Alexei navalny

Sunday

Ben Domenech

Where is the clarity in modern center-right foreign policy?

When Ohio senator J.D. Vance arrived at the Munich Security Conference in February, he had a clear message meant for the world: the Republican Party was no longer the party of Ronald Reagan. Standing outside the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, he informed reporters that he did not believe American support for combat against authoritarian regimes should extend to Ukraine — and that he would continue to oppose efforts to “increase the supply of weapons in Ukraine because we’ve already expended so many of our munitions and resources” to achieve a victory that he does not foresee. Vance’s bootstrap story is well-known — he’s a Marine veteran turned Yale Law grad turned venture capitalist made prominent by his bestselling Appalachia memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

foreign policy

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

Bring back the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine

The death of Alexei Navalny has dramatically increased the risk for other key figures currently imprisoned by Vladimir Putin, whether for reasons of dissident behavior, protest against the war in Ukraine or supposed suspicion of espionage. The fact that Putin would cross this line, and do so with impunity in the midst of both the Munich Security Conference and a western influence push spearheaded by willing patsy Tucker Carlson, is a sign that we are now in a new reality — one that it is the duty of the next administration to irrevocably reverse. In the past, when the United States’s top officials identified an American citizen or important dissident held in another nation and said “do not touch this person, lest you find out what terror awaits you,” it meant something.

marilyn monroe

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

A subdued Donald Trump in South Carolina

Greenville, South Carolina I’ve now seen three versions of Donald Trump in the state where I grew up. In 2016, he was the impassioned underdog, battling against Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in a state many in the national media assumed would decide against a New York limousine liberal and stop the Trump Train in its tracks. In 2020, he was the prideful, over-the-top champion of the conservative cause — he bellowed through a sweaty speech, calling out to the universal Republican endorsements in the audience, playing the hits to a stadium crowd mere weeks before the word "coronavirus" was known to the average American.

donald trump south carolina subdued

Friday

The Spectator

Trump hit with mega fine in fraud case

Judge Arthur Engoron handed down a $355 million judgment against former president Donald Trump in his civil real estate fraud case in New York. Engoron held that Trump inflated the value of his assets in obtaining bank loans.The case seemed doomed from the start for the former president as Engoron, before the trial began, accepted a valuation that determined Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort was only worth $18 million. This was a laughably absurd assertion, as Mar-a-Lago sits on wildly attractive oceanfront property in Palm Beach, Florida — the land value alone would be worth far more than $18 million.

Daniel DePetris

Alexei Navalny won’t be the last of Putin’s martyrs

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader and a constant irritant to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime for more than a decade, has died in a remote penal colony in the Arctic Circle at the age of forty-seven. The news was greeted with shock, outrage and sadness across the US and Europe and came at a time when the West’s most high-profile politicians and security figures were in Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference.   There’s no denying Navalny’s bravery. Most high-profile Russian figures who criticize Putin and live long enough to tell the tale choose to live a life in exile. Navalny, however, was never interested in that option.

alexei navalny
Ben Domenech

Will the West make Putin regret the death of Navalny?

The death of Alexei Navalny, announced a week after Vladimir Putin's sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson and reported as senior officials gather for a security summit in Germany, is an expression of the ruthlessness of the Russian authoritarian. Add Navalny to the list of foes Putin's regime has assassinated — the most prominent since Boris Nemtsov was shot to death while crossing a bridge — and know that so long as the current regime is in power, it will continue to assassinate anyone who rises up against it. Whether they die by poison or bullet or walking in a prison yard north of the Arctic Circle, it's all the same to him. Navalny's defiant stand in opposition to the corrupt Putin regime is the definition of courage.

navalny opponents
Ben Sixsmith

Why Tucker Carlson should have been less excited about his groceries

Tucker Carlson has been radicalized by a Russian supermarket. There’s a sentence you never expected to read. As part of his tour of Moscow, the week before Putin critic Alexei Navalny “died in prison,” the firebrand commentator visited a grocery store and was stunned by the low prices. “That’s when you start to realize,” Carlson marveled: …that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought… Corruption… If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a good person or a bad person, you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country.

tucker carlson groceries