COL BILL ASTORE—Imagine if Venezuela attacked the U.S. Imagine if President Trump and Melania Trump were seized, and that the Venezuelan attorney general said they would face justice in Venezuela. I’d imagine that nearly all Americans would see this as an act of war, a gross violation of national sovereignty. American vengeance would be swift.
MARGARET KIMBERLEY—The response to millions of people expressing outrage over genocide was treated as a public relations stunt, which is what SOTU and the U.S. presidency have become.
If nothing else SOTU laid bare the utter fraudulence of the Biden presidency. It is harder to make the case of lesser evilism or holding one’s nose to vote when the betrayals are so blatant. Claims of moving Biden to the left or holding feet to the fire were always made by the cynical to the naive. Both the con artists and their targets have a lot of explaining to do when Biden used the SOTU speech to appeal directly to the Trump voters we are otherwise told to view as deplorable.
EDITOR—Lira holds forth on the origins of Ukraine’s astonishing corruption, and the deep-seated emotional motivations for Nuland’s hatred of Russia, which Lira traces back to injuries and persecution inflicted on her great-grandfather during Russian pogroms in Bessarabia almost 150 years ago, forcing his son’s emigration to America. This emotional scar, shared by many Jews in the US establishment (Blinken, and the Kagans and the rest of the neoconservatives, for example) may explain, to some extent, their deeply-held Russophobia. Victoria Nuland, says Lira, is not a nice person. She’s a suckup to those above her and a mean tyrant to those with less power. Meanwhile, as one of the key people in charge of “the Ukraine project”, she oversees the colossal grift taking place in that country by all kinds of US and Western business and political figures, much of it huge money-laundering operations, theft and illegal use of state assets, etc.
DMITRY MEDVEDEV—To protect the territorial integrity of our country, ballistic and cruise missiles with special warheads will be used. This is based on our doctrinal military documents and is well known to everyone. And this is the very notorious Apocalypse. The end of everything. Therefore, Western politicians should tell their voters the bitter truth, and not treat them as brainless idiots.
IAN KUMMER—The most important question is also the most difficult one. What will be the short and long term impacts of the interview? I do not think this will have any impact on opposing camps in the US political establishment who have already made up their minds on the Ukraine issue. But this will influence public opinion. For millions of American citizens, this is the first time in their lives they’ve heard the unadulterated Russian perspective, and that is in of itself significant. The interview has over 100 million views (and the exact number is hard to count because it has been shared so far and wide), and is already being translated into other languages and broken up into digestible sound bytes for people not interested in watching the whole video. And this is part of the reason I think it was good for Putin to focus on such broad historical topics because that makes the video evergreen, it will still be relevant in 5 years even if the conflict in Ukraine has already ended.
