THE NEW EASTERN BLOC 🇺🇸🇷🇺🇭🇺 Nobody would greenlight this as a film script. Too implausible. Too stupid. Rewrite. And yet. There is a war in Europe. Russia started it. Tens of thousands are dead. And the President of the United States has decided the correct response is to audition... as Moscow’s defense attorney while cutting weapons to the people being shelled. Rubio flew to Budapest in February to publicly endorse Viktor Orban. Viktor Orban. The man who spent a decade strip-mining Hungarian democracy while cheerfully pocketing EU money and blocking NATO decisions for sport. Rubio sat with him like a pilgrim at a shrine. Now Vance is heading there too, days before Orban’s election, because apparently one American pilgrimage to Budapest wasn’t enough. Marco Rubio, who once called Putin a gangster, now carefully avoids saying anything that might upset the gangster. The ideology is identical across all three capitals. Independent courts: dangerous. Free press: the enemy. Allies with opinions: a problem to be managed. This is not coincidence. This is a shared operating system, running simultaneously in Moscow, Budapest, and Washington DC. Which is the sentence that should make you put down your coffee. Washington DC. Economist Anders Aslund spent years documenting exactly how Putin built it. In Russia’s Crony Capitalism he shows how the system was never accidentally corrupt – it was engineered that way. Loyalty is purchased with state contracts and immunity from prosecution. The loyal get rich. The disloyal get imprisoned, exiled, or defenestrated. Orban read the manual. Now someone in Washington appears to have found a copy. The Europeans feel it. The Canadians feel it. Tokyo and Seoul feel it. The sensation is specific and unpleasant: the feeling of having been betrayed by someone you trusted with your life. They are not rebuilding their defenses against Russia anymore. They are rebuilding them against an axis that now includes their oldest ally. American military planning, American intelligence, American nuclear guarantees – all of it now sits inside a regime that shares its worldview with the people those guarantees were supposed to deter. And ordinary Americans feel it too. The judges removed. The universities targeted. The law firms that dared to disagree, publicly broken. The civil servants who asked questions, gone. The institutions that took two centuries to build are being methodically hollowed out, and the people doing it are not hiding. They are filming themselves doing it and posting it online. This is what the early chapters always look like. The ones nobody acts on because it still seems recoverable. Because surely someone will stop it. Because this is America and these things don’t happen here. They are happening. The Soviet Union needed seventy years to collapse under its own contradictions. It had the decency to be obviously monstrous from the start. This is worse. This came wearing a familiar face. Gandalv / Gandalv The video was made with AI. (Obviously.)show more

Gandalv

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