Brandan P. Buck
@brandan_buck
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Historian | Writer Writes on domestic opposition to US foreign policy Words w/ @LibertarianInst , @RStatecraft Husband, Father, and Greyhound Appreciator
Culpeper, Virginia
Joined March 2021
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Thanks again to
@JustinTLogan
and
@CatoFP
for having
@VictoriaCoates
and I on to talk about the foreign policy debates with the
@GOP
, past and present.
For more of the history, visit my blog:
LIVE NOW: “Old Right, New Right? What History Suggests about the Future of GOP Foreign Policy” with
@brandan_buck
,
@VictoriaCoates
&
@JustinTLogan
.
WATCH:
Join the conversation using
#CatoFP
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@dbenner83
A slight quibble with Carlson's history: the Right didn't uniformly accept the orthodox line on the bombings until well into the 1970s. Many of the early a-bomb dropping disrespecters were conservatives
"At Hiroshima the target was the heart of a teeming city. The great majority of those obliterated were civilians, including thousands of children trapped in the 33 schools that were destroyed."
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I don't oppose American foreign policy because I am "pro-fascist" but because I am a former liberal hawk, intelligence professional, and veteran who literally got his hands dirty doing this country's dirty work.
I've seen behind the curtain, and it terrified me.
THREAD
For anyone who doubted that Biden's gambit to tie anti-US proxy war effort to fascism, here's another data point, in
@atlantic
today:
"today’s anti-war caucus is objectively pro-fascist."
Read more as Kirchick smears QI, Mearshiemer, Chas Freeman, et al
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@Kurt_Steiner
Yet it's so pervasive that popular understandings of the war are often motivated by this absurd counter factual.
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I'd crawl over broken glass to vote for a president who vowed to deliver the State of the Union in print.
This pseudo-monarchical nonsense has gone on long enough.
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@DecampDave
Why does everyone assume that whoever comes after Putin will be better from the American perspective?
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@Cirincione
@djrothkopf
Here's the legacy you're supporting
@Cirincione
:
Debates about war and peace are central to a functioning republic. Silencing them with slander and guilt by association to implement the politics you claim to abhor.
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Why focus on US policy? Because my government is in D.C., not Moscow. I cannot compel Putin's actions, but through my vote and voice, perhaps I can do so here at home and perhaps dial down the escalatory cycle which is inching us closer to nuclear war.
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@gerardtbaker
@MacaesBruno
This narrative is ahistorical. The United States was thoroughly involved in international affairs prior to Pearl Harbor. The US has an empire in the Pacific, was an active trading partner with Europe, and chose a side in WWI, a war that it had no security interest in entering.
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If only the neocons hadn't spent decades purging dissenting voices from the Right, Boot may have come to this conclusion before hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, trillions of dollars were wasted, and thousands of vets destroyed their lives with substance abuse.
In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking. I am a neocon no more, at least as that term has been understood since 9/11.
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Was there ever a point in US history when urban white guys were NOT anxious about rural white guys being aggrieved? Serious question.
Was there ever a point in US history when rural white guys did NOT feel aggrieved? Serious question.
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@evanishistory
I recently ran into the following remarks on the Foreign Military Sales Act of 1968 from Rep. H.R. Gross (R-IA). Among other things he lamented: "I wonder when these arms and ammunition will come back to haunt
us-when they will be used against us"
If only his peers listened.
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I discovered
@Antiwarcom
,
@scotthortonshow
, and other libertarian commentators while becoming disillusioned with the GWOT.
Their insights aligned with what I saw inside the Blob and confirmed my decision to quit government service. Without their work, perhaps I wouldn't have
Scott has made countless of people aware of the evils of the state, and he has caused people to not join the state's war machine.
He's a hero for the cause of liberty.
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I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
The fundamentals of the economy are strong.
If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.
If you get the vaccine you can't catch COVID.
Etc, etc, etc...
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I've faced death abroad; I won't be silenced by the slurs, smears, and opprobrium here at home.
END
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I'm pleased to share that
@mises
was gracious enough to accept my application for the 2022 Rothbard Graduate Seminar.
I'm honored for the opportunity and look forward to broadening my academic training.
Now, just *how* hot is Alabama in June?
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Tactics like Kirkchick's "guilt by association" and binary thinking are what have gotten us to this place. These moves have narrowed the American mind on US foreign policy and condemned this nation to empire.
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I am proud to have contributed to
@QuincyInst
's mission because, as I learned throughout my career in the military and intelligence, U.S. policy can and has elicited blowback.
No one makes decisions in a vacuum, even nefarious men like Putin.
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@scotthortonshow
The rehabilitation of George W Bush, the Dems' last Hitler™, has been something to behold.
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For those not paying attention, we're in a state of permanent exception.
President Biden is prepared to waive U.S. law prohibiting the production, use or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1 percent to send them to Ukraine, amid concerns about Kyiv’s lagging counteroffensive against Russian troops.
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Here's an obvious fact that bears repeating, World War I came before World War II.
One cannot fully understand Americans' opposition to entering WWII w/o understanding how the Great War brought out the worst in many Americans and created the imperial state.
Start🧵
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I'm nearing the end of the WWI chapter, and it is even more evident why it commands so tiny a place in American memory; it holds little political utility. He's my attempt to capture the anguish in a little over 200 words.
I hope that this chapter makes people mad.
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It is time for your periodic reminder that those who bray the loudest about democracy think you ought to have no say in the important political questions facing the nation.
Opinion: Franklin Roosevelt had a devastating way of discrediting isolationists. Biden could learn from it, writes
@SykesCharlie
.
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I am once again calling for a complete and total shutdown of WWII analogizing until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
History isn't supposed to repeat this closely, the writers are getting lazy
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Blowback abroad is being matched here at home. The toll in blood in treasure is ripping this country apart and fueling the very forces Kirkchick claims to oppose.
Which is another reason to advocate for a change in direction.
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"At Hiroshima the target was the heart of a teeming city. The great majority of those obliterated were civilians, including thousands of children trapped in the 33 schools that were destroyed."
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"If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.
Noted populist radical madman, Gen. Dwight D Eisenhower, 1951
Next in our reported-out 2025 Trump policy stakes series went up this a.m. and will be Sunday NYT front: the prospect of withdrawing the USA from or gutting NATO, abandoning Ukraine and a retreat from Europe. w/
@jonathanvswan
&
@maggieNYT
Gift link:
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@politico
@SykesCharlie
He also illegally sicced the FBI on his political opponents, thereby violating the very norms of a liberal, democratic society that he claimed he wanted to uphold.
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Just once, I'd like those who invoke WWII to note that to defeat right-wing totalitarianism, took an alliance with left-wing totalitarianism (Stalin) and right-wing authoritarians (ie, Chiang) and say nothing of Britain and France's own empires.
History isn't a morality play.
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The best part about Republican platitudes is that they know that they're not serious and Democrats pretend to think that they're serious.
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Killing over 300k Iraq civilians and over 4k Americans just to create a client state for Iran, thereby throwing the whole region into further turmoil, was not, in fact, a victory.
(Also though it was a mistake to launch it in the first place and it took a long time we actually won the war in Iraq. thanks. I’m not taking questions at this time)
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Military Keynesianism is a hell of a drug.
Unless you're directly employed by the MIC, this is a losing proposition. Military spending doesn't create wealth, at best it reallocates, at worst, destroys it.
The State Department and NATO HQ are giving European officials talking points to sell the alliance to Americans.
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For those not keeping score at home, advocating for political and social norms from 10 years ago is "fascist," but arming and training the grandsons of the Galician SS is just one of those "Thorny Issues of History."
Never stop being you
@nytimes
The decision by some Ukrainian soldiers to wear patches with Nazi icons threatens to reinforce Russian propaganda used to justify the invasion. It also could give the symbols mainstream life after the West's decades-long efforts to eliminate them.
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Some notable admissions and even more interesting omissions in this military. com piece. Regardless of how one feels about this issue, since the start of the AVF, white recruits have constituted an outsized presence in the combat arms🧵
From my own work:
Scoop: The Army's recruitment of white soldiers has plummeted in the past 5 years, making up much of the recruiting shortfall.
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"It is popular these days to say 'follow the science.' Well, the science shows that there is no mystery to rural rage: Years of neglect, abandonment, and scorn have driven rural America to view 'experts' like Schaller and Waldman as the enemy."
🔥
Two researchers whose work was cited in WHITE RURAL RAGE say the book misrepresents their work, and other scholars' work too.
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Military Keynesianism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Conservatives (at least pretend) to reject this kind of logic on social spending, but when it comes to the MIC, it's money printer go brrrrrrrrr.
Sorry
@HawleyMO
that’s flat wrong. Missouri has received (over your objections) over $600 million in Ukraine aid. That money is going to build two weapons systems for Ukraine in St. Charles, Mo - the Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range (JDAM ER) and the Ground Launched
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I just hit send on an email to my committee containing the first draft of my dissertation, "Partisans of the Old Republic: Right-Wing Opposition to U.S. Foreign Policy." 5 years of work into five chapters and over 88k words (not counting notes).
It is time for a well-deserved nap
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Fellow GWOT bros, never forget that those who sent you to war had "better things to do" when it was their turn.
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How I must have looked to my colleagues as I spent the last 40 minutes explaining MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, and Operation CHAOS.
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@Kurt_Steiner
I wonder how much of the American pop obsession with this is motivated by simple main character syndrome, a desire to place the U.S. at the center of the story (where it doesn't belong), vs. a political statement, injecting the Brown Scare into pop culture.
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I am resharing my old piece with
@Antiwarcom
for no particular reason.
💪 Together, we can take on any challenge.
🪂 Jump into the unlimited
#ArmyPossibilities
to
#BeAllYouCanBe
at
#MondayMotivation
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Let's not fool ourselves here, folks.
Wait what??? Anti-dictatorship is controversial? What is wrong with you? Are you anti-democracy? You’ve demonstrated that you’re pro-hate and extremism.
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@scotthortonshow
I'm not a fan of FDR, but at least he led with "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
Now it's, "We have everything to fear including fear itself."
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Thank you to the
@LibertarianInst
for publishing my latest, a piece that explores the
#FBI
's role in a domestic panic that birthed the early national security state...and its implications for current foreign policy "debate."
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It is time for your periodic reminder that "isolationism" is a nonsense word meant to control the terms of foreign policy debate.
Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin Slams American Non-Interventionists
From
@DecampDave
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has hit out at Americans who prefer a less interventionist foreign policy, smearing them as isolationists who want to see the US “retreat from responsibility.”
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Good lord, I guess it is true what they say about the fighting commitment of Appalachistan.
#koreanwar
#digitalhumanities
And now for Korea:
Throwing Korea into the mix complicates things as Vietnam was something of an egalitarian outlier, as morbid as that sounds.
Yet, a number of populated counties lost residents to the Korean War relative to the national per capita of 23.17 lives per 100k. 🧵⤵️
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Military Keynesianism is a hell of a drug, and a bipartisan one at that.
#merchantsofdeath
Standing with our allies against Russian aggression isn't charity. In fact – it's a direct investment in replenishing America’s arsenal with American weapons built by American workers. Expanding our defense industrial base puts America in a stronger position to out-compete China.
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Since we are all making Mises great again today, my first exposure to LvM was through two of his shorter works, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality and Burueracy, which I found while pursuing the economics section of a used book store. Bangers abound.
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@Kurt_Steiner
"God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America."
-Otto von Bismarck (allegedly).
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I am calling for a complete and total shutdown of the sunk cost fallacy until we figure out what the hell is going on.
The West has now gone too far in supporting Ukraine to afford failing. It can’t step back. It would be an unsustainable loss of face and a geopolitical disaster. Therefore it sounds reasonable to forecast it will do whatever is necessary to avoid a defeat of Ukraine.
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Often overlooked in popular debate around American "isolationism" is the Great War and its ramifications.
Below is an essay that seeks to recenter that war and the anguish it made.
"When 'Isolationism' Won: The Other World War and the Ascent of Dissent"
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"No one's" is doing a lot of work in this sentence.
Intelligence leaks surrounding who blew up most of the Russian-backed Nord Stream pipelines last September have provided more questions than answers. It may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.
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"There is no world; there are states with interests."
Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.
@NoahMullins
No, they don't. There is no world; there are states with interests. And, for the record, the US intervened in the war only after it became clear, upon the fall of France, that Hitler would dominate the continent...which was against American interests.
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I used to be on team bomb. But my work on the war in the Pacific convinced me otherwise, as Japan was almost completely isolated by the summer of 45. The logic of the bombing only holds if one believes in the absolute necessity of unconditional surrender.
“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” — Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Who Opposed Nuking Japan?
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@scotthortonshow
I never stopped believing in America, I stopped believing in the American empire.
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Interventionists don’t seem to understand that international treaty organizations create as many incentives to enter conflicts as they deter. And that the U.S. entered the world wars willfully and incrementally. The US was not "isolationist" during the first half of the 20th cen
Many isolationists don’t seem to understand that international treaty organizations like NATO provide for a collective defense and serve as a deterrent to conflict between state actors. Twice in the last century, enemies have proven that oceans are not enough to keep us safe.
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You know it's true...
In reality, some of the worst disasters began with the wrong scientist being obeyed.
You know it's true…
Every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored.
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I never thought I'd say this...but this piece in National Review is a banger. And McLaughlin is right, Frum is attempting to rehabilitate Wilson in order to rehabilitate himself.
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Thanks to
@KelleyBVlahos
and
@RStatecraft
for publishing my latest on the rise of the American information state.
Feeling manipulated? How Uncle Sam perfected the information state
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I spent a day at UVA a few months ago and for the first time ever I walked around a college campus without feeling dead inside.
Architecture is really the simplest test of politics - before you get to messy stuff - and Tucker is right here. The advent of Bauhaus and then Brutalism has made our public spaces ever worse & dispiriting.
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It's one thing to defend the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the policies that preceded them on their merits, but it is ahistorical and sophomoric to say that challenging them is to peddle "Soviet propaganda" or to engage in self-hatred.
If anything, the reverse is true🧵
Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit: foreign affairs edition.
The initial opponents of the bombing and unconditional surrender was the Republican Right, not the Left. But I'm sure Richard knew that already.
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I'm old enough to remember when the organs of the corporate press pretended to care about government surveillance. Oh those hedy days of 2003.
Happy 4th everyone.
Breaking News: A judge limited Biden administration officials from contacting social media sites, a ruling that could curtail efforts to fight disinformation.
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For others, the war in Yemen is an abomination that has no bearing on the safety of Americans.
Progressives, if you opposed the Iraq War during the Bush years, you should oppose this proxy war as well! Call: 833 STOP WAR and tell your Rep that it is time to end US support.
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@scotthortonshow
@MaxBoot
Imagine thinking of a horrific war of attrition, much of which is being fought by conscripts on both sides, as a "great investment."
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Some thoughts on generational turnover and foreign policy attitudes in light of last night's Senate vote.🧵
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@PeterWrangel
I watched a commander order a subordinate to falsify intelligence in order to justify a raid. In horror, I told my boss who said, "yea, that happens sometimes."
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"The South, for America First, was distinctly hostile territory."
Sometimes it doesn't rhyme.
-From Waynes S. Cole, 'America First and the South, 1940-1941,' the Journal of Southern History, 1956
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Since the realignment of the New Deal, the Right in America has, by and large, consisted of yesterday's liberals. Conservatives understand (and often lament) this, but progressives seem to be completely ignorant of it.
And thus, we get pieces like this.
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If humanity ever dumbasses itself into WWIII, it'll be because every midwit in a position of authority is forever reliving WWII.
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Interestingly, according to the piece, the Army declined to share its regional data. Why?
Is there a pattern they don't want to admit to?
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An excellent takedown of Rachel Maddow's latest brown scare fantasies. No folks, America did not stand at the precipice of fascism in the 1930s.
But it did take its first giant steps into becoming a security state.
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One would hope that a man who was unjustly imprisoned by the government for suspicion of disloyalty during wartime wouldn't be cavalier about throwing around such charges in the present, but alas, even those who lived through history are capable of repeating it.
Pro tip: Whenever you see someone saying, “We could be spending that money on X instead of sending it to Ukraine” it probably originated from and was amplified by the Russians.
Be smarter out there. I know for some of you it’s hard.
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@scotthortonshow
This wasn't a controversial topic in conservative circles until the 1980s. Even as late as 1958 National Review (!) ran Harry Elmer Barnes's revisionist essay “Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe.”
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"It was pure accident if a single person slain at Hiroshima had any personal responsibility for the Pearl Harbor outrage. These victims, like ourselves, were merely the helpless instruments of the ruthless Moloch of Totalitarian Government."
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FDR signed Executive Order 9066
#OTD
in 1942.
Remember what happened, but also remember those who opposed it.
Happy birthday to Ralph Carr, the 29th governor of
#Colorado
. Carr, a conservative Republican and anti-New Dealer was a vocal opponent of EO 9066, the internment of US citizens of Japanese descent. He stood against the mob and paid a political price for it
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@scotthortonshow
Ohhhhh, the framing.
"Democracy" doesn't die in darkness; it dies in the pages of the
@washingtonpost
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The DoD is in a real bind. They can't address the two biggest normative issues impacting recruiting as they are also the most politically sensitive: DEI and the fallout from the GWOT.
As the Army admits in the piece, their struggles are likely to continue.
End 🧵
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The Second World War turned the "Merchants of Death" into the "Arsenal of Democracy," normalized the collusive relationship between business and government, and created the domestic security state, all popular developments.
The downstream effects of this cannot be overstated.
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We've gone from space aliens beer balloon leagues in less than 48 hours.
We're in the dumbest timeline.
Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down By USAF
"The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each"
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"We're not making [X] illegal, we're just using the financial and bureaucratic levers of the state to create incentives to force your compliance, lest you lose your job/business/grant/scholarship, etc. Don't be so dramatic!"
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I'm old enough to remember when suggesting that only diplomacy could end this war made one an "appeaser," "un-American," "treasonous," "traitorous," and a "Putin shill."
.
@ZelenskyyUA
demonstrated leadership again today by making clear he is prepared for diplomacy toward a just end to the war Russia started. Russia's response was another wave of missiles. These attacks will not break Ukraine’s will—we will be with Ukraine for as long as it takes.
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To those on the right:
The empire has needlessly killed in your name, debased the currency, corrupted & killed your youth, contributed to opioid crisis, wasted your tax dollars, & cemented your own colonial relationship with D.C.
It is in your interests to end it.
Culture warriors: It does not matter what you believe about any other thing. The US-Saudi-UAE-AQAP war in Yemen must end now.
-There's a ceasefire
-There's a War Powers Resolution HJ 87 in the House right now (Senate soon)
-If we ALL work together we can get it passed
833STOPWAR
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The
#Warparty
is champing at the bit to send more of your children to die for their foreign policy.
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This is cause for disbandment of the DHS under our First Amendment. Which of our representatives will be the one?
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One person's malignant deep state is another's benevolent technocracy.
Celebration parallax stay winning.
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Thank you to the great
@LibertarianInst
for running my response to Charlie Sykes's not-great piece in Politico. Like other regime op-eds, it hinges on a hackneyed WWII analogy that makes a caricature of the past and provides no context to the present.
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If their numbers are down significantly, then more than likely, those regions that had sent their children to fight at the highest rates during the GWOT account for the biggest drop in recruiting.
Looking at the regional patterns v. national per capita averages, the North's decline becomes clear; they go from being 1.05% of the WWII per capita average (300.5) to 83% during the GWOT (1.9).
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Stop me if you've heard this before. A generation of veterans fights a lost war in Afghanistan and come home to a society with which they no longer feel familiar and begin to see themselves as on the political periphery and in an imperial relationship with a distant metropole.
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The ideological engine for America's Cold War was not anticommunism but liberal internationalism.
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"There's a Russian behind every oped" is the new "there's a commie behind every bush."
At least in the old days, there were actual spies in the State Department.
A sudden inflation of articles advocating for a deal with Russia indicates that the Russian authorities are aware of the difficult situation on the frontline and they seek to freeze the conflict in order to secure the territorial gains. Time to double down on support for Ukraine!
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My dad's going to be alright. Be thankful for those in your life.
I try not to post personal stuff, but my dad has to go to the ER tonight. If you can spare some good vibes or a prayer I'd appreciate it.
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I'm old enough to remember when it was high status for liberals to signal their contempt for vague threat warnings and those stupid color coded terror alerts.
Living this way is a choice people.
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