Letters from an American - March 5, 2025

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

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March 5, 2025. In the gym of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946, former and future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill rose to deliver a speech. Formally titled, Sinners of Peace, the talk called for the United States and Britain to stand together against the growing menace of Soviet communism. Less than a year after the end of the war, the U.S. and its allies were concerned about the Soviets increasing control over the countries of Eastern Europe and their apparent intent to continue spreading communism throughout the world.

Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies, Churchill said. He expressed strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade Marshall Stalin, but he urged Europe and the US to work together to stand against dictators or compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police to control an all-powerful state.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent, Churchill declared, and is warning that Europe had been divided in two by an iron curtain, defined the coming era. President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill's argument. In Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing

distrust between the Soviet Bloc and the Western Allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of Berlin under Western control, a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which the US and the UK delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane, and the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, a security agreement to resist Soviet expansion. The so-called Cold War between the two superpowers dominated much of the geopolitics for the next several decades. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan warned

that the US was engaged in a titanic struggle between right and wrong and good and evil. The Soviet Union was the evil empire, preaching the supremacy of the state and its omnipotence over individual man. When the Cold War ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, those Americans who had come to define the world as a fight

between the dark forces of communism and the good forces of communism and the good forces of capitalism believed their ideology of radical individualism had triumphed. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously concluded that the victory of liberal democracy over communism meant the end of history. As all nations gravitated toward the liberal democracy that time had proven was fundamentally a better system of government than any other. Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared

that democracies led by the United States of America had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand-in-hand. But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called virtual politics, a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called performance art. By

the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on political technology, which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available. Russian political technologists used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored double candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters

and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate. This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a fire hose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders

with the concept of voters rubber stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing. In 2004, Putin tried to extend his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results,

and the Ukrainian government voided the election. To resurrect his political career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort, who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort's help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power, and he fled to Russia. Shortly after Yanukovych's ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the

United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about 17 million dollars but had no way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who was advising Trump's floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help. Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign, but immediately let Deripaska know about his new position. Russian operatives told Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected.

They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin took control of Eastern Ukraine through a peace plan that would end the war in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove US sanctions from Russian entities. According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence or attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at

the direction of the Kremlin. That effort was part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society. A vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood. The latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States. It was a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation's citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans. In other words, they used political technology, manipulating media to undermine democracy he talked for an hour and 40 minutes to a joint session of Congress.

He lied repeatedly, starting with the lie that he had a historic mandate. In fact, more people voted for someone else than voted for him. And moving on to the idea, his first month was the most successful in the history of our nation, saying that the first president, George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world. Trump's speech was valuable not as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered supporters a shared worldview

that reinforce their allegiance to the MAGA movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mortupoulos, and Hannah Dormito of the Washington Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never before heard in a similar address to Congress. Left-wing, weaponized, lunatics, ideologues, and deep fake. Right-wing media reinforces that virtual reality. Today on the Fox News channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro nonsensically claimed that Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels. Russian leaders created a false narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public enterprises

and monopolize the country's wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump said last night is in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, despite what the administration has told courts, told the technology conference that the government should privatize as much as possible and suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak

and the United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also appear to be a prelude to privatization. The Trump administration today announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs in what Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat of Illinois, calls a plan to gut the agency and then push to privatize the department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires. Jess Piper of The View from rural Missouri

notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was when Trump took office, a booming US economy, is a feature of the administration's plan, not a bug. It creates curated failure that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for rock bottom prices. In mid February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Defense Secretaries of European allies

that the US could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values and warned that Europe's true threat was the threat from within. Two weeks later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia. Today, United States officials said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables Ukraine to target Russian positions. In a nationally televised speech today, France President Emmanuel Macron warned

that Europe must prepare to stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the United States. The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries, affecting us," McCraw said. I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our side, but we have to be ready if they don't. Yesterday, politicians in the United Kingdom

angrily interpreted Vice President Vance's dismissal of some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years, as a dig at the UK after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the UK has stood alongside the US repeatedly since World War II. We were at war with a dictator, said French center-right politician Claude Marrere of Europe's stand against Putin. Now we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions,

Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.