We are witnessing a great unraveling

CNN put together an extraordinary video compilation of media appearances from Trump sycophant Stephen Miller. He is speculated about as a potential US attorney general in a second Trump administration.

He was also the person who asked Paul Zukunft, an admiral then commandant of the US Coast Guard, if the US military could attack and kill a boat of unarmed migrants, including women and children. There is a reason people call him “Santa Monica Goebbels.”

Watch:

The abnormality of Miller’s sycophancy is jarring, but it is the blind devotion that is dangerous. This is what fanaticism and zealotry look like. Do you have any doubt about the capacity of Stephen Miller to put thousands of people up against a wall in the name of Trump?

I don’t.

What is your reaction when you see this?

Does it make you laugh? Squirm and fidget? Does it make you uncomfortable?

Does it frighten you?

It should. It is a harbinger of things to come, should we collectively decide to cash out our heritage, history and civilization.

This weekend, the MAGA Congress, under the leadership of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a man who has no bank accounts and believes humans and dinosaurs lived together 10,000 years ago when the Earth was first created, will begin debating the future of Ukraine, Europe, the United States, and ultimately, the peace of the world.

Do you think that I’m overstating the case for danger, or perhaps being a bit dramatic?

A few weeks back, before Iran launched 300 missiles at Israel, it was reported in El País that Polish President Donald Tusk said something that should be heard by every American:

Donald Tusk, 66, has an image of his childhood etched in his memory. It is a photograph that was in his family home in Sopot, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, next to his hometown: a beach full of smiling, happy people. The snapshot was taken on August 31, 1939. “A dozen hours later, five kilometers away, the Second World War began,” he remembers. The Polish prime minister warns that Europe is once again “in a pre-war era” and must get ready to defend itself. 

“What is most worrying now is that literally any scenario is possible. We have not had a situation like this since 1945. I know it sounds devastating, especially to people of the younger generation, but we have to mentally get used to a new era. We are in a pre-war era. I don’t exaggerate. This is becoming more and more apparent every day.”

I wrote about his warning here:

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There is a simple truth at hand. The winds of catastrophe are stirring, which I wrote about in January 2023:

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Ukraine is out of ammunition and time. The Ukrainians are being outgunned 10:1, and the Russian army is advancing. They are waging a war of annihilation in which rape and murder are common weapons against civilians, and where ancient cities are being reduced to rubble and dust. The MAGA Congress isn’t just imposing defeat on Ukraine, they are imposing a defeat on all free people everywhere, without a shot being fired within the living memory of Auschwitz and Normandy.

The MAGA Republicans are led by a venomous nitwit, who is a supernova of blustering ignorance and boiling stupidity. She is addled enough to believe in Jewish space lasers, and every TikTok conspiracy that appears like magic on her phone. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a dupe and a useful idiot of historic dimensions.

The people of Georgia’s 14th congressional district sent their trash to Capitol Hill. The toxic detritus it leaves behind has given the Republican House yet another moral staph infection born from their self-inflicted wounds. They are a braying collective of incompetence, betrayal, perfidy, corruption and immorality who, daily and carelessly, inflict harm on the nation. Bound together by cynicism, extremism and a shared lust for power, they serve a cause that aspires to be masters — not servants — of the people. Each day, they compete for the affections of the MAGA high command with stupefying acts of idiocy and malfeasance in an Olympics of nihilism, while they sprint towards catastrophe and into the abyss. 

Recognizing the trajectory of where we are going is utterly dependent on a few things like reading, basic knowledge and a connection to reality. The MAGA Congress is a lowest common denominator organization in which the structure and rules of the MAGA conference elevate the most insane, corrupt, disordered and dumbest of the hive into the position of queen. The queen of MAGA is MTG, and the reason you know her name is because American media made her famous, and fame made her powerful. She is Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. Her imbecility is on the precipice of opening a fissure through which a darkness will seep that has the ability to extinguish the light.

I urge you to read another extraordinary essay by Claire Berlinski, which explains with urgent fury the fire that is building and moving slowly and inexorably towards us. Where there was smoke, there is now fire. The flames are building, despite the blindness of so many towards a conflagration bearing down. 

What we are witnessing is a great unraveling. Though the Russian shells and missiles are landing far away for now, with each step forward that the Russian Army takes, it moves closer to a NATO border and a moment of testing. This is Vladimir Putin’s grand gamble. Only a fool wouldn’t see that he is winning. His criminal army has sustained 500,000 casualties, but he didn’t need to win on the battlefield when all that was required was the patience to outlast the empty platitudes that washed over President Zelensky during a moment in time long since passed.

There is a choice at hand. The decision will decide whether the world descends into the darkness. Truly. 

The MAGA Congress have strangled Ukraine and the ability of a brave people to defend their nation. Donald Trump has invited an attack on our allies with an open invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade them. This position cannot be reconciled with these words from President Harry Truman, found at the World War II Memorial that remembers something eternal and worth remembering: 

And this from General George Marshall:

Soon, the MAGA Congress will journey to an American cemetery in Normandy where they will pretend for a moment to embody the virtues, valor and cause of the fallen heroes who saved the world. The truth is that they are the new appeasers who admire fascism because it has always been the cause of the weak and afraid. 

Five years before the World War II began, and two years before the Berlin Olympics, Winston Churchill said something profound in a 1934 radio address. It is worth heeding today because it is a warning worth remembering:

Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage. They dilate upon the ineptitude of generals and admirals. They denounce the crime as insensate folly of human strife. Now, all this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so, but how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves that is the question we have to ask.

There is a coalition of menace, chaos and death that is testing whether now is the time to act. This axis of Russia, Iran, North Korea and China wishes to impose a new dogma on the world over the triumph of the liberal democracies that has long since faded. 

The tide is reversing and the old defeated lies are suddenly resurgent again. They are fertilized by delusions and moral cowardice. When whatever MAGA member of Congress strokes their Churchill statue this weekend, and quivers in fear of mean tweets from Trump and MTG, they would be well served to remember the conclusion of Churchill’s warning in 1938:

Our loyal, brave people... should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defenses; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies:

Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.

And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.

The abandonment of Ukraine is a moral tragedy and a moral failure. The United States of America will pay a brutal price in the future for the ineptitude and idiocy at hand. There should be no mystery around what lies ahead. 

There is a huge misunderstanding about appeasement. It didn’t cause war in the 1930s. War was the choice of the aggressors. The appeasers simply guaranteed that when war came the democracies would be completely unprepared.  

It was this reason — and the horrific consequences — that discredit the America First movement and the delusions of the isolationists.  

How soon we have forgotten.  It is beyond tragic. It is appalling.

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