According to archneocon Bill Kristol, this image will feature on ten billboards during the Republcan presidential debate in Milwaulkee, August 20, 2023
Defending Democracy Together, a neoconservative outfit led by career chickenhawk scribe Bill Kristol, has launched a new initiative called "Republicans for Ukraine" to transform the 2024 presidential election into a referendum on US funding for the NATO proxy war.
Urging Republicans in Congress to support more funding for Ukraine in the upcoming appropriations bill is also a key item on the agenda.
Kristol had defined himself as a leader of the Republican Party's neoconservative faction, bashing isolationist and antiwar GOP figures on the pages of his now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine while laying the intellectual groundwork for the invasion of Iraq through his Project for a New American Century.
By fashioning his Defending Democracy Together as a bastion of Never Trumpism, Kristol was able to ingratiate himself with elite Democrats eager for Republican allies in their messianic battle against the Bad Orange Man. His anti-Trump efforts ultimately earned him a cringeworthy MSNBC tribute celebrating the unrepentant neocon as "Woke Bill Kristol."
Now, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive fails and a majority of Americans declare opposition for the first time to sending more military aid to Ukraine, Kristol is launching a multimillion dollar ad blitz to keep the tanks slogging through the Donbas mud and the dark money flowing into his bank accounts.
"Ukrainian troops fought alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now they are fighting to defend their democracy," Kristol's campaign announces on its website. "Most importantly, American military, financial, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine has helped them weaken Russia."
His initiative has therefore invoked the military debacles that turned the GOP base firmly against neoconservatism and into the arms of Trump, presenting Ukraine's participation in these forever wars as justification for a new one.
And as we will see, Kristol's supposedly Republican operation has been funded by a top Democratic Party donor with close ties to US intelligence.
Pro-war ads for a GOP base turning firmly against NATO's proxy war
To generate viral content for its $2 million "Republicans for Ukraine" campaign, Defending Democracy Together gathered testimony from 50 GOP voters, drawing from a base of mostly white collar baby boomers alienated by the non-interventionist direction of the party base.
In each testimonial, the interviewees spouted boilerplate talking points on "defending democracy" and opposing authoritarianism that could have just as easily been produced by senior fellows at any arms industry funded think tank on DC's K Street.
One veteran featured in the campaign claims he spent two decades fighting the "Soviet Union's threat to freedom," and offers his hope that Republicans for Ukraine "can serve as counterprogramming to conservative radio and TV show hosts who are challenging additional aid to Ukraine."
Some of the ads display a geopolitical paranoia far beyond the scope of average American voters. Teresa Benson from Minnesota, for example, is worried that "if nobody tries to stop [Putin] in Ukraine, that next he would attack Moldova and any other non-NATO countries in the area."
The campaign's advertisements will air "on cable and network TV and digitally on Youtube through the end of the year." The outfit has even purchased ad space on Fox News during the first Republican primary debate on August 23 being held in Milwaukee.
In addition to the ads, the group has also purchased 10 strategically placed billboards in Milwaukee, urging debate attendees to "support Ukraine" and "Stand up to Putin." Hints that the operation may expand can be found within a Google Drive folder maintained by the campaign, entitled "Billboards - August 2023."
© Google Maps My MapsBill Kristol's Ukraine war propaganda billboard campaign. One image is labeled "ukraine-times-square-01."
In an interview with the Washington Post, Defending Democracy Together co-founder and former alcohol industry lobbyist Sarah Longwell lamented shifts within the Republican Party base. These included Republicans becoming "more protectionist on trade," and "more populist." But nothing causes her more concern than changes in "Republican attitudes around foreign policy."
"It was alarming in the focus groups to see so many Republican voters talk about Ukraine or [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky in disparaging terms," Longwell told the Washington Post.
The Omidyar connection
If Defending Democracy Together's short history is any indication, the "Republicans for Ukraine" initiative may actually be powered by money from top supporters of the Democratic Party and the ultimate architect of the Ukraine war: President Joe Biden.
Defending Democracy Together was the top dark money spender in the 2020 election with its front, the Republican Accountability Project (formerly Republican Voters Against Trump) leading the charge. By injecting more than $15 million dollars into the campaign, the outfit more than doubled the spending of the second-highest ranked dark money outfit. Its ads urged Republicans to vote for the Democrat, Joe Biden.
Since the outfit is powered by dark money, it is impossible to know who greases its wheels. However, disclosures by one NGO offer insight into the liberal leanings of its main known backer: tech mogul and US intelligence partner Pierre Omidyar, whose Democracy Fund distributed $4.15 million into Defending Democracy Together and its offshoot, Republicans for the Rule of Law, between 2018 and 2021.
As I reported with Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal, Omidyar has leveraged the fortune he amassed as the founder of Ebay to support establishment Democratic candidates while his various foundations act as cutouts for regime change operations waged by US intelligence, including in Ukraine.
Defending Democracy Together serves as the sponsor for a mind-boggling array of important-sounding initiatives, all supposedly representative of the GOP: Republicans for Voting Rights, the Republican Accountability Project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, the Becoming American Initiative, The Russia Tweets, and now, Republicans for Ukraine.
Its first project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, was introduced in a Washington Post column by Jennifer Rubin, a neoconservative former George W. Bush cheerleader who switched parties during the Trump era. Rubin hailed the Kristol-led campaign for launching an effort to "protect [Robert] Mueller," the FBI's special counsel investigator who ultimately failed to turn up evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia. The Republicans for the Rule of Law campaign pushed ads on Fox News and MSNBC touting Mueller's Republican bonafides over footage of Marines firing off mortars in the jungles of Vietnam.
Republicans for the Rule of Law campaign pushed ads on behalf of Robert Mueller on Fox News
The name of Republicans For The Rule Of Law was tinged with an irony that is impossible to ignore: When US presidents have lied to the public to justify catastrophic military adventures and the sadistic torture of detainees, its founder demonstrated little interest in the rule of law. And today, the neocon guru may not even be a Republican at all.
Alex Rubinstein is an independent reporter on Substack.
Reader Comments
Every major player from Nuland to Zelensky to Rothschild to the owners of the MSM are of that tribal group. (((THEY))) are to blame. But, of course, they will not be called to account... at least not by the current crop of political puppet prostitutes in power today. Another red flag as absolute proof of this allegation is that the local Ukrainian inhabitants of this particular group were shipped out of the country months in advance of the onset of hostilities. Rats fleeing a sinking ship so only the expendable g0yim would do the fighting and dying.
And you can bet your bottom fiat dollar that once a third of the indigenous population has been eliminated and their property left open and worthless, those same rats will clamber back in to buy up those assets on the cheap to begin the parasitic process all over again. When we fail to understand the patterns of history, we are condemned to relive them over and over and over again. It is astonishing to behold.
I try to hint at such things on conservativetreehouse (lots of Christian zios there), but my comments get deleted. And my comments are much more subtle, but for some reason, they protect the neocons/banking cartel and most there fail to see the common thread, despite it being in your face obvious.
Spot on, and difficult to understand
Cops accused of beating Palestinian detainee, branding him with Star of David
Israel Police officers are alleged to have brutally beaten a Palestinian and branded a Star of David on his cheek after arresting him in East Jerusalem on Wednesday. The resident of the Shuafat...@parzival:
They are here, with us, everywhere.
They live.
They breed.
They reproduce.
They propagate.
And they profit. Oh, do they profit.
And they do it by inflicting misery and tragedy, again and again and again, upon the very nature and value and meaning of life.
It is difficult to contemplate.
Why?
ned,
out
.
Crisis Update: Indigenous People Under Attack By Globalists' From Maui to Australia, first nations are being neutralised AUG 18, 2023 [Link]
A bunch of hypocrites and posers is all they are.
Who provide the oil and gas, and control the prices?
People need to live. Are they evil for using the products that are provided to them?
People who try to move away from these things and to create a clean, off grid way of life for themselves, can't. Why? The parasites in control won't allow it. The system and laws blatantly do not allow a clean way of living.
The parasites need a host.
The system and the laws do allow it. The problem is that it's too difficult for people to want to do it. They want easy.
I don't pay taxes. I don't have electric or gas bills. There is a way but people use excuses instead because they like the easy comfortable way even if it means sleeping with the devil.