Have you noticed that the people who are speaking most strongly about defending freedom in Ukraine are not exactly defenders of freedom in their own countries?
One aspect of the Trump-Zelenskyy imbroglio that few have remarked upon is the fact that the allegedly stalwart freedom fighters who have lined up with the supposedly Churchillian Ukrainian president don’t exactly have sterling records of protecting freedom at home. Is this just a coincidence? Or is there something else at play here?
Take, for example, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has led the way with his bold pledge to supply “boots on the ground and planes in the air” to keep the dastardly Putin at bay in Ukraine. In less than a year as prime minister, Starmer has earned the nickname “Two-Tier Kier” by aggressively prosecuting native Britons who are opposed to mass migration into the country, sometimes for nothing more than a rude remark, while letting those guilty of violent crimes against people who transgress against woke sensibilities walk free.
When Starmer visited the Oval Office last week, Vice President Vance upbraided him for his encroachments upon the freedom of speech in his once-great nation: “To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.”
And yet here is Keir Starmer, posing as a champion of freedom — not for Britain, but for Ukraine.
Then there’s Canada’s vapid Justin Trudeau. Back in February 2022, Trudeau invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act to crush the Freedom Convoy, a peaceful protest of truckers against the COVID mandates and restrictions that were destroying their ability to make a living. Trudeau’s government froze the protestors’ bank accounts and took other authoritarian measures, earning a rebuke even from that staunch freedom fighter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wrote: “The Violent crackdown on #FreedomConvoy2022 has nothing to do with freedom of speech and human rights. How coercion could be related to liberty & freedom of choice? #TruckersForFreedom.”
But Justin Trudeau, the destroyer of freedom in Canada, is going to save it in Ukraine.
Joining Starmer and Trudeau in this alleged coalition for freedom is France’s President Emmanuel Macron, whose government is busy with efforts to get his principal opponent imprisoned and barred from seeking political office. Yes, that sounds as if Macron has taken a page or two from Old Joe Biden’s playbook, and of course, if Old Joe were still pretending to be president, he would be standing with Starmer, Trudeau, and Macron both in cracking down on our freedoms and in forking over more of our money to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
So what is going on here? One aspect of the conflict is that today’s Commies hate the Russians. The Soviet Union was for decades the vanguard Communist state, and back in those days, the left in Europe and the U.S. loved to mock patriots who were concerned about a Communist threat. Ronald Reagan and the rest — they were just paranoid, you see, and driven by hatred. I remember seeing a news item back in the 1980s, to the effect that the Reagan administration was going to host a concert at the White House featuring the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff. The smug leftist commentator remarked that this was curious in light of the fact that Reagan hated Russia and Russians.
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Reagan did not, but today’s leftist authoritarians do. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is hardly a free society, but it isn’t a Marxist one, either, and the socialist internationalists who control the corridors of power in the West have never forgiven Russia for leaving the Communist fold and destroying what had seemed to be the inevitable forward motion of the Communist bloc. They also hate Putin for overseeing a large-scale re-Christianization of Russia. Whatever Starmer, Trudeau, and Macron are doing or hope to do in Ukraine, defending freedom is at the absolute bottom of the list.
They want to protect their interests there. They want to embarrass and discredit Trump. While they’re at it, they want to embarrass and discredit Putin as well. But when these sinister authoritarians start talking about freedom, the cognitive dissonance between what they’re doing in their own countries and the values they claim they’re determined to protect in Ukraine becomes too massive to ignore. The hypocrisy is off the charts. Trump and Vance should never miss an opportunity to point it out.
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