Some long-overdue housekeeping: why I’ve been absent and the elephants in the room on my Ukraine and 2024 election coverage
By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Bluesky @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) June 8, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News is approaching two million all-time content views, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.
(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish; Russian/Русский перевод)
A PERSONAL NOTE
SILVER SPRING—My dear readers, I owe you an explanation as it has been some time since I have engaged in publishing articles as a journalist, and the reasons are simple.
Last fall, I took on a job in the U.S. Federal Government, and out of an abundance of caution beyond the Hatch Act’s requirements and especially with the de facto war insurrectionist Trump’s presidential administration has declared on federal workers, critics, and many of the world’s most desperate poor alike, I decided that continuing my journalistic work at the time would put my ability to continue my work—work helping those suffering from disasters here in the U.S.—in serious jeopardy.
Over the next few months, I was proud to serve this nation and its people in time of need. I didn’t care that most people where I was deployed had voted for Trump when it came to my work: they were my countrymen and deserved our support, and that was why I was there.
But then my personal life got in the way, and I had to take some time off. Soon after, it was constant dread as it looked more and more likely that drug-addict and all-around bad person Elon Musk’s farcical, gaslighting DOGE would cost me my job.
While all this was going on, my Dear ol’ Dad passed away late in March and monstrous, deceitful relatives of mine made that experience exponentially worse.
Right around that time, I was formally DOGEd along with so many others, my federal position not continuing. Since then, I have had to focus on things other than the news.
Finally, though, I am trying to get back into the swing of things and am working on a number of new pieces I hope to be publishing quite soon. I might very much still be a mess in some ways on the inside, but this is life and it is time to move forward.
However, I think that it is important and that I owe it to you, my readers, to address a few issues before going forward.
A Note on My Ukraine Coverage
As far as my previous Ukraine/Russia coverage, I maintain most of that still stands up quite well, it’s just been delayed: between Ukraine not achieving the massive land gains hoped for during the big 2023 offensive, Trump’s MAGA Republicans holding up Ukraine aide well into 2024, between the aid that did come being diminished because of all the increased costs resulting from the aid delay, with the distraction of the 2024 U.S. elections, and with the Trump Administration favoring Russia diplomatically now and treating Ukraine and Zelensky horribly, the dynamics I have espoused upon consistently were diminished yet still intact and are what they are even if diminished or somewhat dormant.
Well, I do believe a lot of those dynamics could amplify in a decisive way for Ukraine and will be explaining that in a future piece that (indeed, recent spectacular events might signal a promising shift…). The last two years had slowed down and delayed a lot of the core dynamics but not rewritten them. So, while I would have loved for 2023 up until now to be different, like Ukraine is, I am looking to the future to vindicate myself even if the situations have looked less promising (so far) than my analysis would suggest. And I don’t think time favors Russia now just as I felt the same before. Still, while what I predicted is not happening and may yet come to pass and I would argue it will, I will understand if readers intelligently and reasonably question my work, and such questions are welcome.
And I will certainly be covering that recent historic, daring special operations strike against Russian air bases that somehow turned trucks into aircraft carriers and humiliated Russia spectacularly, evolving warfare as we know it before our very eyes, as Ukraine has done before.
A Note on My 2024 U.S. Election Coverage
In some of my coverage and depending on the prevailing trends of polling in any particular race, I have at times challenged pollster’s methodology. I saw a closer race than most in 2016, for example. In the 2022 midterms, I was more than vindicated by my analysis that polls were underestimating Democratic turnout. But in 2024, building on some of the logic from 2020, I ended up putting out my least accurate predictive analysis of my journalism career. To be fair, I still gave Trump a realistic chance of winning—about one in five—but my reading of the tea leaves, uncharacteristically, was seriously flawed.
Why? I may elaborate in the future on each of these reasons below, but for now:
First, I looked at polls showing Americans caring about the state of democracy and the high portions placing democracy as their top or a major voting priority and I assumed—admittedly for very good reasons—that the vast majority of most of those voters were supporting Harris against Trump. I was wrong: it was far closer in various exit polls and surveys released the day of and after the election, with Trump voters absurdly also quite concerned about Harris’s and Democrats’ perceived threats to democracy. I simply did not think that so many millions of Americans would have been hoodwinked and gaslighted enough to think that Trump was in any way a better candidate to protect democracy than Harris, let alone someone who practices or respects democracy.
I also did not believe the polling showing minority and younger voters shifting—in some categories, significantly—towards Trump and MAGA and away from Harris and Democrats. I looked at how some of these polls were constructed and conducted and thought I had understood correctly their flaws. But instead, after the election, I realized that this country had changed, even over the past four years, in ways I didn’t see or expect or recognize fully, and explained away the evidence that did point to this.
I was wrong, and, to their credit, the pollsters overall were pretty accurate.
And, very much related, I underestimated the degree to which social media and random generally unqualified people often dubbed “influencers” (both of which I have long-noted are more and more so spreading dangerous misinformation, propaganda, and disinformation, often backed or carried out by powerful hostile foreign government intelligence agencies) have for years increasingly displaced traditional media (the term “legacy” media is such an arrogant misnomer) and are now seeming to eclipse it. In turn, I overestimated the degree to which people were actually seeing the implosion in terms of coherence, message, and performance at the main events of Trump campaign in the closing weeks. I thought things like the MSG rally from fascist past just before the election would have cost Trump a lot of votes. But it seems a lot of people were not checking into reality. Often, people are so misinformed or worse that they vote for a candidate who will actually do the opposite of what they expect (and no, the recent Elon-Donald catfight will not save the left, but more on that another time..).
Now, I am not sure how many people, or even if a majority of voters, were aware of the quality of campaigns overall or heard the candidates unedited in their own words at any length (relatively few people watched the conventions compared to past election years, for example). Instead of watching what could pass for a white version of a ranting aging Col. Qaddafi with a disturbing cast of minions leaving a bad aftertaste, they seem to have made their minds up on selective or doctored clips or even loved the awfulness, if they even paid attention to it.
I thought the awfulness would cost him the election, but instead it seems to have helped him win it or not hurt him, at the very least. The information sphere is now so jumbled by these new forces that large sections of the electorate are not making well-informed decisions, even more than before.
As others have said, the cruelty is the point. And this time, he won on it.
Conclusion: Stay Tuned and All Hands on Deck
Every path is a learning experience, and even the best still learn on the job. I will be incorporating these lessons and others in my future work, so look soon for more stories Ukraine and Russia, the situation in the U.S., a major piece on Gaza, and even possibly some thoughts on the singular current cultural phenomenon that is the Star Wars show Andor (a must watch for all antifascists, the most politically relevant fictional show on television now, in my opinion and that of others, and the show with the highest-rated-string of episodes of all time on IMDB!).
I will have content soon on Orwell vs. Trump, for my podcast, and on this glorious human achievement known as the Andor Star Wars television show (so damn relevant to our times it’s literally terrifying [spoilers in link]). I humbly ask for your patience and forgiveness and am confident my future content will rectify my recent past underperformance.
Oh, and, given this tough time we’re all in, I’m very much asking for your support. If we don’t support each other, as the senior senator from Chandrila and fellow ginger redhead exclaimed in this season of Andor, “If we do not stand together, we will be crushed.”
First, donate to help Ukraine and civil liberties organizations, but then please consider donating to support my efforts here. Many thanks!
© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome
Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).
If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.
Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!