Political Observer.

Under the frame of ‘FALSE DICHOTOMY’

Headline: The Con Artists Who Blame Ukraine Aid for America’s Social Problems

Sub-headline: RFK Jr., Glenn Greenwald, and other Putin apologists are making disingenuous, pseudo-populist arguments against U.S. support for Ukraine.

https://newrepublic.com/article/173902/ukraine-war-cost-russian-propaganda-rfk-jr-greenwald?utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=SF_TNR

The Reader has to be patient with Alaric DeArment’s first two paragraphs of his ‘essay’ that are mere preamble:

A scene of squalor unfolds as the camera moves along a city street lined with apparent drug addicts to the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A caption reads, “While American citizens live on the streets and take drugs not to feel the pain, the United States would rather finance a proxy war against Russia,” while a bar graph says the U.S. has sent $46.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine.

The video, on TikTok, is but one of the countless posts across social media that convey the same underlying message: By helping Ukraine defend itself from bloody subjugation by Russia, the U.S. is depriving its own citizens of critical aid. This pernicious narrative has spread in part thanks to fringe yet popular media and political figures who already had a history of littering the discourse with Kremlinesque talking points, and who now have weaponized and monetized the perception that the U.S. has been too generous to Ukraine and too stingy to its own people.

This kind of hysteria mongering is familiar to those of us who were alive in the McCarthy era, and who eventually read American History, after that dark period. Of what The Republicans of the period called The New Deal as a ‘Generation of Treason’ ! This ‘News Magazine’ it’s editor Tomasky and it’s hireling DeArment are taking their strategy from those desperate Republicans: to defame, discredit and impugn Greenwald, Dore and Kennedy. The Reader need only look at the defamation of Jeremy Corbyn, for a similar exercise in political mendacity, carefully hidden by the whole of the Corporate Press of Britain.

For Propaganda to ‘work’ it must be repeated over and over again to be established as ‘truth’ in the readers thought.

The ‘Evidence’ against Greenwald

Among them is Glenn Greenwald, whose Substack has more than 300,000 subscribers and whose online talk show, System Update, draws hundreds of thousands of views. In December, on Tucker Carlson’s since-canceled Fox News show, Greenwald said, “I’ve been asking since February, in what conceivable way will the lives of American citizens be materially improved? How will you or your family’s lives be protected or fostered by sending tens of billions of dollars, now in excess of $100 billion, for the war in Ukraine?”

The ‘Evidence’ against Dore:

Jimmy Dore, whose YouTube show has more than 1.2 million followers, was a featured speaker at February’s Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington. There, he criticized the “over $100 billion” sent to Kyiv, telling the crowd, “We could have spent that money saving lives with universal health care, but instead we spend that money taking lives overseas, which is our specialty.”

The ‘Evidence’ against Kennedy:

And then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer running a long-shot challenge to President Biden for the Democratic Party nomination. In his campaign announcement speech, Kennedy contrasted the “$113 billion committed to the Ukraine” with the “57 percent of Americans [who] can’t put their hand on $1,000 if they have an emergency,” “one-quarter of Americans [who] go to bed hungry,” and homeless veterans.

That all three use polemics, to not just sharpen their arguments is questionable? or simply just another persuasive strategy ?

All three figures are peddling a false dichotomy and perverting the traditional guns-versus-butter debate, but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. It’s especially salient in the context of polls indicating that Americans’ bipartisan support for aid to Ukraine, while still strong, has softened considerably, and amid a but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustratiopresidential campaign whose outcome could play a pivotal role in Ukraine’s ability to procure aid from the U.S., its strongest backer by far.

How long has it been that American readers have confronted the ‘Guns & Butter’ argument? Since Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the War in Vietnam, led by Technocrat Robert McNamara?

The Charges Against Greenwald, Dore, Kennedy:

All three figures are All three figures are peddling a false dichotomy and perverting the traditional guns-versus-butter debate, but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan., but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Tellingly, the above paragraph undercuts itself:

The resort

But are Greenwald and others merely interested in promoting anti-imperialism while advocating for America’s downtrodden, or are they bad-faith propagandizers for a psychopathic dictator? The evidence is unfavorable to them.

…

But are Greenwald and others merely interested in promoting anti-imperialism while advocating for America’s downtrodden, or are they bad-faith propagandizers for a psychopathic dictator? The evidence is unfavorable to them.

…

And RFK Jr., in a May interview with UnHerd, called the conflict “a U.S. war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world.”

…

Dore’s, Greenwald’s, and Kennedy’s willingness to parrot Kremlin disinformation designed to justify an unprovoked invasion exposes the disingenuousness of their appeals to economic populism.

…

The further I read, the more apparent it is, that this essay is about the defamation of Dore, Greenwald, and Kennedy, by way a defence of the myth of the Post War Liberal Order , that was a central belief/faith of those long disappeared ‘Liberals’: who became obsolete with the rise of Neo-Liberalism, and it’s utter collapse. And the simultaneous rise of the Neo-Conservative’s destructive hegemonic ambitions, that shaped American Foreign Policy, and its War on Terror, that produced 37 million refugees. Not to forget that Tomasky and DeArment are part of The Biden Re-Election Campaign!

Enough!

Political Observer.