Dead Fall

Winston Churchill. “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.

What was happening in Ukraine was a war between a calcified society lost in its brutal past and a free society looking toward a decent future. Nicholas couldn’t have said it any better himself.

It was slow-motion cultural suicide; an arms race of weapons-grade stupid, which tens of millions of people were lapping up daily. Carolan worried for his grandchildren and what the country would look like by the time they reached adulthood. He had always seen his duty as a citizen to be a steward of the Republic. No generation “owned” America. Instead, it was each generation’s responsibility to do everything they could to make sure the next generation coming up was handed a freer, more prosperous, more secure United States than had been handed to them.

The base makes the case. What they want goes. As French politician Ledru-Rollin once said, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.

There was nothing as provocative as weakness. Inaction was action. Autocrats, strongmen, and dictators could all smell weakness from miles away. It was an aphrodisiac to them; an open invitation to come and take what they wanted, a promise that there would be no consequences for their actions. Only when civilized nations drew a bright line and followed through with heavy consequences for crossing that line could those dictators, autocrats, and strongmen be kept in check.

As was typical with a good chunk of the uberwealthy, the more money they had, the smarter they thought they were, which invariably led them to want to play in the ultimate competitor sport—politics. Some strapped the armor on, climbed into the arena, and ran for elected office. Others accepted a government position based upon how much money they had helped an administration raise. The rest poured money in from the sidelines hoping to influence policy and legislation. Kyle Paulsen was a member of the third category of political players.

People want a sense of control over the uncontrollable. They want easy answers, and conspiracy theories fill that need.

Less than ten years earlier, the Russian President had successfully rolled his battalion tactical groups into eastern Ukraine and sliced off a nice chunk of the country. The rest of the world had done nothing. Worse still, the United States—a key signatory to the Budapest Memorandum, an agreement promising to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in the aftermath of the implosion of the USSR in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapon stockpiles—did little more than shrug.

Because conspiracies, by their very nature, are unfalsifiable. That’s what makes them so dangerous and why the Russians love them so much. They’re experts at weaponizing them against the U.S. and derive a huge return on an incredibly small investment. It’s like injecting the population with an aggressive form of societal cancer. Once it’s in the body politic, all the Russians have to do is sit back and watch as our country eats away at itself and gets weaker and weaker.

The fact that so many were acting as repeater stations for anti-American propaganda was a difficult pill to swallow. These otherwise good and patriotic people simply couldn’t be bothered to do even a modicum of fact-checking.

Too many citizens got their “news” and information only from sources that supported their biases.

People and societies should always be judged by how they treat the weakest among them.

The Ukrainian looks down and sees that the officer has only one boot. He asks, ‘Did you lose a boot?’ ‘Nyet,’ the Russian replies. ‘I found a boot.’ ” The young woman laughed. “Perspective.” “It is the key to everything.

What was worse, the outrage they supplied was akin to hits of heroin. Like any addictive substance, it constantly needed to be delivered in stronger and stronger doses. The moment any grifter or con artist failed to provide an ever-more-potent product, the audience would migrate to someone else who did. It was slow-motion cultural suicide; an arms race of weapons-grade stupid, which tens of millions of people were lapping up daily.

Swamp creatures prefer to work with their own.

The problem, however, was that the internet, coupled with a fractured media landscape, made it all too possible for people to silo themselves. Too many citizens got their “news” and information only from sources that supported their biases.

Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.