I'm not sure that Rubio (or his people) is the source of the leak. Given the leak of the second call between Ditriev and Ushakov, I wonder if this hasn't been leaked to Bloomberg from one or more of the European intelligence services. I'm sure that they would rather be dealing with Rubio than with Witkoff and Vance, and they have been a lot more public in their profile since The Ancient Orange One threatened to withhold US intelligence from other NATO members.
Rofer points out that one question is who leaked it, and it seems obvious that it is from Rubio's camp, because Rubio wouldn't pee on Witkoff if he were on fire. Other is how it was recorded, which gets into questions of spooks and surveillance. State has their own intelligence service, but the current head of the CIA was in Congress when Rubio was a senator. Maybe I should shout vive le petit Marco!
[phone rings]
Steve Witkoff: Hi Yuri.
Yuri Ushakov: Yeah Steve hi, how are you?
SW: Good Yuri. How you doing?
YU: I am ok. Congratulations my friend.
SW: Thank you.
YU: You made a great job. Just a great job. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.
SW: Thank you Yuri and thanks for your support. I know your country supported it and I thank you.
YU: Yes, yes, yes. Yes. You know that’s why we suspend the organization of first Russian-Arabic summit.
SW: Yes.
YU: Yeah, because we think that you are making the real job there in the region.
SW: Well listen. I am going to tell you something. I think, I think if we can get the Russia-Ukraine thing solved, everybody’ll be jumping for joy.
YU: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you need to solve only one problem. [laughs]
SW: What?
YU: Russian-Ukrainian war.
SW: I know! How do we get that solved?
YU: My friend, I just want your advice. Do you think that it will be useful if our bosses will talk on the phone?
SW: Yes, I do.
YU: You do. And when you think it could be possible?
SW: I think as soon as you suggest, my guy is ready to do it.
YU: Ok, ok.
SW: Yuri, Yuri, here’s what I would do. My recommendation.
YU: Yes, please.
SW: I would make the call and just reiterate that you congratulate the president on this achievement, that you supported it, you supported it, that you respect that he is a man of peace and you’re just, you’re really glad to have seen it happen. So I would say that. I think from that it’s going to be a really good call.
Because — let me tell you what I told the President. I told the president that you - that the Russian Federation has always wanted a peace deal. That’s my belief. I told the president I believe that. And I believe the question is — the issue is is that we have two nations that are having a hard time coming to a compromise and when we do, we’re going to have a peace deal. I’m even thinking that maybe we set out like a 20-point peace proposal, just like we did in Gaza. We put a 20-point Trump plan together that was 20 points for peace and I’m thinking maybe we do the same thing with you. My point is this...
YU: Ok, ok my friend. I think that very point our leaders could discuss. Hey Steve, I agree with you that he will congratulate, he will say that Mr. Trump is a real peace man and so and so. That he will say.
SW: But here’s what I think would be amazing.
YU: Ok, ok.
SW: What if, what if... hear me out...
YU: I will discuss that with my boss and then I come back to you. Ok?
SW: Yeah because listen to what I’m saying. I just want you to say, maybe just to say this to President Putin, because you know I have the deepest respect for President Putin.
SW: Maybe he says to President Trump: you know, Steve and Yuri discussed a very similar 20-point plan to peace and that could be something that we think might move the needle a little bit, we’re open to those sorts of things — to explore what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done. Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere. But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here. And I think Yuri, the president will give me a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal.
YU: I see...
SW: ...so if we can create that opportunity that after this I talked to Yuri and we had a conversation I think that could lead to big stuff.
YU: Ok, that sounds good. Sounds good.
SW: And here’s one more thing: Zelenskiy is coming to the White House on Friday.
YU: I know that. [chuckles]
SW: I will go to that meeting because they want me there, but I think if possible we have the call with your boss before that Friday meeting.
YU: Before, before — yeah?
SW: Correct.
YU: Ok, ok. I got your advice. So I discuss that with my boss and then I come back to you, ok?
SW: Ok Yuri, I’ll speak to you soon.
YU: Great, great. Thank you so much. Thanks you.
SW: Bye, bye.
YU: Bye.
[Call Ends]
I will confess that I got about three paragraphs into the thesis and my eyes glazed over.
What I take away from the various snippets of statements by Karp is that he is kind of an odd guy. I'm not sure why it is - there seems to be some kind of self-selecting dynamic in play - but all of the techbro leadership seem to be... unique individuals.
To speak plainly, they seem like a bunch of weirdos. Listening to them speak publicly is like listening to bong-fueled late night dorm room conversations. They seem pretty detached from, for lack of a better word, normal real life, as lived by normal real people.
Maybe you have to have a kind of obsessive monomaniacal personality to rise to the positions they hold. But the absurd levels of wealth these guys - almost all guys - have accumulated gives them a truly outsize influence on public life.
So we end up being ruled by people with strange, anti-social, yet deeply held beliefs about the world.
I always thought the whole "sea steading" thing was a great idea. Go build your giant rafts out in the middle of the ocean, declare yourselves to be sovereign lords beholden to no-one, and leave the rest of us alone. Enjoy the fish!
If anyone has plowed through Karp's oeuvre and can boil it down for a layman like myself, I'd be interested to know more about what makes him tick.
So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised? Does it become stronger among the relatively few who stay put? How do they handle being outnumbered by “the others”? Do the movers become citizens of the world?
Well, you might have the Dubai model with a small number of citizens (roughly 5% in the case of Dubai) and the rest viewing it transactionally. One could scoff at that, because the numbers are so extreme in the case of Dubai, but the whole discourse of "diversity is what makes us strong" is being discarded like yesterday's trash. While moving from one state to another doesn't trigger dystopian images, you start to get a larger and larger group of people who move further afield.
Here's a sympathetic Karen Bass interview. At least, I'm more sympathetic to her than I was before watching the interview.
"Matt Welch visits Getty House for a one-on-one with Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass on the fires, ICE, Trump/Mamdani, Angela Davis/Cuba, and a whole lotta disagreement about the relationship between property rights & building new stuff."
lj, since you are keen on Stewart Lee, in case you don't know he is a regular contributor to Carole Cadwalladr's and the other Observer refuseniks' new online publication The Nerve.
She doesn't talk about China much, but the impact on Taiwan of taking her win-win strategy would be overwhelmingly positive.
That being said, I don't have much hope that this will happen. Yes, what little hope I do have is pinned on my unlikely theory that Trump is trying to bring the EU/UK fully online to have a united front, Witkoff's bumblings notwithstanding.
In terms of internal climate migration, I think it is important to realize that the US does not have one form of nationalism. My guess is that we have at least three competing forms of nationalism, and the White Christian Nationalist side of things is going to find itself on the move moreso than the others. For reference, we have the maps here at the Public Religion Research Institute: https://prri.org/research/support-for-christian-nationalism-in-all-50-states/
Note that support for Christian Nationalism is strongest in the Southeast, Northern Plains, and the Great Plains states that connect those regions.
Compare this with the map of climate winners and losers at Pro Publica: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
My guess is that we will see some migration along the diagonal between these areas as people leave the Southeast and look for something like the "American Redoubt" for their idea of a nationalist utopia, and we are going to start seeing some stark regional divides between WA/ID and MN/SD. Think Ruby Ridge. There's more of that on tap, but the right is now much more aligned with their fringe, so that's going to be more difficult to deal with.
It's one of the things that would make me think harder about settling in places like Spokane, Eugene, or Fargo. Those could become the epicenters for violence fueled by dueling nationalisms in the region.
I was posing those questions as an extension of lj's mention of climate change forcing people to move, thus the conflicts over land and resources. In that case, it will mostly be "I have to leave" with a good amount of crossing national boundaries.
I wouldn't expect someone going from Alabama to Texas to lose their sense of Americanness, at least not simply because of that move.
(If things had really gone to sh*t and someone was moving from what used to be Alabama to what used to be Texas, Americanness might not mean much anymore.)
So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised?
It depends...
If people are relocating across national boundaries, that could reduce nationalism, because they are not rooted anywhere. Say if they relocate because their job moves.
Or increase it, because they have moved on the basis of "I want to go to this particular place" (vs "I need to leave where I am.") See the immigrants to the US who embrace America to the point that they, or their children, volunteer for the US military.
On the other hand, there are those who relocate within a single country. It seems like they might embrace nationalism, simply because that is the level of group they still belong to. If you relocate from Alabama to Texas, you may not have strong ties to either. But you still have strong ties to the country overall.
So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised? Does it become stronger among the relatively few who stay put? How do they handle being outnumbered by "the others"? Do the movers become citizens of the world?
There's going to be conflict over land and resources. How will the lines be drawn? How rapidly do those lines shift? How large will the factions or coalitions of factions be?
Thinking about the future feels like forming the basis of a dystopian sci-fi novel. I might update my resume to tailor it to a position as a warlord.
But I would point out that, while you feel your new roots are shallow, you are hardly someone who is perpetually moving. (I’d put the threshold for “perpetually moving”/rootless at relocating every couple of years or less.)
We seem to be reaching a point where everyone will be more like me: perhaps not perpetually moving, but moving enough that the idea of being rooted in a place no longer holds. I feel like that inflection point is coming in the next few decades, helped along by the fact that climate will make the places we live so different from what they were. People may not be perpetually moving, but the place they are living will change with enough speed and strength as to make everyone strangers in their own towns.
There is doubtless a bit of racism in the mix. But I think by far the biggest part is simply that China is in a position to be an economic powerhouse rivaling the US. (And thus potentially a military peer.)
In contrast, Russia, at this point, is a second rate power. Or maybe third rate considering how they are faring against Ukraine. They've got nukes and (so far as we know) the technology to deliver them. But otherwise? They're a petrostate crossed with a kleptocracy. Even India is closer to being an economic peer than Russia.
That is one of the current double standards on the US right at the moment. Russian expansionism is less alarming to many because Russia is a white Christian nation, and the far right in America is smitten with the Orthodox church, its muscular Christianity and patriarchy, and its staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.
China, in the eyes of the US right, are godless asian communists, and thus enemies of Western Civilization.
The significant difference being that most members of Congress are fairly rabid when it comes to China. A lot of them may not care that much if Russia expands. But China is a whole different deal. If Trump makes a deal there, he may need to publish the Epstein Files as a distraction.
Meanwhile, it is being reported, Xi has been telling Trump how Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and must be reunited with the motherland. A meeting is being proposed. The Putin playbook is clearly an inspiration...
Those other debts weren’t being enforced by the Russian Mafia.
Doesn'tneed to involve the Russiab mafia. The Russian government has demonstrated its ability to conduct its own enforcement operations around the globe.
So the Department of Defense (which Pete Dawg wants to be called the Department of War because the packing penis wasn't fooling anyone) has now declared that they are investigating Sen. Mark Kelly because Kelly had the temerity to remind US military service people, past and present, that they have a duty to uphold the Constitution which supersedes their duty to follow any order that would violate the Constitution.
You, know, keeping that oath that they swore when they joined the service.
And on social media the Ancient Orange One is calling Kelly et al's statement a "clear act of sedition."
This from the same merry band of miscreants who commuted Stuart Rhodes' federal sentence for having committed Seditious Conspiracy during the January 6 insurrection - while leading a group that called themselves the Oath Keepers.
So Kelly is being investigated for warning service people that if they violate the law and the constitution, they will end up a convicted felon like Rhodes.
They are going to keep pushing until there is a confrontation. And then they will push some more.
Trump will go with whatever end game in Ukraine allows his family to continue to service Trump Organization debts that are held by Russian entities. Without that, the family fortunes all go to shit.
The same is probably true for Saudi Arabia and Trump at this point.
It's not just about making money, it's also about whose money is actually backing all of those big splashy projects that they put the family name on.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
I'm not sure that Rubio (or his people) is the source of the leak. Given the leak of the second call between Ditriev and Ushakov, I wonder if this hasn't been leaked to Bloomberg from one or more of the European intelligence services. I'm sure that they would rather be dealing with Rubio than with Witkoff and Vance, and they have been a lot more public in their profile since The Ancient Orange One threatened to withhold US intelligence from other NATO members.
I'd trust the Euro's competence over Rubio's.
"
GftNC, I thought sure you were channelling The Onion. Because it just seemed too over the top. But now it just seems creepy. And stomach turning.
Sorry to have doubted you.
"
At first, I thought the conversation was a joke, but here it is (from Cheryl Rofer at LGM)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-25/witkoff-discusses-ukraine-plans-with-key-putin-aide-transcript?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2NDEwMTcyMiwiZXhwIjoxNzY0NzA2NTIyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUNkFGR1dLSkg2VkwwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJGMUM1Mzc1OEY5Qjg0MDZCOUJCNzMyODRDN0RBMEY3QyJ9.R55A7wfpKrimqSTKzT8ij6J3HqjPMIFE84iKN_Bp9Q0&leadSource=uverify%20wall
Rofer points out that one question is who leaked it, and it seems obvious that it is from Rubio's camp, because Rubio wouldn't pee on Witkoff if he were on fire. Other is how it was recorded, which gets into questions of spooks and surveillance. State has their own intelligence service, but the current head of the CIA was in Congress when Rubio was a senator. Maybe I should shout vive le petit Marco!
On “The surprising philosophy behind Palantir”
At the time I was watching "Succession," I thought the icky uber-rich kooks being portrayed were caricatures. Now I think they were understated.
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
Well, well, so Bloomberg has the following tape:
[phone rings]
Steve Witkoff: Hi Yuri.
Yuri Ushakov: Yeah Steve hi, how are you?
SW: Good Yuri. How you doing?
YU: I am ok. Congratulations my friend.
SW: Thank you.
YU: You made a great job. Just a great job. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.
SW: Thank you Yuri and thanks for your support. I know your country supported it and I thank you.
YU: Yes, yes, yes. Yes. You know that’s why we suspend the organization of first Russian-Arabic summit.
SW: Yes.
YU: Yeah, because we think that you are making the real job there in the region.
SW: Well listen. I am going to tell you something. I think, I think if we can get the Russia-Ukraine thing solved, everybody’ll be jumping for joy.
YU: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you need to solve only one problem. [laughs]
SW: What?
YU: Russian-Ukrainian war.
SW: I know! How do we get that solved?
YU: My friend, I just want your advice. Do you think that it will be useful if our bosses will talk on the phone?
SW: Yes, I do.
YU: You do. And when you think it could be possible?
SW: I think as soon as you suggest, my guy is ready to do it.
YU: Ok, ok.
SW: Yuri, Yuri, here’s what I would do. My recommendation.
YU: Yes, please.
SW: I would make the call and just reiterate that you congratulate the president on this achievement, that you supported it, you supported it, that you respect that he is a man of peace and you’re just, you’re really glad to have seen it happen. So I would say that. I think from that it’s going to be a really good call.
Because — let me tell you what I told the President. I told the president that you - that the Russian Federation has always wanted a peace deal. That’s my belief. I told the president I believe that. And I believe the question is — the issue is is that we have two nations that are having a hard time coming to a compromise and when we do, we’re going to have a peace deal. I’m even thinking that maybe we set out like a 20-point peace proposal, just like we did in Gaza. We put a 20-point Trump plan together that was 20 points for peace and I’m thinking maybe we do the same thing with you. My point is this...
YU: Ok, ok my friend. I think that very point our leaders could discuss. Hey Steve, I agree with you that he will congratulate, he will say that Mr. Trump is a real peace man and so and so. That he will say.
SW: But here’s what I think would be amazing.
YU: Ok, ok.
SW: What if, what if... hear me out...
YU: I will discuss that with my boss and then I come back to you. Ok?
SW: Yeah because listen to what I’m saying. I just want you to say, maybe just to say this to President Putin, because you know I have the deepest respect for President Putin.
SW: Maybe he says to President Trump: you know, Steve and Yuri discussed a very similar 20-point plan to peace and that could be something that we think might move the needle a little bit, we’re open to those sorts of things — to explore what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done. Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere. But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here. And I think Yuri, the president will give me a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal.
YU: I see...
SW: ...so if we can create that opportunity that after this I talked to Yuri and we had a conversation I think that could lead to big stuff.
YU: Ok, that sounds good. Sounds good.
SW: And here’s one more thing: Zelenskiy is coming to the White House on Friday.
YU: I know that. [chuckles]
SW: I will go to that meeting because they want me there, but I think if possible we have the call with your boss before that Friday meeting.
YU: Before, before — yeah?
SW: Correct.
YU: Ok, ok. I got your advice. So I discuss that with my boss and then I come back to you, ok?
SW: Ok Yuri, I’ll speak to you soon.
YU: Great, great. Thank you so much. Thanks you.
SW: Bye, bye.
YU: Bye.
[Call Ends]
On “The surprising philosophy behind Palantir”
I will confess that I got about three paragraphs into the thesis and my eyes glazed over.
What I take away from the various snippets of statements by Karp is that he is kind of an odd guy. I'm not sure why it is - there seems to be some kind of self-selecting dynamic in play - but all of the techbro leadership seem to be... unique individuals.
To speak plainly, they seem like a bunch of weirdos. Listening to them speak publicly is like listening to bong-fueled late night dorm room conversations. They seem pretty detached from, for lack of a better word, normal real life, as lived by normal real people.
Maybe you have to have a kind of obsessive monomaniacal personality to rise to the positions they hold. But the absurd levels of wealth these guys - almost all guys - have accumulated gives them a truly outsize influence on public life.
So we end up being ruled by people with strange, anti-social, yet deeply held beliefs about the world.
I always thought the whole "sea steading" thing was a great idea. Go build your giant rafts out in the middle of the ocean, declare yourselves to be sovereign lords beholden to no-one, and leave the rest of us alone. Enjoy the fish!
If anyone has plowed through Karp's oeuvre and can boil it down for a layman like myself, I'd be interested to know more about what makes him tick.
On “Shabana burns the cakes”
So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised? Does it become stronger among the relatively few who stay put? How do they handle being outnumbered by “the others”? Do the movers become citizens of the world?
Well, you might have the Dubai model with a small number of citizens (roughly 5% in the case of Dubai) and the rest viewing it transactionally. One could scoff at that, because the numbers are so extreme in the case of Dubai, but the whole discourse of "diversity is what makes us strong" is being discarded like yesterday's trash. While moving from one state to another doesn't trigger dystopian images, you start to get a larger and larger group of people who move further afield.
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
Here's a sympathetic Karen Bass interview. At least, I'm more sympathetic to her than I was before watching the interview.
"Matt Welch visits Getty House for a one-on-one with Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass on the fires, ICE, Trump/Mamdani, Angela Davis/Cuba, and a whole lotta disagreement about the relationship between property rights & building new stuff."
Even the Mayor Says L.A. Isn’t Well Governed
"
"Openish" thread, so:
I very much enjoyed (on hilzoy's bluesky feed) the comparison of RFK Jnr's "poetry" about Olivia Nuzzi to Vogon poetry
Further to which, Marina Hyde is fun today on the difference between American and English journalists' self assessment.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/25/rfk-erotic-poetry-scandal-america-olivia-nuzzi
lj, since you are keen on Stewart Lee, in case you don't know he is a regular contributor to Carole Cadwalladr's and the other Observer refuseniks' new online publication The Nerve.
"
Harding's response to Question 6 is, IMO, spot on in terms of why we are where we are and how to make this a win-win.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-strategy-ukraine-russia-peace-negotiations
She doesn't talk about China much, but the impact on Taiwan of taking her win-win strategy would be overwhelmingly positive.
That being said, I don't have much hope that this will happen. Yes, what little hope I do have is pinned on my unlikely theory that Trump is trying to bring the EU/UK fully online to have a united front, Witkoff's bumblings notwithstanding.
On “Shabana burns the cakes”
In terms of internal climate migration, I think it is important to realize that the US does not have one form of nationalism. My guess is that we have at least three competing forms of nationalism, and the White Christian Nationalist side of things is going to find itself on the move moreso than the others. For reference, we have the maps here at the Public Religion Research Institute: https://prri.org/research/support-for-christian-nationalism-in-all-50-states/
Note that support for Christian Nationalism is strongest in the Southeast, Northern Plains, and the Great Plains states that connect those regions.
Compare this with the map of climate winners and losers at Pro Publica: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
My guess is that we will see some migration along the diagonal between these areas as people leave the Southeast and look for something like the "American Redoubt" for their idea of a nationalist utopia, and we are going to start seeing some stark regional divides between WA/ID and MN/SD. Think Ruby Ridge. There's more of that on tap, but the right is now much more aligned with their fringe, so that's going to be more difficult to deal with.
It's one of the things that would make me think harder about settling in places like Spokane, Eugene, or Fargo. Those could become the epicenters for violence fueled by dueling nationalisms in the region.
"
I was posing those questions as an extension of lj's mention of climate change forcing people to move, thus the conflicts over land and resources. In that case, it will mostly be "I have to leave" with a good amount of crossing national boundaries.
I wouldn't expect someone going from Alabama to Texas to lose their sense of Americanness, at least not simply because of that move.
(If things had really gone to sh*t and someone was moving from what used to be Alabama to what used to be Texas, Americanness might not mean much anymore.)
"
So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised?
It depends...
If people are relocating across national boundaries, that could reduce nationalism, because they are not rooted anywhere. Say if they relocate because their job moves.
Or increase it, because they have moved on the basis of "I want to go to this particular place" (vs "I need to leave where I am.") See the immigrants to the US who embrace America to the point that they, or their children, volunteer for the US military.
On the other hand, there are those who relocate within a single country. It seems like they might embrace nationalism, simply because that is the level of group they still belong to. If you relocate from Alabama to Texas, you may not have strong ties to either. But you still have strong ties to the country overall.
"
So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised? Does it become stronger among the relatively few who stay put? How do they handle being outnumbered by "the others"? Do the movers become citizens of the world?
There's going to be conflict over land and resources. How will the lines be drawn? How rapidly do those lines shift? How large will the factions or coalitions of factions be?
Thinking about the future feels like forming the basis of a dystopian sci-fi novel. I might update my resume to tailor it to a position as a warlord.
"
But I would point out that, while you feel your new roots are shallow, you are hardly someone who is perpetually moving. (I’d put the threshold for “perpetually moving”/rootless at relocating every couple of years or less.)
We seem to be reaching a point where everyone will be more like me: perhaps not perpetually moving, but moving enough that the idea of being rooted in a place no longer holds. I feel like that inflection point is coming in the next few decades, helped along by the fact that climate will make the places we live so different from what they were. People may not be perpetually moving, but the place they are living will change with enough speed and strength as to make everyone strangers in their own towns.
On “An openish thread featuring the comedy stylings of Steve Witkoff”
There is doubtless a bit of racism in the mix. But I think by far the biggest part is simply that China is in a position to be an economic powerhouse rivaling the US. (And thus potentially a military peer.)
In contrast, Russia, at this point, is a second rate power. Or maybe third rate considering how they are faring against Ukraine. They've got nukes and (so far as we know) the technology to deliver them. But otherwise? They're a petrostate crossed with a kleptocracy. Even India is closer to being an economic peer than Russia.
"
That is one of the current double standards on the US right at the moment. Russian expansionism is less alarming to many because Russia is a white Christian nation, and the far right in America is smitten with the Orthodox church, its muscular Christianity and patriarchy, and its staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.
China, in the eyes of the US right, are godless asian communists, and thus enemies of Western Civilization.
"
The Putin playbook is clearly an inspiration…
The significant difference being that most members of Congress are fairly rabid when it comes to China. A lot of them may not care that much if Russia expands. But China is a whole different deal. If Trump makes a deal there, he may need to publish the Epstein Files as a distraction.
"
Meanwhile, it is being reported, Xi has been telling Trump how Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and must be reunited with the motherland. A meeting is being proposed. The Putin playbook is clearly an inspiration...
"
bc and GFTNC, thank you for your explanations.
TBH, I can't make sense of any of this mess. It's utterly unclear who exactly is driving the bus on our end. Or what their motivations are.
Putin wants Ukraine absorbed into Russia. Ukraine doesn't want to be absorbed into Russia. The UK and EU very much do not want the conflict to expand.
What do we want? Who is the "we" that is deciding?
"
Those other debts weren’t being enforced by the Russian Mafia.
Doesn'tneed to involve the Russiab mafia. The Russian government has demonstrated its ability to conduct its own enforcement operations around the globe.
"
You seem to think that Trump wouldn’t just walk away from his debts, in spite of all past evidence.
Those other debts weren't being enforced by the Russian Mafia.
"
"Trump will go with whatever end game in Ukraine allows his family to continue to service Trump Organization debts that are held by Russian entities"
You seem to think that Trump wouldn't just walk away from his debts, in spite of all past evidence.
"
So the Department of Defense (which Pete Dawg wants to be called the Department of War because the packing penis wasn't fooling anyone) has now declared that they are investigating Sen. Mark Kelly because Kelly had the temerity to remind US military service people, past and present, that they have a duty to uphold the Constitution which supersedes their duty to follow any order that would violate the Constitution.
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/24/nx-s1-5619314/pentagon-mark-kelly-trump-hegseth-military
You, know, keeping that oath that they swore when they joined the service.
And on social media the Ancient Orange One is calling Kelly et al's statement a "clear act of sedition."
This from the same merry band of miscreants who commuted Stuart Rhodes' federal sentence for having committed Seditious Conspiracy during the January 6 insurrection - while leading a group that called themselves the Oath Keepers.
So Kelly is being investigated for warning service people that if they violate the law and the constitution, they will end up a convicted felon like Rhodes.
They are going to keep pushing until there is a confrontation. And then they will push some more.
Do not yield.
"
Trump will go with whatever end game in Ukraine allows his family to continue to service Trump Organization debts that are held by Russian entities. Without that, the family fortunes all go to shit.
The same is probably true for Saudi Arabia and Trump at this point.
It's not just about making money, it's also about whose money is actually backing all of those big splashy projects that they put the family name on.
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