the Trumpian rabbit hole, and it's not very attractive.





Every comment following the video is supportive, cheerleading Vance and enthusiastically digging Europe's grave

My comment (slightly amended)

Sorry Alexander, your apparent unbridled enthusiasm for Trumpism as it's affecting Europe and Europe's is unduly disingenuous and what also appears to be smug enthusiasm for Europe's problems is pretty unattractive. The US is in Europe because it wanted to be. It suited the US to have a compliant Europe and its arms in Europe, like a mighty battleship always against the ferocious foe, Russia, and now the US is complaining about what has been its own self-interested investment. NATO is the US's misbegotten geopolitical love child, as much as anything that might actually benefit Europe. J D Vance, Trump and any US president or vice president of the last forty years have been experts in massive and dangerous humbug and the cause of wars and destruction accounting for millions of innocent lives over the years. The US has had years of undermining the USSR, they managed that, and then Russia became uncompleted business. Read the Project for the New American Century and Rand Reports, there's no secret here. Autocracies, existing and in the making, are never shy about their intentions. If it's the US that's now withdrawing from NATO, that fits with a country that cares nothing for anyone else and whose rules based order is entirely owned and written by itself. Does that mean that Europe without the US is in trouble - only if Europe wants it to. Indeed, the disbandment of NATO is going to be the best thing that's happened in the continent for decades, if it forces Europe to accommodate the biggest and most important European nation in its own security arrangements. But this should have been done in an orderly fashion not just by pulling the rug out from under everyone and hosing them down with ill founded and politically manipulative invective from a what might yet turn out to be a pretty precarious political perch. . .

And J D Vance as some sort of intellectual powerhouse, you say, Alexander? Vance derides Rory Stewart as not as clever as he thinks he is, hmm, Rory Stewart has passed the tests for MENSA and has a very high IQ, almost certainly rather higher than J D V’s. . That’s no particular recommendation for a political career of course, indeed looking at Vance’s success with his meagre attainments, it’s a positive disadvantage, it seems. One of JDV’s fellow US politicians is quoted qs saying "There’s not really much in terms of original thought," and "one of the most dishonest human beings I've ever known". His book "Hillbilly Elegy" became widely read, but seriously criticised by those who actually know something about Appalachia. Vulture writer Sarah Jones wrote, "The book is poverty porn wrapped in a right-wing message about the cultural pathologies of the region. In Vance’s Appalachia, poverty and immorality intertwine. Success happens to hardworking people, and structural explanations for poverty receive glancing attention when he chooses to mention them at all.” Silas House, an Appalachian author himself and the Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky, said he looks at Hillbilly Elegy as “not a memoir but a treatise that traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance.” And Mercouris heaps praise on this fraud?

This is Vance about Trump in 2016 "unfit for office" "I can't stomach Trump" plus many other criticism. For more information on JDV https://www.rawstory.com/j-d-vance-debate/ JDV has political skills of the conniving kind, but he is fundamentally a seriously dishonest man. .

Are there problems in Europe, certainly and what country above all has made them immeasurably worse? The US. The right-wing ascendancy of the US is bringing the entire planet to ruination, Trumpism is just the latest and most bizarre manifestation. A new broom at the top doesn't excuse a history of disastrous intervention from the same exceptionalism. There is chaos theory in the weather, in asteroid motion and in quantum mechanics, the last thing Europe, the world, and the USA itself, needs is chaos theory in geopolitics. Even less we need the right wing chaos theory promulgated by Trump, Vance and the plutocratic kleptocracy the runs the USA and wishes to impose itself, as all other USA regimes have done, on Europe and the rest of the world. Vance represents this sociopathic ideology to a T. Trumpism is a mere extension of US exceptionalism under another newly minted flag. Unless we revert urgently to a socialist, co-operatist, environmentally sustainable system and the reinvigoration of local communities and societies we are dooming the whole of humanity. Alexander, sadly I have noted for quite a long time your anti-environmentalist streak, you rarely lose an opportunity to dismiss with a smug smile such ideologies when they seem to conflict with the onward march of human economic progress as defined by ruinous capitalist metrics. There is much to admire in your analysis of Ukraine, Russia, and geopolitics generally, and is why I regularly tune in to your channel. You bring huge intelligence and understanding and historical insight in to these complicated, worrying issues. But as I say, sometimes you seem to allow your enthusiasm for certain ways of thinking to override the more rational side of your brain. There is no cogent or reality driven ethos to Trumpism, and you are in danger of cheering Trumpism to yet another socially destructive dead end.