Post 724 - March 1, 2025

Yesterday’s meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, and the President and Vice President of the United States in the Oval Office at the White House was something that hasn’t happened before in the entire history of our country.

I watched the footage, and I still can’t fully believe that it happened.

Before yesterday’s meeting, never had the two highest elected governmental representatives of our country verbally attacked an ally in front of the press. Never have the holders of the two highest offices in the land so publicly demonstrated their fealty to the leader of an aggressive foreign adversary. Never before.

If anyone out there still thinks that our President isn’t under the thrall of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, then they simply aren’t paying attention. We have a Russian asset sitting behind the Resolute Desk.

All this was unfolding yesterday as I was doing everything in my power to comply with the boycott of all META platforms and the not buying of anything. I sincerely doubt that the boycott had or will have any lasting effect but, for me, it was an eye-opening experience.

It is fully ingrained in me to click on social media when anything at all happens. When this meeting exploded across our press, I wanted to know what everyone thought. Just finding a link to the meeting without using Google was a challenge. I finally settled on YouTube which, hilariously, and somewhat tragically, I realized this morning is owned by Google.

During the pandemic shutdown, I would click on Facebook to see how everyone out in the world was coping with whatever was happening that day. Yesterday, I must have reached for my phone a dozen times to see how people were coping with the blackout.

Five years ago, almost to the day now, when the coronavirus exploded, we already knew that the President was compromised in some way. “It’s all about Russia,” is something I, myself, wrote when reporting on current events, several times.

At the time, we all thought that there must be a tape that showed our President peeing on Russian prostitutes that was being used by Putin as blackmail. Since then, the President has been impeached twice, convicted of thirty-four felonies, found liable for damages for sexual abuse, and, well, the list goes on. A filmed golden shower at this point would only get him more support from his MAGA base. It’s almost quaint that anyone would think he’d care whether that footage, if it exists, ever saw the light of day.

Zelenskyy during the meeting and afterward demonstrated what it is to be a real leader. He remained calm. He remained respectful. He didn’t raise his voice. He stood up for his country in the face of two pitiful bullies and didn’t give in to them.

He then went onto Fox News where he reiterated for all the slow learners that he would not compromise the integrity of his country by signing any deal with the United States that did not include security provisions to guard against the Russian aggressors. The rest of us didn’t need to hear that again, but the Fox News audience did.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is forty-seven years old. He went to Law School and earned his degree. He never practiced, though. Instead, he went into show business. He started a production company that created movies, cartoons, and television shows. One of those shows was a comedy called Servant of the People in which he played a fictional Ukrainian president. The show was a huge hit and ran for four years from 2015 to 2019.

During an address by then-President Petro Poroshenko on New Year’s Eve in 2018, Zelenskyy announced that he was going to run for President for real. He won by a landslide getting 73.23 percent of the vote.

The tension between Russia and Ukraine was already high when Zelenskyy took office in 2019. When that turned into a full-scale invasion by Russia in February of 2022, he received many offers from international allies to evacuate him and his family. He refused them all, opting, instead, to stay and fight.

That was three years ago, and the Russians are not any closer to triumphing now than they were when they started.

Zelenskyy doesn’t wear a suit. He rarely shaves. His country is at war for their lives, and he doesn’t want anyone to forget that.

Yesterday, during the press conference, a reporter interrupted the President and asked Zelenskyy why he wasn’t wearing a suit to show respect to the leaders of the United States.

The reporter was the Chief White House Correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a far-right streaming platform. Real America’s Voice embraces conspiracy theories, the dissemination of misinformation about almost anything, and were avid supporters of QAnon. The reporter in question’s name is Brian Glenn and he’s also Marjory Taylor Greene’s boyfriend.

Glenn’s question was meant to embarrass Zelenskyy, but instead, it made everyone else in the Oval Office look indescribably petty and smug.

I didn’t think that Zelenskyy’s meeting with the President was going to end well when I first heard that it was scheduled to happen. One Ukrainian guy against a sea of MAGA radicals seemed like a recipe for disaster. All I can say is that if I admired Zelenskyy before, I am awed by him now. It can’t have been easy for him to stand up to them all like that.

So, why did Putin want the meeting to go that way? Let’s not even pretend that the President and the Vice President are acting in the interests of the American people anymore. Putin is calling the shots. So what was he after?

Putin wants the United States to pull out of NATO so that he can invade other member nations without fear of reprisal. What this meeting did, was drive a wedge between the European Union and the United States that, should it continue to widen, can only lead to us severing ties with some of our staunchest allies. That, in turn, would leave Putin with a clear path toward European domination. With American firepower at his back, it will be hard to stop him.

Yesterday’s meeting was a pre-rehearsed, staged move towards that end.

The first step in addressing an addiction is to acknowledge it. It appears, that I might have an addiction to social media. There are actual twelve-step programs out there for people who truly can’t disengage and whose lives are being ruined by it. I don’t in any way want to belittle the truth of that.

Am I there yet? Is it ruining my life? No. Not yet anyway. What yesterday showed me, though, was how dependent I am upon companies whose motives are anything but pure for my access to information. There are fewer companies running things than might be immediately apparent. I found that I couldn’t avoid Google by searching on YouTube because, as it happens, they are the same thing.

There is an illusion of choice out there, but often it is just that, an illusion. Many platforms and outlets that begin as independents often get subsumed by some corporate monolith. Like resistance fighters, that means that we need to keep moving around online.

I am enjoying Tangle these days because I don’t always agree with the guy running it. He presents a story, talks about the left’s reaction and then the right’s, and then presents his own take on things. He leans a little left, but he doesn’t always land there. He cherry-picks which side he agrees with and then makes a thoughtful case to support it. Sometimes I leave the site gratified and sometimes I leave somewhat infuriated. I think that’s how it should be.

If I’m infuriated, I can always click into the Contrarian which is decidedly lefty. That may be another addiction I’m going to need to examine. Just because it makes me feel good to listen to left-leaning broadcasts, doesn’t mean that I should.

Zelenskyy spells his name with two “y”s. His handle on X is ZelenskyyUa. The American press sometimes drops the second y when reporting on him. I’m inclined to give him the spelling he chooses so until I get corrected by somebody who knows better, it’s Zelenskyy.

I don’t usually write about current events as quickly as this. I usually like to see what the fallout is first. This press conference, however, was something truly unprecedented. It seems as if that word comes up every other day, but in this case, I think it’s entirely accurate. This was a monumental event that is going to have many repercussions.

How the Republican party reacts to what is essentially an open admission that the President is working for Vladimir Putin is going to be interesting to see. Will any of them have the spine to stand against it?

It’s all about Russia and it now seems clear that it has been from the start. If nothing else comes from yesterday’s media circus, we should all realize at least that.