American policy conversations about Ukraine often assume that Ukraine is a problem. For some, it represents a distraction from China. Others fear Russian escalation and retaliation. Still others worry about the financial cost of supporting Ukraine’s army and propping up its war-blighted economy.

These concerns are real and have their place, but they miss the main point. Vladimir Putin’s ill-judged, ill-planned and ill-prosecuted war has ignited a national awakening in Ukraine. The country emerging from Putin’s War will be a formidable new force in Europe whose interests and outlook place it firmly in alignment with the U.S.

The Ukraine that emerges from this baptism by fire will be a formidable country with a battle-tested army, and it is going to transform the strategic landscape. It will join Poland, the Baltic republics and the Scandinavian countries in a defense-minded bloc against Russian expansion.

Further, any end to the war widely perceived as a defeat for Mr. Putin will do more than create a powerful new ally for the U.S.  Here’s why.

[VDH has done it again – here are excerpts to whet your appetite!]

Like the mysterious omnipresence of transgenderism in popular culture, all of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad—a pet-rock or hula-hoop-like collective madness…

Class apparently now means nothing. Do Barack Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and Joe Biden’s “semi-fascist Ultra-MAGAs,” all share the same values as those embraced by Hunter Biden, Jane Fonda, and Adam Schiff, by virtue of some mystical bonds of whiteness?...

For the racialist careerist, the less racism there is to find, all the more essential it is to root it out somehow, somewhere. So, here arrives a new genre of manufactured hate crimes, whose logic is “even if it did not happen, it reminds us that it could have happened.”…

The dearth of actual racism also demands a new set of adjectives that serve as something like sophisticated detectors to discover otherwise invisible natural gas fumes. The adjective “systemic” means only the select can now spot racism. Like air, it is everywhere but invisible and thus requires battalions of diversity, equity, and inclusion inspectors to use their training to expose it in the common atmosphere….

Where does this all lead?

We are wasting trillions of dollars in capital, labor, and time in tribal cannibalism as our friends abroad watch in horror, and our enemies savor our decline into collective suicide—while we sink into debt, our cities turn medieval, our border disappears, our criminal justice system collapses, and our military chases its tail.

[In this compendium of current Leftist insanity, VDH asks: “Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide—to the delight of our enemies like Communist China?”  But he has no answer.  Do you agree that the answer was given 20 years ago in “Beyond Treason”?  That all the passions of the Left are frenzies of masochism, that the more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy-appeasement?]

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Corporate America has joined this cultural revolution hysteria. Companies are apparently now hellbent on destroying their brands, profits, and net worth.

Anheuser-Busch has destroyed its best-selling Bud Light brand. Disney has rebranded its films, amusement parks, and television with  billion-dollar losses in Disney stock, subscribers, and viewers. A woke CNN has all but destroyed its once-global audience. It now has fewer viewers than certain popular podcasts.

All these implosions are not just shocking but surreal. Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide?

Kevin McCarthy trumpeted a debt-ceiling deal Sunday.  His one dealbreaker should have been his promise to defund President Biden’s massive $80 billion to turbocharge an already weaponized IRS.

This was the totemic centerpiece of his pitch to become speaker. It was the most memorable promise of the Republicans’ midterm campaign to win back the House.  “Our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents,” McCarthy vowed.  “You see, we believe government should be to help you, not go after you.”

Sure enough, the House voted 221-210 to repeal the extra IRS funding.  “Promises made,” the newly minted speaker said Jan. 9, banging the gavel on the first bill of the Republican-controlled House.

What about promises kept?  Fuhgeddaboudit.

It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files—the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship—was first published.

For six months, not much of consequence has happened, either in Washington or the mainstream media, in response. Those who owe us mea culpas have not provided them, tending instead to attack the individual reporters or ignore their findings.

Why? Because not many commentators understand the interconnected tendrils of a single censorship apparatus. Michael Shellenberger and his colleagues Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi are now undertaking a monumental attempt at defining that apparatus: they call it the Censorship Industrial Complex.

Shellenberger and Gutentag are two of the few journalists who not only take the reality of increased government censorship efforts seriously but also consider it a systemic, unified, and global threat, as opposed to a few discreet but regrettable extensions of U.S. political power.