We Live In A Time Of Monsters

The Trump regime is not on Europe's side, or Ukraine's, or Canada's. You don't have to guess whose side the White House is on anymore.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not a “peace plan.”

In the National Post today under the headline Trump throws Ukraine under the bus, I try to break down in plain language, for ordinary readers, the tectonic shifts that are occurring right under our feet.

It’s one of those stories that is not made easier to tell by the manner of the mainstream media’s telling. My lede:

A stupid habit that much of the western news media has adopted in reporting on the Trump administration’s various intrigues and contrivances related to Vladimir Putin’s savage war on Ukraine is the extravagant employment of the term “peace plan.”

. . . For good reason, historians do not refer to the Nazi-Soviet protocol of Aug. 24, 1939, as a German “peace plan.”

Do please read it when you’re done here. And do forgive the irony of the Post photo running on top of the story with presidents Trump and Putin and the words “Pursuing Peace” as a backdrop.

The liberty of this newsletter’s mandate allows me to write more frankly and directly about the subjects my columns address. So let me put it plainly for you:

Everything the Trump administration’s has done on the Ukraine file can be understood as a shakedown operation run by American oligarchs and Russian oligarchs in collaboration as accomplices in the looting of Ukraine’s resources.

The subject of my column was the main event disrupted by European intelligence leaks over the past three weeks. It was a joint Washington-Moscow gambit to swindle Russia’s frozen foreign wealth funds from the securities repository Euroclear before Ukraine’s European allies manage to get the monies to Kyiv.

American gangland meets the St. Petersburg mob.

Any one of the Real Story’s paying customers who responds in comments to this fact of contemporary geopolitical reality with something along the lines of “TDS!” I invite right now: Cancel your subscription to this newsletter. I am of no use to you. The point of the Real Story was never to disinvite controversy, but I prefer my paying customers to be full-patch members of the reality-based community.

Besides, if any of you think I was any less discerning in my judgement of, say, Joe Biden, or Barack Obama, you haven’t been paying attention. Substack has a search function. So does The National Post and the Ottawa Citizen and Macleans.

Under the radar, from Miami Beach to Moscow

In Hungary, and to an only slightly lesser degree Slovakia and Austria, there are already enough vipers intent on preventing Russia’s sanctioned assets from being put to use in the cause of Ukraine’s defence. But there is a more immediate problem at the moment.

I’m looking at you, Belgium. Specifically I’m looking at your cheese-eating surrender monkey of a prime minister, the eccentrically-bespectacled, round-collared Bart De Wever.

The big showdown was supposed to come December 18-19, at the next European Council summit. Turns out it’s happening right now, owing to an urgency triggered by the Molotov-Ribbentrop secret pact cobbled together in October by billionaire real-estate developer and longtime Trump family friend Steve Witikoff and Trump’s backchannel to Putin going back a decade, Kirill Dmitriev, at Witikoff’s Miami beach mansion. With special guest Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to offer advice on how to package the thing.

The showdown has moved up. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will be in Brussels tomorrow with a bid to convince Belgium to get out of the way of a $192 billion “loan” to Ukraine extracted from the frozen Russian funds held by the Brussels-based securities depository Euroclear, which I’ve been on about for quite a while.

Most of those Russian funds are from the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a Russian slush fund sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department three years ago. The RDIF, which has deep ties to Putin’s gangland oligarchs, also oversees the Russia-China Investment Fund. And who is the RDIF’s CEO?None other than RDIF chief executive officer and Witkoff partner in “peace” Kirill Dmitriev.

Merz is having a private dinner with De Wever and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. De Wever has been going all wet lately. He’s always the guy for whom money matters most. De Wever told La Libre yesterday that any talk of a Russian defeat is “a fairy tale”, and that Russia’s frozen assets will have to be returned to Moscow sooner or later. He says he’s scared of armies of Russian lawyers making his life miserable. He’s scared of other gangster states getting spooked and deciding against hiding their ill-gotten wealth in Euroclear’s accounts.

And who is that Dmitriev guy again?

Kirill Dmitriev is a Stanford graduate, a Harvard graduate, and an alumnus of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company, because of course he is.

Real Story subscribers and National Post readers will be familiar with McKinsey, whose boss Dominic Barton pretty much wrote the campaign platform for Justin Trudeau, the deposed Canadian prime minister who is now Katy Perry’s insufferable boyfriend. See Dominic Barton and the Damage Done, Part 1 and Dominic Barton and the Damage Done, Part 2.

I don’t think we should take it as a strange coincidence that it was Ukraine’s greatest champion in Canada, Chrystia Freeland, who effectively deposed Trudeau after having deposed Stephane Dion, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s best friend among the NATO countries’ foreign ministers, and also deposed John McCallum, who went on to serve as Beijing’s dual-purpose ambassador to and from Canada.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our current China-friendly prime minister Mark Carney more or less disappeared Freeland, who is still nominally Canada’s point person on Ukraine. See The News We Cover and the News We Avoid. Oh look. Here’s Freeland just this week.

It’s a bit of a stroll down memory lane but I do think it’’s worth remembering the way McKinsey mutated into a service agency for dictators, oligarchs and corporate drug pushers under Barton’s leadership, and played a lucrative role in corrupting and undermining the “liberal rules based order” that has lately fallen apart around the world.

And that was how Canada was transformed into a “post-national” aggregation of intersectional identity oblasts “with no core identity,” dependent on the money, markets, whims and tantrums of Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, and now of Donald Trump.

Three years ago, Dmitriev’s RDIF was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as Putin’s “slush fund.” Trump lifted the sanctions on Dmitriev, but that’s just how things are done nowadays. You can be a former president of Honduras convicted in a U.S. court for your role in trafficking 360 tonnes of cocaine into the United States, but if you say mean things about Joe Biden you’ll get sprung from jail by President Trump.

That’s what we’re dealing with here, kids. It’s just how they roll in “the sickening moral slum of an administration” run by Donald Trump, is the way the conservative American columnist George Will puts it.

A final note. . .

In Dublin, the good guys won. More or less.

In a 35-25 vote, the pround name Herzog will not be removed from Herzog Park down in Rathgar after all. If this seems a bit parochial for this newsletter you might want to read this thing I wrote for the Post two years ago: Antisemitic Ireland needs to shake off the imbecility. It is a big deal, even if it is personal.

I was on about the obscenities in the Auld Place in last Sunday’s newsletter under the heading Beyond the Pale, even the Pale of Dublin.

Even in defeat these jackeens gave themselves away.

Here’s Pat Dunne of the United Left party telling chief executive Richard Shakespeare that the uproar did not come from proper Dubliners and Irish people of conscience but rather from a force more sinister: Israeli spies and the extensive, invisible tentacles of the IDF:

“I’m further convinced that whatever phone calls were made to our CEO and to other officials probably emanated from Israeli intelligence attached to the Israeli Defense Force because they’re active in every issue in relation to Palestine. Trace it all the way back, Richard, and you’ll find that’s the source.”

The council meeting was livestreamed, here.

And here is a fine commentary from our longtime correspondent, the Galwayman Éamann Mac Donnchada.

We’ve taken a park honouring a Belfast-born, Dublin-raised Irishman who built a distinguished life elsewhere (a very common Irish story) and twisted it into a tribal purity test, all the while preening about our moral discernment.

The same people who would rightly recoil at questioning any other minority’s Irishness have appointed themselves arbiters of Jewish morality and Irish authenticity, demanding the right loyalty oath before granting full membership in the national community.

Even so, I do have some sympathy for the standpoint taken by Dan Mulhall, formerly of the Irish foreign ministry: “Conflating the position of a subcommittee of DCC with that of Ireland as a whole is wrong and needed to be contested.”

Tragically, for the time being at least, I’m afraid Ireland will have to be taken as a bad faith interlocutor in all matters related to antisemitism and its contemporary “anti-Zionist” manifestations, until shown otherwise