebody who was going to have zero learning curve with respect to how to make the process work.”

So, there you have it folks. Who is whispering in Joe Biden’s ear? Susan Rice.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64524105

The US has shot down a giant Chinese balloon that it says has been spying on key military sites across America.

The Department of Defense confirmed its fighter jets brought down the balloon over US territorial waters.

China’s foreign ministry later expressed “strong dissatisfaction and protest against the US’s use of force to attack civilian unmanned aircraft”.

Footage on US TV networks showed the balloon falling to the sea after a small explosion.

An F-22 jet fighter engaged the high-altitude balloon with one missile – an AIM-9X Sidewinder – and it went down about six nautical miles off the US coast at 2:39 EST,a defense official told reporters.

Defense officials told US media the debris landed in 47ft (14m) of water – shallower than they had expected – near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The military is now trying to recover debris which is spread over seven miles. Two naval ships, including one with a heavy crane for recovery, are in the area.

In a Pentagon statement a senior US defense official said that “while we took all necessary steps to protect against the PRC [China] surveillance balloon’s collection of sensitive information, the surveillance balloon’s overflight of US territory was of intelligence value to us.

“We were able to study and scrutinize the balloon and its equipment, which has been valuable,” the official added.

President Joe Biden had been under pressure to shoot it down since defense officials first announced they were tracking it on Thursday.

Afterwards, Mr Biden said: “They successfully took it down, and I want to complement our aviators who did it.”

In a statement a few hours later, the Chinese foreign ministry said: “The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to unforeseeable circumstances- it was completely an accident.”

The discovery of the balloon set off a diplomatic crisis, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately calling off this weekend’s trip to China over the “irresponsible act”.

The Chinese authorities have denied it is a spying aircraft, and instead said it was a weather ship blown astray.

Defense officials revealed on Saturday the balloon had first entered US airspace on 28 January near the Aleutian Islands, before moving to Canadian airspace three days later, and re-entering the US on January 31^st. The object was spotted in the US state of Montana, which is home to a number of sensitive nuclear missile sites.

Now folks, what would you think if I were to tell you that this isn’t the first time enemies of the US have sent balloons over the continental US?

Would you believe me if I told you it happened during WWII and that balloons back then carried payloads that killed American citizens un US soil?

That is exactly what happened and that is why I was so upset as our federal government let that balloon fly over our country and yes, even over our homes here at Lake of the Ozarks.

History was repeating itself and yet, our federal government failed to act, ignoring the history of this type of incident.

So how about a little history?

https://www.history.com/news/japans-killer-wwii-balloons

For Reverend Archie Mitchell, the spring of 1945 was a season of change. Not only were the minister and his wife, Elsie, expecting their first child, but he had also accepted a new post as pastor of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in the sleepy logging town of Bly, Oregon.

Seeking to deepen their newly planted roots, the Mitchells invited five children from their Sunday school class—all between the ages of 11 and 14—on a picnic amid the bubbling brooks and ponderosa pines of nearby Gearhart Mountain on the beautiful spring day of May 5, 1945.

After lumbering up a one-lane gravel road, Mitchell parked his sedan and began to unload picnic baskets and fishing rods as Elsie, five months pregnant, and the children explored a knoll sloping down to a nearby creek.

When 13-year-old Joan Patzke spied a strange white canvas on the forest floor, the curious girl summoned the rest of the group. “Look what we found,” 

Elsie called to her husband back at the car. “It looks like some kind of balloon.” The pastor glanced over at the group gathered in a tight circle around the oddity 50 yards away. As one of the children reached down to touch it, the minister began to shout a warning but never had a chance to finish.

A huge explosion rocked the placid mountainside. Elsie, the unborn baby and the five children were killed almost instantly by the blast. When a forest ranger in the vicinity came upon the scene, he found the victims radiating out like spokes around a smoldering crater and the 26-year-old minister beating his wife’s burning dress with his bare hands.

What U.S. military investigators sent to the blast scene immediately knew—but didn’t want anyone else to know—was that the strange contraption was a high-altitude balloon bomb launched by Japan to attack North America.

After American aircraft bombed Tokyo and other Japanese cities during the Doolittle Raid of 1942, the Japanese military command wanted to retaliate in kind but its manned aircraft were incapable of reaching the West Coast of the United States.

Doolittle Raid: The Doolittle Raid was a U.S. air raid during World War II that targeted major cities in Japan. It occurred on April 18, 1942. The attack aimed to lift Allied spirits and incite fear in the Japanese population in retribution for the recent Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. During the operation, which Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle planned and led, 16 aircraft launched from the carrier USS Hornet and bombed targets in Japan, and 13 of the aircrews reached safety in China afterward.

What the Japanese military lacked in technology, it made up for in geography.

Since the 13th century when a pair of cyclones foiled the fleets of Kublai Khan’s Mongol invaders, the Japanese had long believed that the gods had dispatched “divine winds,” called “kamikaze,” to protect them.

During World War II, the military thought the winds could save them once again since its scientists had discovered that a westerly river of air 30,000 feet high—known now as the “jet stream”—could transport hydrogen-filled balloons to North America in three to four days. 

For two years the military produced thousands of balloons with skins of lightweight, but durable, paper made from mulberry wood that was stitched together by conscripted schoolgirls oblivious to their sinister purposes.

Using 40-foot-long ropes attached to the balloons, the military mounted incendiary devices and 30-pound high-explosive bombs rigged to drop over North America and spark massive forest fires that would instill panic and divert resources from the war effort.

Between November 1944 and April 1945, the Japanese military launched more than 9,000 of the pilotless weapons in an operation codenamed “Fu-Go.”

Most of the balloons fell harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean, but more than 300 of the low-tech white orbs made the 5,000-mile crossing and were spotted fluttering in the skies over the western United States and Canada—from Holy Cross, Alaska, to Nogales, Arizona, and even as far east as Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

In March 1945, one balloon even hit a high-tension power line and caused a temporary blackout at the Hanford, Washington, plant that was producing plutonium that would be used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki five months later.

None of the balloons, however, had caused any injuries—until Mitchell’s church group came across the wreckage of one on Gearhart Mountain.

Citing the need to prevent panic and avoid giving the enemy location information that could allow them to hone their targeting, the U.S. military censored reports about the Japanese balloon bombs.

(Word has now come out that the Chinese balloon we saw last week wasn’t the first to fly over the US. Yet the government has remained silent until this one was spotted by a citizen on the ground).

Defense officials recently admitted that they have an “awareness gap” when it comes to tracking these balloons.”

Although many Bly, Oregon locals knew the truth back in 1945, they reluctantly followed military directives and adopted a code of silence about the tragedy as the media reported that the victims died in “an explosion of undetermined origin.” 

By the end of May 1945, however, the military decided in the interest of public safety to reveal the true cause of the explosion and warn Americans to beware of any strange white balloons they might encounter—information divulged a month too late for the victims in Oregon.

Ultimately, Fu-Go was a military failure. Few balloons reached their targets, and the jet stream winds were only powerful enough in wintertime when snowy and damp conditions in North American forests precluded the ignition of large fires. The only casualties they caused were the deaths of five innocent children and a pregnant woman, the first and only fatalities in the continental United States due to enemy action in World War II. 

The balloon bombs, however, foretold the future of warfare. In his book Fu-Go: The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack on America, author Ross Coen called the weapon “the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile,” and the silent delivery of death from pilotless balloons has been referred to as World War II’s version of drone warfare.

https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196210/balloon-bombs-japans-answer-to-doolittle/

One of the best kept secrets of the war involved the Japanese balloon bomb offensive. Prompted by the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942, the Japanese developed the balloon bombs as a means of direct reprisal against the U.S. mainland.

The first operational launches took place on Nov. 3, 1944, and two days later a U.S. Navy patrol boat spotted a balloon floating on the water off the coast of California.

 
….As more sightings occurred, the government, with the cooperation of the news media, adopted a policy of silence to reduce the chance of panic among U.S. residents and to deny the Japanese any information on the success of the launches. Actual damage caused by the balloon bombs was minor.

However, the incendiaries that these balloons carried did pose a serious threat to the northwestern U.S. forests during dry months. These balloons also offered a vehicle for germ warfare if the Japanese had decided to employ this weapon.

The balloon attacks began after air defense facilities in the United States had been deactivated. To counter this threat, U.S. Army Air Forces and Navy fighters flew intercept missions to shoot down balloons when sighted.

Army personnel and USAAF aircraft were also stationed at critical points to combat any forest fires that might occur. In addition, supplies of decontamination chemicals and sprays to counter any possible use of germ warfare were quietly distributed in the western United States.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1945-japanese-balloon-bomb-killed-six-americansfive-them-children-oregon-180972259/

……..As reports of isolated sightings (and theories on how they got there, ranging from submarines to saboteurs) made their way into a handful of news reports over the Christmas holiday, government officials stepped in to censor stories about the bombs, worrying that fear itself might soon magnify the effect of these new weapons.

The reverse principle also applied—while the American public was largely in the dark in the early months of 1945, so were those who were launching these deadly weapons.

Japanese officers later told the Associated Press that “they finally decided the weapon was worthless and the whole experiment useless, because they had repeatedly listened to [radio broadcasts] and had heard no further mention of the balloons.”

Ironically, the Japanese had ceased launching them shortly before the picnicking children had stumbled across one.

However successful censorship had been in discouraging further launches, this very censorship made it difficult to warn the people of the bomb danger. The risk seemed justified as weeks went by and no casualties were reported.

After that luck ran out with the Gearheart Mountain deaths, officials were forced to rethink their approach. On May 22, the War Department issued a statement confirming the bombs’ origin and nature “so the public may be aware of the possible danger and to reassure the nation that the attacks are so scattered and aimless that they constitute no military threat.”

Does that sound familiar to what the national news is telling us today?

The statement was measured to provide sufficient information to avoid further casualties, but without giving the enemy encouragement. But by then, Germany’s surrender dominated headlines. Word of the Bly, Oregon, deaths—and the strange mechanism that had killed them – was overshadowed by the dizzying pace of the finale in the European theater.

The silence meant that for decades, grieving families were sometimes met with skepticism or outright disbelief.

The balloon bombs have been so overlooked that during the making of the documentary On Paper Wings, several of those who lost family members told filmmaker Ilana Sol of reactions to their unusual stories. “They would be telling someone about the loss of their sibling and that person just didn’t believe them,” Sol recalls.

These loss of these six lives puts into relief the scale of loss in the enormity of a war that swallowed up entire cities. At the same time as Bly residents were absorbing the loss they had endured, over the spring and summer of 1945 more than 60 Japanese cities burned – including the infamous firebombing of Tokyo. On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, followed three days later by another on Nagasaki. In total, an estimated 500,000 or more Japanese civilians would be killed. Sol recalls “working on these interviews and just thinking my God, this one death caused so much pain, what if it was everyone and everything? And that’s really what the Japanese people went through.”

In August of 1945, days after Japan announced its surrender, nearby Klamath Falls’ Herald and News published a retrospective, noting that “it was only by good luck that other tragedies were averted” but noted that balloon bombs still loomed in the vast West that likely remained undiscovered. “And so ends a sensational chapter of the war,” it noted. “But Klamathites were reminded that it still can have a tragic sequel.”

While the tragedy of that day in Bly has not been repeated, the sequel remains a real—if remote—possibility. In 2014, a couple of forestry workers in Canada came across one of the unexploded balloon bombs, which still posed enough of a danger that a military bomb disposal unit had to blow it up.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11691539/Russian-company-offers-cash-reward-troops-destroy-capture-Western-tanks-Ukraine.html

By RACHAEL BUNYAN FOR MAILONLINE

A Russian company today said it will offer five million roubles ($70,000) in cash to the first soldiers who destroy or capture Western tanks in Ukraine after the Kremlin vowed that any allied armored vehicles shipped to Kyiv would ‘burn’. 

The United States, Germany and more Western allies are lining up to join Britain in sending dozens of heavy tanks to Ukraine over the next few months to help boost the country’s military capacity as the war approaches the 12-month mark.

The decision by the NATO allies has been criticized by the Kremlin as a dangerous escalation, with Moscow warning the new Western supplies will ‘burn like all the rest’.

Now a Russian company – Fores, a Urals-based firm which makes supplies for the energy industry – is offering cash payments to Russian servicemen who ‘capture or destroy’ German-made Leopard 2 or U.S.-made Abrams tanks.

The company said it will pay five million roubles ($70,000) to the first Russian soldier to destroy one of the tanks, and 500,000 roubles ($7000) for all subsequent attacks. 

Echoing language used by Russian officials and pro-war state TV hosts, Fores said NATO was pumping Ukraine with an ‘unlimited’ amount of arms and escalating the conflict. 

It also said it would pay a 15 million roubles ($210,000) bounty on Western-made fighter jets, should they ever be delivered to Ukraine.

Washington is sending 31 of its fast-moving M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, while Berlin will initially supply at least 14 Leopard 2 tanks and give permission to other NATO countries – including Poland, Norway, Finland and Spain – to deliver their own to Kyiv. 

The UK has already said it will send 14 Challenger 2 tanks and Ukrainian troops on Saturday landed in Britain to learn how to use the next-generation battle tanks against Russian soldiers.

While a total of 321 heavy tanks have been promised to Ukraine by several countries, according to Kyiv’s ambassador to France, they could take months to appear on the battlefield. 

Ukraine is keen to speed up the delivery of heavy weapons as both sides in the war are expected to launch spring offensives in the coming weeks.

Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechayev, said last week that Berlin’s decision to send Leopard II tanks to Ukraine was ‘extremely dangerous’. 

He said it ‘shifts the conflict to a new level of confrontation and contradicts the statements of German politicians about their reluctance to get involved in it’.

Meanwhile, France has not yet committed to sending a squadron of its Leclerc tanks, but President Emmanuel Macron is now under pressure to match his allies’ offer of heavy armor.

Ukraine had been relying on Soviet-era T-72 tanks but its military will be modernized with the shipment of NATO tanks.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine was facing a difficult situation in Donetsk and needed faster weapons supplies and new types of weaponry, just days after allies agreed to provide Kyiv with heavy battle tanks.

‘Russia wants the war to drag on and exhaust our forces. So, we have to make time our weapon. We have to speed up events, speed up supplies and open up new weapons options for Ukraine.’

Russia’s RIA news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Monday that as the United States had decided to supply tanks to Ukraine, it made no sense for Russia to talk to Kyiv or its Western ‘puppet masters’.

On Sunday however a Kremlin spokesperson told RIA, that Russian President Vladimir Putin was open to contacts with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Scholz was quoted by the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel on Sunday as saying, ‘I will also speak to Putin again because it is necessary to speak’.

‘The onus is on Putin to withdraw troops from Ukraine to end this horrendous, senseless war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives already,’ he added.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3025302/biden-signs-lend-lease-act-to-supply-more-security-assistance-to-ukraine/

By David Vergun , Department of Defense News 

So how is the US able to continue to supply arms to Ukraine, while claiming to be a neutral power in the conflict?

On May 9, 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the “Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022.” 

The act authorized the administration, through fiscal year 2023, to lend or lease military equipment to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. The act would exempt the administration from certain provisions of law that govern the loan or lease of military equipment to foreign countries, such as the five-year limit on the duration of the loan or the requirement that receiving countries pay all costs incurred by the United States in leasing the defense equipment.  

Any loan or lease of military equipment to Ukraine would still be subject to all applicable laws concerning the return of such equipment. 

Lend-lease has been used before, during World War II. 

At that time, a total of $50.1 billion, equivalent to $690 billion in 2020, worth of supplies were shipped. In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union and the remaining $2.6 billion to other allies.

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/lend-lease-act-1

The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 stated that the U.S. government could lend or lease (rather than sell) war supplies to any nation deemed “vital to the defense of the United States.”

Under this policy, the United States was able to supply military aid to its foreign allies during World War II, while still remaining officially neutral in the conflict.

Most importantly, passage of the Lend-Lease Act enabled a struggling Great Britain to continue fighting against Germany virtually on its own until the United States entered World War II late in 1941.

Neutrality in Wartime

In the decades following World War I, many Americans remained extremely wary of becoming involved in another costly international conflict. (Just like today) Even as fascist regimes like Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler took aggressive action in Europe the 1930s, isolationist members of Congress pushed through a series of laws limiting how the United States could respond.

But after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and full-scale war broke out again in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that while the United States would remain neutral by law, it was impossible “that every American remain neutral in thought as well.”

Before passage of the Neutrality Act of 1939, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to allow the sale of military supplies to allies like France and Britain on a “cash-and-carry” basis: They had to pay cash for American-made supplies, and then transport the supplies on their own ships.

But by the summer of 1940, France and much of northern Europe had fallen to the Nazis, and Britain was fighting virtually alone against Germany on land, at sea and in the air. The London Blitz and other German offenses had taken a serious toll on British morale and military strength.

After the new British prime minister, Winston Churchill, appealed personally to Roosevelt for help, the U.S. president agreed to exchange more than 50 outdated American destroyers for 99-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland, which would be used as U.S. air and naval bases.

That December, with Britain’s currency and gold reserves dwindling, Churchill warned Roosevelt that his country would not be able to pay cash for military supplies or shipping much longer.

Though he had recently been re-elected on a platform promising to keep America out of World War II, Roosevelt wanted to support Great Britain against Germany.

After hearing Churchill’s appeal, he began working to convince Congress (and the American public) that providing more direct aid to Britain was in the nation’s own interest.

In December 1940, Roosevelt introduced a new policy initiative whereby the United States would lend, rather than sell, military supplies to Great Britain for use in the fight against Germany. Payment for the supplies would be deferred, and could come in any form Roosevelt deemed satisfactory.

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” Roosevelt declared in one of his signature “fireside chats” on December 29, 1940. “For us, this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.”

Lend-Lease, as Roosevelt’s plan became known, ran into strong opposition among isolationist members of Congress, as well as those who believed the policy gave the president himself too much power (Just like today).

During the debate over the bill, which continued for two months, Roosevelt’s administration and supporters in Congress argued convincingly that providing aid to allies like Great Britain was a military necessity for the United States.

“We are buying…not lending. We are buying our own security while we prepare,” Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“By our delay during the past six years, while Germany was preparing, we find ourselves unprepared and unarmed, facing a thoroughly prepared and armed potential enemy.”

Finally, in March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act (subtitled “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States”) and Roosevelt signed it into law.

Roosevelt quickly took advantage of his authority under the new law, ordering large quantities of U.S. food and war materials to be shipped to Britain from U.S. ports through the new Office of Lend-Lease Administration.

The supplies dispersed under the Lend-Lease Act ranged from tanks, aircraft, ships, weapons and road building supplies to clothing, chemicals and food. By the end of 1941, the lend-lease policy was extended to include other U.S. allies, including France, China and the Soviet Union.

Through the end of World War II the United States would use it to provide a total of some $50 billion in aid (equal to $690 billion in 2020 dollars) to more than 30 nations around the globe, from the Free French movement led by Charles de Gaulle and the governments-in-exile of Poland, the Netherlands and Norway to Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru.

For Roosevelt, Lend-Lease was not motivated primarily by altruism or generosity, but was intended to serve the interest of the United States by helping to defeat Nazi Germany without entering the war outright—at least not until the nation was prepared for it, both militarily and in terms of public opinion.

Through Lend-Lease, the United States also succeeded in becoming the “arsenal of democracy” during World War II, thus securing its preeminent place in the international economic and political order once the war drew to a close.

Now back to the current situation.

In 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act.

Much like Roosevelt’s 1941 program, this act allowed the U.S. government to lend or lease a wide range of military equipment to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.

Resulting from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the current Lend-Lease Act exempted the Biden administration from provisions of law that govern the loan or lease of military equipment to foreign countries.

So far, Biden has provided $27.1 billion dollars to Ukraine under his lend lease program.

What do you think folks? Was this money well spent?

How long should we continue providing funds to Ukraine?

Should there be a cap on what we will provide?

Do you think we will ever be paid back?

Columbia Values Diversity Celebration facing backlash over performers in drag; attorney general warns CPS; CPS issues statement

By Marina Diaz, Joushua Blount

Columbia Values Diversity Celebration facing backlash over performers in drag; attorney general warns CPS; CPS issues statement

An annual event hosted by the City of Columbia since 1994 is facing backlash for hosting an LGBTQIA+ group featuring three drag queens.

Nclusion Plus performed at the end of the Columbia Values Diversity celebration following keynote speaker Renee Montgomery. The event is a yearly celebration of diversity that’s pegged on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which took place last week.

Columbia Public Schools invited students to attend the event, according to parents posting on social media sites such as Facebook. Parents were required to fill out a permission slip. Copies of the slip have been posted to social media.

ABC 17 News is working to get a copy of the slip.

Columbia Mayor Barbara Buffaloe attended the event and took to Twitter to post pictures with the performers.

We want to thank the planning committee of Thursday’s Columbia Values Diversity celebration. We appreciate the thoughtfulness that was put into organizing an event that recognizes and elevates the diversity of our community

“We want to thank the planning committee of Thursday’s Columbia Values Diversity celebration,” Buffaloe said. “We appreciate the thoughtfulness that was put into organizing an event that recognizes and elevated the diversity of our community.”

Buffaloe said the event ended with an “upbeat and energetic performance” from Nclusion plus.

“Drag is a cross-cultural art form with a long & rich history that is fun and encourages self-expression,” said Buffaloe. “As hate crimes against drag show locations and performers are being committed in other communities we want to reaffirm that Columbia is a community that supports all.”

Columbia Public Schools did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the event.

Republican State Sen. Caleb Rowden said his office has been “inundated with calls and emails.”

My office has been inundated with calls & emails re: grade school kids being forced to sit through a drag show at this morning’s #CoMO Diversity Breakfast. We have heard from parents whose kids attended who are obviously very upset. 1/3 #MOLeg https://t.co/DQT72a8Z0I

— Caleb Rowden (@calebrowden) January 20, 2023

Rowden said he has asked for a meeting with the CPS superintendent and members of the Columbia Board of Education. Rowden said he wants to hear the process that led to this event, and to “gather information to determine what next steps need to be taken at the legislative level.”

“I will use all the resources at my disposal to stand up for kids and their parents, especially in instances where they don’t feel like their voice is being heard,” Rowden said.

Gov. Mike Parson and Attorney General Andrew Bailey, both Republicans, also gave their opinions on the incident in statements.

We are deeply concerned about reports that Columbia middle school students were subjected to adult performers during what is historically a MLK Day celebration. This is unacceptable.

— Governor Mike Parson (@GovParsonMO) January 20, 2023

“We are deeply concerned about reports that Columbia middle school students were subjected to adult performers during what is historically a MLK Day celebration. This is unacceptable,” Parson wrote.

“To characterize a three song, 830am drag set as ‘adult performers’ is incredibly dangerous. You know what you’re doing here and that, my guy, is what’s unacceptable,” Columbia City Councilwoman Andrea Waner wrote in a now-deleted tweet responding to Parson.

Bailey said in a news release that he wrote a letter to the school superintendent saying taking children to the performance might have run afoul of state law that bans providing sexual materials to children.

Drag performances have become a divisive issue, with Republicans and conservatives criticizing events featuring drag performers that cater to children. The issue is part of a broader culture war that includes battles over other LGBTQ issues, including how transgender student-athletes compete.

An Arkansas Senate committee on Thursday approved a bill that would restrict drag performances.

Tara Arnett is one of those parents who were not aware of the performance. 

“Mistakes happen. We learn from them, we grow from them,” Arnett said. “But we can’t learn and grow from them if we don’t acknowledge that they even happened or take responsibility for them happening.” 

Arnett’s nonverbal autistic son is an eighth grader. Arnett said special planning was done so her son could attend. She did not receive a permission slip, but said she was in constant contact with the school to make the necessary arrangements for her son. 

“I started getting wind from other parents through the morning from their students who attended as to what happened and what was there,” Arnett said. “I was not pleased to find this out just because I didn’t have any control over it. It was not something that we consented to as parents.” 

Arnett said her son expresses himself typically through reenacting things he sees on television. She said she tries to monitor what he views. 

We Project Director Valerie Berta attended Thursday’s event. She thought the event was family friendly. The nonprofit aims to amplify marginalized communities through storytelling. 

Berta thinks the backlash the event has received is alarming. 

“As Mayor Barbara Buffalo said, it’s a really important thing to do, to emphasize the fact that here in Columbia and in Missouri, we value diversity, we value being inclusive of all our humanity,” Berta said. “Especially I think, in the face of attacks, sometimes really violent, physical and so there is real danger involved in spreading those narratives. That is really, to me, profoundly disturbing.” 

https://www.foxnews.com/sports/nhl-analyst-hradek-ivan-provorov-can-involved-russia-ukraine-war-refusing-gay-pride-jersey

On Tuesday night, Philadelphia Flyers‘ Ivan Provorov refused to wear a gay pride warm-up jersey on the team’s Pride Night, citing religious beliefs.

Provorov’s move has garnered plenty of criticism, even by the NHL’s own reporters.

On Wednesday’s edition of “NHL Now” on the NHL Network, senior reporter E.J. Hradek gave Provorov, who is Russian, an ultimatum.

“Ivan Provorov can get on a plane any day he wants and go back to a place where he feels more comfortable, take less money and get on with his life that way if it’s that problematic for him …” Hradek said. “If this is that much of a problem for him, to maybe assimilate into his group of teammates, and in the community and here in this country, that’s OK. Listen, you can feel any way you want. But the beauty is, if it bothers you that much, there’s always a chance to leave, go back to where you feel more comfortable — I understand there’s a conflict of sorts going on over there, maybe get involved.”

Provorov has been labeled “homophobic” for the move, despite saying he “respect[s] everybody and respect[s] everybody’s choices.”

“My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion. That’s all I’m going to say,” he said after the game.

In a statement released Tuesday night, the Flyers said they are “committed to inclusivity and is proud to support the LGBTQ+ community.

“Many of our players are active in their support of local LGBTQ+ organizations, and we were proud to host out annual Pride Night again this year,” they said. “The Flyers will continue to be strong advocates for inclusivity and the LGBTQ+ community.”

Head coach John Tortorella said it would have been “unfair” to bench Provorov for his beliefs, adding that he respects Provorov for “always [being] true to himself.”

The league said on Wednesday that “players are free to decide which initiatives to support, and we continue to encourage their voices and perspectives on social and cultural issues.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nicole-mann-becomes-the-first-native-american-woman-in-space-180980906/

Nicole Mann Becomes the First Native American Woman in Space

She is the mission commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission that will spend five months on the International Space Station

Sarah Kuta

Daily Correspondent

The Dragon Endurance spacecraft, built by SpaceX, launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Wednesday afternoon, carrying a crew of astronauts from multiple nations. As the craft hurtled beyond Earth’s atmosphere en route to the International Space Station (ISS), the mission had already made history. With it, Nicole Mann became the first Native American woman to go to space.

Mann, a 45-year-old member of the Wailacki  (why-las-key) of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, is serving as mission commander for the SpaceX Crew-5 mission. The flight marked the sixth time Elon Musk’s space company has ferried astronauts to the ISS on behalf of NASA.

Her historic achievement comes 20 years after the first Native American man, John Herrington, walked in space in 2002. Mann is also the first woman to serve in the commander role during a SpaceX mission. (Only two women—Eileen Collins and Pamela Melroy—held that position on NASA space shuttle flights before the agency retired that program in 2011.)

Born in Petaluma, California, Mann studied mechanical engineering at the United States Naval Academy, then went on to earn a master’s degree from Stanford, per NASA. She began her military career with the United States Marine Corps as a second lieutenant in 1999 and completed flight training in 2001.

In 2003, she became a naval aviator and, a year later, started her operational flying career with the military, which has included 47 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. She also served as a test pilot for the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet in 2009.

In total, Mann has flown more than 2,500 hours in 25 different types of aircraft and is a “proven warfighter,” as General David H. Berger, the commandant of the Marine Corps, described her in a statement. She is now a colonel in the Marine Corps, and she began astronaut training with NASA in 2013. She lives with her husband and their son in Houston.

Impressive right? Yet with all of those accomplishments, due to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the key accomplishment, according to the press, is that she is a native American.

That is what is wrong with Diversity, equity, and inclusion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/opposing_dei.html

Opposing DEI

By Henry Kopel

Henry Kopel, a former federal prosecutor, is the author of War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom, and is working with several parents to oppose DEI curricula in a Connecticut school district.

Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) is now big business in America. A 2021 Heritage Foundation study found that the average American college employs forty-five full-time DEI administrators.

At a reported average salary of $81,800, this army of DEI staffers costs the average college $3.68 million annually. Across America’s more than 4,000 colleges, the yearly college DEI bill exceeds $14 billion.

And that figure omits the vast private-sector industry of diversity trainers and equity consultants, as well as the ubiquitous DEI officers that populate virtually all government agencies, plus a wide array of non-profits.

This aggressive expansion of the DEI industry across leading American institutions has proceeded with little opposition until now. Like an invading army in hostile territory, the DEI industry has made the mistake of seeking to extend its reach across America’s K-12 educational sector, and taxpaying parents are standing up, saying: “Not with my children — the indoctrination stops here!”

The DEI industry’s answer is that such parents are just old-fashioned racists, White supremacists who seek to suppress discussion of America’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and continued “systemic racism” today.

An entire academic industry supports this false view. An alphabet soup of university “studies” departments — Black Studies, Chicano Studies, Gay Studies, Gender Studies, Whiteness Studies, Women’s Studies — supported by ever-expanding diversity bureaucracies, promote the view that America denies that it remains a deeply racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic country.

These “XXX Studies” professors and their ideological allies promote a hard-left menu of alleged solutions to this litany of damning “isms,” namely: dismantle capitalism; expand the welfare state; impose “anti-racist” hiring quotas; eradicate “biased” ability testing in schools, college admissions, and hiring practices; outlaw and prosecute speech deemed offensive; and establish sprawling government bureaucracies to combat this alleged plague of American horribles.

Leading writers in this field have crafted a flawed but seductive argument that delegitimizes and shuts down those who question their ideology, as exemplified by Robin D’Angelo’s book White Fragility. In D’Angelo’s world, any critique of the ideology is not an invitation to discuss — rather, it is proof of the “fragile” questioner’s inherent racism, and hence illegitimate.

Unfortunately, much, if not all of this — to borrow the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s apt phrase — is just “nonsense on stilts.”

The claim that DEI (and its linked twins, Critical Race Theory and ethnic studies) merely involves teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement is a bald-faced lie. Our public schools have been teaching these important subjects for years. DEI is something entirely different.

As actually applied in K-12 classrooms, DEI is primarily a classification system that divides kids into various “us-vs-them” groupings of privileged oppressors vs. marginalized oppressed.

For instance, a typical DEI lesson plan will teach that white, heterosexual, males fall into three privileged oppressor groups; and that non-white lesbian females fall into three marginalized oppressed groups.

Often this is taught through a DEI exercise called the “Privilege Walk.” Elementary and middle school kids are forced to stand in an open space while a teacher reads out a series of so-called unearned, unfair “Privileges” — like being white, male, wealthy, heterosexual, or “cis-gender.”

The teacher orders the students having such privileges to take a step forward for each one; and those lacking the same must take steps backward. The shame and blame message could not be clearer.

These lessons are doubly harmful. They discourage the so-called “oppressed” kids with the message that the system remains rigged against them — hence if the fix is in, then why even try? And it shames the “oppressor” kids as being the cause of the rigged system — inviting them to doubt and question their aspirations and achievements…. 

….The core problem with DEI curricula is that they train students to think of themselves and others primarily by their separate racial, ethnic, and gender/sexual characteristics. Hence. they teach the very opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King’s momentous call for racial equality. Whereas Dr. King called for E Pluribus Unum, DEI calls for E Pluribus Discord.

Oftentimes DEI programs also force schools to lower academic standards, to make kids feel more “equal.” Across America, DEI advocates have been in the forefront of efforts to eliminate “gifted and talented” programs, and to stop teaching Algebra I classes in middle schools.

The DEI industry justifies these attacks on excellence as simply dismantling the attributes of “white supremacy culture” — which per the DEI ideology, include such evils as “objectivity,” “perfectionism,” and “worship of the written word.”

This is both counterproductive and profoundly demeaning to children of diverse backgrounds, by its false implication that such advanced learning is not for them. Instead of downgrading standards, the effort should be to uplift those kids having a harder time….

……DEI advocates seem blind to the historical reality of humanity’s long and painful efforts to rise above our ancient, hard-wired tendencies towards tribal, “us-vs-them” division and violence. The flawed DEI teaching model would send us back down that violent rabbit hole. It should be opposed by all supporters of pluralistic liberal democracy, regardless of one’s race, creed, color, or political affiliation.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/turmoil-signs-man-worse-than-putin-could-take-over-as-russias-next-leader/news-story/8c74d52787920518f594c01b870a660c

Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel

Signs a man ‘worse than Putin’ could take over as Russia’s next leader

As Russia’s ruling elite fall down stairs or out of windows one-by-one, a star is rising. And he’s becoming increasingly bold.

As Russia’s ruling elite one-by-one fall down stairs or out windows, another star is rising. Now speculation is mounting that “Putin’s Chef” is preparing to step out of the kitchen.

He started out with a catering business.

He quickly became part of President Vladimir Putin’s inner sanctum.

He’s now behind Russia’s cyber warriors and a host of online trolls

And he has his own mercenary army.

Yevgeny Prigozhin ( yev geny , prig o zin) is becoming increasingly bold. He’ promoting his Wagner Group mercenaries as Russia’s most effective fighting force. He’s waging a verbal war against key Putin appointees. He’s winning public support among extremists who believe their ageing president is failing them.

That’s why some warn he may end up being “worse than Putin”.

But among Putin’s government of thieves’ circle of power, he’s rapidly emerging as the 70-year-old’s most likely successor. Or usurper.

And now he’s openly attacking the Kremlin’s military leaders for their failing war efforts.

Prigozhin is passing the buck for the failure of his guns-for-hire to take the strategically insignificant Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. And that’s despite Putin gifting his private army with Russia’s most modern tanks, missiles and attack aircraft.

An expletive-laden video from frustrated Wagner mercenaries has exploded through Russian social media. It shows troops cursing – by name – Putin’s appointed Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, Valery Gerasimov.

They blame him for poor tactical decisions, a lack of ammunition, and inadequate equipment.

That’s despite not being part of his chain of command.

But Gerasimov would likely be among the contenders if Putin was no longer to be president. That makes him a target.

And that may be why Prigozhin was so keen to go on the public record to confirm the controversial video was authentic and to amplify their complaints.

“The guys asked me to pass along that when you’re sitting in a warm office, it’s hard to hear about the problems on the front line, but when you’re dragging the dead bodies of your friends every day and seeing them for the last time – then supplies are very much needed,” Prigozhin told Russian state-controlled media.

But he didn’t stop with such an embarrassing admission of the Kremlin’s frontline failures.

He issued a threat.

“As for the problems that are unfortunately surfacing at every step … we will force them to be solved.”

“(Putin’s) circle of advisers has narrowed,” CIA chief Bill Burns said in April.

“And in that small circle, it has never been career-enhancing to question his judgment or his almost mystical belief that his destiny is to restore Russia’s influence.”

But as more and more of Putin’s old cronies fall by the wayside, Prigozhin appears to be consolidating his influence.

“He is looking for his place in this new reality that has come into existence after (the war began) and that has brought him into conflict with many powerful people,” Exiled Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky  (Ko dor kovsky) told Radio Free Europe.

He’s ideally placed to find it.

“The people around Putin protect themselves,” sacked Russian human-rights council member Ekaterina Vinokurova told the Wall Street Journal.

“They have this deep belief that they shouldn’t upset the president.”

But Prigozhin appears above this.

Putin’s old guard and Prigozhin’s ultranationalists are increasingly at odds. And they’re not afraid to make it public.

Putin, if anything, is rewarding Prigozhin for this boldness.

In the meantime, the president is “likely concerned” at the ongoing muted support he has received from the oligarchs he put in power during his 22-year reign, notes US-based think-tank the Institute for the Study of War.

It cites a Christmas Day interview where Putin criticised “people who act solely in their self-interest”. He insisted that 99.9 per cent of his Russians “are ready to sacrifice everything for the Motherland”. But the remaining one percenters “didn’t act like true patriots”.

This suggests Putin “is focused on those who do not fully support the war rather than on those who do.”

And that puts Prigozhin in an ideal position.

Besides his catering business, Prigozhin is also behind the Internet Research Agency – an internet troll farm that became infamous for its attempts to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election. That gives him a powerful propaganda tool at home and abroad.

But his control of the Wagner Mercenary Group may give him the edge in any future power struggle.

This force is loyal to him. Not Putin. Nor Russia’s halls of parliament.

According to the official Kremlin line, Wagner does not exist.

It’s illegal for Russian citizens to run private military groups.

But it appears some are more equal under the law than others.

Wagner’s boldly signed head office occupies a prominent piece of Moscow real estate. And its ownership, nature and existence are a matter of daily public and political discourse.

Its mercenaries have long given President Putin an air of “plausible deniability” in international conflicts.

It fought in eastern Ukraine after the 2014 invasion of Crimea under the guise of local insurrectionists.

It has been supporting Kremlin interests in Syria and Libya. It’s been accused of diamond smuggling out of Africa. And it’s implicated in the disappearance of three Russian journalists investigating its behaviour in the Central African Republic.

But the mercenaries have now largely been recalled to support Putin’s failing efforts in Ukraine. And they’re not doing all that well, either.

Prigozhin is already positioning himself to use defeat as a weapon against his political enemies.

The rise and rise of Putin’s Chef

The rise and rise of Putin’s Chef

By John Dobson

So we now have to ask the question:Who will replace Vladimir Putin? After 23 years as President and reported to be in ill health, Kremlin watchers are beginning ask the question: “who” and “when”.

Like most dictators, Putin has been careful not to have an appointed successor, always surrounding himself with weak minions. Strong minions can be dangerous.  

As a result, the question of succession weighs heavily these days in the minds of the Russian elite, especially as most now realize that in attacking Ukraine more than ten months ago, Putin made a catastrophic blunder.

With the invasion failing all along the 800-mile front and the Russian leader searching for culprits, a battle for the leadership among the various factions is quietly underway, with few heads appearing above the parapet for fear of being blown away.

So who’s in the running? Setting aside Russia’s total defeat in Ukraine and the subsequent chaos and collapse of the regime, there are those elite around Putin who have always trusted him and who would have the most to gain in a smooth transition.

Nikolai Patrushev, the current head of the Security Council and one of the chief ideologues of the regime, is often mentioned as a potential successor.

But he is the same age as Vladimir Putin, his close friend since the time they were KGB colleagues in Leningrad in the mid-1970s, so he is an unlikely candidate.

More likely would be Patrushev’s son, 46-year-old Dmitry, currently serving as Russia’s Minister of Agriculture, who would be seen as a fresh face.

Others mentioned are Dmitry Medvedev, the former Prime Minister and President, now known as the “Clown Prince” on account of his absurd statements on Ukraine.

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu was long considered a likely successor to Vladimir Putin, but his star quickly waned when Russia began to lose the war in Ukraine.

For as long as his health holds, Vladimir Putin still sits atop the Russian system unchallenged because of the strong loyalty of those around him.

But as the war drags on, Russian power dynamics are shifting in subtle and unexpected ways and new faces are appearing.

A new generation of hard-liners is emerging, surpassing even Putin’s old guard in their aggression.

Of these, the most prominent is Yevgeny Prigozhin.

So who is this guy?

He is a Russian tycoon whose vast wealth comes from Kremlin catering contracts (hence the nickname “Putin’s Chef”) and whose notoriety comes from ownership of Russia’s most famous private mercenary company, Wagner, as well as St Petersburg’s best known “troll factory”, the Internet Research Agency.

There are few details about Prigozhin’s early life. Records show that in his 20s he spent 9 years in prison for robbery, fraud and involving teenagers in prostitution.

After release in 1990 he set up a fast-food business which later evolved into a restaurant and catering empire.

Taking advantage of the new opportunities after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he expanded into fashionable eateries which attracted the attention of the criminal and political elite.

A regular patron of his New Island floating restaurant at the time was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, Vladimir Putin.

Following Putin to Moscow, Prigozhin was awarded catering contracts for hospitals, public schools and the Russian army.

In 2012, his companies obtained over 90% of catering contracts in military units.

In 2014, Prigozhin founded the Wagner Group, a company which evolved out of a network of private security companies run by former Russian Special Forces.

Soldiers from the Wagner Group were used to reinforce Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, as well as in Ukraine’s Donbass after the Russian-fuelled war broke out there later that year.

After President Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 24^th of last year, Wagner mercenaries fought alongside regular Russian forces, playing a central role in the capture of the port of Mariupol and the city of Severodonetsk.

Russia’s military collapse in Ukraine has only magnified the role of Prigozhin’s private army. In only 10 months of war, the Russian military has lost more generals and high-ranking officers than it did in seven years in Syria or the Soviets did in the entire 10-year-war in Afghanistan.

Worse, many of the hundred thousand or so casualties hail from the best-trained, most elite units: airborne troops, naval infantry and combined arms.

Grasping the opportunity, Prigozhin is now transforming the Wagner Group into an actual shadow military force, with access to advanced weapons and platforms, such as Su-25 attack aircraft and T-90 tanks.

In Belgorod and Kursk, two regions in Russia close to the border with Ukraine, Prigozhin has established parallel military structures, including training facilities and recruitment centres. According to the US national security spokesman, John Kirby, Prigozhin’s Wagner group is emerging as a rival power center to the Russian military itself.

A further sign of Prigozhin’s increasing power and influence is that he now has the authority to commute prison sentences and turn them into death sentences.

He has taken tens of thousands of Russian convicts out of their cells and placed them in assault sections on the Ukrainian front. They have little chance of escape.

This all started in July when Prigozhin toured prison colonies to attract recruits. Footage appeared on social media showing him addressing a large group of prisoners all wearing navy-colored uniforms assembled in a concrete yard.

He tells them that their sentences would be commuted if they served in Ukraine for six months – but that anyone who changes their mind would be shot as a deserter. ‘I’m taking you out alive’, he is heard saying, ‘but don’t always return you alive’.

Jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, confirmed last week that Prigozhin had visited his prison to recruit convicts. He had offered them a pardon if they survived six months with Wagner and that between 80 and 90 of them accepted, after being given just five minutes to consider the offer.

Losses are believed to be appalling. Altogether some 40,000 of Wagner Group’s estimated 50,000 members are convicts, and of the first batch of 500 prisoners sent to the front line in July, only two are believed to be still alive.

“It seems as though Prigozhin is willing to throw Russian bodies into the meat grinder”, said Kirby last week. “About 1,000 Wagner fighters have been killed in recent weeks, and we believe that 90 percent of those were convicts.”

This, of course, is of no concern to Prigozhin, who is simply providing cannon fodder for his friend Vladimir Putin.

Following years of denial, Prigozhin final stepped out of the shadows only in September, following the release of that video on social media showing him personally recruiting Russian prisoners to fight in Ukraine.

He revealed for the first time that he owned Wagner Group, which in early November opened its official headquarters in St Petersburg.

He also publicly bragged about the influence of his IRA ‘troll factory’ which had interfered in the US midterm elections. As a result, last year the FBI put Prigozhin on its most-wanted list.

Whether Prigozhin can turn his rising star into a political career is an open question. His criticism of the way the war on Ukraine is being waged has struck a chord in Russian nationalist and military-security circles, and there is little doubt that he expects to be rewarded.

He is establishing himself as a political force, using the popular status of Wagner and the IRA to critique his opponents within elite circles and institutionalize his authority.

Like most aspiring politicians he plays down any ambition. “I do not strive for popularity”, he was quoted as saying recently. “My task is to fulfil my duty to the motherland, and today I do not plan to found any political parties, let alone go into politics.” A sure sign he intends to.

The final word can be given to Andrei Kolesnikov, an expert on Russian politics and senior fellow at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “In terms of his influence, at least in the public space, Prigozhin is beginning to resemble Rasputin at the court of Nicholas II.

Unless Prigozhin suffers the fate of Rasputin, which would please many of his enemies, the rise of Putin’s Chef looks unstoppable.