Fox News’ Mark Levin is all-in for escalating the war in Ukraine. We learned from his opening monolog themed with the “America First” meme, that we can’t be a ‘nationalist’ while at the same time being a federalist and constitutionalist. He equated being a nationalist today with being an isolationist. Somehow, according to the guy who has the Bonafede’s of being a U.S. Constitution scholar, he conflated the notion of choosing or preferring to buy American products with being an absolutist about it. In other words, he logically argued, that in today’s world, it is nearly inconceivable that the writing pen he picked up—as an example—could have been sourced completely independent of foreign-based materials or manufacturing. He conceded we live in an interdependent world. An item so simple as a pen is dependent on the raw materials that could have been mined in a foreign country. The point he was making seemed to belittle someone who insists on being a nationalist today. And yet, within the same monolog, he argues for closing the open southern borders and accuses the Biden Administration of being derelict in its duties to protect our (national) borders.
Beware the speaker who takes the time to give you his definitions of terms he is using, yet somehow obliterates any other meaning than his own.
After declaring he is not a nationalist, nor a globalist, he did not offer how in a normal conversation you can distinguish yourself as being sympathetic to either of those concepts. I, for one, identify as a nationalist in a way that I personally understand that term. I also would claim to be an “America first” supporter. Do I have to be fanatic about it—insisting that everything I buy at the big box stores be exclusively made in the U.S.A.? Of course not. Or just because I am all-for enforcing our immigration policies and intercepting illegal entry by foreign nationals across our southern border, doesn’t mean I am an isolationist that is intolerant of legalized immigration into our country. And in contra-distinction, I definitely do not identify as a globalist, at least in the way that term is generally understood among American patriot circles. You might say I am a globalist in the grand scheme of things. But I am most certainly NOT a globalist in the way Klaus Schwab and his ilk like to define that term. We have to be careful when framing our definitions in absolutist terms. I think Mark Levin was insisting on being completely black and white and ignoring all the gray in between for a specific agenda.
And the gray matter between my ears was detecting something a little bit askew from the normally very professorial and erudite host of that particular show.
As the conversation tilted towards demonizing the leader of the Russian Confederation, Vladimir Putin, I gradually deduced why Mr. Levin seemed to be equating the political term ‘nationalism’ with something relegated to a mere consumerist term. Could it be that if we associated or framed the terminology involved with protecting our borders with a sense of nationalism, then we could logically make the leap that if we as Americans have a right to protect the national security interests at our southern border—implying that we have sovereign interests in doing so—could it then be argued that Putin has a similar right in doing so? This logic does not necessarily contain within it any excuse for outright combat or military violence on its face. We can, however, inquire with some rectitude if Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine had a modicum of justifiable calculations behind it.
The sixty-four-million-dollar question is whether Putin’s special military operation stops at the borders of Ukraine or is just getting started in re-capturing the entire Baltic region. Our military strategists seem convinced that Putin is bent on resurrecting the old Soviet empire. I happen to agree with many analysts that the Russian intention is not expansionist in nature, but was and is exclusively a defensive and pre-emptive posture and confined to exclusive national security interests.
We shall see. But to insist that Putin moved into Ukraine unprovoked by an adversarial West is to ignore the facts. But whose facts you can well ask…
Levin’s comments are normally crystal clear in making his arguments understandable. I guess what I am trying to say is that today, I identify politically with the foundational principles that are at the root of our U.S. Constitution. I affirm the system of federalism and representative government which, as Mark explained, the founders carefully constructed to prevent the democratic principles they espoused to devolve into “mobocracy”. I can be a conservative; I can be a constitutionalist and at the same time I can be a nationalist—all at the same time.
What gradually became apparent, and this only crystalized in my thinking after Mark’s Fox News segment was over, is that he was attempting to contort the meaning of being a nationalist as something totally separate from what motivated Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine. It’s a little complex to unravel the association here, but I think it is worth the effort to dive in a little deeper. The bottom-line of Mark’s show airing on the night of April 24th is that you can’t be a patriot or an America first subscriber and think seriously about NOT defending the Ukrainians in the conflict that is occurring now with Putin’s Russia. Hey! Is it permissible to defend (in principle and as a justly humanitarian cause) the Ukrainians’ very lives and homes while still recognizing that there might be a set of reasons that are calculated with merit from the Russian’s perspective?
And to begin that dive, is it reasonable to consider that there might have existed legitimate and very credible national security issues affecting a sovereign nation and its borders that could have been at stake here? We know with certainty that the NATO partners assured the (then} dissolved Soviet Union leadership that the eastward expansion involving recruiting nations into the NATO sphere would stop with Eastern Germany. Anyone can refer to an appropriate, up-to-date map and simply see that promise was not kept.
In addition, we have confirmation that the government installed in Kyiv after the 2014 Maidan coup—instigated by the U.S. State Department—was given unmistakable threats by a general within the Ukrainian military; should Zelensky enforce the accords called for in the Minsk Agreements granting relative autonomy to the Donbas breakaway republics, he would find himself hanging dead from some street lamppost.
Totally missing from the U.S. mainstream news featured narrative is this whole newsworthy issue of how the Nazi factions within Ukraine have captured and co-opted military and government decision-making, which is seemingly countenanced by U.S. operations there. Nothing to see here, as the saying goes…
Make no mistake about it. Putin, as defined by Mark Levin and his featured guests that night was portrayed as a war criminal. Worse, he is nothing but an evil tyrant. Putin is, according to the narrative we heard from Mark, guilty of genocide and purposefully causing mass casualties of non-combatant Ukrainians. We learned of the discovery, breaking news, of a mass grave site containing the remains of 9000 slaughtered citizens massacred by Russian troops. That will be confirmed—or not—by independent news sources as the story develops. But for the purposes of the anti-Putin diatribe that proceeded from Mr. Levin’s Fox News broadcast, it was sufficient to state as a fact without any evidence offered to the listeners.
I remind my readers that this is the same Fox News that has misstated the facts in the past when it really mattered for the real story to prevail. Remember the way they pre-maturely called the election results on the night of Nov. 3rd, 2020? Recall how they pushed the covid-19 narrative scripted for us by the public relations departments of Moderna and Pfizer. They spouted and backed all the misrepresentations of the efficacy of the vaccines, mask mandates, and lockdowns. Of course, we learn that Pfizer buys the lion’s share of commercial time on most of the T.V. stations. It turns out that Big Pharma ad spend pays a big part of the revenues that the nightly news earns overall. From a Rupert Murdoch-owned news organization, we are getting one side of the story and one side of the story only. The only permissible narrative we hear is “Let’s go to war”. And the reason we are going to war is to defend freedom and liberty (?)
Let’s think about this for more than a minute folks!
Now I happen to consider myself a patriotic American. Like Levin, I did not serve in the U.S. military, and yet I have ancestors who did. My family has a traceable history of forebears fighting in the American War of Independence. Am I a turncoat if I don’t happen to agree with all the war propaganda I am hearing in the mainstream news? Well, according to the flavor of patriotism being pushed on the Networks-the same networks that expressly pushed the Trump collusion hoax now proven to be fake news--I guess, I’m not eligible to claim my America first credentials if I am not all-in for exporting a whole slew of weapons into Ukraine, and maybe even advocating for boots-on-the-ground American troop involvement.
It is a tragedy that lives are being lost in open hostilities that could have been avoided. There was ample opportunity to come to a diplomatic settlement in the lead-up to this war. The Russian side made it abundantly clear over a time span of more than a decade their legitimate national security concerns as they watched NATO absorb their Baltic neighbors into the Trans-Atlantic alliance. Putin made specific high-level requests in the days and weeks before the Feb. 24 incursion into Ukraine for negotiating a new security agreement that would have formalized an acknowledgment of the frankly overt and valid claims that Russia was making.
It is incontestable that the overtures for reaching an understanding between the NATO side and meeting the Russian concerns were one-sided and ignored by the appropriate authorities in the West. As a westerner, I naturally have sentiments that tend to make me give the benefit of the doubt to my own countrymen. However, after being exposed to the duplicity and outright lies promulgated by the United States popular news media pre-dating the 2016 national elections and continuing through the whole fiasco of the Russian collusion hoax followed by the Covid-19 fear-porn mongering and shilling for the vaccines’ train wreck of widespread adverse reactions and fatalities; can you appreciate my skepticism that the mainstream news is now capable of delivering-up true investigative journalism?
It is certainly capable of doing so. However, as long as it remains in thrall to a corpocracy whose directors are committed to defending the agenda of the Davos oligarchs, we will continue to get the type of slanted news that Levin delivered on his vetted program. (And yes, we have our share of oligarchs here in the west—they are not just a Russian phenomenon.)
Fortunately, the controlled press has failed to keep a lid on the real news coming out despite the accelerated efforts to conduct all-out economic and information warfare against Russia--including what Mark Levin made abundantly clear on his show--the asymmetric, information warfare being shilled for the war machine conglomerates against the American people.
In case you missed it, what Mark very purposely avoided relaying to his viewing audience were some pertinent points I can recount from memory.
· The continued eastward expansion of NATO despite the corroborated promises that the U.S. and U.K.-led alliance would hold the line at (then) Eastern Germany.
· The willful ignoring of addressing the legitimate requests by Putin to keep Ukraine non-aligned and neutral, which he has repeatedly stated was regarded by Russia as a red line demarcation.
· The now incontrovertible evidence that the U.S. during the Obama years, in 2014 orchestrated the Maidan coup that ousted the democratically elected president of Ukraine, and replaced him with a compliant Euro-friendly sympathizer—the current Zelensky.
· A categorical refusal (by the West) to conduct or sponsor high-level meetings to arrive at a truce or peaceful resolution to the conflict, despite a number of opportunities for doing so.
· Instead, we see the attempts by NATO to supply more and more heavy armaments shipped to a Ukraine military untrained in their use.
· A 2/3’s majority of U.N. member nations refused to cooperate in the U.S., U.K.-led sanction regime imposed as part of the economic and trade war directed against Russia.
· The failure to adequately explain to the American public why Ukraine could not remain a non-aligned and neutral country that could actually serve as the nexus for establishing a vital hub for East-west trade and transport, leading to much-needed development and economic benefit to the trans-national Eurasian continent.
· Why the national security interests of Ukraine/Russian relations are clandestinely undermined by U.S. foreign policy interests that suborn the traditional ethnic and religious ties these two nations have had with each other for centuries.
· Oh yeah! What about those bio-labs we learned about in recent congressional hearings?
· No mention of the estimated 14,000 civilians killed by (the Kyiv regime’s) incessant bombing of the Russian-leaning Donbas region in eastern Ukraine since 2014.
I can almost hear Dan Bongino, another Fox News analyst who has his own Saturday night program on Fox deliver his line about “the news they didn’t tell you about”. Yeah, no B.S. Bongino. But, of course, he’s not going to tell you anything about the above bullet points either. And that’s because the corporate-owned and controlled media he agrees to appear on has its marching orders. And those orders—at least when it comes to this Ukraine mess—are anything but fair and balanced.
The Great One Levin assures us he is no neo-con. He is no warmonger. But the only solution he and his guests can come up with is to take the fight to Putin. More war. Not to escalate the war, mind you, but to defend freedom and liberty! Where have these closet liberators been since 2014 while the Kyiv regime indiscriminately and incessantly bombed Donetsk and Lugansk?
Is it really too late for diplomacy? Are there no back channels that can be deployed to talk about ways to avoid further conflict? Do you support our NATO bloc of nations resorting to bifurcating the entire world into a new cold war scenario?
It's already been ascertained that Zelensky, the besieged Ukrainian president has already been instructed by his NATO sponsors to not accept any terms for a truce any time soon. This may be old news or non-news by now.
The really sad part aside from the regrettable humanitarian crisis that is unfolding and the incalculable sorrow of this situation is that no one with a microphone and a viewing audience seems to be the least worried that we are saber-rattling with a formidable, nuclear-armed foe. Shouldn’t we be engaged in de-escalating the hostilities with all our might as though all of humanity’s fate hangs in the balance?
There is some hope that cooler heads shall prevail. Despite some really smart people, including Mark Levin who I admire for his brilliance and adept locution, not having a clue about what it will take to give peace a chance; there are more sane solutions being offered. What is lacking is a popular media that will circulate these ideas in a big way.
Mark. Have a look at something here you may not have considered. Economic development and collaboration, not embargos and sanctions, are the trajectory to international peace. Open the envelope, please…
The LaRouche Plan for a New International Economic Architecture