CURRENT EVENTS April 7- 14

[nycfan]

Binance Seeks to Curb U.S. Oversight While in Deal Talks With Trump’s Crypto Company​

Executives for the cryptocurrency exchange met with Treasury officials last month after the company entered into talks with a Trump family venture​

—> https://www.wsj.com/finance/regulat...c3?st=EvWwXZ&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink

“… The Binance executives asked Treasury officials in Washington to remove a U.S. monitor that oversees the exchange’s compliance with anti-money-laundering laws, some of the people said. The move would mark a first step toward returning the company, which in 2023 pleaded guilty to violating those laws, to the U.S. market.

Binance has also been in talks to list a new dollar-pegged cryptocurrency from World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by President Trump’s family, other people familiar with the discussions said.

Listing the token, known as a stablecoin, could catapult it into a huge market and potentially bring in billions in profit for the family.

Those dealings mark the progression of a growing alliance between the Trump family and Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which paid a record $4.3 billion fine for allowing terrorists, drug traffickers and sanctioned actors to move billions of dollars through its exchange.

The Treasury talks took place after Binance had already begun discussing deals with representatives of the Trump family. …”

 

[nycfan]

Binance Seeks to Curb U.S. Oversight While in Deal Talks With Trump’s Crypto Company​

Executives for the cryptocurrency exchange met with Treasury officials last month after the company entered into talks with a Trump family venture​

—> https://www.wsj.com/finance/regulat...c3?st=EvWwXZ&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink

“… The Binance executives asked Treasury officials in Washington to remove a U.S. monitor that oversees the exchange’s compliance with anti-money-laundering laws, some of the people said. The move would mark a first step toward returning the company, which in 2023 pleaded guilty to violating those laws, to the U.S. market.

Binance has also been in talks to list a new dollar-pegged cryptocurrency from World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by President Trump’s family, other people familiar with the discussions said.

Listing the token, known as a stablecoin, could catapult it into a huge market and potentially bring in billions in profit for the family.

Those dealings mark the progression of a growing alliance between the Trump family and Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which paid a record $4.3 billion fine for allowing terrorists, drug traffickers and sanctioned actors to move billions of dollars through its exchange.

The Treasury talks took place after Binance had already begun discussing deals with representatives of the Trump family. …”

“… The more of its USD1 stablecoins in circulation, the more the Trump family could profit from the assets underpinning the token’s value. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, reported $13 billion in profit last year.

For Binance, Trump’s presidential power could help free the company of its legal woes. The company’s 2023 agreement with U.S. authorities placed onerous restrictions on the once freewheeling exchange, requiring it to remove all of its American customers, report all previous suspicious transactions, and cooperate with two independent monitors appointed by the Treasury and Justice departments last May to serve for five and three years, respectively.

Binance is also seeking a pardon for its convicted founder, Changpeng Zhao, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Zhao served four months in prison last year after pleading guilty to related charges, and a pardon would make it easier for the company to return to the U.S. ….”

 

[nycfan]

“… The more of its USD1 stablecoins in circulation, the more the Trump family could profit from the assets underpinning the token’s value. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, reported $13 billion in profit last year.

For Binance, Trump’s presidential power could help free the company of its legal woes. The company’s 2023 agreement with U.S. authorities placed onerous restrictions on the once freewheeling exchange, requiring it to remove all of its American customers, report all previous suspicious transactions, and cooperate with two independent monitors appointed by the Treasury and Justice departments last May to serve for five and three years, respectively.

Binance is also seeking a pardon for its convicted founder, Changpeng Zhao, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Zhao served four months in prison last year after pleading guilty to related charges, and a pardon would make it easier for the company to return to the U.S. ….”

“… The Trump family’s embrace of Binance captures a strange dynamic in the White House. The crypto tycoons that previous administrations pursued for helping the U.S. government’s foes move their funds—Russian sanctions evaders, Islamic terrorist groups, Mexican drug cartels, global fraud rings—are now doing business with the president and members of his inner circle.

Trump has already pardoned a string of crypto felons, including BitMEX exchange co-founder Arthur Hayes, who pleaded guilty to violating the same U.S. anti-money-laundering law as Zhao.

Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain network, is World Liberty’s largest outside investor and advises the company. More than half of all illicit crypto activity last year—some $26 billion—took place on Tron, blockchain researcher TRM Labs estimates.

In February, after he invested $75 million into World Liberty’s token, the Securities and Exchange Commission asked a court to pause a fraud lawsuit against Sun.

Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department had been investigating Sun for suspected financial crimes, people familiar with the case said. It couldn’t be learned whether the inquiry is ongoing.

As part of Zhao’s plea deal, he agreed to give evidence on Sun to prosecutors, some of the people said. That arrangement hasn’t previously been reported. The Justice Department declined to comment. …”

 

[nycfan]

Trump Authorizes Pentagon to Take Over Public Land at Southern Border​

Administration had been planning for weeks to potentially use the Pentagon-controlled zone as a place to temporarily hold migrants​

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/trump-authorizes-pentagon-to-take-over-public-land-at-southern-border-feaf9a4e?mod=mhp

“… In a presidential memorandum released Friday evening, Trump ordered the Defense Department to have authority over the Roosevelt Reservation, among other public lands. American-Indian reservations are exempt from the order.

“Our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats,” Trump’s order read. “The complexity of the current situation requires that our military take a more direct role in securing our southern border than in the recent past.”

The move would ultimately mean that the military’s massive budget can be more directly tapped for border security.

The administration had been planning for weeks to transfer control of such lands to the military and potentially use the zone as a place to temporarily hold migrants who enter the U.S. illegally, according to defense officials. Many U.S. detention centers have been at their highest levels in years, creating a bottleneck for the White House goals of mass deportations. …”

 

[nycfan]

“… The shroud of opacity cloaking ice’s activities has made it increasingly difficult to trust any information supplied by the agency—especially information the Administration presents willingly. In the first several weeks of Trump’s current term, the White House launched a public-relations campaign highlighting seventy-two cases in which icearrested allegedly dangerous criminals.

Maria Sacchetti, an immigration reporter at the Washington Post, investigated the individual stories, and found that at least half the men whom ice claimed to have arrested were already in government custody.

“Hints that they were already incarcerated are in the White House’s photos,” Sacchetti wrote. “Some inmates are dressed in prison uniforms, while others appear against a backdrop of cinder-block walls or industrial doors.” …”

 

[p5mmr9]

lol@Axios

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/11/john-thune-senate-republicans-recess-votes-trump

The money shot:

• Thune had to constantly haggle with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on vote times, and delays from Democrats have been particularly draining, Republicans told Axios.

I'm glad Axios asked them if they are tired.

 

[altmin]

Ice director wants to run deportations like ‘Amazon Prime for human beings’

Todd Lyons said he wanted US immigration agency to be ‘like a business’ in its deportation process

www.theguardian.com

he head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said he would like the agency to implement a system of trucks that rounds up immigrants for deportation in a system similar to how Amazon delivers packages around the US.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, said. He said that he wanted to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”. His comments were first reported by the Arizona Mirror.

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

$150B in 2026 sounds like a lot less than previously touted …

“… Some of it is just absurd, like people getting unemployment insurance who haven’t been born yet!”

Musk’s Latest Fraud Finding Isn’t What It Seems​

His team found cases of seemingly fake people receiving unemployment benefits. But that fake data exists for a reason.

Musk’s Latest Fraud Finding Isn’t What It Seems

His team found cases of seemingly fake people receiving unemployment benefits. But that fake data exists for a reason.

www.nytimes.com

“… He shared a claim by the group that it had even uncovered someone with a birth date in 2154 who claimed $41,000 in unemployment.

These were, indeed, probably fake people — but in a different way than Mr. Musk seemed to realize. It was also most likely a case of his team discovering fraud that had already been discovered by someone else.

… To preserve records of that fraud [during a flood of claims during the pandemic] and protect victims of the identity theft, the U.S. Labor Department encouraged state agencies that administer unemployment benefits to create “pseudo claim” records — in effect, to tie real cases of fraud in their data to make-believe people.

The implausibility of the records was the point.

Agencies were seeking a way to keep track of fraud claims while detaching them from the identities of innocent people who might one day apply for unemployment benefits themselves.

Now four years later, Mr. Musk and his team appear to have found those make-believe people.

… The cases they cite probably do refer to real instances of people fraudulently receiving benefits, said current and former unemployment officials with the Labor Department and state work force agencies. But it is not the case, those officials said, that a hapless government was duped into doling out benefits to people it didn’t realize weren’t even born yet. …”

 

[nycfan]

Musk’s Latest Fraud Finding Isn’t What It Seems​

His team found cases of seemingly fake people receiving unemployment benefits. But that fake data exists for a reason.

Musk’s Latest Fraud Finding Isn’t What It Seems

His team found cases of seemingly fake people receiving unemployment benefits. But that fake data exists for a reason.

www.nytimes.com

“… He shared a claim by the group that it had even uncovered someone with a birth date in 2154 who claimed $41,000 in unemployment.

These were, indeed, probably fake people — but in a different way than Mr. Musk seemed to realize. It was also most likely a case of his team discovering fraud that had already been discovered by someone else.

… To preserve records of that fraud [during a flood of claims during the pandemic] and protect victims of the identity theft, the U.S. Labor Department encouraged state agencies that administer unemployment benefits to create “pseudo claim” records — in effect, to tie real cases of fraud in their data to make-believe people.

The implausibility of the records was the point.

Agencies were seeking a way to keep track of fraud claims while detaching them from the identities of innocent people who might one day apply for unemployment benefits themselves.

Now four years later, Mr. Musk and his team appear to have found those make-believe people.

… The cases they cite probably do refer to real instances of people fraudulently receiving benefits, said current and former unemployment officials with the Labor Department and state work force agencies. But it is not the case, those officials said, that a hapless government was duped into doling out benefits to people it didn’t realize weren’t even born yet. …”

“… A benefit that’s easy to access can let in more fraud. And in the spring of 2020, Congress erred on the side of creating an easily accessible program when it temporarily expanded unemployment assistance.

“This was a decision made by Congress and signed by President Trump that we were going to focus on getting benefits out the door quickly, and that we were going to cover as many people as possible,” said Michele Evermore, a senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance who was previously an adviser at the Employment and Training Administration within the Labor Department.

That was the right call in retrospect, she said, given how quickly the labor market recovered from the pandemic shock.

But initially, this choice also led to a lot of fraud (as happened with other pandemic-era benefits). More guardrails were eventually added to the program, and the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act invested in helping states identify and combat unemployment fraud….”

 

[nycfan]

Crazy to see this befall the GOP after decades of (often justifiably) deriding the left for sympathies for the Soviet Union.

 

[nycfan]

Crazy to see this befall the GOP after decades of (often justifiably) deriding the left for sympathies for the Soviet Union.

“… It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this pivot, as Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes global extremism and disinformation, points out. “If, in fact, we are witnessing a total ideological shift of America away from its post-World War II role as guarantor of the international order and an alignment with Putin and other authoritarian nationalists against the old allies that constituted the liberal world order,” she says, “there couldn’t be anything more dramatic than that.”

… Trump’s policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less than turning America’s dark double into its kindred soul.

Some administration officials and their allies have characterized this as a strategy — a “reverse Kissinger.”

Rather than trying to undermine Russia by making peace with China, the argument goes, Trump is trying to isolate China — an even more daunting rival — by building closer ties to Russia. It’s the America First version of realpolitik. As Vice President JD Vance has said, it would be “ridiculous” for the United States “to push Russia into the hands of the Chinese.”

Others see it as primarily personal. Trump has never made a secret of his affinity for Putin, and the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election only brought the two leaders closer together.

“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during his meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky.

Putin has worked the personal angle. Last month, he told Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, that he went to his local church to pray for Trump when he was shot last summer and gave Witkoff a portrait of the American president that he had commissioned. Witkoff, in turn, eagerly shared these stories in an interview with Tucker Carlson. …”

 

[nycfan]

“… It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this pivot, as Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes global extremism and disinformation, points out. “If, in fact, we are witnessing a total ideological shift of America away from its post-World War II role as guarantor of the international order and an alignment with Putin and other authoritarian nationalists against the old allies that constituted the liberal world order,” she says, “there couldn’t be anything more dramatic than that.”

… Trump’s policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less than turning America’s dark double into its kindred soul.

Some administration officials and their allies have characterized this as a strategy — a “reverse Kissinger.”

Rather than trying to undermine Russia by making peace with China, the argument goes, Trump is trying to isolate China — an even more daunting rival — by building closer ties to Russia. It’s the America First version of realpolitik. As Vice President JD Vance has said, it would be “ridiculous” for the United States “to push Russia into the hands of the Chinese.”

Others see it as primarily personal. Trump has never made a secret of his affinity for Putin, and the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election only brought the two leaders closer together.

“Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during his meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky.

Putin has worked the personal angle. Last month, he told Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, that he went to his local church to pray for Trump when he was shot last summer and gave Witkoff a portrait of the American president that he had commissioned. Witkoff, in turn, eagerly shared these stories in an interview with Tucker Carlson. …”

“… Seen through a different lens, though, the reorienting of America’s relationship with its imaginary twin is not about geopolitical maneuvering or the president’s personal proclivities. It’s about the improbable triumph of a set of ideas — political and cultural — that have been bubbling up on the American right for years.

… After his re-election as president in 2012, Putin took Russia in a new direction. He adopted a crusade of his own against Western “decadence” and “the destruction of traditional values,” beginning with a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. “propaganda,” part of an effort to win over conservative Russians who had been disillusioned by their country’s post-Soviet turn toward the West.

… As [Pat] Buchanan saw it, the great struggle of the 21st century wasn’t a geopolitical battle between East and West, or freedom and oppression. It was a cultural battle between traditionalists and the secular, multicultural, global elite.

In this context, America’s crusade to spread democracy was bound to lead it astray. “If communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation,” he wrote in the early ’90s, “democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind’s ills, hope of the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.”

… In 2013, Buchanan turned his gaze toward Russia. He had recently published his best-selling book “Suicide of a Superpower,” bemoaning what he saw as America’s ongoing social, moral and cultural disintegration. It was an apocalyptic warning about the country’s declining birthrates, the diminishing influence of Christianity, the vanishing nuclear family and what Buchanan called “third world” immigration. Chapter titles included “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.”

Against this backdrop, Buchanan saw Putin as an inspiration.

While Obama condemned the Russian president as an enemy of American values, Buchanan embraced him as one of his own. “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he wrote in 2013 in The American Conservative. “In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?”

When Russia annexed Crimea the following year, Buchanan characterized the invasion as part of Putin’s divine plan to establish Moscow as “the Godly City of today and command post of the counterreformation against the new paganism.”
… Putin’s critiques of Europe’s liberal immigration policies and his talk of rebuilding a Russia with citizens who felt “a spiritual connection to our Motherland” resonated. “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European,” the right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter said in 2017.

… In 2017, Christopher Caldwell, now a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a think tank closely aligned with the Trump movement, paved the way with an address at the conservative Christian Hillsdale College titled “How to Think About Vladimir Putin.” He praised Putin’s refusal to accept a “subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders,” and described him as “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.” …”

 

[nycfan]

“… Seen through a different lens, though, the reorienting of America’s relationship with its imaginary twin is not about geopolitical maneuvering or the president’s personal proclivities. It’s about the improbable triumph of a set of ideas — political and cultural — that have been bubbling up on the American right for years.

… After his re-election as president in 2012, Putin took Russia in a new direction. He adopted a crusade of his own against Western “decadence” and “the destruction of traditional values,” beginning with a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. “propaganda,” part of an effort to win over conservative Russians who had been disillusioned by their country’s post-Soviet turn toward the West.

… As [Pat] Buchanan saw it, the great struggle of the 21st century wasn’t a geopolitical battle between East and West, or freedom and oppression. It was a cultural battle between traditionalists and the secular, multicultural, global elite.

In this context, America’s crusade to spread democracy was bound to lead it astray. “If communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation,” he wrote in the early ’90s, “democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind’s ills, hope of the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.”

… In 2013, Buchanan turned his gaze toward Russia. He had recently published his best-selling book “Suicide of a Superpower,” bemoaning what he saw as America’s ongoing social, moral and cultural disintegration. It was an apocalyptic warning about the country’s declining birthrates, the diminishing influence of Christianity, the vanishing nuclear family and what Buchanan called “third world” immigration. Chapter titles included “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.”

Against this backdrop, Buchanan saw Putin as an inspiration.

While Obama condemned the Russian president as an enemy of American values, Buchanan embraced him as one of his own. “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he wrote in 2013 in The American Conservative. “In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?”

When Russia annexed Crimea the following year, Buchanan characterized the invasion as part of Putin’s divine plan to establish Moscow as “the Godly City of today and command post of the counterreformation against the new paganism.”
… Putin’s critiques of Europe’s liberal immigration policies and his talk of rebuilding a Russia with citizens who felt “a spiritual connection to our Motherland” resonated. “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European,” the right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter said in 2017.

… In 2017, Christopher Caldwell, now a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a think tank closely aligned with the Trump movement, paved the way with an address at the conservative Christian Hillsdale College titled “How to Think About Vladimir Putin.” He praised Putin’s refusal to accept a “subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders,” and described him as “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.” …”

“… Putin’s rhetoric and policies are designed, in part, for American consumption.

“He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the 20th century,” Zygar wrote last year in Foreign Affairs.

The strategy seems to have worked out better than even Putin could have imagined. In the many years since Buchanan first praised the Russian president, his fans have moved from the margins of conservative media to the center of White House decision-making. The soft power is paying hard dividends as American foreign policy bends in Russia’s direction.

… The reorientation of America’s Russia policy, then, may say less about the persuasiveness of a set of beliefs than it does about the takeover of the Republican Party by a group of ideologues who have been welcomed in from the fringe.

In this sense, they are no different from the neoconservatives and globalists who drew Buchanan’s wrath 20 years ago by committing the United States to unpopular wars in the name of ideology.“

 

[nycfan]

From The linked Atlantic 2019 article:

“… Paul Hollander wrote of the hospitality showered on sympathetic Western visitors to the Communist world: the banquets in Moscow thrown for George Bernard Shaw, the feasts laid out for Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag in North Vietnam. But his conclusion was that these performances were not the key to explaining why some Western intellectuals became enamored of communism.

Far more important was their estrangement and alienation from their own cultures: “Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels.”

Hollander was writing about left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century, and many such people are still around, paying court to left-wing dictators in Venezuela or Bolivia who dislike America. There are also, in our society as in most others, quite a few people who are paid to help America’s enemies, or to spread their propaganda. There always have been.

But in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America. And their motives are curiously familiar.

All around them, they see degeneracy, racial mixing, demographic change, “political correctness,” same-sex marriage, religious decline. The America that they actually inhabit no longer matches the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America that they remember, or think they remember.

And so they have begun to look abroad, seeking to find the spiritually unified, ethnically pure nations that, they imagine, are morally stronger than their own. Nations, for example, such as Russia.

The pioneer of this search was Patrick Buchanan …”

 

[nycfan]

From The linked Atlantic 2019 article:

“… Paul Hollander wrote of the hospitality showered on sympathetic Western visitors to the Communist world: the banquets in Moscow thrown for George Bernard Shaw, the feasts laid out for Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag in North Vietnam. But his conclusion was that these performances were not the key to explaining why some Western intellectuals became enamored of communism.

Far more important was their estrangement and alienation from their own cultures: “Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels.”

Hollander was writing about left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century, and many such people are still around, paying court to left-wing dictators in Venezuela or Bolivia who dislike America. There are also, in our society as in most others, quite a few people who are paid to help America’s enemies, or to spread their propaganda. There always have been.

But in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America. And their motives are curiously familiar.

All around them, they see degeneracy, racial mixing, demographic change, “political correctness,” same-sex marriage, religious decline. The America that they actually inhabit no longer matches the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America that they remember, or think they remember.

And so they have begun to look abroad, seeking to find the spiritually unified, ethnically pure nations that, they imagine, are morally stronger than their own. Nations, for example, such as Russia.

The pioneer of this search was Patrick Buchanan …”

“… Buchanan has come to admire the Russian president because he is “standing up for traditional values against Western cultural elites.” Once again, he feels the shimmering lure of that elusive sense of “unity” and purpose that complicated, diverse, quarrelsome America always lacks.

Impressed with the Russian president’s use of Orthodox pageantry at public events, Buchanan even believes that “Putin is trying to re-establish the Orthodox Church as the moral compass of the nation it had been for 1,000 years before Russia fell captive to the atheistic and pagan ideology of Marxism.”

… He is not alone. The belief that Russia is on our side in the war against secularism and sexual decadence is shared by a host of American Christian leaders, as well as their colleagues on the European far right.

Among them, for example, are the movers and shakers behind the World Congress of Families, an American evangelical and anti-gay-rights organization that Buchanan has explicitly praised. One of the WCF’s former leaders, Larry Jacobs, once declared that “the Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world.”

… Ironically, during the Reagan administration, [Tucker] Carlson’s father ran Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast American values into the U.S.S.R. Or maybe this is not an irony, but rather an explanation.

… Fortunately for all such critics, they don’t have to spend much time in the country they are “rooting” for, because there is no greater fantasy than the idea that Russia is a country of Christian values. In reality, Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, nearly double that of the United States. It has an extremely low record of church attendance, though the numbers are difficult to measure, not least because any form of Christianity outside of the state-controlled Orthodox Church is liable to be considered a cult. A 2012 survey showed that religion plays an important role in the lives of only 15 percent of Russians. Only 5 percent have read the Bible.

… Russia has an actual province, Chechnya, that is officially ruled by Sharia law. The local regime tolerates polygamy, requires women to be veiled in public places, and tortures gay men. It is a no-go zone, right inside Russia.

… As for Putin himself, there is no evidence that this former KGB officer has actually converted, but plenty of evidence that Putin’s recent public displays of Christianity are just as cynical as Stalin’s vaunted love for the working classes. Among other things, they are useful precisely because they can hoodwink naive foreigners.

 

[nycfan]

“… Buchanan has come to admire the Russian president because he is “standing up for traditional values against Western cultural elites.” Once again, he feels the shimmering lure of that elusive sense of “unity” and purpose that complicated, diverse, quarrelsome America always lacks.

Impressed with the Russian president’s use of Orthodox pageantry at public events, Buchanan even believes that “Putin is trying to re-establish the Orthodox Church as the moral compass of the nation it had been for 1,000 years before Russia fell captive to the atheistic and pagan ideology of Marxism.”

… He is not alone. The belief that Russia is on our side in the war against secularism and sexual decadence is shared by a host of American Christian leaders, as well as their colleagues on the European far right.

Among them, for example, are the movers and shakers behind the World Congress of Families, an American evangelical and anti-gay-rights organization that Buchanan has explicitly praised. One of the WCF’s former leaders, Larry Jacobs, once declared that “the Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world.”

… Ironically, during the Reagan administration, [Tucker] Carlson’s father ran Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast American values into the U.S.S.R. Or maybe this is not an irony, but rather an explanation.

… Fortunately for all such critics, they don’t have to spend much time in the country they are “rooting” for, because there is no greater fantasy than the idea that Russia is a country of Christian values. In reality, Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, nearly double that of the United States. It has an extremely low record of church attendance, though the numbers are difficult to measure, not least because any form of Christianity outside of the state-controlled Orthodox Church is liable to be considered a cult. A 2012 survey showed that religion plays an important role in the lives of only 15 percent of Russians. Only 5 percent have read the Bible.

… Russia has an actual province, Chechnya, that is officially ruled by Sharia law. The local regime tolerates polygamy, requires women to be veiled in public places, and tortures gay men. It is a no-go zone, right inside Russia.

… As for Putin himself, there is no evidence that this former KGB officer has actually converted, but plenty of evidence that Putin’s recent public displays of Christianity are just as cynical as Stalin’s vaunted love for the working classes. Among other things, they are useful precisely because they can hoodwink naive foreigners.

“… The American intellectuals who now find themselves alienated from the country that they inhabit aren’t interested in reality. They are interested in a fantasy nation, different and distinct from their own hateful country.

… Most of them know that this fantasy foreign nation they admire seeks to put an end to all of that. It seeks to undermine American democracy, beat back American influence, and curtail American power. But to those who dislike American democracy, despair of American influence, and are angered by American power? That, truly, is the point.”

 

[nycfan]

 

[nycfan]

 

[Silence Dogood]

When the adults are in charge