Excellent summary of the present state of relations between Russian and American oligarchical clans. Please read and share. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…

The British Nationality Act of 1948 was the catalyst for the destruction of our country. Find out more by reading my article in The Patriot Magazine.

This is claptrap. So, what is the plan? Stop the boats and do what with them? Take them to France? - with no agreement? On what vessels, diverted from which tasks? Have you thought about the French reaction and how to deal with that? If you can’t land them back in France, what are you going to do with them? Order the military to open fire on unarmed people? Really? Good luck with that. Have you any idea what commitments the Royal Marines already have and the huge ramifications of re-tasking them to this in sufficient numbers? I bet you’ve not even got a clue what those ramifications would be. This is not serious, it is reckless, ill-conceived and very badly thought through - not thought through in fact. Once again, Reform’s leadership thinks tough headlines are enough. They are not. Headlines are empty words - just like the Conservative’s promises were for 14 years - unless backed by the detail and thorough planning that success depends on. Restore Britain has a real plan, one that is not dependent on France, will stop the boats, will safeguard the public, will not involve shooting unarmed people, does not involve drawing unsustainably on the military, does involve securing our borders against all threats - not only illegal immigration - and does supplement rather than divert the military. But that’s serious and putting it together involved dull detail that Reform’s leadership seems averse to. Here is a taste of that plan. assets.nationbuilder.com/res…

By the way, if you're wondering what occasioned this post, it is that @mtracey posted what he thought was the identity of Jane Doe in the Cornell case. Turns out he relied on a scammy website and posted the wrong person's name.

Atrocity-denial is the lowest form of punditry. Which explains why it attracts such inveterate bottom-feeders as @aaronjmate and @mtracey. So let’s take a look at their most recent foray into this scummy endeavor: Denying Russia’s forced-deportations of Ukrainian children.🧵

For Western readers who know the Reformation better than Russian imperialism, the Soviet nationality experiment is easier to see if you treat it as the same gamble in a different language. From the 1860s on, the Russian Empire ruthlessly russified the peoples it subjugated. In Ukraine that meant banning the language from public life. The Valuev Circular of 1863 forbade Ukrainian educational and religious books on the grounds that a separate Little Russian language “never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist.” The Ems Ukaz of 1876 extended the ban to most print, imports, theater, and public performance, even song lyrics. That did not endear the Empire to its subjects, and when it collapsed in 1917 Ukrainians formed their own state. So the communists who reconstituted most of the Empire as the “voluntary” Union of Soviet Socialist Republics tried a different method after their re-conquest. 1/4

Mr Hitchens sees himself as a “Great Russian Chauvinist” in this 2013 lecture about why he likes Vladimir Putin (because he stands up to the West!), & wants Putin to put right the “unfair borders imposed on Russia.” Clear enough? google.com/goto?url=CAESYwHr…

Here’s an example of a deliberate distortion of history. If after reading this you came away thinking Slava Ukraini was a fascist slogan because OUN-B used it, and that this is what the phrase is, you could be forgiven: that is the impression the text is structured to achieve. In reality, the expression appears already in 1839 in genitive form, in Taras Shevchenko’s poem To Osnovianenko (glory of Ukraine). He’s not exactly a marginal figure in Ukraine. Chubynsky’s 1862 poem that became the national anthem also opens with “Shche ne vmerla Ukraina, i slava, i volia” (glory and freedom, nominative). In the student community in Kharkiv in the late 1890s, there was already a response, “Po vsii zemli slava!” (glory throughout the land), and this is where Ukraine’s first modern party in Russian-ruled Ukraine, the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, came from. It became a mass slogan during the struggle for independence in 1917-21, and different formations had variants of the reply (eg, Kozakam slava! — the Cossacks; Hetmanu slava! — the hetmanate of Skoropadsky). In 1920, the UNR Army Commander made it the official military reply to praise. The reply “Heroyam slava!” was adopted by the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1925, changing the Cossack response. That’s one of the groups that OUN eventually came out from in 1929. And even then the Bandera wing only officially adopted that response in its 1941 assembly after the split. So, Bandera’s group appropriated a widely used phrase that had been associated with the struggle for nationhood from the start, for nearly a century before they came around. The phrase was suppressed by the Soviets after 1945 but kept alive by the diaspora. It made a comeback with the Revolution on Granite in 1990 and independence. It was used during the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan as well. In 2018, it was made the official greeting of the armed forces (again!) The idea that the OUN-B tainted the phrase with the atrocities it committed is fair. That this makes a fascist slogan of a phrase that belonged to the Ukrainian national movement for nearly a century before them, and to every major Ukrainian mobilization since, is not.

Actually, the Founding Fathers did worry a lot about party politics (they called them factions). They had the British example in front of them: they read Hume, they knew the pattern we now call the Whig Supremacy, and Cromwell’s Protectorate loomed large. They understood that faction can be manipulated. If one party came to dominate, the path was open to monarchical-style rule through a president: first the despotism of the winning faction, then the elevation of its chief. Here’s George Washington literally saying this in his Farewell Address (largely drafted by Hamilton): “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty. Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

My latest for spiked 👇

This is a poor take that suggests he doesn't know much about Russia in the 1990s, including Russia-US or wider Russia-West relations in the 1990s. By giving only one part of the story, he is repeating the Russian political elite's line that it was all the West's fault. Long🧵

Compulsive dealmaking won’t put an end to russian warmaking. Inviting russia's war criminal in chief to Miami will not end war. To a moscow-centered predatory empire, accommodation is encouragement. I explain why in @KyivIndependent kyivindependent.com/washingt…

Setting aside the absolute ignorance of how the economic reforms went in Russia, this idiot believes that nobody but the West has any agency in the world whatsoever. Nothing happens unless “the West” wills it. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Kremlin propaganda has been feeding this nonsense for many years to the Russians as well — they are the perpetual victims of endless plots to encircle them, keep them on their knees, and ensure their poverty, all hatched in London and Washington, and all using other nations as hapless pawns. Putin is the savior, the only man who could break this cycle and Make Russia Great Again! It really is a convenient story to distract everyone from the fact that the cause of Russia’s economic and international problems is the Russian government and its entire system of mafia-style rule. This nonstop idiotic slop has made Russia into the whiniest aggressor the world has ever seen. And cretins like this guy here are exporting it to Western audiences.

Today Boris Johnson is in my native city of Lviv, presenting his memoir at the BookForum. He is still hailed here as a “great friend of Ukraine.” Everyone wants a selfie with Boris. Local politicians scurry after him, desperate to catch a few reflected rays of his glory. All this despite Johnson being a warmonger and neocon who helped derail the 2022 Istanbul peace process with Russia — and despite his later acknowledgment that NATO viewed Ukraine as the battlefield for a proxy war against Russia. He is one of the Western politicians whose decisions bear responsibility for a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives. Yet Ukrainians still thank him, celebrate him, and even name streets after him. Perhaps one day we’ll complete the set with a Boris Johnson Memorial Cemetery. As long as this mentality persists, Ukraine will remain stuck in the shit: less a sovereign country than a Western colony and proving ground, where a Ukrainian life acquires geopolitical value mainly when it can be spent helping to bleed the Russian bear. And somehow we’re expected to call this friendship.

He's a moron. Boris Johnson blamed EU for Russia’s 2014 attacks on Ukraine and was branded ‘Putin apologist’ Future prime minister was condemned for arguing Brussels had ‘caused real trouble’ in Ukraine – in stark contrast to current stance... independent.co.uk/news/uk/po…

This Tolkien-like map is actually a tapestry from Tudor times. It's a joy to explore londonist.com/london/maps/a-…

Thanks to @JimSwiftDC for joining Dayton-area reporters in covering this terrible news from Springfield. "The Cruelty Comes to Springfield" thebulwark.com/p/the-cruelty… I wrote about the fascist backdrop here: "Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio" snyder.substack.com/p/ethnic…

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I've just watched an excellent documentary about the sublime Joyce Grenfell called Comedy With Breeding, and felt compelled to post one of her monologues. I know her most famous work is the "George, don't do that", nursery monologue, but she wrote hundreds, and fortunately many were filmed. Here's one of my favourites called Lady in Church. By the way, if you'd like to watch the documentary, I've added it to the Comedy Playlist on my YouTube channel, a link for which you will find in my linktree thingumyjig. Good day.

What a coincidence Labour's soft justice and non-incarceration policies are also desired by George Soros' Open Society London. Liz Truss said ''George Soros' NGO activists captured Western nations'' and Alex Soros is at the heart of Labour!