Better in their words…

It was a very good week.  Post-fracas Zelensky fallout; a greening theory of Volodymyr; Argentina was DOGE before DOGE was popular; media wrings hands over Trump 2.0; soul-lifting PEW poll.  .

Source: SOARING ☙ Sunday, March 2, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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The Trump-Zelensky Oval Office cage match continued to dominate the media yesterday, proving once again that the Proxy War is the central conflict around which our political reality revolves. That has been true for a long time; since sometime before Trump took office in his first term. In 2017, the President stumbled over one of the Proxy War’s many snaky, sebaceous tentacles weaving through Washington’s tall neocon grass, and it nearly killed him. Every single story at the top of the Times’ web site this morning was a cage match story:

It wasn’t just corporate media here at home. Perusing European media, out of a sort of sick fascination, I suppose, one finds the Old World more or less obsessed with the personage of Donald J. Trump. Since I thought you could use a laugh, here’s this morning’s headline from Radio Francé Internacionale. Get this: they’re coming up with their own peace plan:

The sub-headline says the UK-Franco-Ukrainian peace plan will “later be presented to the United States.” But why? Should their super-duper peace plan be presented to Russia? One gets the sneaky suspicion that their “peace plan” will be a bunch of stuff that America has to do, and which probably Trump has already ruled out.

Last week, the UK Independent ran an astonishing story reporting that Britain has at best 25 working tanks in its military inventories.

So … what will the British offer us in their “peace plan?” They can’t even field the peacekeeping forces they keep chattering about.

🚀 During one blurry, difficult-to-remember college year when I ran with a very active social crowd, we had this one friend. Let’s call him ‘Moochie.’ Moochie was the kind of guy who’d needle you to borrow ten bucks. When, exasperated, you reminded him he still owed you five from last time. Then he’d say, “okay, just loan me five then. C’mon, man.” He wouldn’t quit, no matter how many times you said “no.” When you finally hauled out your wallet to give him the five, just to shut him up, hating yourself for doing it, Moochie would see a twenty in there and say, “lemme borrow that twenty.”

That was back when twenty bucks paid for an evening’s entertainment. Zelensky and his European buddies are Moochie.

🔥 But Zelensky’s social media team delivered perhaps the most amusing development yesterday. His Twitter/X account flared into busy life. He began with a flurry of “thank you’s” to America and other allies and personages, finally amounting to nearly 75 separate costless missives of gratitude. Then he (his propaganda team) made the error of posting a long explainer of Ukraine’s need for “security guarantees:”

The comments were savage. They are easily running 10-to-1 against Zelensky.

CNN reported that, even before the disastrous Oval Office meeting, Americans’ support for Ukraine has started to crater. Confidence in Zelensky had already dropped from around 75% to the 40’s:

CLIP: CNN polling shows Ukraine support cratering (2:45).

🚀 The media’s selective amnesia is flaring up again. The “Trump minerals deal” was originally suggested by Zelensky to Joe Biden. It was Zelensky’s idea. It was originally pitched as a bribe for “security guarantees,” but Trump said fine, we’ll take the minerals as repayment of what you already owe us. And if lots of American companies were working in Ukraine, it would provide an unofficial security umbrella.

But the sweatshirted dictator was too dumb to take “yes” for an answer. C’mon, man. Gimme the twenty. As Trump told him during Friday’s meeting, Zelensky has no cards to play. ‘Nyet.’

I’ve often harbored a wild conspiracy theory that I could never prove, but I can’t shake it, either. Zelensky is an actor who lived in Moscow before he suddenly became Ukraine’s President. If he were a Russian asset, he’d be perfect. Everything he’s done so far has failed to accomplish anything except helping the Russians achieve their goals.

He’s a perfect failure as a military leader. Despite having access to the West’s military arsenals, he’s managed to relentlessly keep losing. The 2023 Glorious Summer Offensive achieved nothing. His recent Kursk offensive threw his top troops into the Russian Quisenart. He sidelined his best general. Western aid has hemorrhaged through a million sieve holes into corrupt pockets.

His brutal crackdown on Ukrainian society —banning opposition parties, shuttering churches, jailing journalists, press-ganging its young men, muzzling the media, canceling elections— is responsible for credible reports that his political popularity lies in single digits.

Now, he’s alienated the only world leader who can really help him. And he was on thin ice with Trump to start with, considering his role in RussiaGate.

If he’s not working for the Russians, they should probably pay him anyway.

One of the Proxy War’s most bizarre mysteries is why world élites ally themselves so closely with a leader so anti-democratic and so unsuccessful. Success, it is said, has many fathers. But failure is an orphan. What has Zelensky succeeded at, except succeeding in losing the Proxy War in slow motion? Where are all the F16s we gave him?

If the war continues apace, with dwindling American aid mired in extended European dilly-dallying and “peace deal” negotiating, how much further will Russia advance toward achieving the aims Putin originally identified at the outset of the war? Despite media malpractice, his four goals were clear: keep Ukraine out of NATO, protect Russian citizens living in Eastern Ukraine, de-militarize Kiev, and de-nazify the country.

Russia now holds Eastern Ukraine, its Russia-speaking citizens protected. Kiev has no military left, not without Western support. Trump has definitively said no to NATO membership for Kiev, not even a de facto NATO membership knitted from “security guarantees.” And the Nazi battalions of enthusiastically warlike volunteers are mostly dead, having been replaced with conscripts and involuntary fighters.

Russian forces are reportedly now within five miles of the country’s central economic artery— the Dnieper river. It’s a river as indispensable as the Nile or the Mississippi. When —not if— Russia gains control of that river, it will sever Ukraine’s economic life support. Given the chaotic, unpredictable nature of 2025, I hesitate to forecast Russian control of the Dnieper would be “game over,” but it’s devilishly hard to imagine how Ukraine can continue.

Anyway. I offer the ‘Zelensky as Russian Agent’ hypothesis not for its unprovable truth, but for the bare fact that, if the theory is viable in any sense, it evidences the disastrous nature of Zelensky’s lawless ‘leadership.’

When, like the Dnieper, Zelensky finally falls, as it seems inevitable he will, who will he pull down with him?

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On Friday, as if doing so unwillingly, Reuters ran a brief story without anyheartwarming personal interest anecdotes headlined, “Argentina economic activity expands at fastest pace in two-and-a-half years.” Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding, “anarcho-capitalist” President Javier Milei was the original DOGEr. Just over a year ago, on his first day in office, Milei erased DEI and kept cutting. He never looked back. Media darkly warned about an austerity-fueled depression. But nope.

President Milei beat off an army of detractors, so we can beat off the army of anti-DOGE lunatics. Thank you, President Milei, for going first as the proof-of-concept.

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They didn’t want to admit it, but they’re coming around. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “‘All Gas’ Executive Orders Put Trump’s Opponents on Back Foot.” And it is working. The sub-headline added, “Most of president’s efforts remain standing, after advisers rewrote 2017 playbook.”

The Journal is catching on to what we’ve long known. It admitted that Trump is working from a very carefully developed plan:

“The flood,” an incredulous WSJ explained, “has overwhelmed opponents and forced courts to work overtime to try to keep up. That was by design.” They included a handy, and sort of astonishingly, executive order chart:

Democrats are being overwhelmed. “Miller and other Trump advisers,” the article said, “were prepared for more lawsuits than have been filed, and have been surprised at the lack of litigation on some of the orders.” Georgia governor Brian Kemp said, “The problem for the Democrats is he’s throwing so much out there so fast they can’t figure out who they want to be or what they want to go after.”

According to the story, Paul Dans, who led the ill-fated Project 2025 and was forced to resign and disband the group under withering (and false) media coverage, is ebullient. Trump’s first month was even better than Project 2025. “What’s happening now is more than many conservatives dared to dream,” he said.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Remember the cries of outrage over “Project 2025?” Now they want one of their own. New York Times guest essay, yesterday:

Trust me, don’t read the article, it will infuriate you. His first suggestion was to make the Administrative State even stronger and more independent from the President. Viva la bureaucracy!

Don’t worry too much about it. Before the Democrats can put together a “Project 2029” team, first they’ll have to vote over how many team members must be transgendered, LGBTQ++, and indigenous. That will be wildly entertaining and will take at least two years. Who’ll chair it? Maxine Waters? The election of chair will inevitably devolve into an unwinnable ideological purity test.

It’s quite a turn of events. One year ago, the Democrats described dreams of soon achieving a permanent majority. Now, the donkey party is on life support. We shouldn’t take anything for granted; as JD Vance said after the first week’s fusillade of executive orders, “It’s all gas, no brakes.”

Keep your feet firmly on the gas.

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Last, and perhaps most unexpectedly glorious, was this week’s new PEW religious affiliation poll, released under the arresting headline, “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.” If anything, Christian affiliation appears to be on the upswing:

Not just that, but Pew also found that a whopping 92% of Americans hold a supernatural world view, such as believing in (a) G-d, a soul, an afterlife, or Heaven and Hell. In other words, atheism is withering on the grapevine. Younger people are less likely to be religiously expressive, such as attending services or praying regularly, but I might argue they lack life experience.

In any event, the long, slow, slide into agnosticism has, at least, been arrested. Marry this encouraging new statistic to last year’s news of dramatic growth in Bible sales, and an incredibly optimistic picture begins to develop.

Europe is going the opposite direction. Rome Reports ran a story this week headlined, “Hate against Christianity on the rise in Europe.” On the rise is a dramatic understatement. In 2022, they tracked 749 anti-Christian hate crimes. By 2023, the current reporting year, anti-Christian hate crimes more than tripled to 2,444. Surely this reflects the massive waves of muslim immigration.

People’s spiritual beliefs are complicated. But if I had to pick two major factors accounting for the shift, it would be the pandemic and TikTok. We’ve discussed the pandemic’s role many times. Post-covid, people yearn for hope and for freedom from fear. But the growing army of Christian influencers on social media is possibly an even bigger factor, and helps explain the disparity between the US and Europe.

We have absolute freedom of religion and freedom of speech, and they don’t. It’s that simple. Pro-Christian social media in Britain, for example, can be prosecuted as intolerant— unless it is very carefully inclusive. But here, there are more 9-0 Supreme Court decisions upholding the sanctity of religious expression than on any other single subject.

The unique protections afforded by our Constitution—combined with the power of platforms like TikTok to rapidly distribute content—has created fertile ground for online religious expression. This relative freedom allows a wide range of voices to share their faith —without fear of government interference or legal consequences— leading to a vibrant and influential American community of Christian content creators.

Not just that. Social media has also created a new generation of celebrities, so-called influencers, and many of them have recently and dramatically converted. Such as former celebrity witch Kat Von D:

Or how about Tucker Carlson, who recently described being physically attacked by a demon, or former Buddhist and British mega-influencer Russell Brand:

Clearly, social media and instant information pose inherent risks and dangers. But G-d works in mysterious ways. The seeds of a thousand thousand small creators are rooted in every platform and device on the planet. Could the reports of Bible sales, dramatic conversions, and leveling Christian affiliation be a byproduct of three-minute TikTok videos?

Let me know what you think.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you once again, deeply, for all your continuous loyal support. I mean it when I say that I believe the C&C Army played a significant role in getting us this far. So leap back here tomorrow morning as we kick off another astonishing week of essential breaking news and color commentary.

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