Category Archives: Analysis

The insidious libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline

Matt Lewis writes: Libertarianism has an alt-right problem. Many prominent leaders of the alt-right have, at some point, identified as libertarian. I am curious as to… why?

Milo Yiannopoulos has billed himself (and has been billed by others) as libertarian. About a year ago, he came clean about that. According to Business Insider, the alt-right troll Tim Gionet (aka “Baked Alaska”) formerly “identified as a carefree, easygoing libertarian” who “supported Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s bid for the White House, firmly opposed the war on drugs, and championed the cause of Black Lives Matter…”

Gavin McInnes bills himself as a libertarian, but he founded the Proud Boys―a men’s rights group that is considered part of the alt-right. Augustus Invictus, a Florida attorney who literally drank goat’s blood as part of an animal sacrifice, ran for senate in the 2016 Libertarian Party primary and spoke at Liberty Fest. Recently popular among college libertarians, Stefan Molyneux evolved into a pro-Trump alt-righter. And Richard Spencer was thrown out of the International Students for Liberty conference this year after crashing the event.

It is also true that many of today’s alt-righters are disaffected conservatives. However, there are many more conservatives in this country than there are libertarians, which suggests a disproportionate number of today’s prominent alt-righters began as libertarians. [Continue reading…]

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Pro-Russian bots take up the right-wing cause after Charlottesville

ProPublica reports: Angee Dixson joined Twitter on Aug. 8 and immediately began posting furiously — about 90 times a day. A self-described American Christian conservative, Dixson defended President Donald Trump’s response to the unrest in Charlottesville, criticized the removal of Confederate monuments and posted pictures purporting to show violence by left-wing counterprotesters.

“Dems and Media Continue to IGNORE BLM and Antifa Violence in Charlottesville,” she wrote above a picture of masked demonstrators labeled “DEMOCRAT TERROR.”

But Dixson appears to have been a fake, according to an analysis by Ben Nimmo, a fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank. The account has been shut down. Dixson’s profile picture was stolen from a young Instagram celebrity (a German model rumored to have dated Leonardo DiCaprio). Dixson used a URL shortener that is a tell for the sort of computer program that automatically churns out high volumes of social media posts whose authorship is frequently disguised. And one of her tweets attacked Sen. John McCain for his alleged support of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, echoing language in tweets from Russian outlets RT and Sputnik.

The same social media networks that spread Russian propaganda during the 2016 election have been busily amplifying right-wing extremism surrounding the recent violence in Charlottesville, according to researchers who monitor the activity. It’s impossible to tell how much of the traffic originates from Russia or from mercenary sources. But there were hordes of automated bots generating Twitter posts and much more last week to help make right-wing conspiracy theories and rallying cries about Charlottesville go viral. [Continue reading…]

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Trump in Phoenix fuels divisions and incites violence

These days America’s Thug-in-Chief can’t even fill an auditorium:


The fake, soon-to-be failed, president is, needless to say, in denial about the level of support he retains:


But there is little doubt that Trump, as an unleashed demagogue, is now inciting violence:

The Washington Post reports: Just before President Trump strolled onto the rally stage on Tuesday evening, four speakers took turns carefully denouncing hate, calling for unity and ever so subtly assuring the audience that the president is not racist.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson proclaimed that “our lives are too short to let our differences divide us.” Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., led everyone in singing a few lines of “How Great Thou Art.” Evangelist Franklin Graham prayed for the politically and racially divided nation and asked the Lord to shut the mouths of “those in this country who want to divide, who want to preach hate.” And Vice President Pence declared that “President Trump believes with all his heart … that love for America requires love for all its people.” Meanwhile, a supporter seated directly behind stage even wore a T-shirt that stated: “Trump & Republicans are not racist.”

Then Trump took the stage.

He didn’t attempt to continue the carefully choreographed messaging of the night or to narrow the ever-deepening divide between the thousands of supporters gathered in the convention center hall before him and the thousands of protesters waiting outside.

Instead, Trump spent the first three minutes of his speech — which would drag on for 75 minutes — marveling at his crowd size, claiming that “there aren’t too many people outside protesting,” predicting that the media would not broadcast shots of his “rather incredible” crowd and reminiscing about how he was “center stage, almost from day one, in the debates.”

“We love those debates — but we went to center stage, and we never left, right?” the president said, reliving his glory days. “All of us. We did it together.”

Over the next 72 minutes, the president launched into one angry rant after another, repeatedly attacking the media and providing a lengthy defense of his response to the violent clashes in Charlottesville, between white supremacists and neo-Nazis and the counterprotesters who challenged them. He threatened to shut down the government if he doesn’t receive funding for a wall along the southern border, announced that he will “probably” get rid of the North American Free Trade Agreement, attacked the state’s two Republican senators, repeatedly referred to protesters as “thugs” and coyly hinted that he will pardon Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County who was convicted in July of criminal contempt in Arizona for ignoring a judge’s order to stop detaining people because he merely suspected them of being undocumented immigrants. [Continue reading…]

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James Clapper questions Trump’s fitness, worries about his access to nuclear codes

 

The Washington Post reports: James R. Clapper Jr., former national intelligence director, questioned President Trump’s fitness for office following his freewheeling speech in Phoenix on Tuesday night, which Clapper labeled “downright scary and disturbing.”

“I really question his ability to be — his fitness to be — in this office,” Clapper told CNN’s Don Lemon early Wednesday morning. “I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it — maybe he is looking for a way out.”

In Trump’s remarks, delivered without a teleprompter, the president threatened to shut down the government over funding for the border wall he promised, opined that the North American Free Trade Agreement will likely be terminated and hinted he might pardon former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted last month of criminal contempt. [Continue reading…]

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Nikki Haley’s path to the presidency runs right past Trump

Vox reports: Attacks on Russia. Soccer games with refugees. Lively chats about human rights with Bono.

Browse through Nikki Haley’s Twitter feed long enough and you’d be forgiven for forgetting she’s a powerful and high-ranking official in the Trump administration, where the president pointedly refuses to do the first one of those and would consider the last two to be political suicide.

President Trump selected Haley early on in the formation of his Cabinet, settling on her as his ambassador to the United Nations before picking Rex Tillerson for secretary of state or James Mattis for secretary of defense. But she was a surprising pick then, and remains so today.

A popular twice-elected governor of South Carolina, she’s an experienced GOP politician in an administration packed with outsiders. As the daughter of Indian immigrants, she stands out in an administration run chiefly by white men. Telegenic and poised, she has a knack for the limelight that stands in sharp contrast to the administration’s tendencies toward the rumpled (former press secretary Sean Spicer) or reclusive (Tillerson).

But in her first seven months at the helm of the US mission to the UN, Haley’s differences have gone far beyond optics. Trump campaigned on a foreign policy platform of “America first” — the idea that the US should avoid getting involved in unnecessary conflicts overseas and focus narrowly on national security interests over promotion of democracy and human rights abroad.

But Haley has pursued the opposite course. From her stern criticism of Moscow to her championing of human rights to her calls for Syrian regime change, she’s routinely diverged from, or outright contradicted, Trump’s stance on the biggest foreign policy issues of the day.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the most hawkish Republican senators in Washington, told the New York Times recently, “She sounds more like me than Trump.”

Haley’s stances may reflect more than just policy differences. Many in the GOP worry that Trump may not survive four years and that those who’ve served in his administration may be tainted by association if he resigns or is impeached. Haley appears to be one of the few administration officials with the potential to survive the Trump years — and could be positioning herself for a presidential campaign of her own. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s ‘dangerous’ game with North Korea

The Daily Beast reports: In May, President Putin admitted that the missile tests Russia’s friend Pyongyang performed this year were “dangerous.” But he insisted, “We must stop intimidating North Korea and find a peaceful solution to this problem.”

What was Putin’s plan? Go easy on Pyongyang and team up with China to get tough on the United States, all in the name of mediation.

But at the time, North Korea was just about to make a major breakthrough. Previously it had been testing an intermediate range missile called the Musudan that failed repeatedly. But in mid-May, it launched a liquid fuel Hwasong-12, capable of reaching the American territory of Guam or beyond.

Then, to the consternation of the international community, on July 4—Independence Day in the United States—North Korea launched the two-stage Hwasong-14, a true ICBM capable of reaching Alaska. That was followed by the launch of another Hwasong-14 that demonstrated even greater potential range on July 28. The continental United States was coming in range.

Where did impoverished little North Korea get the wherewithal to build such ICBMs, not to mention the nuclear weapons that might someday ride in their nose cones?

International experts have concluded that the rocket engine used by North Korea was of the Soviet-origin RD-250 family, but where the engines came from, and whether they were brought in whole, built from parts, or constructed from scratch based on plans is not clear.

Michael Elleman at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, publishers of The Military Balance, wrote earlier this month that, “No other country has transitioned from a medium-range capability to an ICBM in such a short time,” and concluded North Korea acquired “a high-performance liquid-propellant engine” from “a foreign source.”

“An unknown number of these engines were probably acquired through illicit channels operating in Russia and/or Ukraine,” Elleman wrote, suggesting they probably were acquired in one form or another over the last two years.

But there is evidence the North Korean effort to make such acquisitions dates back much further. [Continue reading…]

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Trump lies to the public about five times a day

The Washington Post reports: We have been tracking President Trump’s false or misleading claims for more than seven months. Somewhere around Aug. 4 or Aug. 5, he broke 1,000 claims, and the tally now stands at 1,057. (Our full interactive graphic can be found here.)

That’s an impressive number by any standard. In fact, we are a little late with this update because we have simply been overwhelmed keeping track of the deluge of claims made by the president in the later part of July. Things slowed down during the president’s “working vacation,” so we have finally been able to catch up.

At the president’s current pace, he averages nearly five claims a day. Many are repeats of claims that have been previously debunked. We also include statements that are unacknowledged flip-flops from previously held positions, such as touting new highs in a stock market that he previously derided as being a “big, fat bubble.” [Continue reading…]

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As Trump predicts victory, the Taliban are prepared to fight for another 16 years

The New York Times reports: The retired Afghan general is no friend of the Taliban: He is a Parliament member, an adviser to the Afghan president and a combat veteran. But he is also from Helmand Province, the heart of the Taliban insurgency, and knows people on the other side.

After President Trump’s speech, the general recalled a Taliban fighter who had taken up arms after six of his sons were killed, one by one. The same AK-47 was handed down to each. Then the father was killed.

“You don’t make peace with people like that,” said the general, Abdul Jabbar Qahraman. “You also don’t win by killing them, there are always more.”

After nearly 16 years of war, America’s longest, the Taliban are not only far from defeated, they are gaining ground. They also have evolved into a more tenacious foe than the one routed in 2001, making a United States military triumph seem more remote.

Ever since 2008, when Adm. Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “we can’t kill our way to victory,” the cornerstone of American policy in Afghanistan has been not about obliterating the Taliban but pummeling them toward peace talks. President Barack Obama’s Afghan surge of 100,000 American troops failed to do this.

Now, President Trump has asserted that the United States would yet achieve peace through victory. Despite that assertion, and far more modest troop commitments this time, the hope of tiring the Taliban remains the mantra repeated by American diplomats and the generals whom the president has empowered to execute his policy.

They have quietly repeated that hope even in the absence of any visible peace process since the latest serious effort at talks collapsed last year. Within hours of President Trump’s speech, the American military commander in Kabul made that clear.

“This new strategy means the Taliban cannot win militarily,” said the commander, Gen. John W. Nicholson. “Now is the time to renounce violence and reconcile. A peaceful, stable Afghanistan is victory for the Afghan people and the goal of the Coalition.”

As might be expected, the Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, scoffed at President Trump’s speech as “nothing new.” But many Afghans on the government side had a similar take.

“That’s the same strategy going on the last two decades,” said Jamaluddin Badr, a member of the Afghan High Peace Council. “He said we’re going to win, but he didn’t make it clear how we’re going to win.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s base goes ballistic over his ‘unlimited war’

The Daily Beast reports: President Donald Trump acknowledged on Monday night that the new Afghanistan strategy he unveiled is a reversal of his long-held objection to the very idea of having a U.S. military presence in the country.

But in announcing a ramp up of U.S. forces with no defined timeline for their departure, Trump tailored and mangled and obscured the policy to such a degree so as to make it both difficult to understand and—he hopes—palatable to his base. At one point, he asserted that his strategy was to have no publicly-stated strategy at all.

“We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities,” Trump told a crowd of servicemen at Virginia’s Fort Myer on Monday.

Presidents have made abrupt foreign policy reversals before, often breaking with campaign pledges when presented with a new set of geopolitical realities. Trump’s reversal stands out not just for the outright vehemence with which he previously argued that America needed to put an end to its 16-year-long war—Trump has called for total US withdrawal from Afghanistan and for handing the country over to an army of mercenaries—but also because of what it says about his foreign policy at large. In the seven months since taking office, Trump has expanded military operations in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and, now, Afghanistan. And that’s in addition to an escalated nuclear standoff with North Korea. [Continue reading…]

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Steve Bannon’s failed plan to outsource the war in Afghanistan to mercenaries

The New York Times reports: Trump authorized Mr. Mattis to send up to 4,000 additional troops — a decision the Pentagon announced in a cryptic late-afternoon news release on June 14 that played down its significance and suggested it was a stopgap measure. White House officials said nothing publicly about the decision, and Mr. Mattis said he would not send any troops until there was a broader policy in place.

Mr. Bannon, meanwhile, continued to play disrupter. As the administration tried to flesh out the policy, he recruited two outside businessmen — Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management — who proposed plans to substitute private military contractors for American troops. Both men owned companies that supply contractors and would have profited from such a policy.

On a Saturday morning in early July, Mr. Bannon visited Mr. Mattis at his office in the Pentagon to lobby him on the unorthodox concept. Mr. Mattis listened politely, officials said, but dismissed it. Although Mr. Bannon continued to share his views privately with Mr. Trump, he became marginalized from the process even before he left the White House on Friday.

On Monday, a few hours before Mr. Trump was to speak, Breitbart published an interview with Mr. Prince, in which he criticized the president for not being more receptive to his proposal for mercenaries. “The presidency by its nature lives in a bubble,” Mr. Prince said. “When you fill it with former general officers, you’re going to get that stream of advice.” [Continue reading…]

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We can’t thrive in a world without darkness

Rebecca Boyle writes: Sound dominated my senses as we left the village of San Pedro de Atacama and walked into the desert night. The crunch of shoes on gravel underlay our voices, which were hushed to avoid waking any households or street dogs. Our small group of astronomy writers was escaping from light and, without any flashlights or streetlamps, we struggled to see, so our other senses were heightened. Land that looked red by day was now monochromatic, the rods in our retinas serving as our only visual input.

After about 15 minutes of hiking, we stopped to take some pictures of the sky. I fumbled with my gear and tried to get my bearings, but everything was alien. I was horribly jet-lagged after 10 hours hunched against the window of a 757, another two-hour flight north from Santiago and a two-hour bus ride, and it wan’t just my oxygen-hungry brain that put me out of sorts. The Atacama Desert looked like Mars as drawn by Dr Seuss; I was surrounded by wrong-coloured cliffs and swirling rock formations. But I was determined to photograph something even more bizarre: the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy you can see only from the southern hemisphere. I perched my camera on a rock and aimed at the sky, but the cosmic smudge would not resolve in my viewfinder. I stood, brushed dirt from my jeans, and looked up.

The unfamiliar sky momentarily took away what little breath I had left at 8,000 feet in elevation. Above the horizon was the conspicuous Southern Cross. Orion was there, too, but looked as disoriented as I felt, upside down to the world. And there were so many constellations I’d never seen, with hopeful, Latinate names such as Dorado and Reticulum. Countless stars blazed into view as I stared into the smear of the Milky Way.

To most people who have travelled outside the developed world – whether to camp or to meditate or to hunt – such bright and plentiful stars are a glorious sight. But this beauty instilled in me a creeping sense of guilt. At home, 1,500 miles north, I wouldn’t recognise such spangled heavens. From where I live in the American Midwest, the stars might as well not exist. After journeying millions of years, their light is swallowed by city glare and my porch lantern. Those that make it through will still fail: not even bright Betelgeuse can outshine my iPhone. Yet I am an astronomy writer, a person who thinks about stars and planets all the time. What does my neglect of the night sky say about the rest of humanity?

‘We are all descended from astronomers,’ the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson intones in the rebooted version of the TV show Cosmos. This is as poetic as it is true. Everyone owns the night sky; it was the one natural realm all our ancestors could see and know intimately. No river, no grand mountain or canyon, not even the oceans can claim that. But since Edison’s light bulbs colonised our cities, the vast majority of humans has ceased to see those skies. More than 60 per cent of the world, and fully 99 per cent of the US and Europe, lives under a yellowy sky polluted with light. [Continue reading…]

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How Trump is enabling famine

Jackson Diehl writes: Last month, eight large private U.S. relief organizations formed an unprecedented alliance to call Americans’ attention to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II: 20 million people at imminent risk of famine in four countries, including millions of children the United Nations says are “acutely malnourished.” Thinking of the popular anti-famine movements of the 1980s and ’90s, the groups enlisted support from big corporations and rock stars; the hope was to get through to the 85 percent of Americans whom polling showed were unaware of the crisis, and make a dent in the more than $2 billion deficit in funding needed to head off mass starvation.

For the most part, the two-week campaign didn’t work. Officials from the groups say they raised about $3.7 million and got more coverage than they would have working separately. But there was no eruption of public interest; news stories about the famine remain few and far between. The reason is fairly obvious: The continuing Trump circus sucks up so much media oxygen that issues that otherwise would be urgent — such as millions of people starving — are asphyxiated.

The U.N. tried to call attention to the looming hunger crisis in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria in March. Nearly six months later, the grim facts are these: Just 54 percent of the $4.9 billion the U.N. said was needed to head off a catastrophe has been raised. Though aid deliveries have pulled a state in South Sudan formally out of famine, more than half the population there and in Somalia need emergency food assistance, along with 5.2 million people in northeastern Nigeria. [Continue reading…]

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Trump says to study Pershing. I did, and the lessons are the complete opposite of what he thinks

Mark Perry writes: There was a time in U.S. history, and not so long ago, when General John “Black Jack” Pershing was the most famous American alive.

Feted by presidents, revered by soldiers, celebrated as a military genius by his followers and the subject of salacious gossip columnists (he was handsome, a widower—and available), Pershing was a legend in his time. Large numbers of Americans would have been able to recite the Missouri farm boy’s life story: A West Point graduate, Pershing was an officer in the African-American 10th Cavalry Regiment during the Indian Wars, participated in the Battle of San Juan Heights (where Teddy Roosevelt served as a Rough Rider), served as a key officer during the Moro Rebellion in the southern Philippines (from 1909 to 1913) and served a governor there, chased Pancho Villa around northern Mexico (starting in 1914), then led the American Expeditionary Force to victory in World War One.

In 1919, after Pershing returned from Europe to public acclaim, the Congress named him General of the Armies – only George Washington still outranks him.

Ironically, Black Jack, whose fame has faded in the seven decades since his death, is still celebrated among military scholars, but not for what he did – but for what he didn’t: and he most certainly didn’t take fifty bullets, dip them in pigs blood and execute 49 Muslims in retaliation for Islamic terrorism, as Donald Trump has repeatedly told us. Trump’s claim, first aired at a Feb. 19, 2016 campaign rally in South Carolina, cited Pershing as “a rough guy” – a personality trait that, it seems, the president very much admires. After this week’s attack in Barcelona, Trump tweeted: “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”

It was an allusion to a fictional yarn the president told on the campaign trail. According to candidate Trump, during his time fighting the Muslim Moro tribesmen in the southern Philippines, Pershing “caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage . . . and he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood. You heard about that? He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pig’s blood. And he had his men load up their rifles and he lined up 50 people and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem.” The fable, like all such, gets more grandiose with the telling: During a campaign rally in March of 2016, Trump’s initial 25 years became 42.

The story seems to have been kicking around the fever swamps of the internet for years. [Continue reading…]

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White House aides can’t stop talking about President Trump like he’s a toddler

Daniel W. Drezner writes: It started, as all 2017 stories about American politics start, with a garden-variety snarky tweet:


The point of the tweet was to push back on the occasional impulse by Very Serious People to claim that some speech or act by Donald Trump proved that he was “growing into the presidency.” The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has been examining Trump’s words and actions for the 2016 presidential campaign and thought this was nonsense. Hence the tweet.

The thing is, it quickly became clear that the evidence that Trump was not growing into the presidency was hiding in plain sight. Barely a week or even a day could pass without someone with access to Trump telling the news media in no uncertain terms the ways in which he was unfit for office. So I decided to keep adding to the thread. [Continue reading…]

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Small wonder: The global fascist love affair with the Assad regime

Alex Rowell writes: When the neo-Nazi who smashed his Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia – killing a woman and injuring many others – was found to have posted a Facebook photo supportive of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, more than a few lay observers were left scratching their heads.

Adding to the confusion were videos from the scene showing fellow white supremacists in Charlottesville voicing sympathies for Assad (‘Assad’s the man, brother! Assad’s the man!’); one even wearing a t-shirt depicting a helicopter next to the words, ‘Bashar’s Barrel Delivery Co.’.

That the fascist mob should be enamoured of President Trump seemed comprehensible enough. But why should they be keen on a non-Aryan, non-Christian – indeed, Arab and Muslim, no less – leader with ties to such notorious Islamist entities as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran?

‘Syria’s Assad has become an unexpected icon of the far right in America’, declared a Washington Post headline, in a nod at the general puzzlement. This was a fine article but an unfortunate title, for it was only ‘unexpected’ for those unaware of Damascus’ open courtship of the global far-right stretching back many years now (the headline was later amended to remove the word ‘unexpected’). [Continue reading…]

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Without equality of income there can be no equality of opportunity

File 20170731 30708 1duxdds
Incomes and outcomes.
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By Kate Pickett, University of York and Richard Wilkinson, University of York

If moving forward is the goal, it’s a not a good policy to stand still. Yet we hear little from the government about solutions to Britain’s poor record on social mobility. Earlier this year both the current administration and its predecessors were roundly condemned for their failure to make any headway.

Research has repeatedly shown the clear link between high levels of income inequality and low levels of social mobility. This graph, from our book The Spirit Level shows that far from being the land of opportunity, the US has very low social mobility. You’re much more likely to achieve the “American dream” if you live in Denmark.

Mobility and inequality.
The Spirit Level, Author provided

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How Russia treats its Ukraine veterans

Christopher Miller writes: Russian volunteer Andrei Kamayev arrived in war-torn eastern Ukraine in late September 2014, bursting with patriotic bravado and convinced that he was following in the footsteps of his grandfather—a Soviet intelligence officer in World War II—by fighting against “fascists and Nazis.”

Using terms propagated by the Kremlin to describe Ukrainian government forces fighting Russia-backed separatists, the 49-year-old Kamayev admits to other motives for joining up: He also wanted to help restore the Russky Mir, or “Russian World,” and stave off the perceived encroachment of NATO.

But his dream of military glory came to a quick and devastating end on February 1, 2015. As Kamayev followed a convoy of tanks during an assault near the strategic town of Debaltseve—then Ukrainian-controlled—a mortar shell exploded beside him, shredding part of his left leg. He was evacuated to a nearby hospital, but without the proper medicine to treat him, gangrene set in and doctors were forced to amputate the rest of his leg up to his hip.

He was lucky to survive, unlike many fellow Russians who volunteered to fight in Ukraine. But back in his new home, St. Petersburg, Kamayev hobbled around the former imperial capital on crutches, struggling to get by.

For him and thousands of other unrecognized, so-called veterans of the Kremlin-fomented conflict in eastern Ukraine, there is little, if any, glory beyond the battlefields of a war that grinds into a fourth year, with no end in sight. [Continue reading…]

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Bannon was set for a graceful exit. Then came Charlottesville

The New York Times reports: John F. Kelly, the new White House chief of staff, told Stephen K. Bannon in late July that he needed to go: No need for it to get messy, Mr. Kelly told Mr. Bannon, according to several people with firsthand knowledge of the exchange. The two worked out a mutually amicable departure date for mid-August, with President Trump’s blessing.

But as Mr. Trump struggled last week to contain a growing public furor over his response to a deadly, race-fueled melee in Virginia, Mr. Bannon clashed with Mr. Kelly over how the president should respond. Give no ground to your critics, Mr. Bannon urged the president, with characteristic truculence.

At the same time, New York real estate investor friends told Mr. Trump that the situation with Mr. Bannon was untenable: Steve Roth on Monday, Tom Barrack on Tuesday and Richard LeFrak on Wednesday.

By Thursday, after Mr. Bannon undercut American policy toward North Korea in an interview published by a left-leaning magazine, Mr. Trump himself had concluded that Mr. Bannon was too much of a liability.

By Friday, when he was forced from his job as Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Mr. Bannon had found himself wholly isolated inside a White House where he once operated with such autonomy that he reported only to the president himself.

This account is based on interviews with a dozen White House aides, associates of the president’s and friends of Mr. Bannon’s.

A former Naval officer, Mr. Bannon speaks often in the language of combat — of escalating conflict to “nuclear” levels and driving his enemies “ballistic.” But in the end, he had lost the war against a list of enemies that included nearly everyone in the West Wing. They included not just the adversaries whose conflicts with Mr. Bannon were widely aired — Gary D. Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser; Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser; Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter; and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law.

Also against him was Mr. Kelly, who was outraged by the indiscretion Mr. Bannon displayed in the interview with The American Prospect, according to three senior administration officials. And Mr. Bannon could no longer turn to Mr. Trump, whose confidence in him had eroded over a period of months, to ask for a reprieve.

Even the market tumbled on the prospect that Mr. Bannon could come out on top. Blue chip stocks slid last week after an erroneous report said that Mr. Cohn’s resignation was imminent because of his disgust with Mr. Trump’s failure to more forcefully denounce the racist Charlottesville, Va., demonstrators. Friends and former colleagues of Mr. Cohn’s said the economic adviser criticized Mr. Trump in such strong terms that at least one wondered how he could possibly remain in his position. [Continue reading…]

“People make too much of the idea that [Trump’s] some kind of blank slate that advisers can push one way or the other,” says Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. Indeed. The only pushing evident is that occasionally Trump’s persuaded to read someone else’s words from a teleprompter. Otherwise, every vile statement that comes out of his mouth is authentic Trump. His ugliness is completely genuine.

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