By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 6, 2026; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. All other editions of the Real Context News AI Reading List can be found here.

Let’s get to it: here are some articles that I came across over the past few years and recently that you should take a look at to have a better understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and its context in the war erupting in the Middle East, but starting with its recent antecedents in Palestine’s Gaza:

A groundbreaking, revelatory article on Israel’s Habsora (“the Gospel) AI targeting system and its highly inappropriate, irresponsible, immoral, and amoralapplication in Gaza.  ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza—Yuval Abraham; +972 Magazine with Local Call.

The Guardian’s follow up with additional material.  ‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza—Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan and Dan Sabbagh; The Guardian.

Unhuman Killings: AI and Civilian Harm in Gaza—Brianna Rosen; Just Security.

The second big article from +972 Magazine on Israel’s horrific use of AI systems in Gaza, this one concerning the Lavender targeting database. ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza—Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine with Local Call.

Guardian follow-up: ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets—Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies; The Guardian.

Editorial in an academic journal:Who did that? AI assisted targeting and the lowering of thresholds in Gaza—Marion Birch; Medicine, Conflict, and Survival. PDF

After the Lavender piece, +972 discusses with experts how the Israeli leadership along with global tech companies are involved. Why human agency is still central to Israel’s AI-powered warfare—Sophia Goodfriend; +972 Magazine.

“The Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham on his investigations of the I.D.F.’s use of A.I.-backed targeting systems and the dire cost to Palestinian civilians.”  Q. & A.: Inside Israel’s Bombing Campaign in Gaza—Isaac Chotiner; The New Yorker.

Video interview with +972’s Abraham: Understanding how Israel uses ‘Gospel’ AI system in Gaza bombings; FRANCE 24 English.

Israel offers a glimpse into the terrifying world of military AI—Ihsan Tharoor, The Washington Post.

A major Dutch military journal takes a look: Israel’s use of Military AI-systems in the occupied territories of Palestine—A. El Johari; Militair Rechtelijk Tijdschrift/Netherlands Military Law Review. PDF

A leading tech-writer weighs in.  What War by A.I. Actually Looks Like—David Wallace-Wells; The New York Times.

Israel’s A.I. Experiments in Gaza War Raise Ethical Concerns—Sheera Frenkel and Natan Odenheimer; The New York Times.

Gaza: Israel’s AI Human Laboratory—Anwar Mhajne; The Cairo Review of Global Affairs.

Israel is using an AI system to find targets in Gaza. Experts say it’s just the start—Geoff Brumfiel; NPR.

Some say AI will make war more humane. Israel’s war in Gaza shows the opposite—Sigal Samuel; Vox.

Israel – Hamas 2024 Symposium – Algorithms of War: Military AI and the War in Gaza—Omar Yousef Shehabi, Asaf Lubin; Lieber Institute, West Point.

Israel-Hamas 2024 Symposium – AI-Based Targeting in Gaza: Surveying Expert Responses and Refining the Debate—Klaudia Klonowska; Lieber Institute, West Point.

Israel – Hamas 2024 Symposium – The Gospel, Lavender, and the Law of Armed Conflict—Michael N. Schmitt; Lieber Institute, West Point.

Military Use of Biometrics Series – Israel’s Use of AI-DSS and Facial Recognition Technology: The Erosion of Civilian Protection in Gaza—Emelie Andersin; Lieber Institute, West Point.

Lavender, Israel’s artificial intelligence system that decides who to bomb in Gaza—Manuel G. Pascual; El País.

When AI Decides Who Lives and Dies The Israeli military’s algorithmic targeting has created dangerous new precedents—Simon Frankel Pratt; Foreign Policy.

The Genocide Will Be Automated—Israel, AI and the Future of War—Leila Katibah; Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).

RELATED BONUS:

Generative AI Is Playing a Surprising Role in Israel-Hamas Disinformation—Will Bedingfield; Wired.

I also came across some interesting stuff that was submitted for publication, but still under review.  I will await the final versions if I can remember any of this in a few days.

And if you want to spread the word?  It’s easy:  AI reading list dot com: AIreadinglist.com!

© 2026 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 1, 2026; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. All other editions of the Real Context News AI Reading List can be found here.

Let’s get to it: here are some articles that I came across recently that you should take a look at to have a better understanding of AI, get through the noise and industry-attached cheerleaders:

• Some of what I was warning about in 2019: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence—Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, Ruyu Chen; Stanford. PDF
• AI company Anthropic’s responses to Pete Hegseth’s immoral Pentagon ultimatums: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War and Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
• Is AI destroying the rising generation’s ability to think?  Seems like it (chaser).  Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking—Sam Kriss; Harper’s Magazine.
• More on this theme (shot): The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents—Sasha Rogelberg; Fortune.
• AI hates real diplomacy, loves to threaten with nukes: this is Skynet stuff and we should be terrified. AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crises—Kenneth Payne; King’s College London. PDF
• Think you have privacy using AI bots?  Think again!  User Privacy and Large Language Models: An Analysis of Frontier Developers’ Privacy Policies—Jennifer King, Kevin Klyman, Emily Capstick, Tiffany Saade, Victoria Hsieh; Stanford University. PDF

And if you want to spread the word?  It’s easy:  AI reading list dot com: AIreadinglist.com!

© 2026 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. 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!

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 6, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—On paper, officially, “legally,” both the West Bank and the United States have clear ways that security forces are to bound to be applied from any central governing authority in particular areas, deferring to local forces and limiting the roles of those coming from outside. But as both Israel and the U.S. implode politically on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist pogrom against Israel and the beginning of the even larger mass-killing of Israel’s Gaza campaign, it is important to understand how far from reality this description actually ends up being under the current crises both nation nations face.

Wrecking Boundaries in the West Bank

But in the West Bank, Israeli leaders have long ignored many of these supposed restrictions at will, none more so from the top than extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The West Bank is by far the largest of the three Palestinian territories forming the State of Palestine and occupied during the Six Day-War in June 1967 by the Israel Defense Forces (or IDF, i.e., the Israeli army) and still illegally occupied after all these years (the other Palestinian areas being the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).  For decades, Israel has illegally colonized these lands and transferred some of its Jewish population illegally to form illegal Jewish settler communities—often of religious fanatics—on Palestinian land, sometimes ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities in the process.   Netanyahu, a champion of the settler movement often nicknamed “Bibi,” has served more time as prime minister than any Israeli, including Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion; indeed, Netanyahu seems willing to do just about anything to maintain power, including repeatedly prolonging the current horrific “war” (a term loosely applied) in Gaza.  Since the 1993 Oslo peace process began, a three-tiered system is supposed to govern whether Israelis or Palestinians hold civil or security authority in the West Bank: Area A (Palestinian security and civil), Area B (Israeli security, Palestinian civil), and Area C (Israeli security and civil).  In reality, Israel treats all areas as if it can do whatever it pleases whenever it pleases: new illegal Israeli settlements in the middle of Palestinian land, abrupt arrests of Palestinian officials trying to exercise their duties, or raids deep into the heart of the most populous Palestinian cities care not what lines on the map say, and the Israeli political and military leaders have also long since stopped caring (Netanyahu himself bragged repeatedly over the years up through the present about killing the Oslo process that even brought these three Areas about).

Your Posse Is Not Legal, Mr. President

In the United States, possible tensions between the civil and military spheres preoccupied the Founding Fathers so much so that there was no official permanent standing army established by the Constitution and George Washington himself was lionized as a hero in the mold of Cincinnatus for stepping down from supreme military power when his duty was done (and as much for that as anything else he ever did, which says a lot).  There was a bold, idealistic, prescient experiment in Reconstruction (1865-1877)—really the last phase of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) over slavery—to bring about multiracial democracy that achieved much relying on the deployment and backing of federal troops before succumbing to white supremacist terrorist insurrections throughout the recalcitrant South.  Some dynamics during Reconstruction in the South in key ways resembled the West Bank in that whites in the South eventually used lawless means to establish control over security forces and courts to create a separate-and-unequal system, violating Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments and laws to instead impose a pre-apartheid apartheid system on newly-freed people in the South that would come to be known as the Jim Crow “legal” system and would take most of a century to dismantle.

Simultaneously, while Reconstruction wound down as a failed experiment, Americans were uneasy about the fact that the newly mighty U.S. military after the Civil War had been used so much in civil affairs in formerly rebel southern states, so the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 to more clearly define the U.S. civil-military divide, already quite strong without it.  The law further codified that the federal military cannot be used for domestic civilian law enforcement purposes with a few exceptions for special, unique, and extreme circumstances often as laid out in very specific laws.  This law was passed in 1878 shortly after Reconstruction ended by both the House and Senate with comfortable margins and signed into law by then-President Rutherford B. Hayes.  The exceptions allow the president to work around or go over the Act in times of severe emergencies.

While there are some issues of “ambiguity” in the Posse Comitatus Act, the long tradition of taking great care with the use of military forces on U.S. soil in non-war settings is clear and Trump’s domestic military deployments in 2025 are not ambiguous in that his premises for deploying them to begin with were flat-out-false or grotesquely unproven, unsubstantiated assertions (“untethered to the facts,” in federal Judge Karin Immergut’s words from her ruling after an emergency hearing in Oregon late yesterday; for this, permanent caricature and White House Deputy Chief Staff Stephen Miller irresponsibly and dangerously called her actions a “legal insurrection” that aids “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers,” yet another proclamation of open season on the judiciary).  The Trump Administration’s wild claims are contrary to existing publicly available information, with no serious attempts made to counter such information with a proper presentation of demonstrably better or updated information as would be expected under a normal, functioning government.  And though he has far more authority to deploy troops to the District of Columbia, of which I live just outside (so yes, I have seen these illegally deployed forces many times and spoken with them), false premises were still articulated for the DC deployment, so it was still, therefore, illegal before any other considerations are raised (despite raising concerns about the statistics for crime in DC, Trump authorized deployments to the District outside of any federal process to review, challenge, or improve crime statistics reporting in Washington, a common problem many cities confront, and the U.S. Department of Justice only initiated an investigation after Trump’s deployment; any effort to demonstrate any sort of adherence to proper procedure would have seen the investigation happen and conclude far before any military deployment, prove the statistics are clearly false, and demonstrate that officials in Washington were bad-faith and not cooperating or responding to good-faith efforts to obtain cooperation or improve said statistics).

Plenty of scholars have also pointed out that both the intent and context of Posse Comitatus Act and its related laws at the times they were enacted and the spirits with which they have been enforced since are incompatible with Trump’s machinations, not just legally but also constitutionally.  And the main exceptions allowed for and invoked under the 1807 Insurrection Act are for situations totally different than the country finds itself in today: it and precursor legislation saw thirty events in U.S. history result in invocation since 1792, the most recent occurrence for the 1992 L.A. riots. This was notably at the request of California’s governor at the time, the opposite of Trump’s baseless, illegal and unconstitutional deployments there now in 2025.

West Banking America

But the point is, whether in the West Bank of the United States, there are clear restrictions on a.) military forces being deployed in normal circumstances and, even in extraordinary circumstances, b.) when, c.) where, and d.) how they can be deployed.

Yet as noted, for years, Israel and especially Netanyahu have ignored these restrictions whenever they have felt like it and, indeed, have increasingly attacked the idea that these restrictions have any validity whatsoever.  In short, the law is treated as whim, and everyone knows the dirty truth deep down that even some Israelis can admit: the West Bank is an apartheid system, based on religion and ethnicity: ethnic and religious Jews with Israeli citizenship in the West Bank are accorded full Israeli civil rights in the face of Israeli authority, while, in practice, Palestinians (be they Muslim or Christian) have no rights at all and are totally subject to whatever whims and depredations the military rule of the Israeli state and its supporters mete out, up to and including mass vandalism, rampant property destruction, prodigious assaults, orchestrated ethnic cleansing, rarely-punished murders (even of Palestinian-Americans), and indefinite child detention, whether from official government security forces or any number of Jewish settlers engaging increasingly in terrorism with the state’s backing, sometimes far more than tacit.  Even before October 7 in 2023, that year was still the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the Second Intifada that ended in 2005, meaning the deliberate escalation in the West Bank by Israel has little to do with October 7, and settlers have even attacked positions of their own IDF in the West Bank when such settlers feel they are not being given enough impunity, showing their lawlessness knows no bounds.  Essentially, you have rights or not based on who Israeli authorities want to have rights there, and they award them to their side while denying them to the other.  Lines on maps, the law, human rights (for those they deemed unworthy) meant nothing, but rewarding their supporters and punishing their opponents is everything.

What has been the obvious “legal” reality for many years in the West Bank—only intensifying more and more over time both qualitatively and quantitatively and now exploding—is now something Trump wants to recreate for all America, turning the whole country into a Wild West Bank of Lawlessness.

But where for Israel, the divides are relatively simple and easy—Jewish vs. Palestinian—here it’s MAGA against everyone, even sometimes other MAGA (some Trump voters are now seeing friends, coworkers, and family members deported, detained, or arrested, even veterans).  If you are a U.S. citizen supporting what Trump is doing and your family and friends also match this description, you have little to worry about when it comes to this (for now…).  But if you are an immigrant who is undocumented/unauthorized who has no criminal record, a legal non-citizen resident—even one showing up for your own immigration hearing—or a U.S. citizen who is either ready to exercise your constitutional rights to ask questions, protest, and confront what is happening or is just at the wrong place at the wrong time, you are not necessarily protected by the law anymore.  Furthermore, by far the vast majority of the human beings being detained and deported are non-violent and non-criminal, whatever nonsense is claimed to the contrary by whomever in power.  And the masked, large, tattooed, angry individuals newly minted as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in paramilitary style and other federal fun folks are here to make sure you do not feel safe.  Are you an elected official, including a sitting U.S. Senator, simply asking questions of federal officials?  It does not matter, you can be handcuffed or bodyslammed with the least-protected among us.

Like Netanyahu and too many Israeli leaders in years before, Trump and his similarly extreme, similarly-minded counterparts are hell-bent on erasing, de facto or de jure, the lines the Posse Comitatus Act solidified in the sand on the limits of the use of federal military in a civilian setting, lines for principles clearly enshrined by U.S. Constitution and over two centuries of precedent, principles the Trump Administration is shredding not just in the streets of American cities but even partly also in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

In seeking to erase legal rules binding the authorization, deployment, and use of federal military forces on U.S. soil in civilian settings (leaving similar jurisdictional mission creep in Venezuela aside), Trump and his MAGA minions with illegal occupation in America are trying to recreate key aspects of the fascist nightmare of the illegally occupied West Bank.  But here in the U.S., this is not based on two warring and competing nationalities and one of those nationalities’ democratically elected leaders pursuing total subjugation at best or actual genocide of the other nationality at worst, broadcast daily for all the world to see and fueled by insane colonialist, imperialist, expansionist fever-dreams based on ancient fantasies and ancient maps, no.  Here in the U.S., Trump is trying to divide Americans on ideological, political, identity, and legal-status lines, lines he will use to award and protect rights for some, deny them to others, still dangle to yet others as ways of obtaining “obeying in advance” or to even explicitly threaten, say, ABC and Disney over a certain late-night host named Kimmy Kimmel.  As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois fighting back against Trump’s illegal military deployments to Chicago, noted during that drama: “Tyranny requires constant effort.  It breaks, it leaks.  Authority is brittle.  Oppression is the mask of fear.  Remember that,” quoting the amazing antifascist masterpiece that is the Star Wars show Andor.  Yet, we must also remember that, however much Trump and Netanyahu act out of fear of losing power, they are also clearly in the drivers’ seats, consolidating more and more power for themselves in ways the founder fathers of both the U.S. and Israel never intended.

And while there is hardly the level of violence between the sides as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even as political violence in the U.S. may be on the rise, dynamics are between the two have been converging somewhat for some time and make no mistake about it, the key principle is the same: longstanding, binding legal distinctions are melting away in the face of determined illegality, such that the law disappears and factional whim reigns supreme so one side can enforce its will upon the other, tyranny replacing law as the very system.  In short, Trump seeks to create a political apartheid here in the U.S., a West Bank of Left and Right, “evil” and “good,” veering Manichaean and not dissimilar in legal nihilism to the separate and unequal system of Jew and Palestinian (or “Arab,” so much less specific…) in the West Bank’s Nablus but bringing it to New York.

Adding New Meaning to “Executing” the Law

To execute their plans, both Trump and Netanyahu have hosts of extremists willing to unquestioningly nakedly embrace the partisanship of their missions, from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, from U.S. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (all of whom have had their own past issues with illegality or criminal probes well-before 2025: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich being convicted and arrested terrorists, respectively; Bondi in the center of a criminal bribery and obstruction scandal with Trump; and the brotastic Pete Hegseth, well, being brotastic Pete Hegseth…), just to name a few, with far, far too many others alongside.  And these allies have made it clear, sometimes as senior law enforcement officials: if we don’t like you, the law cannot protect you from us and we are coming for you, even for your children.  While in Israel, broadening this behavior to include Israeli Jewish citizens has been far milder than what has been done to Palestinians—even those in Israel with Israeli citizenship but especially those without Israeli citizenship outside of Israel in the actual territories of actual Palestine—Trump and his lawless allies are rapidly casting a far wider dragnet, or at least attempting to do so, advancing on several fronts even as I write this.

Yes, you are witnessing the MAGA Trump Administration’s attempts at illegal jurisdictional jumps dehumanizingly intending to target both directly and indirectly various large swaths of the population in America, illegal deployment by illegal deployment, related measure by related measure, until Trump has created a de facto national federalized police state he can use to prosecute and intimidate his opposition and others deemed undesirable, jurisdictional issues and the law be damned.  They have lost the program when it comes morality, cartoonishly celebrating their roles as oppressors (of certain people) and projecting so publicly for all to see.

Maybe a lot of this should not be surprising, since both men have no problem breaking the law: Trump is an insurrectionist and convicted felon and Netanyahu is currently on trial in three cases in Israel for damning corruption crimes (with Trump, unsurprisingly in true birds-of-a-feather mode, even very publicly pressuring Israel to stop Netanyahu’s trial) in addition to having the International Criminal Court issue a warrant for his arrest in 2024 for war crimes.  Both men are fascists remaking their countries in a fascist image of their former democracies, the actions mentioned herein just some of the examples (I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but carefully and specifically and with history in mind).

At this point, one really has to wonder if either the U.S. or Israel can still be fairly termed “democracies,” because in key ways, the rule of law is damaged, dying, or dead as both Israel and the U.S.—Bibi and Donnie—continue to feed, rather than restrain, each other’s worst tendencies.

But it is both too easy and too simple to blame just such leaders: voters in both countries could have easily set their countries on different paths—ones that respected the rule of law—and voters in both countries rejected, even if narrowly, the rule of law in favor of Trump, Netanyahu, and the fascism they represent, whether they realize it or not.  And perhaps nothing screams fascist more than violently taking away legal protections for the most vulnerable and defenseless and, in turn, their allies in order to expose the chosen to ever more deprivation and violence at the hands of the same people taking away their rights and protections.

In the current state of Israel’s short history, this could simply mean the end of Israeli democracy.  In the U.S. context, this would be like the success of white supremacist terrorists during Reconstruction in brutally taking away Freedmen’s rights throughout the south, except that Trump is engaging in this massive ripping away of rights not in one region but in the whole country.  2025 may yet be known a watershed year for America, Israel, and Palestine, but only for the most horrific, sad, pathetic, and—perhaps most importantly—most preventable of ways.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. 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!

(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) August 20, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—A small yet extraordinary series of events happened after a regional U.S. Border Patrol office posted a video on its official social media of a clip from a Star Wars movie (spoilers for Star Wars in general and specifically about Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and its precursor masterpiece of a series, Andor).

The Force…Is Not with This Video

In the video posted by the regional U.S. Border Patrol office for California’s “Premier Sector,” a.k.a. “El Centro Sector,” the Premier Sector agents are portrayed as Sith Lord Darth Vader in his final scene in Rogue One, in which he is shown mercilessly cutting through Rebel soldiers trying to hand off the Death Star plans to those escaping on Princess Leia’s ship.  In the movie, the plans were obtained by the Rebels because of tremendous suffering, horrific sacrifice, and the heroic efforts of Cassian Andor, Jyn Erso, Saw Gerrera, and many others rebels.  Some of the Rebels here in the Border Patrol video facing Vader are labeled as “Fentanyl,” “Sanctuary Cities,” “Cocaine,” and “Fake News.”  Vader has already disabled and boarded the Rebel command cruiser (their biggest space ship at the battle) and is trying to intercept the plans—transmitted only through bloody fighting by the rebel leaders on the planet Scarif below—before the rebels can get them to Leia’s ship, docked with the cruiser.  As Vader chases deflects with his red Sithlightsaber the Rebels blaster bolts as they are standing their ground against him, we can see other Rebels labeled “meth,” “human smugglers,” “the swamp,” “cartel terrorists,” and “gang member” as Vader makes his way down the docking hallway.  Some he kills by deflecting their own blaster bolts at them, others he cuts through with his lightsaber like a scythe into wheat, still others (the “fake news,” “cartel terrorists”), he uses the Force to toss around or pull their weapons from them before slicing them to death or choking them while suspended in the air by Vader’s Force powers.  In the movie, the Rebels are mostly massacred by Vader but just manage to get the plans abord Leia’s ship, which undocks and escapes with Vader looking on.  His further pursuit is captured in the very opening scene of the very first original Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.  It is these plans that enable Luke Skywalker to know how to blow up the Death Star at the end of the movie and to save the day, but not before it is used to partially destroy one planet and totally destroy another, killing billions of innocents.  Darth Vader was trying to stop the rebels from stopping this genocidal Death Star.

Yet Vader is with whom these Border Patrol agents, in one of the most important and prolific sectors in the country, wanted to publicly identify.  Not Luke blowing up the Death Star, but Vader killing those who would ensure Luke and the Rebel planners were able to make use of the Death Star’s weakness to destroy it.

Just think on that.

The Border Patrol regional account has since either deactivated or turned on privacy settings, not allowing the account or video to be seen by the general public if it hasn’t been deleted (at least there is some self-awareness as to the problematic nature of this post) but it was still posted on an official federal government account and indicates the views of the people in that office. And it is still proudly up on Twitter!

The Response: Fascist Icing on a Fascist Cake

But this is only the beginning.  Appropriately, the team of the indispensable John Oliver, who discussed this all last week on his Last Week Tonight show on HBO, reached out to the government for a response.  He pointed out that rather than the labels on the Rebels in the absurd Star Wars video, most being snatched by these draconian raids are not violent criminals.  Rather than slaying “fake news,” the government was spreading it.

The government—specifically, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under the authority of which the Border Patrol operates—did actually reply. While ignoring most specific questions posed by Oliver’s team, the government communications staff did write: “Not to spoil the plot, but as any Star Wars fan knows, Darth Vader is also Anakin Skywalker,” continuing that “I don’t think DHS needs to regale the American public on the heroism of Skywalker, they know.”  They really seem to think that this was a serious clapback, not mortifying self-own.

John Oliver characterized this as “an incredible, deeply shitty response.”  He then went on to satirically laud Thanos, form the Avengers series, as a similar “hero,” since, at one point, he was a baby.

Oliver is spot-on and actually understands Star Wars.  Because any serious Star Wars fan knows that the hero Anakin Skywalker succumbed to evil to become Darth Vader, that both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Vader himself viewed Anakin’s new persona of Vader as having killed the man who was known as Anakin Skywalker.  (Obi-Wan series spoilers)Years before Rogue One, in a climactic duel captured in the problematic Obi-Wan Kenobi series, Vader even tells Obi-Wan “Anakin is gone.  I am what remains.”  Obi-Wan apologizes for how things turned out, to which Vader replies “I am not your failure, Obi-Wan.  You didn’t kill Anakin Skywalker,” now smiling, “I did” (End Obi-Wan series spoilers).  Even without this more recently-produced scene and series, in the words of Obi-Wan to Luke Skywalker three movies chronologically after Rogue One, “Your father… was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force.  He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader.  When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed.”  Later in the film when Luke references Anakin Skywalker to Vader, Vader’s response is to say “That name no longer has any meaning for me.”  And that was the case for nearly Vader’s entire life as Vader, from the end of Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith—when Anakin became the Sith Lord known as Darth Vader—to the last moments of Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, just before he finally abandons Vader to die as regretful Anakin in the arms of his son.

Thus, both Obi-Wan’s and Vader’s own statements, while not completely true—deep, deep down, Anakin was still in there as Luke, his son, felt, only coming back out in extreme circumstances just before Vader’s death to try to save his son Luke—were the measure of the man in the scene the Border Patrol office posted in that video, which took place in the timeline years before Vader’s redemption.  In this scene a Border Patrol account posted from Rogue One, Vader was solidly the Emperor’s right-hand man, a full Lord of the Sith, evil and acting as an enforcer for an evil, illegal, genocidal, tyrannical, expansionist, fascist regime.  The Rebels Vader casually murders are fighting to stop all this, to destroy the Empire and restore the democratic Republic the Empire overthrew.

But given Trump’s own fascist, dictatorial tendencies, should we be surprised his cultists in and out of government openly identify with the bad guys?  With fascism?  While all this on certain levels is funny, it is also revealing and terrifying:  the fascists are not hiding their fascism and are openly identifying with an evil, murderous Sith Lord.  They did not show Anakin fighting as a hero or Luke blowing up the Death Star, they showed Vader—clearly at that point a fallen hero, not a hero, fighting against heroes as a clear villain.

From the White House to DHS and Border Patrol, our republic has fallen to control of Empire and fascist fanboys, embracing the Dark Side, not the Light Side.  The mainstream press continues to miss the gravity of the situation, toning things down, using euphemisms, or missing the plot entirely.  We must shed light on all this so people understand what is truly at stake.  It may not be a whole galaxy or a whole planet under threat, and Trump and his MAGA minions may be far less interesting than the Imperial bad guys, but with no Luke Skwalker or Cassian Andor coming to rescue us, it’s time to wake up and save ourselves (and as I hope to discuss in a future piece, community-consciousness-building is one of the main themes of the Show Andor…).

© 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. 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!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) June 10, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—Much like the scenes unfolding in Los Angeles in recent days—and I have plenty to say on that but not below—a bird’s eye view can often be most revealing, helping to sift through the noise made by often quite loud individuals spreading misinformation and/worse, disinformation that is amplified deliberately by social media algorithms.  A zoomed-out view usually gives you a larger perspective and allows you to attach weight and context where a much more zoomed-in, granular view does not, where a particular point of view may be wildly unrepresentative compared to what is happening in a larger radius.

Well, Ladies and Gentleman, Comrades and Friends, Fan and Critics alike, I present to you the bird’s-eye-view of Russia’s territorial progress in Ukraine between January 2, 2025 (the fine Institute for the Study of War, which provides these excellent maps of this terrible war along with Critical Threats, was understandably closed on January 1) and June 2, 2025, roughly the first half of the year, and, well, what is revealed in clear and indisputable:

Your eyes do not deceive you: Russia has made virtually no visible progress advancing in Ukraine, despite constant attacks: try squinting, try squinting hard, and you will still have difficulty finding clear progress, let alone significant progress.

The one exception where there is easily visible progress? Inside Russia, in the Kursk Oblast that Ukraine boldly partially occupied to great effect beginning in June, 2024.

If Russia’s only easily visible territorial progress in an imperialist, colonialist attempted conquest of Ukraine that is trying to genocidally erase Ukrainian identity over the course of six months is to retake some of Russia’s own territory (after it was mortifyingly occupied for some ten months and was only liberated with the help of thousands of North Korean—North Korean—troops!), it’s impossible to credibly claim Russia is “winning,” let alone that Ukraine is “losing.”

Last time I checked, a defender successfully defending most of its territory from enemy advances means the defender is, actually, winning (for all you Risk board game players, think the tie-goes-to-the-defender rule)…

I plan to elaborate on some of the details of what’s been going on, but for now, take a look at that stark picture of failure on the part of Russia that is also a portrait of dogged Ukrainian determination and perseverance and it is clear which narratives are backed by reality and which are not.

Add to all this that over five of the six months were under a fascist Trump Administration that was and still is hostile to Ukraine, favors Russia narratively and diplomatically, and had criticized, redirected, “paused,” and/or ended major aspects of U.S. aid to Ukraine, and it is even more embarrassing that Russia has failed to advance when it should have been able to.  In fact, think of a major war where a major backer—one of the world’s most powerful nations—of the weaker defender pulls much of its support for that defender against a far stronger attacker—also one of the world’s most powerful nations—and it is harder to find examples in history where such an attacker was unable to capitalize on the rug being pulled out from under the defender (and this even was after Republicans in Congress had cut off aid for much of 2023-2024).

But here we are, Putin’s Russia even more laughably pathetic than ever (and this says a lot) and increasingly unable to defend its own territory, often mostly only able to pathetically and indiscriminately target civilian areas with war-criminal, Hamas-like area bombardments and far less able to actually hit Ukraine’s military.

And oh, we haven’t even gotten into the historic, amazing, and devastating June 1^st special operation by Ukraine that has disabled or destroyed as much as some one-third of the Russian aircraft capable of wielding nuclear weapons.

I think you can say Ukraine is winning, all things considered, but more on this another time…

© 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. 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!

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!

Yes, I am using my own news website to promote my candidacy and ideas I am putting forth as a candidate for U.S. Senate for Maryland and I won’t apologize for it!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, Threads @bfchugginalong, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 26, 2024; *UPDATE April 8: Afro News finally posted coverage of the March 21 eleven days later on April 1; Brian was quoted more than Alsobrooks; see related articles: March 19 Frydenborg Holds His Own Against Alsobrooks in Baltimore Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic Primary Debate, but Will It Matter & Why Won’t Local Media Cover this Race Properly?, March 6 Maryland U.S. Democratic Primary Debate Raises Questions on Frontrunners’ & Party’s Readiness to Take on Hogan. Can Frydenborg Emerge As Third Option?, and March 2 Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! and see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, 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. Correction appended: this article earlier misstated the length of Sen. Mikulski’s Senate term.

SILVER SPRING—To paraphrase what I wrote recently after my second Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic primary debate, if a debate happens but is not covered by the media, did it really happen as far as voters are concerned?

I am afraid the answer is no.

A Candidate Failed by this Maryland Primary Process

I write now as a candidate perhaps cheated by history in gross fashion, but in a way we may never know fully or be able to quantify to what degree.  To start, I would like reiterate the facts of the only credible independent poll to come out in 2024 at the time it was released, the mid-February Emerson College/The Hill/DC News Now poll:

For the Maryland Democratic U.S. Senate primary:

• Undecided 37%
• U.S. Representative David Trone 32%
• Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks 17%
• and all other candidates combined (including me) totaling 14%.

For the general election:

• Trone tied with Hogan at 42% with 16% undecided
• Alsobrooks down 37% to Hogan’s 44% and 19% undecided

Those general election numbers are clearly a horrific result for Democrats in a blue state race for a seat held for 17 years by Democrat Ben Cardin and held for by Democrat Barbara Mikulski for the thirty years prior to that.

But since that poll, in the first two debates of 2024 (see my writeups of both and also video here; there was only one exclusionary debate beforehand in early December in which I was not allowed to participate), one other candidate besides the two frontrunners—Trone and Alsobrooks—and only one other candidate was quoted by major press outlets after those debates, by The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun after the first and by The Baltimore Sun after the second (quoted twice, as much as the only other person quoted, Alsobrooks; Trone did not attend): me, Brian Frydenborg.  Quickly setting myself apart from the rest of the second-tier candidates in terms of substance and quotability, and with an online presence with more social media followers for my Twitter account than the campaign accounts of Trone and Alsobrooks combined while I was ramping up my campaign, it would seem I could be considered the third candidate in the Democratic primary.

Now, of course, that is open to debate, but think of it this way: media coverage for unknown candidates and for undecided voters is often the decisive factor, as most voters don’t go to rallies or events but read the news to learn about candidates or go to the candidates’ websites after seeing them covered in the news.

I will herein now present an alternative history as food for thought, and then look at what actually has just happened.

What Could Have Been…

Just a few days after that second debate on March 16 and riding a surge of being the only other candidate given serious attention by the mainstream press after Trone and Alsobrooks, The Washington Post/University of Maryland released a poll on March 20 that showed both Democratic frontrunners losing by 12 points or higher to Hogan.  But it also showed Brian Frydenborg in clear third place in the Democratic primary, significantly ahead of all the other second-tier candidates even as he was not that close to either Alsobrooks or Trone and with still many undecided voters.  Separating himself from that pack, Brian was contacted by several major outlets, including The Washington Post, quoting Brian not just on the state of the race and his concerns with both Democratic frontrunners but also on some of his own positions and experience.

The very next day, the third debate—a bipartisan one—in which Brian participated was held in Baltimore and covered by all the local Baltimore television stations as well as multiple newspapers.  Neither Trone nor Hogan attended, but Brian’s performance not only stood out for his energy and passion, but his specific command of details and history, in contrast to Alsobrooks, whose performance was fine and with good responses, but was far less energetic and detailed.  Brian often got more audibly engaged positive responses from the audience than Angela did, and while some of the rest of the Democratic candidates might have drawn some laughter with humor and antics, none compared to either Frydenborg or Alsobrooks in terms of giving substantive, direct, and knowledgeable answers to the questions asked.  It was the two of them and everyone else far behind, but the relatively unknown candidate Frydenborg not only held his own against the county executive frontrunner, but exceeded her performance.  His passionate framing of the failings of the two-frontrunners’ campaigns, the Democratic Party organizations and allies in Maryland, and the media with its general lack of coverage in producing a situation where Democrats are losing badly Republican opponent in the race to succeed Ben Cardin in the U.S. Senate.  In contrast, Alsobrooks gave relatively normal answers and projected unreassuring confidence for a potential matchup against Hogan for someone who was down 14 points to him in a blue state.

The media writeups and television coverage of the event—all the local Baltimore stations and papers with some of that coverage spreading—all of sudden introduced a new candidate more forcefully to primary voters besides just a few quotes in a few articles, a candidate who was articulate, passionate, and able to discuss the issues in detail while also giving voice to their anxieties about the state of the race and of potentially losing Cardin’s Senate seat to Republicans.  Thus, profiles in papers and television interviews followed, and while the next poll out still showed Brian significantly behind Trone and Alsobrooks, he had still risen even further and was clearly the only other candidate making waves, clearly establishing himself as the third candidate in the Democratic primary, with a snowball effect of more donations and more media coverage reinforcing each other that ensured his voice was heard and having an effect and keeping his trajectory in the polls an upward one in the weeks to follow.

The Sad Reality Failing Democrats, All Maryland Voters, and the Nation

I said that this was an alternate history.  Now for what really happened.

To reiterate—because this is so important—The Emerson/Hill poll had shown that the collective support of all the second-tier candidates (14%) was just 3 points behind Alsobrooks in second place (17%), with more voters than even those supporting first-place Trone (32%) saying they were undecided (37%).

In the fictional history, the next poll included the second-tier candidates: this was the only responsible choice given how much collective support the second-tier candidates had that was so close to the level of support of the number-two candidate in Alsobrooks—the 3-point gap within the 3-point margin of error—and given how the largest bloc of voters in the poll was not supporting any candidate but was undecided.  In such a context, any respectable pollster not including the second-tier candidates would be ridiculously irresponsible, but in the real world, that is what was done: the Post/UMD poll was actually released on March 20, as happened in the alternate history, but it excluded all of us second-tier candidates, including myself—the only candidate from that second tier and besides Alsobrooks or Trone tier to be quoted by the Washington Post or Baltimore Sun from the past two debates, as I have pointed out before.  And given all that, relative to all the other second-tier candidates, for me there was an excellent chance that I would have risen more than any of them and surpassed all of them to legitimately claim third place then and there in this Democratic primary race.  But with not being included at all, it is not possible to know this and not possible for voters to have an accurate, full picture of a potentially volatile contest.  So no bounce recorded and no media exposure as a result of such a poll just before my third debate, which could have even partly framed the debate itself.

To make matters even worse, while in my alternate history there was still ample media coverage of the third debate to allow my forceful and stand-out performance to reach the voting public even if I was inexcusably excluded in that latest poll, there was no media coverage in real life: no local sites, no local TV stations, no newspapers, period, (*April 8 update) until, that is, Afro News finally published coverage on April 1, eleven days after the debate; still, better late then never and I was quoted more than Alsobrooks!

“We’ve got to be real about what is coming at us,” said U.S. Senate Candidate Brian Frydenborg (D), during the forum at New Psalmist Baptist Church. “Hogan 50–Alsobrooks 36,  Hogan 49–Trone 37, that is not where we need to be as Democrats. What that means is that despite the best of intentions and two quality frontrunners, we are failing.”

For a debate less than two months before the primary and less than six weeks before early voting, this is just an absolute collective disgrace on the part of the local media (*April 8 update) apart from Afro News, and it still should have published its account much earlier.

If you’re disappointed by now, here’s another harsh dose of reality: while the event was organized by the League of Women Voters of Baltimore City (LWVBC), the host for the event was Baltimore’s New Psalmist Baptist Church and they were in charge of the recording and streaming of the event.  Before the debate, I asked about the status and quality of the recordings.  I was directed to a Pete French, who assured me that the Church recorded all their services and that they were professional quality (I mentioned that previous “official” recordings had sorely missed the mark in quality).  He made it clear that an audio, not a video, recording would be made (strange, why not record video, what are we hiding from voters here?) and that no decision had yet been made on whether that recording would be released.  I pressed him on this, noting how it would really be a disservice to the public to not share the recording.  He declined to explain why they were going about this in such a secretive way and clearly did not feel he had any obligation to offer any further explanation, making it clear he would not say anything further of substance at this point on this issue.  I must admit I had a bad feeling about whether or not this recording would be released given his polite yet clearly dismissive attitude; also, days earlier, I had asked if the organizers might offer any rides from the main Baltimore-Penn Station connecting to DC since the Church was on the outskirts of the city and I was coming from DC—about an hour away by public transit from Baltimore-Penn Station, and was told no; when I introduced myself to Farmer, he asked me with an amused and perhaps condescending tone if I was the candidate who has asked for a ride (an Uber had been suggested, which would have been prohibitively expensive, but I eventually learned that Baltimore had a subway and was able to take that out).  After this exchange before the debate during the introductions while we were on stage, it was announced that the debate would be live-streamed.  I asked one of the staffers for that link to be provided so I could share with all my followers online, and she said she would get that for me.  It never came.  After repeated inquiries after Thursday’s debate, I learned on Sunday from the Facebook account of LWVBC that the New Psalmist Baptist Church—specifically Pete Farmer—had decided not to release the audio to the public.

Even with the oddness of our exchange I had in-person with Farmer, I was still flabbergasted and deeply offended by this decision, sure for myself, but even more so for the people of Maryland.

They may be a church, but who in the hell did they think they were keeping this debate from the larger voting public?  This furthermore went against what the LVWBC website had stated, that “The event will be recorded and made available online”:

To be honest, though, this triple whammy—a major polling firm making an exclusionary and totally inexcusable decision to not include second-tier candidates despite the results of the previous poll as characterized earlier, literally zero media coverage of the debate (until this piece you are reading now by yours truly *April 8 update: and until Afro News‘s artile eleven days later)), and then the New Psalmist Baptist Church recording the event but then the person in charge of the decision on whether to release the recoding deciding against its release despite my personal entreaties to have them released made directly to him in person—is par for the course for this Maryland Democratic U.S. Senate primary this election cycle.

Fortunately, there is one available unofficial partial video taken by one candidate’s staffer by mobile phone of the debate that is missing most of the opening statements but has the rest (you can hear me speak at 12:36, 28.24, 43:43, 1:01:07, 1:18:11, 1:33:30).  You can clearly see that my alternative history description from above is accurate: the only difference from above is that there was no news media coverage (April 8 update: until Afro News eleven days after the event).  And the debate was well attended, so there is still a chance for it to have some impact, though because of what I outlined above, that impact will surely be minimal unless somehow my coverage here makes a difference and that video gets a lot of views.

Time for Democrats to Panic and Adjust and Why I am the Solution (Even if You Support David or Angela)

The Problems with Candidates Trone and Alsobrooks

It is mistakes and attitudes like the above that, if nothing changes, make Republican Larry Hogan the favorite to win in November.  Yes, here we have two candidate frontrunners and their campaigns running their campaigns in such a problematic way that Hogan is beating them badly and either most or close to most voters don’t even have an opinion on them: 46% when it came to Trone and 58% compared to Alsobrooks, while Hogan had a 64% favorable rating.  And when he left office in Maryland in January 2023 not that long ago as one of the nation’s most popular governors for years, a final poll had him with a 77% approval rating, including 81% with Democrats (even matching their approval of Biden), higher than with Republicans (68%).  And this was a Republican governor in a heavily-Democratic state!  Additionally, his approval was 81% with African-American voters to 76% for white voters.

So here we are heading into a general election with two far-lesser-known frontrunners running far behind the far-more-well-known Larry Hogan: David Trone 12 points behind—49%-37%–and Angela Alsobrooks down 14 points—50%-36%.  “Don’t worry, once voters get to know them in the general election, they’ll be fine, plus, we have the abortion issue!” is not just an extremely naïve, hubristic, non-sequitur response, it is incredibly risky and a losing mentality.  We have no idea if any of that ground will be made up (I would suspect some would be but hardly think it’s a given that enough of it will be, and though I think Alsobrooks just picking up the endorsement of rockstar Rep. Jamie Raskin—our modern Daniel Webster in the House—will big a serious boost in her fight with Trone it may not be enough to get her past Trone, only time will tell), let alone whether the gap will get worse for either candidate.  And abortion rights are not really particularly at stake in Maryland with a 102-39 Maryland House of Delegates Democratic majority, a 34-13 Democratic majority in the Maryland Senate, and with Democratic Governor Wes Moore running the state, not in the way they are at risk in purple swing and Republican-controlled red states with local leaders or extremist right-wing courts trying to impose sweeping restrictions on women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy.  But that or some other version of “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine” is the dangerous mentality I am hearing from the frontrunners and their supporters.

This should be even more worrying when one consider that certain key parts of the base will be less than enthusiastic about supporting an old white guy who was a billionaire retail alcohol mogul for decades before entering Congress just five years ago or a former county prosecutor with what especially some on the left would view as a controversial record in that role.  And neither have the stature or big-time political experience Ben Cardin had in 2006 or Larry Hogan has today.  These and other weaknesses are being ignored or denied, and not testing the candidates on these grounds before Larry Hogan would challenge them on in a contest that would involve many Republicans and independents, not just Democrats, is a plan for failure and losing.  As I noted in my concluding speech, Obama was a much better candidate having faced off against Clinton in 2008 before he went up against McCain.  We need a third person in this race to toughen or hone these Trone and Alsobrooks into being much more competitive against Hogan or consider an alternative.  I can play both roles better than anyone else among the second-tier Democratic candidates in this race.

Trone may have way more money than Alsobrooks, but she had raised just under $5 million before last quarter’s reporting date at the end of 2023, no small amount.  I can promise you that if I had $5 million, this would be a very different race with a very different feel.

The Problems with the Maryland Democratic Party and its Affiliates

As I have noted before, the Maryland Democrats’ plan has failed thus far and needs to change dramatically.  If I was involved in the Maryland State Democratic Party, my plan would have been and for the rest of the primary is now simple:

1. Encourage every organization sponsoring any primary debate or candidate forum to reach out to all other Democratic Party organizations in the state to cross-promote and cross-post about all these event on their pages and social media.
2. I would also ensure all local papers, local news sites, and local television stations would be listing all these events well-ahead of time and prominently as a matter of public interest.
3. I would engage national- level outlets, especially The Washington Post, in addition to C-SPAN to engage in much more coverage.
4. I would have the state party interview each and every Democratic candidate and post video on our site, YouTube, and social media, as well as transcripts.
5. I would have the state party during these final weeks organize two to three more debates in the final less-than-two months of the primary.  The questions would not just be about issues but also the candidates’ possible weaknesses and their strategies to win against Hogan.  I would include all candidates for at least the first one or two debates, pay to commission an independent and respectable non-partisan poll or two from a major pollster, and have some sort of polling cutoff based on non-partisan polling available (right now, just two polls) for the final debate or two.  I would find a way to get these televised live on public access television, perhaps C-SPAN, and definitely streamed online live and posted online after.  They would not be amateur, cell-phone quality, or inaudible or unintelligible as has been the case thus far.
6. I would have the state party provide assistance to any involved or sponsoring organization to further all these ends.

The insanity here is that all six of these are no-brainers and should have been happening on some level partly since late in 2023.  There is no excuse for the lack of coordination, cross-promotion, and not properly recording all these debates/forums and not properly making them publicly available on the internet, period.

The Problems with the Media

And as a journalist, I for damn sure wouldn’t depend on outreach to know about these events and cover them.  I would prioritize coverage of these events, make sure they are listed in an “upcoming events” section within the politics section with links to the event pages, and sure as hell not let a situation occur like what happened with the last debate when it was not covered at all.  Lost pets, fraternity hazing, and traffic accidents are not more important.  If outlets are short-staffed, bring on some interns if necessary to cover, but have someone there covering no matter what for every single primary debate (plenty of college kids can at least sit and take notes).  There should be alerts in the days before on the news organizations’ homepage, and this should be especially prominently featured on the homepage up top on the day of the event.

All this is so absolutely basic that it shouldn’t need to be said, anything less is gross negligence.  But this is not happening and so it very much needs to be said, and this is just damn pathetic.  This needs to go for all the main local papers and The Washington Post, all the local-interest sites, and all the local television stations.  There is no excuse for anything less.  And, as I noted before, if you’re a newspaper associated with a poll, you sure don’t exclude second tier-candidates under current conditions for the reasons outlined earlier.

Conclusion: Candidates, the Party, and Media: Help Me Help You Do Your Jobs

In the end, the top candidates’ jobs are to put themselves in a position that make it the most likely they will defeat their opponents.  In the end, the Democratic Party and its allied organizations’ jobs are to promote events as much as possible so as to generate real public and media interest and ensure voters can make informed decisions over months of a competitive primary process that for much of its duration is open and gives all comers a real chance to connect and get their message out to voters and the press, along with making sure the process forges candidates into stronger versions of themselves better equipped to take on a formidable general election candidate if there is such a candidate and, boy, there sure is this time around, clearly much more than was anticipated.  Andin the end, the press’s job is to cover all this in substantive ways and to also raise awareness and so that voters can stay informed and not just take candidates’ and the Party’s words without scrutiny and context.

With the polling where it is and factoring all of the above into the equation, it is obvious none of this is happening now.  And I don’t see signs of any adjustments or self-awareness that adjustments need to be made.   And either they change what they are doing and how they are doing it or Larry Hogan’s odds of winning Ben Cardin’s seat for Republicans will be high, far too high for my liking at a time when having more Democrats to stand up to Trump’s MAGA insurrectionist fascism is essential because the survival of democracy in America itself and the whole post-World War II U.S.-led international order are at stake, under assault from an unholy alliance between Trump and Putin.  So no, we cannot afford to have even one of the best possible Republicans in Larry Hogan—in votes, the GOP equivalent of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), breaking often with his party on key issues—to replace Ben Cardin, we need a Democrat.

At the last three debates, I was the only candidate who talked about the frontrunners’ (increasingly) poor polling against Hogan and the major crisis for Democrats in both Maryland and the U.S. Senate this represents.  None of the moderators so much as asked anything even remotely related to clear and present dangers this reality presents for Democrats’ prospects in a deep blue state.  So I see only one solution to correct course: make me the third person in this Maryland Democratic U.S. Senate primary race so I can light a fire under the ass of all the major actors involved to either forge the frontrunners into being more Hogan-ready than their current 12-14 point disastrous deficits or to present a third alternative if they are unable or unwilling to adjust.

Whichever role I end up playing, me being that clear third person in this Democratic U.S. Senate race in Maryland seems to be the only way to maximize our changes to keep Ben Cardin’s seat blue.  The current course and status quo of the press coverage along with the Democratic candidates and Democratic establishment here in Maryland are failing and making it far too likely that Hogan and Republicans will win.  I am the only Democratic candidate willing to admit this, let alone call for action to address it and be a leader by acting accordingly.  I therefore deserve to at least be the third candidate in this race and be part of the discussion from now until May 14, not for my sake, but for all our sakes and for the sake of a Democratic victory in November.

But I need your help to make this happen.  Even if you support Rep. David Trone or County Executive Alsobrooks, they are not currently on a path to beating Hogan or even close, they need help and need someone to push them to be better.  And like it or not, there is no other candidate that can do that in this race at this time besides me.  So please support me, spread the word, and donate to my campaign for the sake of the party and keeping Ben Cardin’s seat blue to better fight against Trumpist MAGA insurrectionist fascism in Washington, the most important fight that must take precedence before all others.  Hogan is a nice guy, not a fascist nor an insurrectionist, but he will still vote too many times with those who are, and that is why we must defeat him, and that is why I’ve got to be the third person in this race.

See related articles Frydenborg Holds His Own Against Alsobrooks in Baltimore Maryland U.S. Senate Democratic Primary Debate, but Will It Matter & Why Won’t Local Media Cover this Race Properly?, Maryland U.S. Democratic Primary Debate Raises Questions on Frontrunners’ & Party’s Readiness to Take on Hogan. Can Frydenborg Emerge As Third Option? and Petty Feuding Between Trone and Alsobrooks Does Not Honor Ben Cardin’s Legacy. Vote for Me Instead! And see all of Brian’s Maryland U.S. Senate race coverage here as well as Brian’s official campaign website.

© 2024 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. 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!

January 2, 2023: A personal note to readers from the man behind Real Context News:  Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook)

Dear Readers: YOU have done it.  Yesterday, the very first day of 2023 (and possibly before, more on that in a bit), my site has surpassed ONE MILLION content views!!  THANK YOU!!!

Over 900,000 of these views have come since late February 2022, and are mostly related to my Ukraine content.  While I swear my other content is great, too, I recognize that this war between Russia and Ukraine is one of those inflection points in global history and has generated an unprecedented level of interest in my work from an increasingly global audience.

My Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times and Baltimore Sun journalist (featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.  My analysis of Ukraine has been featured by Newsweek, Real Clear Defense, Small Wars Journal, Byline Times, the Arabic television stations Alghad TV and Alaraby TV (including my debate with former major Putin advisor, Kremlin insider, and Duma lawmaker Sergei Markov), interviews for the French news site Atlantico, the German news site Buzzard, Indian Strategic Studies, the and the Ministry of Defense of Brazil.

This million milestone is by measurement of the Jetpack plugin for WordPress (one of its most popular plugins of all time, with over five million installations, with the Jetpack count excluding common bots), but with an exception: for about three weeks, another plugin blocked both Jetpack and Google Analytics (that latter of which had a bit more generous of a counting), but another statistical tracker (Burst Statistics) persisted that came close to matching the Jetpack stats.  Using this plugin’s data to plug in the gap, by that combined accounting, I surpassed 1,000,000 content views on the first day of this new year.

Frankly, this should have happened months earlier.  I had hit 500,000 views on August 27, 600,000 by September 8, and 750,000 by September 27:  a quarter of a million increase in a month’s time!  But since then, it took three times as long to cover the same ground as I did in that one month, as it has been road-block after road-block, first from Twitter, then the worst coming from the despicable Elon Musk as “Chief Twit” of Twitter.

In the past few months, I have had to contend with several major rounds of Twitter suppressing wrongfully and on false grounds my account’s visibility and reach, including (a thankfully apparently shorter) one the last few days of 2022.  On top of that, I have had to endure the leadership of Elon Musk over Twitter, which I have criticized here before and which had led to increased suppression of left-leaning accounts and accounts critical of Musk.  In addition, Elon’s highly problematic reforms of the blue checkmark policy at Twitter have dramatically affected me until I recently (regrettably, with no better option) bought and paid for my blue checkmark (I was close to getting one on my own merits and accomplishments and had objectively met the previous requirements before Musk did away with that path, derisively labeling it “legacy.”).  Before Musk changed the blue checkmark policy, I was getting extremely good traffic and engagement levels form you, dear readers, on Twitter, from which usually over 90% of you find my work.  After he changed the policy and the disastrous rollout of Musk’s new policy, non-blue checkmark accounts were also suppressed to encourage forking out $8 to join his new program, and it was impossible for me to attain my previous levels of success under Elon’s new system until I received my blue checkmark, which happened late in December.  Hence, most of November and December I had only a tiny trickle of traffic, a single-digit percentage of what I could have and had been having.  My recovery has started, but I still need your help to keep going and recoup my past success.

The Journey of Real Context News

So, if you’ll indulge a little of my tooting my own horn here, apart my friends and some of you for some suggestions I took to heart (and thank you for those), this has entirely been a one-man show by yours truly.  As the Founder, Executive Editor, Chief Correspondent, and Webmaster of Real Context news, I have written every article and every single word of copy on my site; I planned, designed, built, and managed this site entirely on my own (including fending off what were almost certainly Russian-state-sponsored cyberattacks that temporarily shut down and corrupted my site repeatedly, especially earlier this year when my site was gaining a lot of traction, which forced me to pay more for security).

This project formally was started in December 2018, again, all on my own (with the only exception of services I have paid for tech support, but more often than not I have figured out and solved the problems in spite of, not because of, this support), with the site formally launching in January 2019.  Much of that month was spent re-upping many of my pieces self-published on LinkedIn’s publishing platform, LinkedIn Pulse, but it was on January 28, 2019, when I published by first Real Context News exclusive article, Crime Too Narrow As Main Lens to View Putin’s Masterpiece of Collusion, one of my most prescience pieces on the Trump-Russia saga and the Mueller probe, and included this author’s note to open the article:

I sat on this piece for over five months, pitching to many outlets, hoping each new revelation that obviously backs up my framing of these issues would increase its chances of publication, but it seems editors at major media outlets are not terribly interested in self-reflection and discussions about how media coverage of Trump-Russia could and should be far better for the American people.  Well, now I have my own website not subject to the capricious corporate whims of LinkedIn or the myopia of the mainstream media’s editorial class.  I proudly present my first Real Context News exclusive publication!

In the nearly three years since then, from U.S. elections to Israel-Palestine, from Trumpism to racial injustice and up to the current Ukraine war, I have produced hard-hitting, deeply-researched, heavily contextual-and-historical pieces.  I have striven hard to fill the voids in the mainstream media, which often covers poorly and improperly some of the most important stories.  I have done this by adding deep context and often data-driven arguments that put things in perspective and highlight substance over noise, destroying the myopic narratives that are all too pervasive in the current media landscape.

This has often made my coverage far more prescient, accurate, and informative than the body of mainstream coverage—often slow to catch up to me if they do—on the same tectonic issues (if you’re new to my site, I am confident that if you read my older work, you will see I am not exaggerating).  As I noted in a 2017 piece of mine advocating for more analytical journalism:

In our current era, so many journalists are out there chasing new pieces of information that they are basically throwing puzzle pieces in the public’s face; the pieces hit people and fall to the ground in clumps, often unrelated to each other.  At best people start putting a few pieces—maybe even a section—together, but before there is ever a chance to actually put the puzzle together, or even a majority of it, the whole press corps is back, flinging their individual pieces or a few pieces joined together back in people’s faces, and the whole process repeats, until people are buried by small clumps of pieces that turn into mountains of confusion, ones that obstruct the larger picture since it is not being assembled, and the continuous piling of new chunks prevents this from ever happening.

In the end, bringing it all back to the big picture and weighting the relevance and importance of any particular development is crucial for good journalism, but the media often fails to do so, as I have repeatedly noted.  And I have even engaged some famous people on my podcast, including patriots like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his colleagues Gabriel Sterling and Jordan Fuchs, recorded just two days before that other “perfect phone call” and six days before Trump’s insurrection.  These were Republicans with whom I have serious disagreements but who put country over party as their civic duty demanded but at literal risk to their lives, all at a time when most elected officials in their own party chose, instead, to go along with a fascist cult’s illegal, undemocratic coup attempt.  Another of my podcasts featured Ukraine’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Oleksandra Matviichuk, a few months before her much-deserved award.

I literally started with nothing but ideas, passion, and will, all by myself, with (and still with) no advertising budget (just my hustle!), but have risen be named, now three years in a row, one of the “60 Best Foreign Policy Blogs and Websites” (currently ranked #26).

The Real Reason for My Success

But more important than any specific accolade is that my site has reached the milestone of a million content views.  If I used the metrics of Google Analytics, I reached that milestone earlier (December 27), but am trying to be conservative and not get ahead of myself and, thus, am taking the more conservative estimate between Google Analytics and Jetpack (plus Burst).

And you know who I really have to thank for that considerable milestone in my readership-level being reached, in a way that has truly humbled me and made me feel tremendous appreciation from the depths of (what remains of) my soul?

YOU!  My dear readers!!

Literally, hundreds of thousands of you have seen my content collectively one million times!  It if was not for you, this would simply be a personal diary posted online.

Instead, I am a website officially recognized as a news website by Google News, one with a global audience (and global credibility, even cited by NATO for my groundbreaking proposal to modify the Alliance’s Article 5 to include cyberwarfare explicitly), attracting the praise of former generals and top journalists, viewed by people in over 220 nations, territories, and dependencies around the world (nearly every single populated place)!  Nearly two-thirds of my audience comes from outside the United States, with my largest audiences after Americans, in order, coming from the UK, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, France, Finland, and Spain (incidentally, Ukraine and Russia are my 18^th and 45^st most popular readerships).

And, again dear readers, that is because of YOU.  My success is because you have given me your time, respect, and energy.  This entire enterprise depends on you, and not only you as an audience, but you as donors have empowered me to keep doing what I am doing.  I could not do this without the financial generosity that some of you have provided.  So, on that note…

An Appeal for Support

1.) I like to think that most of you recognize how my content is unique and worthy of being read, so those of you who really appreciate and can support my work financially, this is a direct appeal for to give what you can when you can (CLICK HERE).  Your donations have kept Real Context News going, and I am not going to lie: it has been difficult, but things are finally going much better now as I draw in more and more readers, more and more donations.  Every little bit helps, but those of you inclined to make larger donations, please do not hesitate to do so.

2.) Those of you who choose not to support me financially but still really appreciate my work, you (and my donors, too) can share my content on social media and e-mail; talk me up to your friends, family and colleagues.

3.) Specifically, those of you on Twitter (and if you are not you should join and follow me there), I am asking all of you to convince at least 10 others in your orbit to follow me on Twitter (even recommending my account to just random people you run into and talk with about these issues).  I also post on LinkedIn and Facebook, but, by far at present, Twitter is the medium by far that is most successfully driving Real Context News’s engagement, growth, and recognition.  And also, for all of you, please remember that while likes are appreciated, retweets have more impact on growing my reach and, quote retweets with your own commentary are approaching the divine.  That being said, please feel free to share on other platforms, too, besides Twitter: there is always room for growth!

If I can raise enough funding, I am planning when my schedule permits to travel to Ukraine myself and report there for a few weeks, maybe even a month or more!   Being a war zone, I will need to take expensive precautions, and am not going to rush in willy-nilly, but well-prepared and only if I can properly resource the trip to mitigate risk.  But such a trip would be a natural next step since it is, after all, my unique Ukraine analysis on Real Context News that most of you have seen and that has brought most of you on board as engaged, thoughtful readers of this site.

Half-a-million content views out of starting my own site from scratch… it is really humbling and something, one of the key achievements of my academic and professional career spanning over two decades.  But this is just another in a series of stages of progress.  Let’s get 1.5 million and then let’s break two million!!  I can’t do it alone, but with your help, and the more people I reach, all that and more are possible, and the more I can have an impact on the deeply problematic media landscape, to educate, enlighten, and drive a more informed conversation and, therefore, better debates, better problem-solving, and better outcomes for humanity, what the best journalism has always strived to do, what I set out in Real Context News’s mission statement back at the beginning of 2019.  You empower me, and I empower you, but without you, again, I am just a diarist. 

THANK YOU

So, thank you all so much, for everything you’ve done, and for what you will do to help this site grow more and more into its potential.  I am counting on you, and together, there is so much we can accomplish, so many more stories that need to be told, so much good we can do as a team.  I may be a one-man show here at Real Context News, but in a larger sense you are all part of the website too: it is your support that makes this site what it is: something special that will inform its readers far better than most other outlets on the chosen topics (and those topics are many and varied).  More reach, more support, more funding, together means more of all of this.  So join me, fight against disinformation misinformation, fascism, war, oppression, and injustice of all kinds (and occasional battles of artistic taste) with factual, reasoned, researched, honest, in-depth, transparent, and well-sourced discussions of the pressing issues of our era.

Thank you all again, from the very bottom of my heart, and PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING and/or SPREADING THE WORD

All Yours,

Brian

© 2023 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) December 7, 2022

SILVER SPRING—Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I could write thousands of words on Elon’s rank hypocrisy, gaslighting, lying, extreme partisanship, and other mendacities—both before and after Twitter—but here I will let a picture do most of the talking:

The context?  “China and Ukraine” was trending on Twitter yesterday.  I, thinking maybe Chinese President Jinping and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had had some sort of chat, was curious, so I clicked on the trend.

And this is what I saw:

Not about Ukraine and China, the first result (and it was not a sponsored advertisement) was a post about Twitter and the decisions it took just before the 2020 U.S. presidential election regarding suppressing content that engaged in rampant speculation about Hunter Biden and what would supposedly be revealed about him and Joe Biden and their assumed “corruption” from a then-unverified trove of content (gigabytes’ worth of) from a “laptop” (or more likely a massive data posting or postings), the parties of which had access to it were keeping access closed and were only releasing unverified bits and pieces for the clear purpose of trying to generate damage against Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and to aid Donald Trump’s reelection.  There was smoke, but the idea that this was a serious fire was not accepted by multiple major media outlets (including the Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal).  If you think this resembles Russian cyberwarfare and media inanity against Hillary Clinton (her e-mails!) in 2016, you would be onto something…

A lot more can be said on all this and certainly should be.  But for now, it should be noted that the newly Manchild-in-Chief of Twitter, Elon Musk, was only too happy to work with writer (I would say former reporter turned polemicist) Matt Taibbi to release what the duo are calling “The Twitter Files.”  Musk did not choose a mainstream journalist with respect and credibility that runs deep across the political divide; he chose Taibbi, who has a record of extreme bias, slander, and smear when it comes to both the mainstream-Democratic Party-left in the U.S. and on the very obvious reality that there is a major relationship between Team Trump and Team Russia and has been for years (however you want to describe it in any legal sense), one that had a decisive effect on the 2016 election.  He and Musk amusingly claim their Twitter stunt is a real bombshell even though they are trying to rehash the same Hunter Biden stuff at issue late in the 2020 election cycle some two years later, still confusing and conflating the issues of highly speculative and likely specious reporting on Hunter’s personal information on one hand and whether or not those personal files (“the laptop”) embarrassing for Hunter Biden actually existed on the other (again, more on all this in the future).

But the bottom line here: I chose to look into a “China and Ukraine” Twitter trend, and, up at the top of the trend results, not a sponsored tweet, but at the very top of a trend on China and Ukraine was THAT story from my screenshot, a story by the Murdoch-owned New York Post (which exhibited less independence than The Wall Street Journal back in 2020 and led the Hunter Biden “laptop” story charge) about the Twitter decisions from 2020 related to the suppression of the anti-Hunter Biden campaign (even key figures at The New York Post thought that the story back in 2020 was weak and not publishable under actual, you know, journalistic standards).  Nothing about Ukraine or China appear in the Tweet text or the article preview.  But Elon wants you to see it, wanted me to see it, so damn what you or I actually clicked to see; Elon gets what he wants with his new toy.

On Elon Musk’s Twitter, when Elon wants to partner with a problematic “journalist” like Matt Taibbi—full of vitriol and hatred for mainstream Democrats—to do a selective hit-job on Hunter Biden and combine that with efforts to distort and reduce Twitter’s moderation efforts (from and still at a time when disinformation, violence, insurrection, and terrorism from the right dwarfs similar efforts on the left) to suit Musk’s own partisan politics, you can be sure that Musk will twist the platform to push his own pet project into your feed even if you search for different subjects.

This is not “free speech,” nor is it “freedom;” it is the effort of a billionaire malignant narcissist (who seems want to minify and excuse the transgressions of that other less-wealthy malignant narcissist) to hijack Twitter under the banner of those slogans but for his own unstated and nefarious aims, posing as a liberator but aiming for destruction, like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.  Under such gaslighting, Musk is happy to manipulate Twitter to amplify his favorites and punish those whom he dislikes, all happening silently behind the scenes, not in any kind of transparent way regardless of the meaningless, unsupported claims of Musk’s words of Tweets.  This is the truth of how Twitter is now, how it is after Musk took over with all the changes happening under his iron, merciless, take-no-prisoners rule as Twitter’s warlord. 

In the past, you might see a search result that returned results that were not what you wanted (maybe searching for TED gave you both Ted Lasso and Ted Cruz and you wanted a TED Talk…).  And, to be fair, Twitter has been somewhat broken since Elon sabotaged its workforce, with other nonsensical results happening when I use Twitter, but I have a very hard time believing that Musk’s preferred nonsense being force-fed to me on Twitter is accidental and not deliberate.

Having seen enough of Musk and his modus operandi, to me, this is clearly deliberate, agenda-driven manipulation stemming from the man who has made himself the absolute monarch of Twitter, without him telling us he was doing that, how, or why, while gaslighting us about transparency all the while (so who knows what tinkering might have happened between October 28—when Elon formally took over Twitter—and Election Day on November 8 to affect several close House races that came down to just a few thousand or even just hundreds of votes, that’s a whole other question that may never be answered, something that can and should be discussed later).

“Free speech” and “freedom” for Elon, but forced attendance in the court of the king for the rest of us.

Down with the monarchy.  Down with the king.

See Brian’s related article from December 18, 2019, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma and from December 26, 2020, The Nexus of American Right-Wing and Kremlin Disinformation Exposes Trump-Russia’s Mechanics, both of which are excerpted from Brian’s eBook described below.

© 2022 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; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, 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!

UPDATE: January 1, 2023: We hit ONE MILLION! New announcement here. September 8, 2022: Real Context News passes 600,000 content views (100,000 more in just 11 days)

August 28, 2022: A personal note to readers from the man behind Real Context News:  Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook)

It is with great pride, but also great humility, that, as of yesterday, I can announce that my news website Real Context News has surpassed half-a-million views of my content!

Of those 500,000, well over 400,000 of these views are just since late February of this year, with nearly 100,000 from August alone (with a few days left in the month, too), meaning Real Context News is growing by leaps and bounds rapidly at present!

This is by measurement of the Jetpack plugin for WordPress (one of its most popular plugins of all time, with over five million installations, with the Jetpack count excluding common bots).

The Journey of Real Context News

So, if you’ll indulge a little of my tooting my own horn here, apart my friends and some of you for some suggestions I took to heart (and thank you for those), this has entirely been a one-man show by yours truly.  As the Founder, Executive Editor, Chief Correspondent, and Webmaster of Real Context news, I have written every article and every single word of copy on my site; I planned, designed, built, and managed this site entirely on my own (including fending off what were almost certainly Russian-state-sponsored cyberattacks that temporarily shut down and corrupted my site repeatedly, especially earlier this year when my site was gaining a lot of traction, which forced me to pay more for security).

This project formally was started in December 2018, again, all on my own (with the only exception of services I have paid for tech support, but more often than not I have figured out and solved the problems in spite of, not because of, this support), with the site formally launching in January 2019.  Much of that month was spent re-upping many of my pieces self-published on LinkedIn’s publishing platform, LinkedIn Pulse, but it was on January 28, 2019, when I published by first Real Context News exclusive article, Crime Too Narrow As Main Lens to View Putin’s Masterpiece of Collusion, one of my most prescience pieces on the Trump-Russia saga and the Mueller probe, and included this author’s note to open the article:

I sat on this piece for over five months, pitching to many outlets, hoping each new revelation that obviously backs up my framing of these issues would increase its chances of publication, but it seems editors at major media outlets are not terribly interested in self-reflection and discussions about how media coverage of Trump-Russia could and should be far better for the American people.  Well, now I have my own website not subject to the capricious corporate whims of LinkedIn or the myopia of the mainstream media’s editorial class.  I proudly present my first Real Context News exclusive publication!

In the well-over two years since then, from U.S. elections to Israel-Palestine, from Trumpism to racial injustice and up to the current Ukraine war, I have produced hard-hitting, deeply-researched, heavily contextual-and-historical pieces.  I have striven hard to fill the voids in the mainstream media, which often covers poorly and improperly some of the most important stories.  I have done this by adding deep context and often data-driven arguments that put things in perspective and highlight substance over noise, destroying the myopic narratives that are all too pervasive in the current media landscape.

This has often made my coverage far more prescient, accurate, and informative than the body of mainstream coverage—often slow to catch up to me if they do—on the same tectonic issues (if you’re new to my site, I am confident that if you read my older work, you will see I am not exaggerating).  As I noted in a 2017 piece of mine advocating for more analytical journalism:

In our current era, so many journalists are out there chasing new pieces of information that they are basically throwing puzzle pieces in the public’s face; the pieces hit people and fall to the ground in clumps, often unrelated to each other.  At best people start putting a few pieces—maybe even a section—together, but before there is ever a chance to actually put the puzzle together, or even a majority of it, the whole press corps is back, flinging their individual pieces or a few pieces joined together back in people’s faces, and the whole process repeats, until people are buried by small clumps of pieces that turn into mountains of confusion, ones that obstruct the larger picture since it is not being assembled, and the continuous piling of new chunks prevents this from ever happening.

In the end, bringing it all back to the big picture and weighting the relevance and importance of any particular development is crucial for good journalism, but the media often fails to do so, as I have repeatedly noted.  And I have even engaged some famous people on my podcast, most notably patriots like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his colleagues Gabriel Sterling and Jordan Fuchs, recorded just two days before that other “perfect phone call” and six days before Trump’s insurrection.  These were Republicans with whom I have serious disagreements but who put country over party as their civic duty demanded but at literal risk to their lives, all at a time when most elected officials in their own party chose, instead, to go along with a fascist cult’s illegal, undemocratic coup attempt.

I literally started with nothing but ideas, passion, and will, all by myself, with (and still with) no advertising budget (just my hustle!), but have risen be named, now three years in a row, one of the “60 Best Foreign Policy Blogs and Websites” (currently ranked #25).

The Real Reason for My Success

But more important than any specific accolade is that my site has reached the milestone of half-a-million content views.  If I used the metrics of Google Analytics, I reached that milestone earlier (August 18), but am trying to be conservative and not get ahead of myself and, thus, am taking the more conservative estimate between Google Analytics and Jetpack.

And you know who I really have to thank for that considerable milestone in my readership-level being reached, in a way that has truly humbled me and made me feel tremendous appreciation from the depths of (what remains of) my soul?

YOU!  My dear readers!!

Literally, hundreds of thousands of you have seen my content collectively half-a-million times!  It if was not for you, this would simply be a personal diary posted online.

Instead, I am a website officially recognized as a news website by Google News, one with a global audience (and global credibility, even cited by NATO for my groundbreaking proposal to modify the Alliance’s Article 5 to include cyberwarfare explicitly), viewed by people in over 220 nations, territories, and dependencies around the world (nearly every single populated place)!  Nearly 60% of my audience comes from outside the United States, with my largest audiences after Americans, in order, coming from the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, France, and Ireland (incidentally, Ukraine and Russia are my 17^th and 41^st most popular readerships).

And, again dear readers, that is because of YOU.  My success is because you have given me your time, respect, and energy.  This entire enterprise depends on you, and not only you as an audience, but you as donors have empowered me to keep doing what I am doing.  I could not do this without the financial generosity that some of you have provided.  So, on that note…

An Appeal for Support

1.) I like to think that most of you recognize how my content is unique and worthy of being read, so those of you who really appreciate and can support my work financially, this is a direct appeal for to give what you can when you can (CLICK HERE).  Your donations have kept Real Context News going, and I am not going to lie: it has been difficult, but things are finally going much better now as I draw in more and more readers, more and more donations.  Every little bit helps, but those of you inclined to make larger donations, please do not hesitate to do so.

2.) Those of you who choose not to support me financially but still really appreciate my work, you (and my donors, too) can share my content on social media and e-mail; talk me up to your friends, family and colleagues.

3.) Specifically, those of you on Twitter (and if you are not you should join and follow me there), I am asking all of you to convince at least 10 others in your orbit to follow me on Twitter (even recommending my account to just random people you run into and talk with about these issues).  I also post on LinkedIn and Facebook, but, by far at present, Twitter is the medium by far that is most successfully driving Real Context News’s engagement, growth, and recognition.  And also, for all of you, please remember that while likes are appreciated, retweets have more impact on growing my reach and, quote retweets with your own commentary are approaching the divine.  That being said, please feel free to share on other platforms, too, besides Twitter: there is always room for growth!

If I can raise enough funding, I am planning when my schedule permits to travel to Ukraine myself and report there for a few weeks, maybe even a month or more!   Being a war zone, I will need to take expensive precautions, and am not going to rush in willy-nilly, but well-prepared and only if I can properly resource the trip to mitigate risk.  But such a trip would be a natural next step since it is, after all, my unique Ukraine analysis on Real Context News that most of you have seen and that has brought most of you on board as engaged, thoughtful readers of this site.

Half-a-million content views out of starting my own site from scratch… it is really humbling and something, one of the key achievements of my academic and professional career spanning over two decades.  But this is just the beginning.  Let’s get to 600,000, then aim for 750,000, then let’s break a million!!  I can’t do it alone, but with your help, and the more people I reach, all that and more are possible, and the more I can have an impact on the deeply problematic media landscape, to educate, enlighten, and drive a more informed conversation and, therefore, better debates, better problem-solving, and better outcomes for humanity, what the best journalism has always strived to do, what I set out in Real Context News’s mission statement back at the beginning of 2019.  You empower me, and I empower you, but without you, again, I am just a diarist. 

THANK YOU

So, thank you all so much, for everything you’ve done, and for what you will do to help this site grow more and more into its potential.  I am counting on you, and together, there is so much we can accomplish, so many more stories that need to be told, so much good we can do as a team.  I may be a one-man show here at Real Context News, but in a larger sense you are all part of the website too: it is your support that makes this site what it is: something special that will inform its readers far better than most other outlets on the chosen topics (and those topics are many and varied).  More reach, more support, more funding, together means more of all of this.  So join me, fight against disinformation misinformation, fascism, war, oppression, and injustice of all kinds (and occasional battles of artistic taste) with factual, reasoned, researched, honest, in-depth, transparent, and well-sourced discussions of the pressing issues of our era.

Thank you all again, from the very bottom of my heart, and PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING and/or SPREADING THE WORD

All Yours,

Brian

© 2022 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook), July 21, 2022

WARNING: Spoilers for Star Wars in general, especially Obi-Wan Kenobi and other Disney+ Star Wars series

Author’s note: Regrettably, I have been sitting on this for nearly a month (mostly as is, with minimal edits).  I was excited to have this come out for an entertainment site—I will not get into specifics names here—for which I had written about Star Wars before.  No real history of any real issues there, certainly none with my editor at the time, but apparently that editor—again, not going into names, and I go into details I won’t go into here in a Twitter thread you can find if you really want to—despite never, not once, sending any critical or negative thought or communication to me about me or my work, couldn’t stand my views on Disney Star Wars or me as a person and projected a great deal onto what I did and did not mean in my communications, going far beyond my actual words into speculation and distortion.

This piece below, in earlier draft form, though, put this editor over the edge.  That editor then engaged in a temporarily successful political purge against me because of the views expressed here and projection related to them, but eventually the company realized major mistakes were made, apologized, and more or less fixed the situation to one acceptable to me after admitting the editor had behaved very inappropriately towards me.  So I was pleasantly surprised my attempts at open, reasoned discussion paid off (not with this editor, but with the company I freelanced with for some time; still, please do not seek out, bother, or engage the editor on my behalf, I absolutely am not trying to make this about this particular person, site, or company, but, rather, the larger issues this whole situation represents).

I really wanted to get my deep-dive on the Obi-Wan Kenobi series out to readers though, so here it is, with some edits/updates and a further explanatory note at the end* on what I touched upon here in this note, tying it into the larger issues I focused on on my original article. And oh, if you really hate what I have to say, feel free to disagree by actually sending me your critiques and views! Don’t be like that editor, engage and exchange!

SILVER SPRING—I try hard to go into new Disney/Lucasfilm Star Wars projects with an open mind.  Yes, mistakes are human, but refusing to learn from the body of dedicated fans giving consistent feedback is unforgiveable.  But when you don’t have a passionate, informed person or duo leading the effort from the top (three is a crowd), you basically get a committee trying to please everyone, do everything at once, shoehorn way too much in, and executing each part of the overburdened project with less finesse than more focus and time would allow.

While in George Lucas’s films, there are occasional technical errors that usually only a close rewatch can catch—a stormtrooper hitting his head on a Death Star doorframe, some of the droid voices or random side character voices in the prequels being slightly inconsistent—there are glaring moments of cringe here in Kenobi that, unlike in the J.J. Abrams Star Wars movies, stick with you in the moment because it is not trying to move at Abrams’ blazing lightspeed, skipping or not (not that Abrams’ flaws in his Star Wars films do not come flooding through as soon as the roller coaster ride ends and the credits roll, they do and easily stick with you when your brain can take a pause from the sensory overload and actually process what you have seen).

I don’t mind an awkward sequence or two.  But what we have is almost lazy, consistent, substantive flaws that are damn distracting—that is, when the show isn’t distracting with its own intentional distractions that they confuse for major plot lines betraying the titular choice of the series.

Bait and Switch

And what I mean is that Disney/Lucasfilm is constantly faking out its audiences, trying to make each new series as much as it can a “ONE-SIZE FITS ALL FOR ALL AGES!”-snare, baiting with what looks like one thing, but ends up being something else.  The key examples:

What we were sold:

A Badass Show about a Mandalorian bounty hunter!

What we got:

Mando and son, whereas Mando learns to be a dad! (I’m partly kidding, but partly not. There is less bounty-hunter badassery than we mostly all wanted, but the balance is still on giving Mando screen time vs Grogu, who can’t speak and definitely doesn’t compete for screen time, but the father-protective/mentoring dynamic, not the bounty-hunter dynamic, dominates.  But I guess we MUST HAVE the mentoring dynamic with a kid (CHECK)… (Still, I love this show)

What we were sold:

Bad Batch: A badass show about hardcore mutant clones

What we got:

Those clones babysitting an admittedly cool kid, Omega, but still…. Hero/kid mentoring/family dynamic (CHECK) dominates the series, not mutant clone badassery (I do like this series though)

What we were sold:

A show about the OG bounty hunter from the Original Trilogy, THE BOBA FETT, being a total badass!

What we got:

A show in which Boba mostly decides “I wanna be a super nice guy,” farms out most of the badassery to the more badass Fennec Shand (LOVE her, but she shouldn’t outshine Boba in his own show), the series being extremely inconsistent with storytelling/pacing, and the best episode by far is actually a Mandalorian prequel to that show’s third season, an episode in which Boba does not even appear , but we get the mentor-kid dynamic again (CHECK)

What we were sold:

“Hey, want a badass, mature show that’s about Obi-Wan’s dark, traumatized existence after Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith? Here’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Ewan McGregor, and, bringing Hayden Christensen back, we might even give you some deep introspection on Vader while we’re it at!”

What we got:

The Adventures of Obi-Wan, Lil’ Leia, and Reva!  Plenty of kid stuff for the kiddies, and plenty of Reva (because I guess the idea is Millennials and “Gen Z”—really baby Millennials—would get “bored” with Gen-Xer-age Kenobi so we need to add a younger-adult focus! Maybe my annoyance is clouding my judgment, but I think Leia and Reva get more screen time combined than Kenobi does in most episodes. And, of course, the mentor-kid dynamic (CHECK)

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those Reva haters (again, screw the racist attacks against actress Moses Ingram), and knowing what I know now after the big Part V reveal and the ending, I am not upset with her story like some or her performance, I actually like it: it works fairly well and explains a lot of what people complained about initially, but I do agree it would have benefitted from letting it breather a little with more development over more episodes or at least longer episodes.  And I like Lil’ Leia!  A LOT!  But I don’t need THAT MUCH of her.  This isn’t the Lil’ Leia show.  It’s not the Reva show.  Instead of coming off as a series where the focus is on Kenobi where there are new (Reva) or reintroduced-at-a-younger-age characters (Leia), for a show billed as Obi-Wan Kenobi, it feels like they are just about equal stars.

We Were All Oversold on Obi-Wan Himself for No Good Reason

And this is where I get really angry with Disney/Lucasfilm.  I know they are a profit-driven corporation that is constantly trying to grow audience and hit new demographics (and we know, to appease Chinese censors, they minimized Nigerian-British actor John Boyega’s Finn’s appearance on Chinese posters, and Boyega felt misused by Disney overall).  I’m ok with trying to grow audience and expand demographics if done well, but the bait and switch—here is something we know longtime and hardcore fans will want, Obi-Wan, but instead of truly giving due focus in a show named after him to the titular character, we’re going to throw this other stuff in to the point Obi-Wan is competing for screen time with these new elements—has left a bad taste in my mouth and many others.

What’s crazy is that, for a show with just six episodes, we only got two episodes that focused on the Obi-Wan/Vader/Anakin dynamic above all else.  The rest all had way more going on, in many ways to their detriment.

If they called the show: Star Wars: The Hunt for Obi-Wan and Leia, I’d have been fine with what we got.  We are focusing on the main objects of the hunting—Obi-Wan and Leia—and we are focusing on the main actor on the hunter’s side, Reva.  It would be a great three-thread story on how they all tied into each other’s destinies, with some great Vader stuff mixed in.  But it’s a freaking show called Obi-Wan Kenobi.  And we didn’t see Obi-Wan before we saw Reva; it was the other way around, which may be coincidence, or it may not be.

I respect Deborah Chow, who, like Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau and unlike Rian Johnson and some Disney/Lucasfilm executives/producers, respects Star Wars for what it is has been and is and could be, not far more for what it could be, not as something they can “fix” or make better because it was sooo lacking, soooo missing modern sensibilities.  And trust me, anything older could use a few updates to better fit into any new era, but you can tell the difference between people who love and cherish the old and give thoughtful updates and those who are on a mission to “correct” beloved franchises in ways destined to offend longtime fans unnecessarily.  That former is what Dave Filoni did spectacularly with George Lucas with Clone Wars, that’s what Dave and Jon Favreau did with Mandalorian.

So here, again, we get to corporate plotting to have everything at the same time and nothing as an individual element being truly standout.  Some corporate committee decided they wanted to insert X stuff for the “new fans” or “potential new fans” and for “the kids” on top of the obvious elements in Obi-Wan Kenobi built on the legacy characters of Obi-Wan and Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker.  No, we couldn’t possibly just have a show focused on those two, it doesn’t check enough “boxes.”  Gods forbid!

To do this, said corporate committee hired a nobody writer to lead the writing for the series who virtually none of us have heard of before who has little ownership/attachment/knowledge of the existing material and who the committee can easily push around: Joby Harold, whose writing credits before Kenobi are only three films: Zack Snyder’s 2021 Netflix film Army of the Dead, 5.7 rating on IMDB and written with another; 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, 6.7 rating by fans onIMDB and written with Guy Ritchie and other randos; and Awake in 2007, 6.5 IMDB rating, directed by Joby Harold, too, and starring Hayden Christensen (I guess that’s why??).

Except that Deborah Chow told us that we were getting a deep “character-driven story,” like the masterpiece Logan—about Wolverine, the only superhero movie, in my view, that can compete with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, which was tight-knit and very focused on Logan and his relationship with Charles Xavier and Laura, with three standout performances—or the deep psychological drama Joker, centered only on the Joker, with him being the only main character.  But at the point I was writing much of this, in the half-day before the final episode aired, I thought, no matter how good the final episode is, no matter how different it is, with five-sixths of Kenobi sealed, delivered, and opened, that is definitely not what we got (the finale mixed episode, with an amazing Vader/Kenobi showdown and a decent culmination of Reva’s story, has not changed this understanding for me).

I checked for how long each episode was not including credits: Part I included a more-than-4-minute recap of the Prequel Trilogy, so not including that nor the credits, it’s not much over 44 minutes, I’m not cutting out the recaps for the other lengths, but keep in mind these do include recaps that take over 1 minute, sometimes closer to 2 minutes, off the length: Part II isn’t even 35 minutes; Part III isn’t even 41 minutes; Part IV isn’t even 33 minutes; Part V isn’t even 36.5 minutes; and the finale Part VI is the longest, at 44.5 minutes.

I am sorry, Disney/Lucasfilm, but if you want to engage in prestige TV, the general rule for being considered top-tier is to give your viewers about an hour an episode: this has been the case since The Sopranos, with everything from The Wire and Rome to Homeland and Dexter to Westworld and Game of Thrones (AMC with Mad Men, Walking Dead and Breaking Bad is the main example otherwise, cuz commercials, and Disney/Lucasfilm doesn’t have that excuse).  Yet half of Kenobi’s episodes feel little more than half-an-hour: they feel like half-episodes.

Which brings me to this next point, what drives me crazy even more so:  we could have had every second of Reva and Lil’ Leia we have now, and if this was a proper prestige show, given the status, respect, effort, and budget those shows had, we had plenty of time to have WAY more of Obi-Wan-himself!  That’s way more time for Ewan to act, to speak, way more time for him to reminisce, to possibly commune with Qui-Gon Jinn or Yoda (as I was hoping we would get and discussed elsewhere and finally got in the finale), to watch Luke, to have Clone Wars flashbacks (and not necessarily expensive battles but some nice downtime with Obi-Wan and Anakin, maybe even Ahsoka, which I thought maybe we would still get in the final episode, but oh well).  Disney, you had Ewan hired, and these scenes could easily have been written and produced with not a tremendous amount of effort, just a writer who really knew Star Wars and had the confidence to tackle it respectfully, or even if you had to drag Filoni in to write them, I am sure he would have obliged.  You could have added three, five more minutes of each episode, even easily more, still not exceeded an hour, and given us far more character development for Obi-Wan, you know, the main character the show is named after.

Quality Control, Please: Consumers vs. Fans

Instead, we get Obi-Wan having two episodes where the main thing he does is try to find and rescue Leia, two whole episodes in a six-episode series dangerously retreading incredibly similar ground.  We also have two chase sequences involving Leia, both of which are slow and poorly directed.  Again, I like Deborah Chow, and can’t explain this.  Maybe it was the Second Unit or Assistant Directors, of which there are literally eleven for the few episodes I checked (including the lowest-rated-by-far one at 6.3 on IMDB), something I’ve never seen before, but which explains the incoherence: Chow probably directed the best parts, and pick from among the other eleven to explain the WTF moments…

Before this final episode aired, I was dreading the fact that apparently young Luke is being dragged into this, and at least his role was kept to a minimum, but still, I think we would have been better off not bringing in Luke/Owen/Beru into the final episode for Reva’s culmination because we already made the decision to take Obi-Wan off Tatooine and to focus on Leia; making Luke the focus for the end of the final episode when Leia has been the focus of the previous five just feels contrived, and, in such a short series, rushed.  And the contrived, forced way we had Bail Organa needlessly name-dropping Owen and Tatooine when Kenobi already knew that information was just ridiculous, really bad writing along with it just being dropped like that and left for Reva to find.  It was as if once not killing Reva off during the Vader fight they did not know what to do with her or how to wrap the next episode up and they just forced everything together.

We already have three main axes around which the show has revolved: Obi-Wan, Reva, and Leia, with a sub-focus on Vader.  After five episodes, bringing in a fifth axis with Luke… in a six-episode show, just no.

With Reva and Leia, I almost felt like we were getting a product testing sample: let’s see how the audience response to X and Y, and, depending on the reactions, we may develop a new product line, more products for more money.  Hell, we could have had a whole new series: Star Wars: Inquisitor, focused solely on Reva, with her being brought into the Inquisitorius, hinting at her backstory, and setting up a crossover with Kenobi.  Instead of getting a Reva series and/or an Obi-Wan series, it seems like Disney/Lucasfilm tried to do both in one and succeeded at neither.  I could say the same for Leia.  We get some great scenes for all the main characters, but the ways they were all put together make me feel the marketing boxes having their checks drawn in them, that I am being subjected to some sort of corporate algorithm.

Which I wouldn’t mind if the show was put together in a much better way, if the final produce was of a much higher quality.  We’ve already seen this with The Mandalorian (but even it can come off as uneven sometimes).  We know of one aborted spinoff (Rangers of the New Republic) and one currently in production (Ahsoka, but, to call that series a Mandalorian spin-off doesn’t do Ahsoka Tano’s character’s history in other Star War content justice; with Dave Filoni helming that, I very confident it will be amazing).  If a show is good enough, I won’t realize, won’t notice too much, or won’t care that you are trying to sell me or pitch me an upcoming product; Ahsoka and other Mandalorian cameos did not feel shoehorned int.  It won’t feel grossly commercial or too corporate-y because I will be enjoying the content so much. 

There are people who consume and enjoy a product—let’s call them the consumers—who enjoy most of what’s thrown at them without really thinking about it much or ever allowing themselves to get that bent out of shape over a particular property.  They enjoy Baby Yoda or Rey or whatever, but it’s not that important to them and they don’t feel that deeper connecting to Star Wars.  They may even post Baby Yoda memes or own Baby Yoda dolls or get their kids Baby Yoda lunchboxes, but they are primarily consumers without any deep emotional attachment even if they find Baby Yoda adorable.

But then there are the people who care deeply about the characters, themes, and worlds of Star Wars—let’s call them fans, who will think carefully about anything, will still consume but do far more than that and not without thoughts and reactions, analysis, or sometimes protestations.  Star Wars for fans is much more than entertainment and distraction.  And, at least in the George Lucas era, that is what set Star Wars apart from, say, the Transformers series, Fast and Furious series, all the Jurassic Parks after the original, and most of the other current blockbuster franchises.

The Star Wars consumers aren’t really thinkers when it comes to Star Wars content, they will happily take the flashy distractions, but the fans, they demand vision, storytelling, something more than exciting sequences strung together.  For them, Star Wars—a lot like the Lord of the Rings—was never just another fun property; it transcended entertainment, was about so much more than just fun, spoke to our souls, and was something that has to be treated gingerly and respectfully in order meet the minimum standards of what made these franchises great.  Instead, Disney had made its era feel like the Hobbit Trilogy if the Hobbit had the same weight and reverence as Lord of the Rings (it doesn’t so it was easy to shrug off those problematic, drawn-out films and even they did not mess up the main characters in the ways Disney often has).

If Lucas didn’t make the Original or Prequel Trilogies, just the first movie, and it kept being handed off to different directors and a whole plethora of different writers selected by a corporate committee, it would never have evolved into the franchise it is now: a staple of global pop culture for four decades, quoted so often in other movies (Tom Holland’s Peter Parker plays with Star Wars Legos), the subject of so many amazing video games and novels (including bestsellers), its exact costumes from 1977 appearing all over the world constantly, its references seeping into politics and everyday references, its music played at nearly every major sporting event from NCAA college sports—played by college bands—to being played on the organ at Madison Square Garden during New York Rangers hockey playoff games.

Such a team would perform embarrassingly poorly, out of line with tis stories history.

With Kenobi, this has manifested itself in significant ways.  The action apart from the lightsaber duels was almost invariably sloppy and poorly coordinated.  Things that defied belief—not sending Tie-fighters after a snowspeeder or a refugee ship (even when the Millennium Falcon had a tracking beacon on it after leaving the Death Star, a few token ties were sent to make it convincing), a roadblock that can easily be walked around, Bail’s ridiculous holomessage to Obi-Wan in Part V that forces the whole Luke subplot for Part VI, that cartoon moment when Obi-Wan walked out of a base full of Imperials with Leia walking with him under his jacket, and apparent canon issues—were just fed to us as if we should simply accept them and not think about it, let alone complain.  All of this is symptomatic of laziness, lack of respect for the audience, and rushing, none of which belong in our Star Wars.

And keep in mind, this comes after a whole Sequel Trilogy that they made up as they went along with no real plan and poorly handled, to varying degrees, the legacy characters of Han Solo, Leia Organa Skywalker, and, especially, Luke Skywalker, ranging from missed opportunities to just doing a character dirty with a postmodern deconstructionist attitude wholly inappropriate for the Skywalker Saga (but admittedly could have worked in Star Wars in a different era with all new characters unrelated to the original characters).

So the idea is that they would take more care this time around…

I will admit that I loved Liam Neeson back as Qui-Gon Jinn, I loved the final battle between Kenobi and Vader (and the first), hell, I even cried during that final duel, and I cried when Kenobi was telling Leia about her mother and father—those two scenes alone were worth the price of admission—but the journey matters, not just the destination, and so much of what got us to that final lightsaber duel was just so-so, B-level TV writing and action of questionable quality.  On my 4k TV, some of the scenes even looked poorly shot, with some of the larger scenic shots in the final duel looking grainy and buffer-y, even low-quality, not anywhere near how it should look in 4k.  Disney, where was the quality control?  Why the RUSH??  While I could give the fight a 9 or a 10, I cannot give the whole episode that, let alone the series.

Star Wars vs. Marvel MCU and the state of Disney Star Wars

I will confess that I have been turned off by the Marvel MCU its sheer volume of content (and the X-Men comics were my big Marvel reads growing up), most of which isn’t terribly highly rated (of over two-dozen films, only a handful have an 8.0-or-higher IMDB rating and the two highest are only 8.4, plus, you can’t count the Spiderman movies because they aren’t Disney), because it seems like the point isn’t to tell a great story or a great movie but to simply keep pumping out content that will be consumed by linking it to all the existing content.  If I feel like I am being fed one thing just so I will consume the next thing, I because suspicious, old geezer that I am.

But I must put some stock in die-hard Marvel fans, because they seem to generally love the MCU.  I hear relatively few complaints, let alone bitterness, rage, betrayal, or that combination leading to indifference, common to find these days among a large portion of Star Wars fans.

So Marvel must be doing a better job, because Star Wars fans are not eating up their version of the MCU.

Some were fooled on a nostalgia overload by Force Awakens, and most longtime fans hate Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, both of which help people who missed the shallowness of Force Awakens realize it upon subsequent viewings (two directors pissing on each other’s work over the course of a trilogy is not how you make a quality trilogy.  For anything.  Ever.).  Rebels is hit or (mostly) miss but I think people just took the excellent Vader/Ahsoka content and pretended the rest of the repetitive, underdeveloped, low-production-value rest was good when it was just ok or meh…  Resistance?  OOPS.  Solo is underrated (best of the Disney-era films!) and Rogue One is overrated (an awesome final combined-space-and-ground battle with Vader icing and sprinkles a great movie does not make).  The entire approach to Book of Boba Fett left most people scratching their heads, and even if the show was overall enjoyable, it was also incoherent and disjointed in some ways similar to the Sequel Trilogy, just not as horrifically so.  Yes, Favreau and Filoni were attached, which makes is even more confusing, but let’s just say we lucked out with the different-director-episode-to-episode-approach when it came to Mandalorian, let’s not repeat that with anything else. The point is, that’s three major projects with a patern.

That leaves Mandalorian and Clone Wars as the only newer content that united nearly all fans.

I think about how the Marvel section within Disney can take a new show about a second- or third-tier hero and generally please both its audience and its critics, tend to do this consistently, and then I think about this Kenobi show, from a mile away pretty clearly going to feature two of the four most important characters for the bulk of the more than forty years Star Wars has existed—Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker—which will even include some of the other two, Anakin’s children, Luke and Leia—and I am mystified as well as enraged: how could Disney allow a more coherent, well-thought-out, crowd-pleasing vision and production for even lower-tier Marvel shows get the treatment and effort that should obviously have been there from a corporate organizational standpoint for Vader and Kenobi?? As a case in point: the apparently meh The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is not even in the top ten Disney-era Marvel TV-shows by rating, and yet even it is rated slightly higher (7.2 on IMDB) than Kenobi (7.1 on IMDB) but with nearly 50% more ratings.

(Or even getting away from Marvel, I never heard of The Boys before the show, and the show just keeps banging out well-produced, well-written, coherent, consistent, good-looking episodes episode after episode.  Why is The Boys getting better treatment than Star Wars??  Or how about Peacemaker?  A very diverse show, dealing with complicated issues, that turned out to be superb, about a character I never knew and never cared about, why is this character given grade-A treatment?? [Because a person of stature with a great track record and with a vision was able to execute that vision as that person saw fit, and a studio gave him pretty much as much as he wanted to be able to do that.])

In short, why is Disney not pulling out all the stops, bringing in the best talent, bringing in veteran hands, throwing money (it has plenty), giving Obi-Wan Kenobi A-list, first-tier treatment?

Don’t try to answer this question, because there is no logical way to understand the paths that led Disney to more of less succeed and skillfully execute shows for non-top-tier Marvel characters like Wanda Maximoff (7.9 on IMDB), Loki (8.2 on IMDB), and Jessica Jones (7.9 on IMDB) but not so much with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth freakin’ Vader.  Or to understand the management approach behind any masterpiece film or TV show compared to what Disney did with Kenobi.  Those successful showrunners and film creators do not, for one thing, bring in a writer like Joby Harold.  But let’s not hate on Joby: the blame is with the mentality of the corporate powers that be thinking it would be anywhere near acceptable to do this for a series with flagship characters.  There are numerous writers who have written well-received Star Wars novels—some New York Times bestsellers for years, but, hey, let’s go with some guy who doesn’t seem to even know Star Wars particularly well.

It would be like one of the most storied franchises in sports history—Real Madrid, Manchester United, the New York Yankees, the New England Patriots, the Boston Celtics, or the Montreal Canadiens—hiring some person who done an ok job as a college coach for a few seasons and just that in any of those sports (I know some of you Star Wars folks are like “what is sports?” I promise the analogy works).  Or, better yet, it is like Disney/Lucasfilm hiring Rian Johnson to do Star Wars: Episode VIII…  I don’t blame Joby Harold, though; I do, again, blame those who put him in that position.

Imperial Hubris

For my other recent work, I have been reading and writing about the 1939-1940 Soviet Finnish Winter War between the USSR and plucky little outgunned Finland as a prism through which to examine the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.  For most of the fairly short war, the Finns embarrassed a colossally misled, improperly equipped, poorly led, mind-numbingly-stupid Soviet Red Army, inflicting enormous losses on the Soviets to far fewer losses for their own forces, with far-less advanced equipment and far less ammunition than the Soviets (think the Ewoks vs. the Imperials at the Battle of Endor and it’s honestly not that much different, except think Arctic snow instead of temperate forest.  I’m not kidding).  In other words, like the Empire vs. the little fuzzy bears, they had the resources, technology, and manpower to crush the little furballs.  But they kept making the same mistakes, week after week after week, and it boggles the mind.

At this point, that’s how I feel with Disney/Lucasfilm when it comes to Star Wars.

Those who study business in MBA programs would be at a loss, too: it is incredibly hard to understand the rhyme or reason of their approach because they keep taking an ad hoc approach where vision and consistency is obviously needed.  They did not do this with Sequel Trilogy, and it is painfully obvious.  Now, we are hearing about how Disney/Lucasfilm is making it up as they go along as to whether Kenobi really is going to be a limited six-episode series or to have a whole second season.

Enough… please!

The fans, as opposed to consumers, really want art.  They have every right to expect the prestige treatment, the quality of the Sopranos or Rome or most seasons of Game of Thrones.  Apart from Mandalorian and Clone Wars, fan reception—and with Star Wars, there is a massive fanbase, not just a consumer base—has been decidedly mixed, hit or miss.  We have every right to expect the studio to take the time, expense, and consideration to churn out a Star Wars series featuring Kenobi and Vader as the presumed centers of the series actually focus mainly on them, that matches the efforts put into the best of television and movies, not some cheaper, wildly uneven mishmash put together by twelve directors per episode and a committee of generally not-known writers without serious resumes as writers.  This isn’t your experimental product test-balloon, this is the first time we are seeing Kenobi against Vader since literally 2005.  Instead, we get unfocused and uneven, repetitive episodes.  We get cheap-looking scenes.  We get some things that really don’t make sense in jarring ways.  We get lightsabers that look like the expensive replica lightsaber toys, that look like they are rounded glass 3D blades used by coplayers but with brighter lighting that made otherwise solid-to-excellent action scenes sometimes look off visually.  We get a flashback with Anakin designed to show “ANAKIN AGGRESSIVE WANT TO WIN TOO MUCH” and that’s it, nothing deeper.  We get mostly unmemorable music (compare to the Fallen Order soundtrack; hell, compare the writing and action in that game to this series, the focus on great characters, the excellent pacing from world to world, level to level, without characters feeling shoehorned in, to Kenobi…).

Yes, we ask for a lot.  But the thing is, it has been done with Star Wars before, and Lucas, Filoni, Favreau, and the developers of Fallen Order at Respawn have shown us it can be done.  Instead, Disney/Lucasfilm keep doubling down, to one degree or another, on the errors of the aimless, non-planned/poorly-planned direction of the Sequel Trilogy.  Book of Bob Fett was the worst offender since Rise of Skywalker until Kenobi, but let’s be honest: I love Boba but he’s not Anakin and he’s not Obi-Wan.  So the carelessness is even worse here, given the weight of the material.

I loved certain scenes in this show.  That doesn’t forgive the rest of the series.  Don’t tell me we needed buildup and that explains it.  So do all other great series and the best Star Wars movies, the issue here is the quality not just of the execution, but the approach taken to hiring writers and directors, planning, staffing, everything.  Kenobi is a microcosm of the range of Disney’s version of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: highs, lows, end everything in-between.

Especially with the finale, I can say “Obi-Wan Kenobi is pretty good!”  But not great.

I’d rather they just slowed down, hired much better and better-established writers (ideally one or two-maximum, with VISION) that idolized Star Wars, better assistant/second directors, had Filoni involved as an executive producer, and spent another year developing everything far more carefully, limiting the side-plots, side-characters, giving us more of the main characters and in live location shots in the desert, not only The Volume (as Vader himself said of the Death Star in A New Hope, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”).  I want Rome and Game of Thrones and Band of Brothers and production values.  I want a masterpiece of high-art television for Star Wars, Logan-level character development and scripts, Star Wars-quality music (Clone Wars’s and Narcos’s Kevin Kiner or the Fallen Order guys, Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab), your best damn effort, Disney!

That isn’t what we got.  We got a product, trying to do too much, appeal to too many audiences, we did not get art with a singular vision, which is perhaps what characterizes the best Star Wars Content: I-VI and Clone Wars.

Please, Disney and Lucasfilm.  PLEASE.  It’s time to take a different approach.  All-things to all people run by a corporate committee just hasn’t worked, and even if it has made you money, it has really divided and disappointed audiences.  Learn from what has united, not divided fans, form both within Star Wars and Disney and without.  Don’t fall the corporate Dark Side, open your minds to the artistic light-side, and stop repeating the same needless, careless mistakes.

And, as a writer, above all, bring quality writers who know Star Wars to write these scripts.  It all starts with the script matched with love of the material.  When you do that, it’s hard to go wrong.  When you don’t, you fail, and have no one to blame but yourselves for the messes that get created and recognized for the messes that they are.

Please, stop giving us messes.  Slow down.  Take your time.  Listen.  And learn.

Postscript

Between “finishing” this piece and its final publication, I rewatched the last episode of Season 3 of HBO’s magisterial Westworld and the premiere of the brand-new first episode of its Season 4 (and, since sitting on this piece, the next three episodes).  To appreciate my argument on its most simple, visceral level, I ask simply this:  if you are caught up on Westworld, watch the same two episodes I did; if not, watch the next two episodes from where you are in the series, and if you have not started the show, watch the first two episodes.  As you watch, notice and then compare the incredible story, mix of high-level and crass yet superb dialogue, the seamless general writing and transitions, the deep philosophical references, the Emmy-worthy acting, the lush set design and quality mixed with incredible location shots, the high general production values, the mesmerizing cinematography, the spectacular lighting, the evocative and highly memorable music, the incredibly detailed pacing and editing that gets to almost exactly an hour or even occasionally more, the dance-like-conceived action choreography, the intricate way character arcs develop and characters make decisions, the nuance competing with the intensity—and all of this built upon the overall level of effort, care, and planning that was required to pull all this off throughout the entirety of the episodes, along with the budget and patience to execute these scenes as well as they were executed—to all their counterparts in even the two best episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Then ask yourself: which is the prestige and artful television show, and which is not.

And then, you will understand where I am coming from.

After that, ask yourself why this is the case.

Then, you will understand the depth of my frustration.

*Explanatory note for author’s note: I knew next to nothing of editor’s views or work until right around the time all this went down and after I had sent this draft as a submission.  Instead of simply rejecting the draft, sharing what problems this person as an editor or human had with it, or engaging with me at all—and I would have welcomed a spirited discussion, been ok with rejection—this editor went around me and gathered a number of other folks at the company (freelancers like myself and the editor) with whom I had little to no direct interaction (most likely none) but who really didn’t like my views on Star Wars.  They went like a woke mob of the type that saw Bari Weiss and Donald McNeil, among others, driven from their journalistic home (two people whose work and views I often admire, even if I don’t always agree with them; Weiss has, since her departure from The New York Times, disappointingly moved somewhat to the right in ways with which I don’t agree, but she is still a voice worth hearing and I embrace her resignation letter’s criticism of the Times).

After days of no response of my editor to some different and related inquiries (nothing hostile), I got an e-mail with this pretty Orwellian line from a much-higher-up at the company: “Our chief goal at ___ has always been to establish active communities around each of our sites. We accomplish that through our content, primarily, and that is, in part, why we welcome and encourage opinionated content from all points of view. Some of your work, however, has challenged other members of the site and left them feeling uncomfortable. Some of the criticism you’ve included in your work has crossed outside of their comfort level.”  After that series of wholly contradictory thoughts, the conclusion was a variation of adios/sayonara to your role here, an abrupt unilateral act with no warning that seemed an extreme overreaction.

Again, this was from an editor’s and other staffers’ reactions to a series of Star Wars articles published with the approval of the staff (I cannot post directly, only an editor or higher-up can) that no reasonable person would react to this way.  Not Trump.  Not Gaza.  Not abortion.  Star Wars.  Reasonable people could disagree with my Star Wars views (and admittedly I myself in some of those pieces bring some heavy issues into the discussion), of course, but for reaction to rise to that level an enraged secret purge campaign, thinking that was a justifiable response, was extremism run amok, liberal Millennial snowflake intolerance at its worst (and I say that as a lifelong liberal). 

I suspected what was going on and was able to later directly confirm, but before I confirmed, I did my own research.  I had already known that a number of authors were very into leftist social and political activism, particularly around identity-driven issues, and were also vert pro-Disney (I’d even go as far as to say they are shills for Disney Star Wars), enthusiastically greeting each new movie, show, comic, book, toy that comes out with Star Wars on it from Disney.  Looking at the site in general, the vast majority of the content is positive on Disney Star Wars and you’d never know how incredibly serious the problems are between Disney’s Lucasfilms’s version of Star Wars and the Star Wars fandom.

To be fair, lots of Star Wars content out there is like this, particularly from voices attached to larger entertainment fan sites that seek to have a relationship with Disney to have early access to products and to interview folks involved in Disney Star Wars.  This is a serious problem in journalism, not least in political journalism, as I highlighted with The New York Times’s Glenn Thrush and that paper’s biggest political reporting star, Maggie Haberman.  Access can either blind journalists or, at worst, corrupt them.

Anyway, I specifically did my due diligence on this editor, and found this person’s articles and Twitter feed, especially, full of a crusader mentality, a clear history of not getting along well with almost anyone who challenged this person, an abhorrence of engagement with people who held sharply different views, and very much focused on this person’s social causes in a way that demanded they be fused with Star Wars and Star Wars fandom, anyone who disagreed be damned (or, blocked and denigrated as “toxic” simply for not being in full agreement with this editor).  It was appropriate to be controversial if you were in agreement with this editor, but if not, you did not deserve to speak or be heard.  Star Wars was to primarily (or at least as much as anything) be about advancing social and political agendas, and if people didn’t like it, well, they shouldn’t complain and should just be grateful for the content, the thesis of an entire article by this person (unless, again, you were unhappy from a social/leftist political perspective, and then, your complaints were valid and enthusiastically supported, the contradiction laid bare).  In particular, any Star Wars content that promoted a non-male/white/heterosexual character in a strong way was to be celebrated as wonderful, regardless of the quality of storytelling, writing, production values, plot continuity, if it damages the existing key Star Wars films and canon, if it made no sense… you get my drift, per my above article; if that person overpowers, saves, or corrects a non-diverse character (say, Obi-Wan or Luke Skywalker), then it’s even more awesome, cuz, it’s about time!

Quality is redefined as that which advances the agenda, the views of the editor and that editor’s self-selected allies.  Personally, I deeply value and respect elevating marginalized and underrepresented or poorly represented groups if done well, with care and not at the expense of story or tearing down beloved characters to make a political/social point that takes us away from a Galaxy Far, Far Away and right into the muck of our current culture wars.  That’s not to say you can’t touch on sensitive issues that resonate in our world, of course you can, but you should do so without making it so pointed and specific that it feels like your bringing us back into our world in a way that will staunchly alienate many needlessly and make them feel like they and their favorite Star Wars characters are being attacked or denigrated; again, I am a liberal, but don’t want to cheapen Star Wars by making it about scoring shallow points in a culture war at the expense of quality and coherence, hence my title).  And, again, with this editor and this crowd, if you complain about the content lacking good writing, pandering instead of really representing, or anything else reasonable to complain about, you’re bad, your views are bad, and you shouldn’t be given a platform.  You should not get a response, just a nothing or a block; there is no engagement unless it comes from a perspective these people want to elevate.

The more the Disney Star Wars content offended more longtime fans, the more they loved it and attacked the people criticizing it.

This nonsense resembles only one other thing in my writing career:  when a Russia-government affiliated think tank, the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), censored, purged, and gaslit me as a contributor for publishing views very much against the Kremlin line on the human-rights related U.S.-imposed Magnitsky sanctions that infuriated Putin and were the subject of a clear attempt to bribe and corrupt the Trump campaign in 2016 at an infamous meeting at Trump Tower, on Jared Kushner-linked Prevezon and Russian influence campaigns (all the details are here, including the gaslighting e-mails from RIAC).

Needless to say, I wasn’t going to just meekly slide away.  I did not, ended up engaging a very respectful senior staff member at the company, and that staff member admitted major mistakes were made, that I was treated in an extreme and unfair manner, that the whole situation should have been handed much differently, that the editor had behaved wrongly and disingenuously concerning me on a number of fronts, and basically rescinded the other e-mail ending my relationship with the company for a mutual, shared understanding that would have me step away on Star Wars content, at least for now, with a chance to perhaps reengage on that front in the future.  I was inspired by the company’s response to my concerns and it was an inspiring victory for decency, openness, engagement, and hashing out difficult issues respectfully and fairly and being able to admit mistakes (all the things which the editor’s approach and those who think like this editor don’t practice).

I took on a woke mob on a corporate level and was surprised by the results.  Treat people as people, that’s the main lesson I took away from all this.  And I was almost certain it would be pointless but forced myself to give respectful engagement a chance, anyway. There needs to be far more of such engagement in our society, with journalists and commentators having serious engagement with their critics, like I was surprised to find in this awesome video

Snowlfakes need to purge intense disagreement and wrap themselves in a Linus-blanket of an echo chamber, but the adults in the room need to know better and need to teach the younger Millennials (I will note that corporate staffer I engaged with was [or was almost] a fellow Gen X-er, like me) especially, how to do better.  It’s not just Star Wars at stake: it’s our increasingly polarizing entertainment culture overall (look at the different intense reactions to the Lord of the Rings prequel-prequel, Rings of Power, and, on the other side, The Terminal List) and our politics and society overall. 

The original George Lucas Star Wars. Like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, UNITED people, did not divide them.  If Disney and Amazon are finding that their new content for these storied franchises are doing the opposite, and not just dividing people who did not like them from those who did over taste, but dividing intensely along social, political, and identity-driven axes, they really, really need to rethink their approach, just as Trumpist fascists and the far-left need to rethink their approach to politics.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook), July 11, 2022 (**updated July 13 with an excellent exposure on the part of The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin on how the mainstream press distorts their narratives on Biden; *updated July 12 with new polling data proving my point)

SILVER SPRING—I’m a big Star Wars fan (spoilers for Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in this paragraph), and this past month was a big one for Star Wars fans with the (somewhat, but not entirely, disappointing) Obi-Wan Kenobi series, with key scenes bringing us back to Order 66, when clones with chips implanted in their brains were forced against their will by the chips to turn on their Jedi leaders.

I feel that the members of the “respectable” (as opposed to fascist propaganda/disinformation) media might even have some sort of chip in their brains when they cover Democrats: from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from CNN to MSNBC and many, many other outlets, it seems there is a near-constant need to push a “Democrats in DISARRAY!” narrative regardless of the facts.  These hot takes or seemingly analytical pieces almost invariably take one of a few approaches:

• “I, Smarty McSmart-Pants, awesome journalist that I am, am going to call out Democrats/President Joe Biden for not accomplishing X, Y, and/or Z!”—but with little to no regard for the actual balance of power or even proper procedure, let alone historical precedent, how Congress or the presidency actually work and what each can and cannot do or what it would actually take to actually do said thing(s).
• Interviewing and quoting a selective selection of activists, voters, or party folks (“some” or “dozens” out of WAY, WAY MORE—literally out of hundreds, thousands or, when it comes to voters, millions), nearly all of whom are obscure and folks 99% of readers have never heard of before and who will all complain (“whispers”!?) about Democrats’ leadership/direction; this will be presented without noting that their collective complaining is not representative but while offering some token pushback from a couple of people who are far more representative without noting they are, in fact, more representative; aggregate polling data (as opposed to citing one or two polls, if any) showing how most relevant people feel is usually ignored because of either laziness or “the narrative.”
• This or that outlier or outliers within the Democratic Party or its caucus (usually the Squad, Bernie Sanders, or other far lefties—wonderful clickbait for click-hungry websites—but sometimes the defiant two-headed albatross of relatively conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) complain/tweet and/or their criticisms of the Party as a whole are presented as major stories in and of themselves and as examples of overall Party “dysfunction.”
• Sensationalizing the clickbaity thoughts of anonymous staffers, usually in the White House (and the White House has a lot of staff) or a campaign but sometimes in Congress, griping about this or that, which upon review are usually just the result of banal office politics, generational conflict also typical in today’s newsrooms, devoted acolytes wanting “MORE” for their masters or stans wanting “MORE” for the object of their stanning, and personal egos blown way out of proportion; even if you read between the lines, it’s more about individual staff clashes/competition or their projected desires for this thing or that person than anything originating from the big-name figures with whom they are associated.  Typical red-flag sentence emblematic of these articles: “This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials, lawmakers, congressional aides and other Democrats close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the president’s private conversations.”

Sometimes, yes, these types of articles are on to something.  Most of the time, it’s just hot air, unrepresentative whining, or simply “whispers,” as in, articles that resemble more tabloid gossip columns than news articles that should actually be written.

In Data We Trust: The Current Congress in Historical Context

The problem is, almost none of this—and I mean absolutely none except for the best-of-the-best of such takes—is based on any serious data-oriented research.  The data is there, it just isn’t properly engaged with, but let’s set the record straight with some mind-blowing facts for those of you being inundated by the “Dems in Disarray” narrative:

1. No party has ever been as unified in its Congressional voting (“party unity vote” average) in both the House and Senate as today’s Democratic Party, with the possible exception in the Senate of just one year of Federalist Party Senate voting in the first few years of the 1800s
2. Specifically, the Democratic Party has never been more unified in terms of its Congressional voting records than it has in recent years, including a record high for all of-American history in 2021 in both the House (98% average) and Senate (97% average)
3. In recent years (last decade), party unity has been close between the two parties in the House, but in the most recent years the Democrats have been more unified, while the parties have alternated in recent years in the Senate, Republicans beating Democrats for all of Trump’s term but Democrats winning for all of Obama’s two terms and with Democrats setting a new record for unity in 2021

Reread that if you need to, but let’s be clear: this current Democratic Party in recent years overall and especially in 2021 was the most unified major party in history where it counts the most: in its votes in Congress.

It’s even more impressive when you realize that the Democrats have only a narrow edge in the House and are essentially tied in the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker.

I came across a telling, wonderfully-data-driven article by that guided me to this understanding by Niels Lesniewski and Ryan Kelly for Roll Call from March 1 of this year, covering the years of the half-century from 1972 to 2021, and have used its chart above and table below:

Being the data- and history-oriented researcher that I am, I wanted to know the full record, and while I plan to continue finding more presentations of this data, so far the below chart from this other study is the best (and only) full account I have come across thus far in chart, table, or graph form (plenty for recent decades but not going all the way back the Founding of our republic):

In that all-encompassing chart, “Democrats” and “Republicans” include their antecedent parties from early American history, thus, the Federalists would account for that “Republican” spike in the Senate that comes close to 100% in the very early 1800s; the graphs are small and it’s hard to tell the exact year or numerical value, so I laid that out as the only possible exception to the numbers the 2021 Democrats put up the in Senate and clearly no one has beaten them in the House (where average party unity has only increased since the end of the chart).

The other chart below the comprehensive one shows the level of majority strength in each Congress since Republicans were first seated there in 1855.  As anyone can see, a tie “majority” in terms of party balance in the Senate is exceedingly rare, and since the Senate seated Alaska’s and Hawaii’s first senators in 1959, bringing the Senate’s total to 100 senators when fully seated, the only other time there was a 50-50 Senate at all was during the 107^th Congress, from January 20, 2001, until May 24 of that year, when Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party to caucus as an independent with the Democrats, giving the Democrats an effective 51-49 majority for the remainder of that Congress until January, 2003.  For those few months before Jeffords’ defection, the situation was the same as now just in reverse in that the Republicans had a 50-seat “majority” with a tie-breaker vote able to come from their Vice President, then Dick Cheney, as Democrats have with Harris today.

Other than that, there are the odd the exceptions during the 83^rd Congress, from early 1953 to early 1955, when throughout its term the deaths of nine senators and resignation of one caused a number of leadership changes in a close Senate, some of which led to shorter-term ties but with one situation leaving a tie for more than two-thirds of a year.

Before that, you have to go all the way back to a crazy situation from the 47^th Congress in 1881, which began with a tied Senate that lost its tie-breaking ability when President James Garfield was assassinated late that year and replaced by Vice President Chester Arthur, as there was no constitutional provision for replacing a vice president and, therefore, no person to cast a tie-breaking vote after Arthur was sworn in, a situation that thus lasted until the beginning of the next Congress in 1883; before that, a Senate balance-of-power tie had never happened in all the years of the Senate’s existence going back to 1789.

Biden’s and Democrats’ Accomplishments in Context: A Bipartisan Past vs. Our Partisan Present

In all these instances, like the situation today, there was only a small lead for the same party with the tie-breaking vice president in the other half of Congress, the House of Representatives.  But as the graphics I have provided above show, partisanship was significantly less intense, bipartisanship significantly more common, in these other eras than today.  This allowed some major accomplishments to actually happen easily even in 50-50 Senates.

In 1883, President Arthur was able to get the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, which formed the basis of the modern civil service.  The next time there was a split Senate in the 1950s, there was also a spirit of bipartisanship on a broad variety of issues, leading to legislation passing that established both the Small Business Administration and what would eventually become the Department of Health and Human Services; President Dwight Eisenhower’s major legislation concerning tax reform, along with major bills regarding nuclear regulation and expansion of both unemployment and Social Seucrity benefits, were all enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support, among other bills passed in a similar spirit.

In the next period when there was an effective tie in the Senate, no major legislation was passed, but just days after Jeffords’ late May defection, President George W. Bush saw his massive tax cut bill’s final Senate passage by a significant bipartisan margin.  Yet the massive reorganization of the government’s security apparatuses (including the Patriot Act and the bill creating of the Department of Homeland Security) and major reforms to education and prescription drug benefits for Medicare during the 107^th Congress all occurred only after the 9/11 attacks of September 11, 2001, when there was a period of historic bipartisanship, if only temporarily (these big wins came from Republicans even when the Democrats had a 51-49 Senate majority with Jeffords).

Of course, today’s situation is quite different from these: not only are most congressional Republicans in a long–extremist and increasingly-fascist Republican Party openly shielding former president Trump and other plotters of his 2020-2021 attempted coup (a term I used at the time) and perpetuating the lies that the 2020 election was stolen by phantom “fraud” while preparing to be able to carry out another coup attempt if Republicans lose the 2024 presidential election, on legislative issues, they are engaging in extreme obstructionism and partisanship.  Their primary method for this is in utilizing the 60-out-of-100-vote-threshold filibuster for just about everything they can to block about as much as they can of the Democrats’ agenda from passing.  As both parties have 50 votes, in most cases, Democrats need 10 Republicans senators to advance legislation and overcome a filibuster, so even when there is bipartisan support, inaction can reign unless at least a full one-fifth of Republican senators are on board.  In recent decades, filibuster use (and abuse) has become unprecedented, particularly so by the Republican Party and especially—even exponentially—so since Mitch McConnell became the leader of Senate Republicans in 2007, a role he still holds today.

In the face of these key differences, looking at all that Biden and Democrats in Congress have been able to accomplish so far—including numerous large votes through one of the only ways to circumvent a filibuster in what is known as budget reconciliation (among them a massive COVID relief bill) as well as a once-in-a-generation historic infrastructure bill, historic aid for Ukraine in the face of rampant Russian imperialism, and the first federal gun legislation in roughly three decades (the last being hammered out by Biden himself in 1994, when he was still a senator), and with time still left in this Congress for passing further major legislation—this much is clear: no majority has accomplished more with such low margins in the Senate in American history in the face of such extreme partisanship and organized obstructionism from the opposition party.  The few major accomplishments of the Biden Administration and the Democratic-led Congress that were bipartisan were the exception, not the norm, a departure from the entire modern era and the last few times there was a Senate evenly divided as today’s is.

I am not suggesting there are not other factors or that this tells 100% of the picture: falling just short of enough votes on Biden’s would-be-signature Build Back Better legislation surely counts more than most typical legislation, and there are things that are sometimes not brought up for votes because of awareness of existing problems within a caucus or opposition from Republicans wielding a filibuster.

Yet the main point made above still stands: of all the different individual metrics out there, the average party unity not only counts a lot, but it is hard to think of a metric that counts more.  In this current record heights of party unity on display from Democrats with Speaker Nancy Pelosi leading Democrats in the House, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leading Democrats in the Senate, and Joe Biden leading the Party overall from the White House, the Democratic Party in 2021 and in recent years collectively, then, has been the most disciplined and unified major national political party in U.S. history when it comes to actual legislative votes.

Another Inexcusable Media Fail

Churchill once famously remarked: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”  With Joe Biden, we can honestly say: “Never in the field of American presidential politics was so much expected by one man with a narrower political ‘majority’” (really a 50-50 tie with a tie-breaker in one-half of Congress and a very slim majority in the other.  And despite major, entrenched opposition to most of the Democrats’ efforts, they have still accomplished much and improved the situation where they are actually capable of effective change quite dramatically compared to the situation they inherited: an America reeling from COVID and its accompanying economic meltdown as well as reeling from Trump’s treasonous coup attempt.  Obviously, the elephant in the room today is inflation, which presidents and congresses generally have little ability to mitigate well in the short-term even if people don’t want to acknowledge this simple Economics-101 truth (with their record profits, why are we not questioning oil companies more??).  And apart from inflation, the metrics for the economy for Biden for most of his presidency thus far have been strong (admittedly less so the past few months).

Yet there is a huge gap in the public perception of Biden and Democrats and their actual popular accomplishments.

The relentlessly negative coverage of Biden and the Democrats—the media’s pursuit of the whole “Democrats in Disarray” narrative in the face of historic data that thoroughly discredits this narrative—is a big part of the reason for this.  Just as was the case during the Democratic primaries, the media is also relentlessly portraying Biden as just-about-to-collapse in terms of his Democratic support, based on no serious larger empirical analysis, with near-mindless, pointless speculation about who might be the Democratic nominee in 2024 other than Biden more than two years out from that year’s presidential election (and even before this year’s midterms!) despite Biden’s and his vice president’s repeated, clear statements on running together again in 2024 as a ticket.

**Update July 13: Perhaps the most exemplary recent example of the mainstream press’s gross distortions has been adroitly addressed by Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, a Never Trump conservative who is one of the most incisive of the major newspaper columnists on the media’s failures in the current era. She notes that in a recent New York Times article trumpeting its latest poll with Siena College, the framing is almost entirely anti-Biden, beginning with the headline (and, again, this is just one poll): “Most Democrats Don’t Want Biden in 2024, New Poll Shows” and how key findings from the poll that Biden would still beat Trump and that 92% of Democrats would stick with Biden vs. Trump in 2024 are buried after 15 paragraphs of negativity and after multiple graphics. In this Biden hit-job, Times clearly chooses to emphasize what will damage Biden (CNN and others discussed the headline all day) while making the reader really put in effort to find the positives mentioned so deep into its story. Behold, the Times, exposed and noted. And this is the default tone most reporters and editors in the mainstream media resort to when it comes to Biden and Democrats in general, because… “narrative.” Their preferred narrative.**

But just as much to blame is the childishness of the American people, who clearly expected Biden to fix, well, pretty much everything within a year and now blame him for the country not being back to a total normal after a once-in-century pandemic, after four years of fascist-leaning insanity under Trump, and now during a twice-in-a-century large-scale European war.  Americans currently clearly do not understand the unique gravity of historic problems faced—and well-mitigated—by Biden and that none have easy solutions, especially with a country and a Congress as divided as they are.

No president could have righted all the wrongs plaguing the U.S. on January 20, 2021 in one, let alone two, years—certainly not the criminal coup plotter Trump or his Republican Party focused more on overthrowing the constitutional order and preventing the legitimate peaceful transfer of power than on actually governing or dealing with real problems affecting actual Americans—so for the media and the public to hold Biden to such a standard is not just down-right myopic, but threatens to undo so much of the progress that has been made by returning incompetent would-be-fascist demagogues to power.

Yet even with one of the worst polls for Biden from a major, respectable pollster to date (the June 25-28, 2022 Economist/YouGov poll), he still has the approval of over three-quarters of Democrats (76%: 34% strong, 42% somewhat) while only 18% expressed disapproval (only 9% strongly).  On top of that, the Democratic Party was still seen in that poll as more favorable (if just slightly and within the margin of error) than the Republican Party.  And, again, I abhor highlighting single polls to discuss a president’s approval rating—all too common an article headline or framing in the press these days (a general weighted average should always be included in those, but rarely is)—but I did this just to show how high his approval rating is among Democrats in, again, one of his worst polls among respectable polls begun no earlier than June 22 up through the first respectable poll conducted and released in July (since I wrote most of this, polling from early July is not much different, but Democrats’ approval of Biden went slightly up in a newer Economist/YouGov poll [77%] poll while being significantly lower in a different pollster’s most recent data [69%, from Reuters/Ipsos from July 5–6, their lowest yet, down from 72% in their previous poll]; new polls are coming out even as I am about to post this, too, but, to quote the great Jedi Master Yoda: “Difficult to see.  Always in motion is the future;” they may be up or down in a week or a month, and we will only see what happens in time; *update July 12: as if to make my point for me, the next Reuters/Ipsos poll, from July 11-12, has Biden’s overall approval up up 3 points, his overall approval down 4 points, and his approval among Democrats up 5 points, to 74%*).

Those numbers would still mean crushing defeats for anyone challenging Biden in a primary (although, again, that hypothetical would be happening a year-and-a-half from now, a different world).  Still, the overall numbers with voters are not good, though it should be noted that, especially in today’s overcharged media cycles, the overcoverage both of such polling data and especially inflation (relative to other major aspects of the economy like low unemployment and growth in both jobs and wages) creates something of a negative feedback loop for Biden, helping to drag or keep those polling numbers down.  In contrast, polling for Democrats has just improved in the wake of the radical judicial activism of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, with now just under four months to go before the midterm elections.  And if Democrats surprise many and hold on to Congress or even gain seats in the midterms (and, at least in the Senate, polling is indicating they may very well increase their number of seats there), there is a good chance Biden’s approval will increase, too.  And all of this in the context of the myopic coverage that inexcusably misses the data proving the Democrats’ historic discipline and organization, which will be key in they succeed in the midterms, even if the media does not acknowledge this reality.

Conclusion: A Need for Professional Journalism

So, to recap, 1.) not only is Biden’s job performance as president still eliciting approval from an overwhelming majority of Democrats, who are still overall united behind Biden—making all the “who will replace Biden?” news stories irresponsible, premature speculation—but 2.) Democrats’ performance in Congress is the empirically provably best of not only any major political party in the modern era, but in all of American history (with one possible exception of the Federalist Party in the early 1800s in just one half of Congress), higher now than the supposedly better organized Republicans 3.) and Biden and Democrats’ accomplishments are the greatest of any party with such a narrow “lead” (tie) in the Senate when facing such intense partisan opposition and obstruction.

These are not my opinions: these are simply the facts, fully supported by data, history, and context, as I have proven here.  It’s far, far overdue for coverage in the media to reflect these empirical realities, for journalists, editors, and producers to stop ignoring this irrefutable empirical data in favor of their own biased, selective, and inaccurate “narratives.”

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, 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!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg, March 19, 2022 (Twitter @bfry1981; LinkedIn, Facebook); excerpted and slightly adapted from his March 8 Small Wars Journal piece The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt (featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News) and related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see his earlier article The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine published by Small Wars Journal the morning of February 21 and featured by SOF News on February 26; see related articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—I noted before that the betrayal of Russian soldiers and their families was being weaponized by Ukraine and should be weaponized by the U.S.-led international community, including NATO.  But most importantly, these injustices must all be seized upon by the Russian soldiers and the Russian people themselves.

The Time Is Ripe for the Russian Army and the Russian People to Reject War, Reject Putin, and Rebel

Despite Putin’s totalitarian-ish crackdown on media and the flow of information, social media (ironically so often the vehicle for the dissemination for Russia’s own disinformation) and, especially, certain messaging apps (e.g., Telegram), are too powerful to be easily silenced fully, and it is hard to stop text exchanges.  Especially among the country’s young people, information will keep trickling in past Putin’s Media Iron Curtain through these means, and with enough holes emerging, the truth will light the way for more and more inside Russia as time marches on.

As this far more accurate and convincing information reaches the Russian people, we can expect some of the “yes” to war and most of the undecideds of the CNN poll mentioned earlier to switch to “no.”  With many of their lives being ruined under sanctions and international isolation, Russians will turn to the people they should blame most of all: introspectively, themselves for being duped by Putin’s propaganda and empowering him, and externally, Putin and his inner circle themselves, who made themselves monstrously wealthy and treated Russia, its resources, its industries, and its military as their personal playthings.  Protests will erupt in Russia in ways not seen since the fall of Soviet Union.

All the devastating Ukraine revelations have happened incredibly quickly, and it will take time for things to filter into enough Russian minds, so expect a gap, but when at least some of the truth does become apparent to a certain critical mass of Russians, expect Russians to revolt from within.

In response to understanding the precariousness of its standing with its own people, in the crackdown alluded to above, Putin’s regime is censoring, (partly?) blocking, banning, or even criminalizing the work of major Western news outlets, independent Russian news outlets, protests, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter: reporting the truth inside Russia of Putin’s war in Ukraine is now illegal.  Other platforms—such as YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and text messaging—remain.  It is inevitable, then, that word of what is happening in Ukraine and the awful treatment of Russian soldiers will continue to spread among the Russian population, members of which are increasingly taking to the streets in protest despite at least some 4,600 protesters being arrested throughout Russia just on Sunday, March 6, according to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, with about 13,000 arrested in total since February 24, some of them tortured.  Among those arrested was Yelena Osipova, a nearly-eighty-year-old woman who survived Nazi Germany’s epic Siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during World War II.  The protests have the backing of that perennial political martyr and thorn in Putin’s side, Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, currently jailed himself for ridiculous fake “crimes” and facing new state-initiated indignities.

Russian people, businesses, and celebrities (even Elizaveta Peskova, the daughter of Putin’s main spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov) are speaking out and warning their countrymen, customers, and fans of the mendacity and killing that is afoot because of their government and its autocratic leader holed up in the Kremlin.  A Russian senator even complained publicly during a Federation Council meeting that conscripts were being coerced into signing contracts and that, in one unit, only four survivors out of 100 soldiers total returned alive from fighting in Ukraine.  Such acts knock chunks out of the wall of Putin’s Media Iron Curtain.

Soldiers, indeed, whole military units disgusted with their mission—being forced to become murderers and war criminals—will get wind of the massive outrage and civil unrest at home as protests in Russia grow in number, frequency, and intensity.  And these protests will include these soldiers’ mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, romantic partners, children, and friends hitting the streets, even leading the protests.

Hopefully, enough of these troops, their officers, and commanders will realize and collectively decide as whole military units that there is a more important mission than destroying and subjugating Ukraine: to march on Moscow, join the people for whom they should be fighting, and realize that when the military and people are united, Putin is defenseless.  Russia can end an era of gaslighting, delusion, criminality, and kleptocracy through the actions of the Russian people themselves.  Russian soldiers wising up to their abuse and taking a stand, sometimes a stand that echoed throughout history and helped bring down the Russian government at the time, is not unheard of in Russian history, especially in the twentieth century.  Thus, this would hardly be unprecedented.

It is already occurring to Ukraine’s government that Russian soldiers and their families are very much worth engaging, as it is already appealing directly to them and has set up that aforementioned hotline to help reunite Russian soldiers with their families, but there should be a concerted information warfare campaign to coopt Russian soldiers and citizens directed not just by Ukraine but by the entire NATO Alliance and the rest of the democratic world.  The prolific hacking group Anonymous has already gotten into the action, including with a major hack March 6 of all Russian state television stations and several Russian streaming services that put footage of Russia’s Ukraine war, suppressed in Russia, on screens for the whole of Russia to see.  Other hacking groups and tens of thousands of volunteer cyberwarriors from around the world are engaging in similar efforts on behalf of Ukraine (perhaps even including U.S. Cyber Command).  Such acts will do much to lift the veil of gaslighting draped by Putin over many a Russian’s eyes, and should dramatically increase opposition to the war and Putin’s regime over time.

As I have noted time and time again, Putin’s information warfare against the West has been relentless.  Now, let us turn the tables on him, but use truth as our weapon instead of the disinformation so favored by Putin as we give him a coordinated taste of his own medicine.  In turning the tables of cyberwarfare on the Kremlin, NATO should even explicitly add cyberwarfare—including disinformation—to NATO’s collective defense Article 5 in addition to engaging in this targeted information warfare offensive.  And if NATO states adjust Article 5 in this way—as I formally recommend last year—they can even collectively declare Article 5 in response to Russia’s years-long sustained cyberwarfare against NATO and carry out this offensive information warfare campaign as the first cyberwarfare-related invocation of Article 5 and just the second-ever invocation in the Alliance’s history, the only one so far being a response to the 9/11 attacks.

History Has Its Eyes on All of Us

Barely a fifth into the twenty-first century, Great Power autocracy in Europe has reared its ugly head again, ready to destroy Western democracy and the precious post-World War II order of European—and relative global—peace and stability, sometimes referred to as the “Long Peace,” or Pax Americana.  I must admit, when I wrote almost exactly six years ago an article warning of Western democracy being tested like no time since World War II, I did not imagine a major land war in Europe in 2022.  But make no mistake about it, Putin at the helm of Russia has forced this upon us and seeks to drag Europe and the world centuries backwards, with China watching, waiting, and taking notes.

Let’s make sure we provide China a clear set of lessons by encouraging and demonstrating the high cost of actions like Russia’s and encouraging a Russian soldiery at its breaking point, abandoned in so many ways by its Kremlin, to march on Putin in Moscow in support of the Russian people and their shared Motherland.  Not through NATO military forces, but through the Russian people themselves—soldier and citizen joined together—can Russia, now more than ever, seize the moment and rid itself of Putin and Putinism.

And then, having freed themselves from tyranny, Russians would find—should they want to reach out—open arms and extended hands from the West.

Should a Russia free of Putin clasp hands with and embrace the West, the future will be a world in which there is no challenge that Russia, Europe, and the United States working together cannot overcome.  And in such a world, China will not want to be left out.

But for such an era to come about, the first and necessary step is for Putin to be gone and for Russia to no longer be a menace on the periphery of Europe and the free world but to be a partner of both as part of both.  For NATO to attempt to do this itself is the path to World War III, perhaps nuclear war and the destruction of humanity and the world; it is for Russians to remove Putin, but if they do, they will find the same level of global support Ukraine has found.

Under the threat of Putin and the leadership of U.S. President Joe Biden, the West and the free world have awoken and realized they are strong, stronger than Putin and in a position to stare down his challenges to freedom, democracy, and that singular international order set up in the wake of the Second World War.  And they will gladly support the Russian people of a post-Putin Russia in a quest to rejoin the family of nations as a good-faith constructive partner for an era of unprecedented global cooperation.  This support would match the amazing energy present in the current solidarity being expressed for Ukraine, but it is up to Russians to decide if they are willing to fight for a better future for themselves as Ukrainians clearly have.  And by far the best way for this to happen is for the Russian Army—the weakest link in Putin’s current imperialist plans—to become Putin’s worst nightmare.

Putin began his reckless campaign by dangerously overplaying his hand in Ukraine, and now we see him dangerously overplaying his hand at home in Russia.  At the heart of this all are some of the people most wronged not just by his regime in general, but most especially during his Ukraine fiasco: the rank-and-file Russian soldiers fighting—and dying—on the front lines and their families back home in Russia.  The Russian people owe nothing to this orchestrator of the betrayal of those soldiers and their families, but they owe a great deal to the Russian soldiers and Ukrainians being treated as disposable pawns for the geopolitical ambitions of the dictator they empowered.  Only by removing Putin themselves can they restore Russia, in time, to true greatness, but going along with their Dear Leader’s insane playbook will only result in the opposite.

For too long, Russians have fed Putin’s maniacal, anachronistic ambitions; now is the time for them to act—for soldiers to inspire citizens and citizens to inspire soldiers—to free the world of a madman; waiting may prove fatal for the Ukrainian state and far too many Ukrainians and Russians fighting in the current tragedy created by Putin.  This war in Ukraine is not the first tragedy foisted upon the world by Vladimir Vladimirovich, but let us all—especially the Russian Army and people—ensure it will be his very last.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, 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!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 13, 2022; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—The focus of my last excerpted article was to show how disgustingly careless, even cruel, the Russian military has been with the lives of its soldiers, how abusive and deceitful they have been to these fighting men of Russia and their families.  And the point of this is to acknowledge that, by such unforgivable conduct towards Russia’s own soldiers and their families, Putin and his cronies may have finally sowed the bittersweet seeds of their own demise.  This was one thing with the hundreds of concealed deaths over eight years with “volunteer” deployments into rebel-held portions of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions (known together as the Donbas) in Ukraine’s east (discussed in more detail earlier); it is already an entirely different phenomenon with thousands of deaths less than two weeks into Putin’s exponential escalation in the whole of Ukraine.

Even allowing for the possibility that some of the images and video coming out of Ukraine are not authentic, there is still (as I have noted recently) a lot of real footage of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Russian vehicles, evidence of Putin’s lies to his own people and his lack of competence in managing and leading Russia’s army, evidence that increasingly destroys his credibility not only with his own people but his own soldiers and their officers.

The dead collectively are something that is very hard for Kremlin spinmasters and apologists in Russia and around the world to explain away, an undeniable public monument to Putin’s astounding failure.  The truth is enormous, visible even from afar, and death on the scale that the Russian Army is experiencing just across a border where many Russians have friends and family cannot be hidden by Putin from his people forever: Russia is not North Korea, its people not North Koreans.

As more and more Russians take in parts of the horrific picture, they will realize how totally they have been gaslit, how pathetically their army has performed under the leadership of a man so desperate to project strength that he literally rides around shirtless on a horse to pose for photos for public consumption.

The key psychological component here is that the foundation of Putin’s regime rests on the idea of restoring Russian strength.  So when the Russian people realize how totally degraded the Russian Armed Forces are after two decades of Putin’s leadership, only able to beat up on Georgia and Syria and utterly humiliated by its first real challenge under Putin’s Potemkin regime in a war with far smaller and far weaker Ukraine—which Russia has always regarded as a little brother, a former vassal of Russia in recent centuries—and understand that thousands of their boys have been needlessly slaughtered in a needless war as Russia hits its economic nadir and apex of isolation under well-deserved historic sanctions, there is going to be massive public outrage.

For Putin’s whole bargain with his people was “Give me your fledgling democracy to discard and I will raise you up and deliver you from the pit of Boris Yeltsin’s humiliated Russia,” yet Russia finds itself now—after only a matter of days into Putin’s absurd war—precisely where Putin promised to move it away from: the weak laughingstock status of the Yeltsin years, not respected, just tolerated because of its nuclear weapons and natural resources.

As more and more Russians realize this, Russians overall will realize that the bargain it struck with Putin repeatedly over the years is null and void, that they owe him no allegiance or support since the little man delivered (after some stability) mainly illusions and repression: the weakness of the Russian military, state, and international standing has now been exposed in a matter of mere days to the whole world as the Ukrainian people kick the Russian Army’s ass, the U.S.-led international order roars into action to show how defenseless the main institutions of Russian daily and economic life are rendered if America and its allies will them to be so, and the world overall isolates Russia as a pariah as no top-tier state has ever been isolated before. 

This last point bears some spelling out: Germany, Japan, and Italy had each other and numerous vassals during World War II.  Today, Russia could only muster the support of four other pariahs—Belarus (essentially its puppet), Syria (its mass-murdering client-state), the Stalinist/Maoist relic of North Korea, and basket-case Eritrea in a historic 141-5 vote at the United Nations condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (China, Russia’s supposed new “best friend,” wanted no part in the historical record of being seen to be emphatically on Russia’s side here, settling for a cowardly pathetic abstention, a choice shared by 34 others).

According to a major CNN poll conducted shortly before Putin launched his full Ukraine war, when asked “Would it be right for Russia to use military force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO,” half of Russians said “Yes,” one-quarter “No,” one-quarter “Don’t know;” if the war was framed as one “to ‘reunite Russia and Ukraine,’” that support dropped to only 36% “Yes,” “No” rising to a plurality of 43%, with 21% as “Don’t know.”

It is remarkable that the numbers for war are not higher when one considers the insane media atmosphere inside Russia and how it trickles down throughout public life in Russia.  It is a constant Orwellian bombardment of an alternate universe, one where Russia is a perpetual victim fighting against the whole world.  Ukrainians with relatives and friends in Russia (as well as the pro-Russian separatist parts of Ukraine’s Donbas and a very Russian Crimea controlled by Russia since that region’s 2014 invasion and annexation) are even having inane conversations with these brainwashed relatives and friends, those relatives and friends telling the dismayed Ukrainians laughable fictions about the reality of the war.  So strong is the pull of Kremlin propaganda that these wayward friends and relatives believe fantasy over their own blood as they dare to lecture on the invasion to those actually living through the bombs and shells of the invasion.  Much like America’s Trumpist Capitol insurrectionists in the U.S. believe in an alternate reality bellowed out by Fox News and its ilk, so, too, does Putin’s base in Russia (and the few Ukrainian regions with high-proportions of Putin-loyalists) loyally and enthusiastically consume Russian state-run television networks’ non-stop barrage of the world according to Putin (and it is no coincidence that the American rightist and Kremlin media ecospheres have tremendous overlap, as I have noted in detail before).

As a result, most Russians actually get their news from state-run media, so most Russians, then, simply do not have an accurate understanding of what is currently happening in Ukraine and believe as fact many absolute falsehoods while rejecting actual facts.  Because of the relentless propaganda, lies, and straight-up gaslighting that is the media and government apparatchik public landscape in Russia, they think that this has been a limited humanitarian peacekeeping operation mostly in the Donbas area of Ukraine with few Russian casualties. 

But there are others in Russia who see past the propaganda and disinformation.  And the brittle reality of the Kremlin’s fake news operations can come crashing down like a house of cards in the face of hard realities, none more likely to cause this than thousands of dead Russian soldiers and their enraged families.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, 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!

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 9, 2022; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; all other updates from 2022: July 1: updated casualty numbers at the end; update April 18: updated casualty numbers at the end; note/update March 20: casualties have obviously increased since March 9 but the point and validity of the analysis still stands; updated casualties given at the end, with a comparison to casualties from the Soviet-Afghan War); updated to add Tolkien content March 11; excerpted and slightly adapted from his article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

Also see Brian’s preceding February 21 Small Wars Journal piece The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine, featured by SOF News on February 26; see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• February 21: Why Is Putin Doing All This Now?
• February 25: How to Lose Nations and Alienate People, by Vladimir Putin
• March 1: Putin’s NATO Narrative Is Bullshit
• March 16: Putin’s Zombie Russian/Slavic Ethnonationalism Is Utterly Banal

WASHINGTON and SILVER SPRING—For those willing to search, there are also plenty of videos of Russian soldiers’ dead bodies, abandoned by their comrades and country.

In fact, casualties are clearly very high for the Russians, and by all major indicators, significantly higher than those of Ukraine’s armed forces.  Though precise numbers are impossible to arrive at amidst the current fog of war, there are multiple reasons to believe the higher Russian casualties estimated by Ukraine’s government are far closer to the truth than Russia’s claims.

For one thing, we are talking about Russia, which has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that it has zero credibility on such matters, gaslighting as it has for years about all things Ukraine (as well as other theaters in which it operates militarily, especially in Syria).  But led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s democracy is trying to build up its credibility and earn spots in both the European Union and NATO, working hard to overcome the corruption that has long plagued the country (corruption boosted greatly by Putin et al., as I have discussed at length).  Thus, maintaining the distinction in regards to truth-telling between itself and Russia is vital for Ukraine, which has a lot to lose by lying, especially at a time when it is in desperate, existential need of international support.  Zelensky and his government have a far better record than Putin and his Kremlin, then, and should be extended the (slightly cautiously bestowed) benefit of the doubt.  Ukraine also has a “robust,” “free” media landscape and open society relative to Russia where information travels far more freely than Russia, a further point in favor of the Ukrainians’ accounting.

And while, even taking into account the preceding, it is possible that there could be some deliberate exaggeration on Ukraine’s part for propaganda purposes, Ukraine has demonstrated during this conflict an ability to correct more self-serving narratives to more accurate ones when new information becomes available.

In this war, it was the Russians who gaslit the world the first few days of their invasion by claiming they had suffered zero casualties when numerous pictures and videos proved otherwise, while it was the Ukrainians who admitted from the very beginning that they were suffering casualties as well as inflicting them even as they have since declined to specify their losses.  But choosing to not specify so as not to tip off your enemy to the scale of your losses is entirely different from straight-up denying or significantly misrepresenting them.  Such describes the serial approach of the Russians, who obviously and actively hide and grossly downplay their casualties, especially to hide them from their own population, a Russian trend in the earlier low-level conflict in the east of Ukraine going back to its beginning in 2014 (in this earlier conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas that has now blended into the current all-out war, Russia, denying it ever sent soldiers into eastern Ukraine when it most certainly has, even lies to the families of soldiers who have died fighting there about their deaths; the dead soldiers are not given proper combat-death honors and it seems their families are not even given proper combat-death benefits or, if they are paid anything, it can be in exchange for their silence).

There are other reasons Ukraine’s official estimates seem entirely probable.  Given the quality of Western—supplied weapons (including Javelin and Stinger missiles), American training of Ukrainian forces since 2015, and that Ukrainians are playing defense on home soil, it makes sense that they are, more often than not, inflicting more casualties than sustaining them.  The previously discussed sheer amount of evidence of the sheer amount of both Russian combat deaths and destroyed, burned-out Russian vehicles (even some large transport planes)—many of which would have been full of troops—adds even more credibility to the high casualty figures presented by the Ukrainians.  In addition, early in March, several Western officials corroborated Ukraine’s accounting of Russian casualties at the time as quite accurate, at close to 5,800 killed; a (possible hacking and) releasing of a state-run Russian media outlet’s communications also further corroborates the accuracy of Ukraine’s Russian casualty figures with similar numbers around the same time.

As for the current specific estimate, as of the morning of March 8 Ukraine time (note March 20: casualties have obviously increased since March 9 but the point and validity of the analysis still stands), Ukraine’s estimate of *Russian combat deaths and wounded was over 12,000*, with far more precise figures of nearly 2,100 ground vehicles of different specific types destroyed (including over 300 tanks) along with 128 aircraft (helicopters and planes).  Astonishingly and mortifyingly for Russia, even if the estimate is generous by several thousand troops (say, 4,000, a third of the total given), just the troops killed in less than two weeks alone still easily exceed the combined military deaths for the U.S. in Iraq over almost eight years (over 4,400) and Afghanistan over two decades (over 2,400).

UPDATE March 20: Updated casualty estimates from Ukrainian government below, with some 14,700 Russian troops estimated killed and wounded* (a figure that exceeds the official Soviet military death toll of 14,453 for the decade-long 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War, though over a decade after the war, even the Russian General Staff put that figure at well over 26,000 and other estimates range even higher), nearly 100 planes, over 100 helicopters, over 475 tanks, and well over 2,800 other vehicles destroyed or captured by Ukrainian forces; on March 16, U.S. intelligence gave a “conservative estimate” that over 7,000 Russian troops were killed, while on March 12, Zelensky gave an estimate of 1,300 Ukrainians military forces killed.

Update April 18: In an excerpt released April 15 from an interview with CNN‘s Jake Tapper, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave an estimate of 2,500-3,000 Ukrainian military forces killed and 10,000 injured. Below is the April 18 estimate of Russian casualties from the Ukrainian government:

Update July 2: below is the July 1 estimate of Russian casualties from the Ukrainian government:

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my 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), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, 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!