In which the bromancer and our Henry have FAFO moments, but Killer Kreighton stays stuck on his need to FA with JD ...

 

First, Zoe Williams in the Graudian following up on that interview in The Atlantic and setting the tone for this day's herpetology studies:

...Lachlan reportedly came to be thought of as the chosen heir because his politics mirrored those of his father, while James, Liz and Prue were all dismayed by his increasingly hardline conservatism, particularly with regard to the climate crisis. However, this makes it sound like a classic family row, and cannot begin to describe the evolution of Rupert’s politics, how he’s been transformed by cupidity and mindless ratings-chasing from a centre-right, newspaperman sensibility to bankrolling conspiracist, racist drivel. Fox News slid to the right faster, basically, than Rupert’s conscience or intellect could rouse themselves.
We may have had a ringside seat over here on Murdoch senior’s droning xenophobia, with the Sun splashing on fear of migrants reflexively in the absence of other news, like an out-of-office auto reply, but I think we would have been astonished, certainly before 2016, to see the openly white supremacist “great replacement theory”, evangelised by Tucker Carlson on Fox, in any British tabloid. Rupert, who always loathed Donald Trump, created in Fox News both ideas-machine and propagandist for Trump’s victory. And for what? More money, more power, to wield over the junior Murdochs, set them against one another, and make everyone miserable.
So maybe Wolff was right, maybe the politics of the Murdochs aren’t interesting, being as they are pretty bland, in James, Liz and Prue’s case, and all over the place, in Rupert and Lachlan’s. We do, unfortunately, have to live in the Murdochs’ politics, and the fact that they are also personally miserable – well, if it’s a consolation, it’s very small and vanishingly brief.

If the pond might be allowed to amend one line to make it a more localised telling of the tale: 

...how he’s transformed The Australian by cupidity and mindless paywall hive mind subscription-chasing from a centre-right, newspaperman sensibility to bankrolling conspiracist, racist drivel. 

On with this day's drivel, and what an exceptionally rich day of drivel it is ...

The pond felt a twinge of alarm, neigh panic, at the Will Glasgow splash about a jolted Taiwan feeling the cold harsh reality of a Cantaloupe Caligula spray. 

What would the bromancer make of this? What about his war with China by Xmas, with the bromancer in charge of military strategy?

Fortunately over on the extreme far right they all lined up to play, and the bromancer's response, albeit only a three minute read, was deemed important enough to hang around in the early morning...

Then there was our Henry, and to bolster the Friday ranks, it seems Krusading Killer Kreighton of Gina's IPA (hush, no need to mention that) has begun hanging out his fear of masks on as a reptile Friday regular ...

The pond wondered if the bromancer had been reading the perfidious NY Times:

Trump Elevates Kremlin Talking Points, a Familiar Pattern From His First Term, President Trump’s description of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as a “Dictator without Elections” echoes the Kremlin’s messaging. (Relax, it's in the archive).

Or perhaps he'd got his talking points from the WSJ editorial board's Trump Elevates Kremlin Talking Points, a Familiar Pattern From His First Term (relax, that's the archive link)

The talking points emanating around the world - for the hive mind to emulate - seemed clear enough...

One challenge in the Trump era is distinguishing when the President is popping off for attention from when his remarks indicate a real change in policy and priorities. President Trump’s rhetorical assault on Ukraine in recent days appears to be the latter, and perhaps it is a sign of an ugly settlement to come.
Mr. Trump on Tuesday mimicked Russian propaganda by claiming Ukraine had started the war with Russia and that Kyiv is little better than the Kremlin because it hasn’t held a wartime election. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky replied on Wednesday that Mr. Trump was living in a “disinformation space,” which may have been imprudent but was accurate.
Mr. Trump escalated on Wednesday, as he usually does, calling Mr. Zelensky a “dictator,” and suggesting Ukraine’s leader snookered the U.S. into supporting a war “that couldn’t be won, that never had to start.” Mr. Zelensky “refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle.’”
It’s tempting to dismiss this exchange as mere rhetoric, but it has the feel of political intention for Mr. Trump. He may be trashing Ukraine’s democracy to make voters think there’s no real difference between the Kremlin and Kyiv. He may think this will make it easier to sell a peace deal that betrays Ukraine.
We doubt most Americans will overlook his false moral equivalence. Mr. Putin’s war of conquest started three years ago this month when Russian troops rolled over the border and tried to capture Kyiv. The war began not because Mr. Putin had legitimate security fears—but because the aging former KGB agent wants to reassemble most of the Soviet empire he saw crumble as a young man.
Ukraine has delayed elections while it is operating under martial law and fighting a war for survival. Its constitution allows this, and Britain under Nazi siege didn’t hold an election during World War II. Was Churchill a dictator?
Ukraine’s democracy is fragile and would be stronger if it could affiliate with Western institutions like the European Union. The only dictator in the war is Mr. Putin, who poisons exiled Russians on foreign soil and banishes opponents to Arctic prison camps. Call us when he holds a free election.
Mr. Trump may also think he can turn Ukrainians against Mr. Zelensky. But the irony is that Mr. Trump’s lashing may have the opposite effect, especially if they see Mr. Zelensky opposing a bad deal forced on them by a U.S.-Russia pact that includes no credible security guarantee against future Russian marauding.
The U.S. has a profound interest in denying Mr. Putin a new perch on more of the NATO border, which is the real reason America has been right to arm Ukraine. A deal that amounts to Ukrainian surrender will be a blow to American power that will radiate to the Pacific and the Middle East. It would be the opposite of Mr. Trump’s promise to restore a golden age of U.S. prestige and world calm.
The oddity so far is that Mr. Trump seems to want a “peace” deal more than Mr. Putin does, which is the opposite of leverage in any negotiation. Mr. Trump wants to be able to claim he brought peace as he promised as a candidate, but a cautionary tale is Joe Biden.
President Biden tried to wash his hands of Afghanistan, but instead his retreat set in motion a chain of global crises that defined his Presidency. Mr. Biden tried to sell his withdrawal as a triumph of military logistics, but the public knew better. Americans may have a similar reaction if they see Russia emerge triumphant and realize this wasn’t the peace they had in mind.

Last week Mr. Trump said Ukraine can’t join NATO and must give up much of its territory to Russia—concessions to Mr. Putin with nothing in return. Mr. Putin’s response this week has been more drone attacks on Ukraine. And here we thought Mr. Trump doesn’t like being played.

The better strategy than beating up Ukraine is making clear to Mr. Putin the arms and pressure he’ll face if the Russian doesn’t wind down the war to accept a durable peace. As it stands now, Mr. Trump’s seeming desperation for a deal is a risk to Ukraine, Europe, U.S. interests—and his own Presidency.

Well, yes, a clear case of FA and FO, though the bro phrased his response as a tricky question ...

Is Donald Trump being outfoxed by Vladimir Putin?

Then the sub-heading made it clear that the bro was going through a FAFO moment.

The strategic weight of the word of the president of the United States was once a powerful and positive factor in the strategic environment. Trump is trashing the credibility of his own words. And he’s insulting people who have given their lives for freedom.

That didn't stop the reptiles, inspired by bro verbiage, evoking the usual 4D chess crap in a truly crappy uncredited graphic, Is Donald Trump playing four dimensional chess over Ukraine, or is he being outfoxed by Vladimir Putin?

The bro found it hard to muster anything in favour of the mango Mussolini...

Donald Trump’s friends and admirers say he is playing four dimensional chess over Ukraine, while everyone else is playing checkers, which is why no-one can understand him, but his purposes are masterly.
That’s a pretty feeble defence of what are simply indefensible, even despicable, comments from Trump about Ukraine.
Even long-time Trump admirers like Britain’s former prime minister Boris Johnson have pointed out that to claim, as Trump has quite bizarrely done, that Ukraine started the war with Russia is like claiming that America attacked Japan to kick off the Pacific war in World War II.

Et tu Boris? But here's another one, a little closer to home ...

Poor bro, how hard it is for him, and yet how classically stupid he still manages to sound ...

There is no ambiguity here, no shade of gray. Trump’s words are simply flatly untrue.
Similarly, it’s absurd to describe Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as a dictator. He can be a bit rough on domestic political opponents. But he is Ukraine’s democratically elected leader. Ukraine has not tried to hold an election while waging a war. Britain made exactly the same decision in World War II. There was no British election between 1935 and 1945. Winston Churchill, Britain’s war time leader, who unlike Zelensky had not even won an election, was surely no dictator.
Further, Trump’s claim that Zelensky enjoys a paltry 4 per cent approval rating is also, let’s not beat about the bush, a ridiculous lie.
Trump is not stupid. So why has he said all this? Has he just fallen for Vladimir Putin’s propaganda?

Actually Trump is pretty stupid. 

His main claim to fame is as a multiple bankrupt (casinos!), a fraudulent businessman (universities, steaks, airlines, heirlooms from China) and failed reality TV star given to failed observations of the real world ...

At this point, the reptiles decided to cling to the dream by inserting an AV distraction recycling all the MM's talking points:

US President Donald Trump has slammed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post to Truth Social on Wednesday. In a long post, Trump revealed that America had spent “$200 billion" more than Europe with no guarantee that the money would be returned. Trump called out “sleepy Joe Biden” for not demanding “equalisation” in the war despite it being more important to Europe than the US before slamming Zelensky as a “dictator”. “On top of this, Zelensky admits that half of the money we sent him is “MISSING.” He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” Trump wrote. “A Dictator without Elections, Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

The bromancer followed suit ... 

He fought the good fight to stick to his mango-flavoured dreaming for as long as he could ...

Sophisticated Americans who have some general sympathy for Trump hold that he is administering shock treatment to Europe. Trump believes that Western Europe, with a substantially bigger economy than the US itself, is well and truly rich enough to provide the military capability to deter and if necessary defeat Putin’s Russia.
Trump doesn’t see why America needs to keep paying the bills, providing the hardware, and if necessary risking war with Russia. Europe has had decades of warning but has never stirred itself to do anything of real consequence militarily for the last 30 or 35 years, since the end of the Cold War.
It abolished military capabilities and never replaced them, just like Australia, though we are in fact much worse than Europe.
People who know Trump think he is also trying to entice Putin into serious negotiation. If Putin is not serious in negotiations, then Trump could just as easily reverse himself and go hard, economically at least, against Russia, while supplying Ukraine with more weapons.
Similarly, there is no way Trump will want to leave a legacy of having been humiliated, or completely outfoxed, by Putin. There’s a lot of negotiation on all this still to go. We don’t know where Trump will land, or even where he calculates he could land.

But those are all suppositions, ifs and buts. In the simple, plain English meaning of Trump’s words, they were somewhere between lies and despicable insults directed at a gallant ally.

Trump has every right to rail against feckless Europeans who talk big but abolish their military capabilities.

What a valiant attempt.  He's still negotiating, he's foxing like a Faux noise fox, he has every right to rail, yadda yadda ...

All the best bits of the 4D chess master laid out for "sophisticated Americans", aka Faux Noise viewers ... but, then, oh billy goat, in any decent FAFO, there has to be a moment when a gigantic billy goat butt looms out of the darkness to give mugs like the bromancer a whack to the bum and a big fright ...

Ukraine is not like that. It’s fighting for its life. It’s fighting with great gallantry and heroism. It has not asked the United States to commit one soldier to its defence. It’s only asked that the West supply it with weapons.
It’s perfectly reasonable for Trump to want to bring this hideous war to an end. It’s not reasonable to insult an ally and tell lies about it.
There is a severe cost to Trump’s practice of crafting every statement as a negotiating position which can be modified, given up, reversed, whatever. The danger is that if Trump ever wants to say something of genuine and lasting strategic significance, everyone will always and automatically regard it as just another negotiating position.
The strategic weight of the word of the president of the United States was once a powerful and positive factor in the strategic environment. Trump is trashing the credibility of his own words. And he’s insulting people who have given their lives for freedom.
You don’t get the good Trump, so they say, without the bad Trump. There’s still a strong case that Trump is a net positive. But if this abuse of an ally is four dimensional chess, let’s bring back the chequered board with its regular squares and reliable pieces. Not everything can be a pawn sacrifice by the king.

Nope, he still can't let go ...There’s still a strong case that Trump is a net positive.

Dear sweet long absent lord, what a sublime dickhead you gave unto the world of the lizard Oz... 

Couldn't he have headed off to Reddit to get a meme summary and put it next to his keyboard?

Meanwhile, in other Faux Noise news Maria Bartiromo stopped in her tracks for peddling Trump’s false ‘4% approval’ claim about Zelensky and for a laugh, how about Fox News anchor says Trump’s EPA guy just found ‘$20 billion sitting in a parked car.’ But he definitely didn’t

US$20 billion sitting in a parked car? Why that's Uncle Leon figuring at its finest ...

And so to Henry, hole in bucket fixer extraordinaire, offering up ‘Capitulation’ on Ukraine will haunt the West, That is not Yalta; it is Munich. It will bring neither peace nor freedom to Ukraine and encourage more agression by dictators worldwide.

The pond had hoped that our Henry might have been inspired to emulate Jim Sleeper in Salon asking Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or Augustus Caesar? then answering, Honestly, it's both, An aspiring dictator, fueled by popular resentment, overthrows a failing republic. We've seen this show before

...The republic’s consuls and other officers became Augustus’ lapdogs, but he preserved their venerable offices and titles “with anxious care,” seeming to consult them and massaging their vanity. Augustus established a regime on their backs whose stability and benefits lasted for centuries in what Gibbon characterized as "an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth” whose ruler exploited his subjects in ways that reflected his perverse character:
A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside…. His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial …. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government.
Human nature hasn’t changed enough since then to shield masses of people from being seduced and intimidated into servility and herd-like stampedes. It certainly hadn’t changed by the 1770s, when Gibbon described the spread of what he called “a slow and secret poison” into the vitals of the Roman Empire, whose residually republican citizens "no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command” and so “received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army.”
Trump has been counting on such weaknesses, as Augustus did, but he's doing it even more recklessly and at warp speed. 

There was even a historical snap to go with it all, without a hint of anachronism ...

Do carry on a little bit more, our Henry is patiently waiting ...

Gibbon’s “slow and secret” poison has always spread much faster and more blatantly in America than it did in Augustus’ Rome or even in Gibbon's England. John Adams may have been channeling Gibbon in his warning to Americans:
When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery ... and downright venality swallow up the whole society.
A thousand-year Reich — that lasted 12 years.
Rome’s decadence may indeed be outdone by our own, owing to 20th-century developments that would supplement Gibbon’s account of Augustus with an even-darker analogy between Trump’s plot against America and Hitler’s plot against the Weimar Republic.
In an Atlantic article, “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days," (archive link) historian Timothy W. Ryback references Hitler’s failed Beer Hall putsch of 1923, triggering memories of Trump’s failed coup attempt of 2021. Ryback also notes that Hitler “campaigned on the promise of draining the ‘parliamentarian swamp — den parlamentarischen Sumpf,’” a promise that Trump has repeatedly echoed by vowing to “drain the swamp” in America.
Trump’s apologists can’t excuse or ignore his continuing refusal to disavow supporters who have made Nazi salutes while shouting “Hail Trump”; who have marched into Charlottesville in 2017 shouting, “Jews will not replace us"; who have brandished Nazi swastikas in the Capitol during their 2021 coup attempt; and who have flirted with Germany’s proto-fascist Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, as Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have both done.  

Dear sweet long absent lord, how did Uncle Leon and JD get mixed in with that talk of servile lickspittle lapdogs? (More on JD anon with Killer).

What about mad King George III, or that Napoleon tweet?

Gone already into the 'toon archive?

Never mind, Sleeper went on at length, and our Henry missed his chance, preferring to start off with a hideous, again uncredited, collage of the two villains, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin ...

... and then expending all is pompous, portentous energy on the Yalta conference, with nary a hint of noble Augustus or Napoleon in sight ...

What about Thucydides, what about Cicero? Nope, nada, nil, nihil ...

With American and Russian negotiators discussing the fate of Ukraine, parallels are inevitably being drawn to the Yalta conference, which was held 80 years ago this month.
Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, accurately captured that conference’s grim reputation. “Yalta,” he observed in 1997, “is a place name that has come to be a codeword for the cynical sacrifice of small nations’ freedom to great powers’ spheres of influence.”
Speaking on the conference’s 60th anniversary, George W. Bush went even further. Comparing the agreements reached at Yalta to the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Bush concluded that “when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small countries was somehow expendable”.
There is, for sure, a grain of truth in those claims; but by taking the Yalta conference entirely out of context, they misrepresent its outcomes and misinterpret its lessons.
Yalta was not the concluding conference of the Second World War; it was a wartime summit, conducted before the common enemy had been defeated.
A simple fact hung over its proceedings: while the British and American forces were still recovering from the German counter-attack in the Ardennes, the Red Army – having swept through Bulgaria, Romania and large parts of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – was securing bridgeheads on the Oder River, a mere 70km from Berlin.
It was, in other words, not Yalta that sealed Soviet predominance in central and eastern Europe; that predominance was a military reality by the time the summit convened.
Nor was the so-called “proportions agreement” – which defined the “proportions of influence” each of the allied powers would exercise in the Balkan countries – an endorsement of Soviet predominance; on the contrary, it was an attempt to mollify its effects.

And yet somehow, ineluctably the result was that the freedom of small counties was expendable, while Churchill did his level best to cling to empire and India, the latter effort ending in tears and millions dead and displaced.

Never mind, have a cheap reptile archive offering, Soviet leader Stalin, American President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill seated together during the Yalta Conference, 1945.

Our Henry kept on ranting about Yalta, and has his own FAFO moment when he has to admit that Stalin did a Putin and sold his valiant warriors a mongrel pup ...

It is a common error, recently repeated on these pages, to attribute that agreement to Yalta. It had, in fact, been reached by Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in October 1944, months before the summit took place. Churchill’s goal was straightforward: to ensure the West retained some influence, however slight, in countries that were, or would soon be, under tight Soviet control.
Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt not only continued to pursue that objective at Yalta; they also sought Stalin’s agreement to a democratic government in Poland and to the exclusion of Italy and Greece from the emerging Soviet bloc.
That Roosevelt was unduly optimistic about the prospects for great-power co-operation is well-known; but he wasn’t entirely unrealistic about the summit’s outcomes. When Admiral William Leahy, who accompanied him to Yalta, complained that the agreement on Poland was “so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it”, Roosevelt wearily replied, “I know it, Bill, I know it; but it’s the best I can do at this time”.
Churchill was even more disabused. As he wrote to Peter Fraser, the prime minister of New Zealand, “Great Britain and the British Commonwealth are very much weaker militarily than Soviet Russia and have no means, short of another general war, of enforcing their point of view”. In the end, however, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”; Britain, and he believed the US, would only remain committed to the agreements if there was “full execution in good faith of the terms of our published communique”.

At this point, the reptiles turned to petulant Peta, and even she seemed to be having her own Morticia Addams moment, Sky News host Peta Credlin discusses how it is “hard to agree” with President Donald Trump’s scathing assessment of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy. “It is easy to President Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for stopping the killing in Ukraine,” Ms Credlin said. “But it is hard to agree with his assessment that Ukraine started it.”

Hard, Morticia? Hard? Feel our Henry's wroth, his righteous wrath ...the turning point, the pushback begins ...

That was the crucial point for Harry Truman, who became president after Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945. Rushing back from Moscow to brief him, Averell Harriman alerted Truman to a new “barbarian invasion of Europe”, with Stalin breaching every element of the Yalta summit’s Declaration on Liberated Europe, which committed the parties to hold free and fair elections in the countries under their control.
To make things worse, from Austria to Turkey and Iran, the USSR was trying to extend its reach beyond what had been presented at Yalta, and later at the Potsdam summit, as a fait accompli.
By March 1946, when Churchill warned in his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent” of Europe, Truman was convinced that “We must stand up to the Russians – we must not be too easy with them”.
The result was a series of hard-nosed decisions, including, most importantly, the announcement on March 12, 1947 of the Truman Doctrine, which committed the US to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures”.
That doctrine did not mean Truman was unwilling to compromise, if compromise was demanded by the facts on the ground. But to the greatest extent possible, compromises had to preserve the space for freedom to grow.
Thus, when the Korean War turned into a bloody stalemate, Truman accepted a return to Korea’s division at the 38th parallel, ensuring that at least the South had the scope to become a prosperous, democratic society. And Truman readily acknowledged, as did his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, that enforcing the armistice would require an American military presence in Korea “for years to come” as both a trigger and a trip-wire, mightily increasing the costs the North would bear for breaches.

Cue another cheap snap from the reptile archive, Winston Churchill delivering his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Missouri in 1946.

At this point, the pond began to wonder, as it always does: do any of the reptiles ever watch Faux Noise? 

They're always willing to regurgitate talking points, and with a host of lickspittle lackeys to rally to the cause ...

Sorry, the pond doesn't link to Faux Noise, but will note that it's pretty hard for Zelensky to come back to the table and continue the discussions, because he was never fucking invited to the fucking table, you Waltzing douchebag, dancing to two step lickspittle oblivion ...

Back to Henry for a final bit of the history lesson ...

Moreover, to ensure the armistice wasn’t viewed as a broader sign of weakness, Eisenhower, on learning that Mao intended to seize Taiwan, deterred the invasion by entering into a Mutual Defence Agreement with the Republic of China (Taiwan) and by having congress pass the Formosa Resolution, which authorised the president “to employ the armed forces of the United States as he deems necessary for securing and protecting Formosa against armed attack”.
That, in the end, is the real lesson of Yalta. As Harvard’s Serhii Plohky put it, “Like any war, any peace is never a one-act play: it has its beginning and its end, its ups and downs, its heroes and villains. It also has its price”.
It was the abject refusal of the European Union – and notably of France and Germany – to pay that price by enforcing the agreement it had reached with Vladimir Putin ending Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia that encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine.
And it was the paltry response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, along with France and Germany’s failure to give any teeth to the Minsk Agreements on the Donbas, that laid the ground for today’s disastrous war.
Whether a deeply divided EU now has a greater willingness and ability to bear the costs of securing a credible peace is highly doubtful. Moreover, the Trump administration has made it clear that it has no intention of doing so. Truman’s abiding sense of “the shadow cast by power” – the burdens the United States and its allies must bear to preserve freedom’s chances – seems to have vanished from this Earth.
We are, as a result, at the point where compromise risks veering into capitulation. That is not Yalta; it is Munich. If the West can do no better, our future is a world of pain.

Luckily the immortal Rowe was also on hand to talk up Yalta ...

It's always in the details ... what a fine gaggle of goons drinking the kool aid as they gather around the sock puppet ...

And so to the bonus, a burst from Killer Creighton fresh from Gina's IPA (shush again, no mention of the IPA please):

JD Vance’s warning to European leaders on free speech applies equally to Australia, Had Elon Musk performed his (admittedly) bizarre thank you gesture to a crowd of Trump supporters in Australia, rather than the US, he could have found himself in jail.

Always good for a laugh ... not from the opening snap, Vice President JD Vance and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio during their meeting with the President of Ukraine at the Munich Security Conference.

Rather it was Killer's coy reference to that (admittedly) bizarre thank you gesture ...

So Adolf was just thanking the Germans. It was just a thank you gesture from the heart ...

As for the rest, it goes without saying that Killer was entirely on the side of a desperate attention-seeking, couch-fucking whiney and needy toady, who can only make admittedly bizarre verbal gestures...

JD Vance’s controversial speech at the Munich Security Conference should be a wake-up call for Australia’s as much as for Europe’s governing elite.
The new Vice-President, who’s quickly becoming the intellectual spear carrier of the Trump administration, mocked the growing obsession with censorship – including attempts to criminalise “hateful conduct” – among European governments.
Unless the continent changed, the US would seek a more distant relationship, he explained, rattling off some recent prosecutions, which I hope would still shock most Australians. German police recently raided the homes of citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist content online. British police arrested a man for praying outside an abortion clinic.
Vance could have delivered a similar speech about Australia, where federal and state politicians have taken advantage of a despicable spate of anti-Semitic graffiti and arson committed by a handful of idiots to ram through new laws that will fundamentally abridge Australians’ ability to speak freely without incarceration.

At this point, the reptiles wheeled in Sharri, full disrespect, to back up Gina's IPA man ...

Sky News contributor Kosha Gada says US Vice President JD was “blunt” with European leaders during his Munich speech. “He was very blunt and is again for the pulpit of what the Trump administration is all about,” Ms Gada told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “He was laying it out bare in a friendly way, but I would say in a blunt constructive criticism.”

While the mango Mussolini's thought police are busy at home suppressing dissent, intimidating judges, sacking government officials - the nukes, the bird flu, the vaccines, the education - and assaulting minorities and disappearing them to the cornfields, Killer of the IPA bought into the whole bullshit freedumb angle ... and oh dear, must we do it all again? Five historical quotes that we probably misquote...

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” - Voltaire

This quotation, supposedly by French writer and philosopher Voltaire, is often cited by free speech advocates. In a nutshell, it's saying that if you believe strongly in people’s right to express what they believe in, you will defend it even when they’re saying something you really don’t want to hear, or find offensive.
Voltaire, who lived between 1694 and 1778, certainly believed in free speech. Much of his writing attacked the Catholic Church’s attempts to restrict people’s liberty at the time. But he almost certainly never expressed his views in his most often ‘quoted’ line.
The quote has its roots in a biography by Evelyn Beatrice Hall published in 1906, more than a century after Voltaire’s death. In it, she tries to sum up Voltaire’s thoughts on freedom of speech and wrote the line to help do that.

Not Voltaire, but a woman doing a summary for dummies. Yep, we must do it again, as dummies crib while urging women to go about domestic duties...

“Under Donald Trump’s leadership we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree,” Vance said, in a nod to Voltaire’s famous dictum. “We shouldn’t be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.”
These principles are becoming as alien in Australia as they are in Europe, as Australia seems to be adopting a similar model of governance. We’re moving in a direction in stark contrast to our most important ally and ultimate defender, the US.
With little debate last month, federal parliament rushed through new laws that criminalise the display of “hate symbols”. It also removed the intent requirement to successfully prosecute someone for hatefully urging crime against a targeted group.
Now, speech that is merely “reckless” as determined by a “reasonable” person, can land someone with a mandatory sentence of years in prison.
Had Elon Musk performed his (admittedly somewhat) bizarre thankyou gesture to a crowd of Trump supporters in Australia, rather than the US, he could have found himself in jail.

Then it came again... as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia stalks the land, and a respectable atheist must hide in plain sight, more talk of a "thankyou gesture".

It was a bloody Nazi salute, pure and simple, from a white nationalist with training in apartheid and a devotion to importing his kind into the USA... 

Check it out again Killer...

Is it that Killer feels frustrated at not being able to make his very own IPA thank you gesture?

He seems peeved ...

Parliaments in Victoria and NSW are falling over themselves to introduce laws that are even worse. Victoria is planning to criminalise being “hateful or seriously contemptuous of, or reviling or severely ridiculing” a so-called targeted group, as determined by a hypothetical member of that group! Cartoonists and comedians will be out of work soon.

Not really - there's a healthy sprinkling of 'toons this day in the pond - but maybe bigots and fascists and the IPA will be out of work soon...

The reptiles then helped Killer with his Uncle Leon fixation, Elon Musk speaks in the Oval Office at the White House.

Speaking of Uncle Leon, it seems to have caused some blowback for Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan’s Infatuation With Elon Musk Is Angering His Fans

Poor Joe, poor Killer, still on the JD bandwagon, and the right and need to insult and bully and demean...

Sweden’s free speech laws, as Vance explained, do not grant “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief”. Australia is moving in that direction.
Free speech is entirely about protections for undesirable speech; no one would bother passing laws to protect desirable or even banal speech because no one would be offended.
The contrast with the freedoms that Americans enjoy and our own is increasingly stark. In 1969 the US Supreme Court, in what became the benchmark case, overturned an earlier conviction of one Clarence Brandenburg over his racist rantings about forcibly expelling black Americans.
Only speech that was “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and, crucially, “was likely to produce such action”, could be penalised, the judges found.
It’s an extremely high threshold and one that’s now sadly unimaginable in Australia. Personally, I struggle with the whole concept of a “hate crime”: how is physical assault, say, worse if the perpetrator in question also hated the victim? Isn’t hate an element of all crime to some degree? How can hate even be measured?

What a prize dickhead... if only because he immediately shows how good and wise it is to hate, hate, hate pesky, difficult, uppity furriners ...

Vance could also have made similar observations about immigration. European governments clearly have ignored their citizens’ increasingly overwhelming desire to slow rates of immigration amid high inflation, growing social discord and straining public infrastructure.
According to a Scanlon Foundation poll last year, 49 per cent of Australians believe immigration levels are too high, up from 33 per cent a year earlier. Yet both major parties over the past decade have overseen record inward immigration, which will ultimately prompt a backlash.

At this point the reptiles introduced another distraction, Dana White speaking during the UFC press conference held at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney Olympic Park. Picture: Jonathan Ng

That talk of the UFC reminded the pond of both Joe and Killer, and their fear of masks and Covid and vaccines, and Joe's love of Ivermectin ...

Remember Killer ranting like Joe?

...The great variety of responses across US states to Covid-19, which ultimately demonstrated the costly futility of masks and lockdowns, couldn’t occur again.
Unless the measures imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the way they were introduced, are condemned as a mistake made in a panic, we will have passed a turning point in Western history, one that has ushered in a more intrusive, utilitarian, even totalitarian system of government throughout liberal democracies.

Remember Joe's astonishing understanding of all things nutty?

Why is this man dropping in popularity? Why are Reddit ranters rabbiting on about his stupidity?

Sorry, the pond must stop Redditing ...must stick to Killer ... rabbiting on about masks ...

Australia’s reputation in the US has suffered hugely since Covid, where the government’s totalitarian response shocked many Americans who associated Australians with Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin.
“For a place that is so tough, where everything on land and in the water can kill you, you have the biggest pussies in the media I’ve ever seen in my life,” said visiting UFC supremo Dana White, among Donald Trump’s best friends, on a recent trip here.
In his speech Vance pointed to the outrageous censorship of individuals who suspected SARS-CoV-2 might have emerged from the China’s Wuhan Institute.
Australia’s government went much further during that time, even demanding social media remove a tweet that accused Daniel Andrews of being a “dick” alongside a picture of the then premier wearing a mask bearing the words “This Mask is as Useless as Me”.
“It would be insane that we would support a military alliance if that military alliance isn’t going to be one that is pro-free speech,” Vance said in September.
European elites were angry with Vance for humiliating them. Our elites should instead be worried: we rely on the US a lot more than Europe does.

Masks, always with the masks ...

In most parts of the world, that last Krusading Killer Kreighton sentence would pass as intimidating and threatening speech, designed to restrict freedumb, while endorsing bullying and public humiliation as a way to induce worry, fear and silence.

But then Killer is a Murdochian, and pace Zoe, where the pond started so long ago, humiliation within the family and humiliation in the world is all the go in the land of the hive mind ...

And so to a final domestic word from the infallible Pope...

And it would be remiss of the pond not to quote Russian state media, which has something of a bearing on the above, as (the despicable) Vladimir Solovyov says Trump's info comes from Putin...and Kellogg is cancelled...

Take it away stooge ...