Saturday Commentary and Review #171
Project 2025 As Warmed-Over Reaganism, Bretton Woods Revisited, Rio de Janiero's "Narco-Pentecostal" Gangs, Srebrenica and "Genocide", A Wife's Revenge
Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
The populist tide that Donald Trump rode into the White House in 2017 was held back by a series of coordinated actions involving mainstream media, Silicon Valley, and what we call the “Deep State”. Whether via media hysteria, the “Trump-Russia” conspiracy theory, or intelligence officials pushing the falsehood that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinfo”, the Trump administration was effectively neutered from its first day up until its last.
This only tells us one part of the story. The other part involves that administration’s unforced failures that came from within. One thing that liberals and NeverTrumpers got right is that Trump was never presidential material, even if he has a wealth of executive experience in the business and entertainment worlds. This is not to say that all US Presidents have been made of that special ‘material’, but they all have had the organs of state at least not openly working to sabotage him.
It’s also no secret that staffing the Trump administration ended up being a complete disaster. Due to inexperience, naivete (or even negligence), “vetted” individuals were placed into positions of power to either try and steer the Presidency along the “accepted” course laid out by previous administrations, or to sabotage any efforts to try and chart a new path. In my opinion, it was the inability to source the best possible staff comprised of people who authentically wanted to correct America’s course that proved to be the biggest failure of his time in office.
The question as to whether Trump would be permitted to re-occupy the White House is still not a settled matter. Many think it preposterous, with some insisting that he would have been imprisoned, others arguing that the upcoming election will be “fixed” to deny him a win. On the other hand, some have been preparing for a Trump Redux and making plans to try and ensure that he is not cut off at the knees a second time. The conservative Heritage Foundation has led this charge, and has put together a 920 page manual entitled “Project 2025” to try and influence Trump America Part Deux.
Liberals and Democrats have seized on the release of this manual as a “how to end democracy in the USA forever” guide for Trump. This scare tactic relies on the assumption that no one will actually read it in its entirety (a safe bet), and therefore will not realize that it is little more than a standard-fare Con Inc. set of policy proposals, in many parts serving as continuity from the Biden regime. But even I should not say that, as I have to inform everyone here that I have yet to read the entire thing, either. I am making an assumption based on what I am hearing from trusted people who have read parts of the publication, and especially because it comes from Heritage.
has read through several portions of the document, and based on what he has read he comes to the conclusion that it is just warmed-over Reaganism:What would be far more surprising is if the Heritage Foundation, which drafted the document now being wailed about by every Democratic pundit, had not maximally ingratiated itself with Trump — in fact, the Trump Administration’s embrace of the Heritage Foundation was already well underway during his first term. But now liberals, desperate for a campaign pivot amidst Joe Biden’s cognitive implosion, are using their usual overwrought melodrama to hype “Project 2025” as slam-dunk proof that Trump obviously represents an Existential Threat To American Democracy™ or whatever. What they curiously fail to mention is that the document is robustly aligned with many of the liberals’ most sacrosanct priorities.
Alright Mikey, tell us more:
Christopher C. Miller, who briefly served as Trump’s “acting” Secretary of Defense, writes in his Project 2025 contribution that the next Conservative Administration must “prevent Beijing’s hegemony over Asia,” including by “modernizing and expanding the US nuclear arsenal.” Because we all know that what the “Deep State” fears most is pouring untold billions into nuclear weapons boondoggles that will keep themselves and their corporate partners gainfully employed in perpetuity. Miller solemnly declares that in addition to China, “the United States and its allies also face real threats from Russia, as evidenced by Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine, as well as from Iran, North Korea, and transnational terrorism.”
Countering these alleged threats, he concludes, “will require more spending on defense, both by the United States and by its allies.” Thus the fearsome Project 2025 envisions a future in which the march of US and “allied” militarization continues apace, just like it has during the Biden Administration. Someone’s going to have to explain how massively increasing expenditures on what is sometimes derisively referred to as the “military-industrial complex” represents any sort of severe blow to the “Deep State,” as the trembling libs claim to fear, and as “anti-establishment” right-wingers claim to yearn for.
Miller says US conventional force planning must be structured in such a manner as to “defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan,” so if what you deplore in this document is that bipartisan planning for war with China could accelerate under a second Trump Administration, that may be legitimate — but that does not seem to be what the liberals are whining about. Because the Biden Administration is currently doing the same thing!
So therefore, Project 2025 urges a continuation of Biden’s policy towards Beijing (a policy that he inherited from the Trump regime).
“Replenish and maintain US stockpiles of ammunition and other equipment that have been depleted as a result of US support to Ukraine,” the document advises. Good news: that, again, is already happening, with new artillery factories popping up everywhere from Arkansas to Texas.
Miller’s DOD section additionally declares that the US “must regain its role” as the “Arsenal of Democracy” by further ramping up foreign arms sales, which he says have fallen to unacceptable lows under the Biden Administration — despite Biden and Democrats similarly trumpeting the “Arsenal of Democracy” concept as it relates to Ukraine and other conflicts in which “Democracy is on the Line,” just like WWII. (Yawn.) Apparently there is firm agreement on this messianic imperative amongst the “Project 2025” crowd. The US has firmly retained its distinction as the world’s number one global arms exporter all throughout the Biden Administration, but this clearly isn’t enough for Project 2025. Weirdly, the MSNBC liberals don’t seem to be particularly troubled by that policy prescription.
More continuity.
And then:
As far as the DOD’s “intelligence” assets, Miller advises that they more fulsomely “align collection and analysis with vital national interests (countering China and Russia).” Can someone explain what Democrats find so “existentially” horrifying about this? They support the same exact thing, and in fact often argue that Trump is insufficiently committed to countering Our Big Bad Enemies. If there’s an “existential threat” contained anywhere in this document, it’s the same one that Democrats are currently promoting at full-blast: a lurch into a hotter-than-Cold War with China and Russia. (Which was just bolstered once again at the Washington NATO Summit this week, having produced an official Declaration that came closer than ever before in designating China an official enemy, by accusing it of providing “material support” to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.)
Miller wants to “increase the Army budget”; for the Navy, he wants to “build a fleet of more than 355 ships” as well as “produce key munitions at the maximum rate with significant capacity,” because the Navy must be urgently “prepared to expend large quantities of air-launched and sea-launched stealthy, precision, cruise missiles.” If any of this sincerely troubles hysterical Democrats, they would’ve been troubled by the budget-busting Defense expenditures that Biden has ushered in, building on the similarly budget-busting expenditures ushered in by the “dangerous” Trump. But of course they’re not troubled by any of this stuff.
A simple pattern should be detectable by now.
On Ukraine:
As far as the Ukraine war, the author of the State Department portion of the tome, Kiron Skinner, a former Director of Policy Planning in Trump’s State Department, attempts to distill what she concludes to be the consensus “conservative viewpoint” with respect to Ukraine: “Continued US involvement must be fully paid for; limited to military aid (while European allies address Ukraine’s economic needs); and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.”
This nicely mirrors what has indeed been the Congressional Republican consensus with respect to Ukraine policy under Biden, including among many self-proclaimed “MAGA” Republicans; it also tracks with the garbled and obfuscatory policy stance that’s been intermittently articulated by Trump.
Trump and the mainline GOP seldom ever object to the principle of funding and supplying the Ukrainian war effort. (After all, Trump is the one who started sending Ukraine lethal weaponry in the first place.) They simply call for that funding to be streamlined with a greater emphasis on core military expenditures, rather than the “economic aid” that Democrats are generally more keen to tack on. This was the essence of a House GOP policy brief that “MAGA Mike Johnson” (to use Trump’s preferred nickname for the Speaker) personally hand-delivered to the White House in late 2023, while the mammoth National Security Supplemental bill was being preliminarily negotiated — and which Trump himself eventually orchestrated the passage of. Another key prescription in that policy brief was that the US should “descope” its involvement in Ukraine to only that which is necessary for “enabling the killing of Russians on the front lines. That means providing the necessary weapon systems and tactics to win — not to tie.”
On the Deep State:
When it comes to what’s commonly referred to as the “Deep State” in MAGA parlance — aka, the “Intelligence Community” — Project 2025 contains virtually the opposite as what’s being suggested by hysterical libs. (Go figure). Fundamentally, the guidance calls for marginally re-organizing the Intelligence Services so as to empower them.
Trump loves to grouse that elements of the National Security State were irrationally against him in 2016-2018, and that’s true as far as it goes, with the Russiagate/Mueller fiasco being proof of these tawdry machinations. So it would make sense that Trump and the people in his orbit would want to impose various safeguards to prevent any future sabotage against Trump. But the idea that this means Trump would radically overhaul the “Intelligence Community” and put it in service of Putin and Kim Jong Un, or whatever other nonsense, is just entirely wrong. Simply read the text!
The whole point of these fearsome reforms with respect to the “Intelligence Community” is to enable “an incoming conservative President” to use all the “intelligence authorities” at his disposal to more “aggressively anticipate and thwart our adversaries, including Russia, Iran, North Korea, and especially China.” Is this what Democrats have in mind when they hyperventilate about Project 2025? Of course not, because the Biden Administration is doing essentially the same exact thing.
……..
The “intelligence” section of the document further advises the renewal of FISA warrantless surveillance, declaring that “Section 702 should be understood as an essential tool in the fight against terrorism, malicious cyber actors, and Chinese espionage.” Which again nicely aligns with Trump’s position, so far as it can be ascertained, seeing as he backed MAGA Mike Johnson’s successful effort to renew FISA in April, on the understanding that they both wanted Trump to be the one wielding that power when it next comes up for reauthorization in two years.
Mikey’s focus was on foreign policy, the intel community, the MIC, and the Deep State, which leaves out most of the document. But he does address the call to eliminate the Department of Education:
Yes, there’s a bunch more domestic policy stuff in Project 2025 that I haven’t focused on here. (I’ve only even highlighted a small percentage of the “national security” stuff.) But for the record, Ronald Reagan also ran on abolishing the Department of Education in 1980, back when he was also outsourcing his personnel and policy plans to the reviled Heritage Foundation. The abolition never happened. Whatever your views on this desirability of maintaining the existence of the Department of Education, the fact remains that this has been a bog-standard “Conservative Movement” aspiration for ages. So you might as well call the plan Project 1981 rather than Project 2025. To portray it as some sort of apocalyptic fascism unique to Trump is just totally ridiculous.
The 1981 version was compiled in 1979, similar to the advance compilation of the “2025” document, which was published in 2023.
Trump has tried to distance himself from this project, but Heritage is quite influential in conservative policy circles and therefore will have a presence in any future Donald White House. They are making a smart play to try and seize the initiative and steer a new Trump regime. The question remains: what does this have to do with draining the swamp?
The Yalta Conference held during February of 1945 decided how Europe (and especially Germany) would be reorganized politically once the Nazi regime was defeated once and for all. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin got together to decide how to occupy a coming post-war Germany (with France joining the occupation party), and to agree on zones of influence for the rest of the continent. This agreements made at this conference would lead to the eventual formation of two separate German states, the Iron Curtain, NATO, and the Warsaw Pact.
Just as important as the conference at Yalta was one held in July of 1944 in New Hampshire. Attendees were staying at a hotel called Bretton Woods, and they were there to map out the future global economic order. Like Yalta, all the big players were present. But unlike Yalta, the Soviets were sidelined as the conference was dominated by the junior partner Brits, and their senior partner, the Americans. The three-week-long conference hashed out the details on how the future global economic order would look and function. Interestingly enough, agreements from this conference have managed to persevere longer than those struck at Yalta:
The conference had been facilitated by the US to agree new rules for the post-war international monetary system. Described as the most important international gathering since the Paris peace conference of 1919, it would “look beyond the carnage of war to establish a new world order founded on commerce and cooperation”. To the indignity of the British, it became the moment when the hosts conclusively replaced them as the world’s dominant power.
Some 80 years later, the international system looks very different to what was agreed during that three-week process, much of it having failed or mutated along the way. All the same, American dominance has continued, with the basic tenets that underpinned the agreement still broadly in place. As we shall see, however, they are now under threat like never before.
The two key protagonists at Bretton Woods were the British economist and lead negotiator, John Maynard Keynes, and the chief international economist at the US Treasury Department, Harry Dexter White. Keynes was a veteran of the Paris conference, which had culminated in the treaty of Versailles.
The Americans won out for many reasons:
White and Keynes both wanted the avoid repeating the mistakes of Versailles, and believed that a system of stable exchange rates and free trade were essential to promote both prosperity and peace. Yet there were some sharp differences between the two men about how the new system should be set up.
Essentially this boiled down to a geopolitical battle, with the war-torn British trying to salvage their global importance while the Americans were determined to sideline them.
Keynes proposed, among other things, that the international monetary system be underpinned by a global reserve currency called the bancor and a global central bank called the International Clearing Union. Unfortunately for him, the Americans held most of the cards.
They had become the world’s leading exporter, including supplying the bulk of military equipment for the two wars and lending large amounts so that the warring nations could afford to fight. Much of this was paid for in gold, and by 1944 the US owned most of the world’s reserves.
As a result, White’s vision of a more America-centric system prevailed (and Keynes would die from heart problems less than two years later). Two new US-dominated institutions were set up, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).
The IMF was tasked with managing an international system of fixed exchange rates, pegged against the US dollar. The dollar had a fixed value in gold – US$35 (£28) per ounce – replacing the previous system in which many countries’ currencies were pegged directly to gold and could be converted into the precious metal.
It didn’t last as long as many thought it would:
The system only lasted until 1970, as US military spending during the Vietnam war meant the US dollar was unable to retain its peg to gold. Whereas Bretton Woods had restricted the quantity of currencies in circulation, now central banks could expand their money supplies to try and stimulate their economies.
This enabled the vast money creation used to prop up the global economy after the economic crises of 2008 and 2020, which has arguably been a major cause of inflation.
Meanwhile, the IMF and World Bank have become preoccupied with lending to poor countries in crisis. Both get heavily criticised for forcing governments to slash public spending and sell off assets to foreign companies. As for the WTO, it may have done much to help reduce tariffs and other trade barriers, but it has all but ceased functioning in recent years.
On the primacy of the US dollar:
Then there is the US dollar. The US government’s decision to weaponise the international financial system in the wake of the Ukraine war by cutting off Russia’s access to its dollar-denominated assets has made other countries fear they could suffer the same fate. China and others have been reducing their exposure to the dollar by doing trade deals priced in other currencies such as the yuan.
But……
Yet none of this is to say that the Bretton Woods system has truly failed. Between 1950 and 2017 the volume of world trade increased 39-fold. The share of the world’s population living on less than US$2 a day after adjusting for inflation declined from 75% in 1950 to just 10% by 2015, albeit it has barely fallen since then.
Europe paid the US the compliment of trying to replicate the Bretton Woods system when it created the eurozone, while the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, felt enough goodwill towards the 1944 agreement to call for a “new Bretton Woods moment” in 2023 to ensure that developing countries have a greater voice in global financial institutions.
Equally, some of the other problems with the current system can be overstated. Arguably, the discipline demanded by the IMF and World Bank are ultimately well intentioned. Greece may have endured brutal austerity on the back of its 2010s bailouts, for instance, but the loans probably still saved the nation from even worse outcomes like being forced to leave the euro and going into hyperinflation.
Similarly, “dedollarisation” has had a limited effect: the greenback’s place at the apex of the international financial system is not in serious trouble.
The author is clearly a proponent of global free trade:
But new challenges have emerged. China is now a real threat to US economic dominance. America’s subsidy-heavy Inflation Reduction Act 2022 represents a significant move away from the free-trade doctrine underpinning the international system since the 1940s, as are the tariffs recently imposed by Washington and potentially Brussels on Chinese electric vehicles.
The greenback is still king, the USA still controls so many of the most important levers of global economic institutions, and BRICS is way, way overblown. But China is indeed a threat to US economic hegemony.
A few years ago, I decided to click on a video on YouTube because the thumbnail showed an attractive Brazilian woman to alleviate my boredom. It turned out to be a short documentary on female rappers in the favelas of Rio. The music was instantly forgettable, but what stuck in my mind was something that was brought to my attention for the first time: the fact that local drug lords who rule these favelas were increasingly turning to Evangelical Protestantism.
The Catholic Church is taking a beating everywhere these days, save for parts of Africa. Latin America, once almost entirely Catholic, is now in competition with Evangelicalism in many places, especially in Rio de Janiero. Where less than 10% of all Brazilians were Protestants only as recently as two generations ago, it has grown to 30% since then. Why? There are many reasons for this, but one reason that is consistently left out is that people like a winner, and Fundamental Evangelicalism is associated with the USA, the world’s leading power.
Drug lords being religious may sound counterintuitive, but Brazil is a wild country that produces so many subcultures, most of which are never seen outside of the country. In Brazil, “Narco-Pentecostals” made sense:
Reports that a powerful Rio drug lord known for his extremist religious beliefs ordered Catholic churches near his stronghold to close have spooked worshipers and security experts and exposed the advent of a “narco-pentecostal” movement made up of heavily armed evangelical drug traffickers.
Claims emerged in the Brazilian press over the weekend that Álvaro Malaquias Santa Rosa – a notorious gang boss known as Peixão (Big Fish) – had determined that three places of worship should shut down in and around the agglomeration of favelas that he controls in northern Rio.
Since Peixão – whose nickname comes from the ichthys “Jesus” fish – took power in 2016 of five favelas that have become known as the Complexo de Israel, an allusion to the evangelical belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land is a step towards the second coming of Christ and Armageddon.
A neon Star of David has been erected at the top of the complex and at night can be seen for miles around – an unmissable symbol of Peixão’s force and his faith. The roofs of the favelas’ redbrick houses are dotted with blue and white Israel flags demarcating the territory the gangster controls. When police raided one of his hideouts in 2021 they found a swimming pool framed by a mural of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem and the words: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”
To quote the late, great Johnny Carson: “weird, wild stuff!”
The first inkling that something was amiss came on Saturday when staff at the Our Lady of Conception and Saint Justin Martyr parish told parishioners that meetings and mass were suspended “until further notice”. The social media post was later deleted but, according to local newspapers, word quickly spread among churchgoers that the order had come from Peixão.
The broadsheet O Globo said there were subsequent reports that armed men on motorbikes had visited two other local churches, Saint Hedwig and Saint Cecilia, and decreed that weddings or christenings should not take place. Those churches also published messages announcing their temporary closure.
The Archdiocese of Rio denies these reports, btw.
But the civil police’s anti-intolerance and racism unit is reportedly investigating. On Monday morning, military police launched an operation to remove barricades blocking roads leading into Peixão’s domain, where Bible-themed murals carry quotations from Psalms. The government said police had been deployed to prevent “instability in the region and ensure that churches can operate and that residents are safe”.
Whatever the truth, the drama has alarmed churchgoers and highlighted the growing influence of Bible-bashing bandits known as “narco-pentecostals” who now control large swaths of Rio.
“They call themselves evangelicals but I refuse to use this term. In reality, [Peixão] is a narco-religious-fundamentalist,” said the commentator and former newspaper editor Octavio Guedes on the television network GloboNews.
Experts say the backdrop to the rise of narco-pentecostalism is the breakneck spread of evangelical churches through Brazil in the almost four decades since 37-year-old Peixão was born in Rio’s dilapidated northern suburbs.
Since then, Brazil’s evangelical community has exploded, from less than 7% of the population in 1980 to 22% in 2010 and about 30% today. The Catholic congregation, meanwhile, has shrunk dramatically. In 1991, 83% of Brazilians identified as Catholic, compared with about 50% today.
I don’t have much to say about this phenomenon other than it being a testament to the failure of the Church in places like Rio. Why is it failing to hold on to the faithful, or even the semi-faithful? There are obvious answers, but I am certain that there are less obvious ones too that require a good think.
29 years ago this week, Bosnian Serb forces of the VRS managed to seize the town of Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia, on the border with Serbia. A massacre of Bosnian Muslim males ensued shortly thereafter, and the narrative of genocide sprung forth quickly from it, giving cause to NATO’s intervention in that conflict.
Did a massacre occur? Certainly. Some 2,000 Bosnian Muslim males were summarily executed by Bosnian Serb forces around Srebrenica shortly after the UN-designated “safe haven” fell to the Serbs. Some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims lost their lives in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Srebrenica, but the narrative of “genocide” whereby all 8,000 were executed is simply not true as per John Schindler, the then-Technical Director for the Balkans Division of the NSA:
Twenty-nine years ago today, the Bosnian Serb Army captured Srebrenica, an isolated town in Bosnia’s east that was jam-packed with Bosnian Muslims, most of them refugees. This small offensive, involving only a couple of battalions of Bosnian Serb troops, soon became the biggest story in the world. What happened around Srebrenica in mid-July 1995 permanently changed the West’s approach to war-making and diplomacy.
The essential facts of the Srebrenica massacre are not in dispute. The town was a United Nations “safe area” but U.N. peacekeepers there, an understrength Dutch battalion, failed to protect anyone. Over the week following Srebrenica’s quick fall, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, almost all male, a mix of civilians and military personnel, were killed by Bosnian Serb forces. About 2,000 disarmed Bosnian Muslim prisoners of war were executed soon after the town’s capture. The rest died in the days that followed, all over eastern Bosnia.
As the world learned the extent of the massacre, by far the biggest atrocity in the Bosnian War that had raged since the spring of 1992, Western anger mounted. Six weeks later, President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to bomb the Bosnian Serbs in Operation Deliberate Force, the first major military action in NATO’s history. By the year’s end, the war was concluded by American-led diplomacy.
Here are Schindler’s conclusions:
That for three years, Srebrenica, supposedly a U.N. “safe area,” served as a staging base for Bosnian Muslim attacks into Serb territory. The Muslim military’s 28th Division regularly attacked out of Srebrenica. Bosnian Serbs claim they lost over 3,000 people, civilian and military, to those attacks.
That the Bosnian Muslim commander at Srebrenica, Naser Oric, was a thug who tortured and killed Serb civilians (he showed Western journalists footage of his troops decapitating Serb prisoners), as well as fellow Muslims he disliked. Mysteriously, Oric fled Srebrenica three months before the town’s fall, leaving his troops to die.
That most of the Bosnian Muslim dead, some three-quarters of them, died not at Srebrenica but during an attempted breakout by troops of the 28th Division to reach their own lines around Tuzla. They showed little communications discipline, and Bosnian Serb forces called down their artillery on them, columns of Muslim military and civilians together, slaughtering them. This doesn’t meet any standard definition of genocide.
That the Muslims were flying weapons into the “safe area” by helicopter in the months before the Bosnian Serb offensive. (Controversially, the Pentagon knew this was happening but pretended it didn’t.) The Serbs repeatedly protested to the U.N. about this violation, to no avail. This was the reason for the offensive to take the town.
There’s also convincing evidence that the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo knew Srebrenica would be attacked and allowed it to fall. Their leader, Alija Izetbegovic, stated that if Srebrenica fell, the Serbs would massacre Muslims as payback, and America would intervene on the Muslim side in the war. He was right.
Some of you may not like what John has to say here about Gaza and how it relates to Srebrenica:
This isn’t merely a historical matter. What happened in Bosnia is being repeated today in Gaza. Western journalists uncritically accept Muslim claims about war crimes and “genocide” to smear a Western state that’s at war with radical Islam.
Here the strange ideological affinity between jihadists and the Western Left plays a role, as it did during the Bosnian War as well. No claims of war crimes, which possess great political value on the world stage, should be accepted without independent confirmation. Srebrenica should have taught Western elites this essential truth, but it didn’t.
On a personal note, I like to bring up Srebrenica to Serbs as an example of how media shapes narratives that are often very remote from the truth in the hope that they understand what I am saying in a wider context.
Fun fact: Srebrenica translates into “Silverton”, as it was a significant silver mining town during the late Medieval era, with imported Saxons running the show.
We end this weekend’s SCR with a long and wild read about “A Wife’s Revenge”:
In October of last year, Free Press reporter Francesca Block came across a fascinating tip in her inbox. It told the story of Allan Kassenoff and Catherine Youssef, a couple of New York City litigators who married in 2006. It was a tempestuous union, which resulted in three daughters, and ended with a series of terrible abuse allegations. Allan finally filed for divorce in May 2019, triggering a brutal custody battle that remains infamous in the courts of New York. It was still ongoing when, just over a year ago, Allan received a horrifying email—Catherine had traveled to Switzerland where she would die by assisted suicide.
But death did not part the Kassenoffs.
When Francesca started digging into their story, she found that nothing was as it seemed. To get to the truth, she has spent more than eight months speaking to dozens of people and reading hundreds of documents. This is the longest piece we’ve ever published, and it’s well worth your time. Because it isn’t just a story about one family’s ugly domestic dispute, though that story is a wild one. It’s equally a story about how social media can distort our perceptions, reflecting complicated human beings in a funhouse mirror that bears little relationship to who we really are.
It’s a very long read. Click here to check it out.
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Every time Biden stumbles, the TDS MSM covers for him by ratcheting up the fearmongering. Project 2025 is the latest catnip for the cat ladies that comprise the Biden base. Heather Cox Richardson is the worst Trump Derangement Substacker and she is the second-highest growing author on this platform: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/heather-cox-richardson-karen-tds-historian
Thanks for presenting the facts on Srebenica. Here's a crazy chain of events: Clinton gets a blowjob, then bombs Serbia to distract, then Novak Djokovic emerges from the rubble with the mental strength to become the greatest tennis player of all time. Hope he wins Grand Slam #25 at Wimbledon tomorrow!