Why Ukraine Aid Is About A Lot More Than Ukraine
How to preserve an alliance in a bipartisan fashion
I want to share with you a few quick thoughts on the passage of the Ukraine aid while they are still jostling around in my head.
The headline story is that those of us who had faith in Speaker Mike Johnson have been totally vindicated. When the moment called for it, Johnson showed up. This was not unexpected by those of us who had been tracking Johnson’s career.
As you know Tom Emmer (Navy father) was my preferred candidate. I thought he vastly preferable but Trump, close to the Israelis, sank Emmer’s candidacy before it began. This hope that Emmer, father to two sons in the Navy, would help clean up the Navy after Kevin McCarthy had dirtied up by no bid contracts to himself.
Little did I know that Johnson would wind up having his own son Jack attend the Naval Academy. During the Bush or Obama years it was often said that our leaders wouldn’t dare send their own kids into the military. Well, Joe Biden and Mike Johnson did send their kids into the Navy. That speaks well of them. And it also gives you a sense that they understand the stakes of what’s at play in Ukraine.
In my honest assessment Congressman Matt Gaetz squandered an opportunity to address Kevin McCarthy’s history of corruption and so Gaetz will likely be felled. Both the New Yorker and the Atlantic are elevating Gaetz by condemning him. Neither mentioned how Gaetz was targeted by the Israeli world. Both Gaetz and McCarthy are imprisoned by the factions they really represent. Neither can tell the full story about the other without implicating himself.
Johnson drew upon the experience of his own son, Jack, soon to enter the Naval Academy, to make the case for sending bullets rather than bodies.
In retrospective this turning of Johnson was obvious to anyone who has had any dealings with the Italian or Cajun mobs, both of which are rather dominant in Louisiana from whence Johnson hails. It’s conventionally understood that Johnson’s district is one of the poorest in the country but when I visited I found that, au contraire, there’s just a lot of cash flying around. Much of this cash is washed within the evangelical churches with which Johnson has an alliance. In this way, the mob world and the religious one intersect.
You can see this relationship in the slavish support that the evangelical world gives Israel too. Part of the reason we want Israel to continue using our technology stack, however grisly the conduct of their ultra Orthodox soldiers, is that we want to have eyes on them. What’s been rather interesting in recent years is the role that the press has played in taming some of these Israeli excesses. The speed with which war crimes are identified with satellites and facial recognition and DNA testing is rather remarkable. It’s a bad time to be a bad guy.
Religious people are always useful to mobsters because they provide a fake because — God told me to! — to carry out actions. In the Bible, you can only tell if someone is a false prophet or a true prophet if his prophecy comes true. So, too, in politics.
But you should also be wary of a lot of the anti-Israel protests which are both obviously backed by a nation state as well as the sincere convictions of the young. You can look at the Chinese and the Russians trashing Israel lately not so much as something done out of conviction but as trying to renegotiate the terms under which the criminal bits of Israel is brought back into their fold. I don’t see that happening anytime soon as the only thing the Israelis really have to offer is their spyware.
In an ironic way, the most anti-Israel thing you can do is to favor Israel aid but force conditions upon its acceptance. You can remake Israel if you want to.
The relative “drill baby drill” policies of Joe Biden have made more than one mobster friend of mine take Biden seriously. As it happens I have occasion to talk with players in these worlds and I found them broadly supportive if not of Ukraine then of the opportunity that Ukraine presented to their own overall operations. It’s no secret that the Russians have played in Texas, Louisiana and Florida in recent years and there are a lot of local mobsters who resent their hustles being disrupted by international players. The withdrawal of the Chinese and of the Russians is good for their bottom line and they’ll find an excuse to be in favor of the Ukraine War. Add to that Time’s piece about the maltreatment of evangelical Christians by Russia and you get a lot of the way there.
When I saw that the Department of Justice had obtained a conviction against Orlando steel traders with ties to the Chabad network and Igor Kholomoisky I knew — more or less — that Ukraine aid would go through. So, too, when the Japanese prime minister addressed Congress and that there were articles showing up supporting how Japan’s prime minister was oh so supportive of Ukraine. Even Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has signaled he'd be supportive of a peace agreement, provided, of course, that Zelensky not be in the picture. Zelensky was in the picture with Kholomoisky in 2019 but now Kholomoisky is on trial for corruption. Careful observers of Ukraine have noticed the rate at which Zelensky trades his erstwhile political allies or mentors for more weapons or more benefits. That’s cold but that’s politics.
I suspect if Johnson is Churchill in September 1939 than Zelensky is Churchill in May 1945 — that is to say soon to be replaced.
If Johnson is Churchill Trump is the Italian mob which helped our boys take Italy. He helped Johnson get the political cover he needed to win the vote.
The Italian mob will now help Trump. That’s why you see Michael Avenatti — graduate of Saint Louis University — show up and offer to help Trump against the interests of his former client, Stormy Daniels, who hails, interestingly enough, from Baton Rogue, Louisiana. I think Trump has more than a few outs in that trial, for what it’s worth. It seems more than plausible to me that Michael Cohen worked with Daniels to extort Trump. If he behaves himself he might well survive that trial.
And given his sudden turn on Ukraine aid, I think he’ll survive the submarine trial too. Trump’s political calculation is rather plain to see too. British Foreign Minister David Cameron delivered a message to him at Mar-A-Lago. Johnson flattered Trump but suggesting that the aid be a loan. OK, fair enough. But I think everyone knows that it’s likely a gift or, if you prefer, an “investment.”
A lot of the people who think they’ll be getting paid won’t be getting paid.
A government contract can also be used to discipline a naughty contractor as will likely happen to Palantir now.
There must rightly be questions about how effective Palantir actually is. Ukraine will provide an occasion for us to see for ourselves. What was that old saw “Doveryai, no proveryai”? Or “trust but verify”?
You’ll see a lot of the contractor class struggle to make it work. We’ll be watching there, too. President Joe Biden had promised that the watch dogs would be back.
You can see that self-immolation of that crazy man as an effort by other foreign players to keep some of those compromised contractors — Thiel namely — on team. Some of these tech oligarchs have direct through lines to foreign governments and that would be martyr isn’t entirely wrong when he says that there’s a lot of Ponzi schemes going on in the tech sphere. He didn’t mention Founder’s Fund but then again, he didn’t have to. Just ask our fraudster friend Delian.
Did Thiel expect us not to notice that he was unload bitcoin at the same time he was encouraging others to buy it? Or that he’s sold Palantir stock right as he's boosting AI?
But in the main I’d say I support the protests against the Israeli state which have broken out throughout the tech community, in the halls of Foggy Bottom or White Hall, and on American college campuses.
To be fair Americans don’t really care about what happens in these schools because they are systematically discriminated by their admissions’ departments. Nor do they really care what happens at places like Google because Google doesn’t really spend much of its time focusing on American interests. Google is busy chasing Microsoft off an AI cliff but not spending any real time thinking about facial recognition or genomics or processing satellite photos — all of which are essential for the coming conflicts.
The writer Peter Beinart puts it best: “I don’t think the Jewish advocacy organizations are as interested in protecting actual Jewish students as they are in quashing anti-Zionist speech, even if the anti-Zionist speech comes from Jews themselves.”
One of the virtues of youth is that you don’t have a track record. You can be pure. You can live your conscience. Oh how I miss it.
Of course Google makes it so that the permanent record that the Boomers often joked about is all too real. So, too, do the pro-IDF assets photographing and processing the students protesting the Israeli war machine. The reason the Googlers wore a mask wasn’t because of covid but because they didn’t want to be blacklisted by the IDF in their own country.
Until this sort of thing is handled and handled clearly and decisively, it’ll continue. What is it Churchill once purportedly said about Americans? That we try everything else before doing the right thing? The same thing could be true of the Republican Party as well.
It’s good of America that we didn’t abandon the Ukrainians but we need to do a lot more to clear up the IDF influence in our colleges and companies. Justice demands it.
W