I'm an American citizen. I'm the father of a US Marine who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am a patriot. And as a patriot, I can tell you that we know one thing for sure this morning, and that is JD Vance will never be President of the United States. There are enough Republicans left who are patriots who understand that JD Vance initiated and participated in a mugging of a world leader who I think most people would agree is the bravest man on earth today; our version of Winston Churchill, who has stood up against a Russian invasion for three years, against tyranny, against the rape of his nation, quite literally, by people who were trained to both molest civilians, kill them, and also torture prisoners as a matter of state policy; that kidnapped thousands of children from Ukraine and took them back to Russia to give them to Russian parents; that stole land. Vladimir Putin is a murderer who killed people in the United Kingdom by poisoning them, who killed his political opponents, had them thrown from windows, who bombed two buildings at the beginning many, many decades ago to gain power and had them labeled terrorist attacks. He's an international criminal. And to bow before this man and to declare that somehow Ukraine is our enemy and Vladimir Putin is our friend, is a level of derangement and evil the likes of which I've never seen in my 72 years of life as an American citizen.
I was born in Europe in 1952, and the kind of GIs I knew who came to my parents' mission of L’Abri had fought in World War II against the Nazis in the Italian campaign and D-Day and all the rest of our honorable engagements with this tyranny and this dictator. But Adolf Hitler was no worse than Vladimir Putin when it came to aggression. Vladimir Putin is as aggressive and as lawless as Hitler was and does the same sorts of things to his political opponents as Hitler did.
There are some things over which there is no compromise.
I'm one of the progressives that gets a lot of flack from my own side because I blame a lot of Democrats for their “woke theology,” as I call it, for the use of pronouns, demanding everybody change language to talk about their gender issues, And I think they helped give away the election.
But that's nothing compared to what the Republicans have now done in aligning themselves with Vladimir Putin through Trump and JD Vance. Vance is a disciple of Tucker Carlson, who might as well be a Russian agent and has been advocating for changing sides in this war for a long time based on a weird idea that he thinks has to do with his Catholic conversion– but it has nothing to do with that. He has misunderstood the Catholic faith entirely, and that is that somehow because Vladimir Putin says he's anti-gay and anti-trans; that he's for traditional morality. Traditional morality does not include the rape and the invasion of a whole country. Traditional morality does not include the kidnapping of children. And just because Archbishop Kirill of Moscow has supported this adventure does not make it right. Just because evangelicals all the way from the 1990s to the present have been going to Russia, trying to involve them in our culture war and have succeeded going all the way back to the very beginning of said culture war does not make it right.
So members of the Republican Party that have been hoodwinked into thinking that somehow Vladimir Putin is on the side of the angels because he stands against some of our culture war enemies when it comes to gay rights and other things have been totally misinformed on two levels.
Vladimir Putin could care less about traditional morality. He is a professional trained thug and murderer; an FSB agent from the KGB of the old days.
He is an enemy of the United States and of the West.
The result is this. We are going to see a nuclear-armed Europe as a result. I will bet you within 10 years that Germany and a number of other European states are going to have to develop a nuclear arsenal to match ours that we have now confiscated, as it were, by more or less disintegrating NATO. That's what Donald Trump has achieved.
We have made enemies of our European allies. We have made enemies of our international allies, New Zealand, all these other countries that have offered a bulwark against the Soviets and now against Vladimir Putin's Russia. America is now standing alone and not in a good way, but in an isolated way because we have joined Vladimir Putin's isolation. We are now the bad guys since we have switched sides. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt are spinning in their graves. We used to have one thing that Democrats and Republicans agreed on, the strength of our military, the need for defense, and the fact that we opposed tyranny. And sometimes we screwed up and we were on the wrong side of issues in South America and other places, where the CIA would get involved in coups and overthrowing people because we suspected them of being communists, but it was all in defense of a higher principle. So even misguided, we didn't actually change sides. We were hypocrites at worst. But our guiding principle was that we were standing for freedom and for democracy.
And that principle is gone now.
I think there must be Republicans who are ashamed at this moment, as I am, of our country and what it is.
Who look at Donald Trump as a complete outsider and interloper who has hoodwinked his voters into voting for him with his con.
Who look at the tech bros like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and these others who have joined Trump's side out of greed for their own companies, hoping to get deals from the government and so forth. This is a gallery of shame.
We could have all made mistakes in voting for this guy. Maybe Elon Musk made a mistake and joined his forces to his and his billions with his. But this morning we now know that JD Vance has declared war on the freedoms that we hold dear. He has incited Donald Trump to follow Tucker Carlson's philosophy. What we now have is a denial of everything America is and as a result, the world is shaking this morning.
Because America used to be the good guy, and now we have joined with Russia as the oppressor. We have bullied a brave patriot who came to the White House seeking help, and instead of that got a dressing down and a mugging, a planned attack by JD Vance and Donald Trump. That shames every American who wakes up this morning.
JD Vance was in the Marine Corps. So was my son. And I spent months down on Parris Island Recruit Training Depot researching several books as the guest of the commandant of the Marine Corps, actually two commandants of the Marine Corps that loved the book that I wrote with my son, Keeping Faith: a father-son story about love in the United States Marine Corps, that became a bestseller and could be found in every Marine recruiting office across the world for years afterward, where I was invited to speak and so forth and so on. That's another story. But what I learned on Parris Island was that the drill instructors drilled into the recruits the idea of honor, the idea of integrity, the idea of patriotism. these are all lessons that JD Vance has spit on and has abandoned. If he had done something similar within the Marine Corps, an act of disloyalty, dressing down an ally, someone perhaps sent to a Marine Corps base for training with the United States, as thousands of people come from around the world to do, he would have been court-martialed. And he deserves a court-martial now. He would have been dishonorably discharged. This is a dishonorable man. JD Vance is no longer an American. He is a Russian. JD Vance is no longer a patriot. He is a traitor. And he has taken Donald Trump with him in this traitorous behavior because he has talked himself into believing that Vladimir Putin represents traditional morality. Hitler didn't like gay people either. And he didn't like Jews and he didn't like gypsies and he killed them. And he didn't like handicapped people. And nor does Trump. Hitler went ahead and started gassing those who were disabled because they weren't of use to the Reich. And Trump is going to cut Medicaid with his billionaire friends who will have no trouble paying their doctor bills.
We are in a sorry place, This is a morning of shame.
Take your rose-tinted spectacles off and replace them with a clear vision of what JD Vance and Donald Trump just did in the White House, in your White House, in your Oval Office. This has nothing to do with Republicans and Democrats. I would be perfectly happy to have a Republican president who's a conservative, who pushes back against some of the stupidity of the left. Our government's too big. We spend too much money. We're going to go broke. All of that is true. The whole “woke” strategy has backfired. We have lost the culture wars because we push too far. Roe v. Wade has been reversed. The courts have all been appointed by Republican presidents. We are in a mess on the political front.
But this isn't politics. This is treason.
JD Vance has betrayed our country and sided with Russia. And he's taken Donald Trump with him because of Tucker Carlson's infamous influence over both of those men through JD, and I say this to Elon Musk: Take a very hard look. You might be a South African emigre who's made billions here, but believe me, everything Donald Trump and JD Vance touch from now on will be tainted with the brush of treason. Tech Bros, you better run. This man will take you down.
Republican ‘leaders,’ if you're afraid that you'll get primaried if you go against him, a great pushback is coming because there are plenty of MAGA voters who are also patriots. There are plenty of people who understand that Vladimir Putin literally raped his way across a whole country and that a strategy of persecution of civilians was part and parcel and that thousands of children were kidnapped. You know perfectly well in your heart and soul this morning that to come down on the side of this person for whatever reason is nefarious and evil.
I use that word and I'll go further. It is demonic. This is bare-knuckled wickedness.
This is stupidity at a level that boggles the mind. Stand up and be counted, and if there are protests, pour into the streets. If there are letters to be written, write the letters. If there are congressmen and congresswomen and senators to be called, call them at (202) 224-3121.
Believe me, a line has been crossed here for the first time in American history. In our 250 years of existence, there has never been anything like this. An open siding with tyranny from the White House. These are not fringe elements as happened in World War II where the isolationists and the anti-Semites like Lindbergh and Ford and all the rest of them sided with the Nazis. They were not doing it in the White House in the Oval Office. They were outsiders and they lost. And we went to war and defeated Hitler and fascism. Now the enemy is within the Oval Office. His name is JD Vance. His fool is Donald Trump.
Donald Trump should wake up this morning and ask for his resignation. Because to whatever degree JD Vance and Tucker Carlson stuck this program into the White House agenda, they have misserved the president. The best thing that could happen is JD Vance should resign or be fired today. And Donald Trump can unload this fiasco on him and get a Vice President who at least is a patriot. This is a shameful day.
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