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Here is the evening in Kyiv. Our office. Monday.
It feels to me like we are living through President Volodymyr Zelensky's moment in history. Kiev is being shelled. It has been for the past three weeks. But the former comedian turned president remains at his desk.
wearing his army t-shirt and sitting in his green leather chair on Bankova Street. More than two million Ukrainians, probably more at this point, have fled the country. But Zelenskyy?
Zelensky simply will not budge. I am not hiding and I am not afraid of anyone, he has said. When the Americans offered him help evacuating, he said, Good evening, everyone. The leader of the fraction is here. The
The head of the president's administration is here. Prime Minister Schmeierle is here. The president is here. The fight is here. We are all here. Our military are here. Citizens and society are here. We are all here defending our independence, our state, and it will remain so. Glory to our defenders. Glory to our women defenders. Glory to Ukraine. And then, reportedly, I need ammunition, not a ride.
I'm in Florida right now and I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt with that line printed in yellow and blue. Already somehow there are t-shirts. There's a reason that that line, apocryphal or not, instantly became a meme. It's because we live in an era in which acting like sheep has become the norm. In which cowardice has become the default. In which the ideas of leadership and sacrifice and duty seem like dead letters.
And yet here in front of us in this person was the real article. A leader showing courage, physical as well as spiritual courage, and in doing so inspiring bravery in others that they did not think themselves capable of. He is breathing life into virtues that many Americans thought were on life support are already dead. President Zelensky knows what he is fighting for.
We are all at war, he said in an address to Ukrainians. Everywhere people defend themselves, although they do not have weapons. But these are our people. They have courage, dignity, and hence the ability to go out and say, I'm here, it's mine, and I won't give it away. My city, my community, my Ukraine. And Zelensky knows what he is willing to do to defend it.
In his speech last week to British Parliament, he said it through the words of Churchill: "We will fight in the forest, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets. We will fight on the banks of the rivers and we are looking for your help, for the help of the civilized countries." And he promised to never surrender. My favorite Zelensky line of all though, the most profound thing of so many profound things in these shocking few weeks, came when a reporter asked him how he was doing given the circumstances.
Here's what he said: "Life is as it is. My life today is wonderful. I believe that I am needed. I think that's the most important sense of life, that you are needed, that you're not just an emptiness that breathes and walks and eats something." "My life today is wonderful, because I believe that I am needed. That's the most important sense of life, that you are needed,
That you're not just an emptiness that breathes and walks and eats something. Now, cynics will point out that Zelensky is an actor, that he's adept at delivering lines, even at playing a president. They'll say he knows how to tug on our heartstrings and that he's doing it on purpose right now, to draw the West into the war and to get Ukraine the help it needs. Maybe that's all true. But this isn't a movie.
His life really is on the line. And in any case, that explanation doesn't account for the millions of ordinary Ukrainians who are now taking up arms to defend their country. We are in a queue.
where people are waiting to get their weapons to fight the Russian invaders. In one video, I watched a computer programmer waiting in line in Kiev to get his weapon. I'm just a regular civilian. I have basically nothing to do with war or any other thing like it. And I wouldn't really want to participate in anything like this, but I don't really have any choice because this is my home. There are so many astonishing videos like this. There's one that I saw from Odessa.
It was a big choir of ordinary men and women. And they were singing at the top of their lungs a song in Italian. I looked it up. It's from an opera, and the song is called Choir of Hebrew Slaves. And the lyrics go like this. Oh, my homeland, so beautiful and lost. Oh, my homeland.
I saw another video this morning. This one was posted by a friend of mine, a journalist who flew to Ukraine to see the reality for himself. It was a video of a funeral for three fallen Ukrainian soldiers in Lviv. And while they're mourning, while they're going through this funeral service,
The air raid sirens start up, but no one moves and no one budges. Listening to all of this, watching it, watching people speak and sing and weep is really, really moving and inspiring to me. It is also, if I am honest, unsettling. And I ask myself why. Why is witnessing such bravery uncomfortable? I think it is because I cannot help but notice the gap between them and us.
Between the bigness of their vision and their mission and the smallness of ours. Between their moral clarity and our moral confusion. Between their spine and our spinelessness. Between their courage and our epidemic of cowardice. Between their steadfast commitment to civilization and our too-often resignation to chaos. Watching Zelensky and the Ukrainian people reminds me what we have lost as Americans.
of how uncertain and mushy and fragile, frankly, that we have become. Bearing witness to Ukraine's answers forces me to ask some hard questions about us, questions that I worry many of us have forgotten how to ask. How would we act if the guns were to our heads? Would we similarly feel no choice but to fight for our home, for our way of life, for everything that we love?
Would we actually have the courage to live by the values that we profess if our backs were the ones to the wall? Would we have the sense of national unity, of sacrifice? Or have we gotten so comfortable, so divided, so removed from the world of flesh and blood that we have forgotten how to name those values at all? We are very, very far from a physical war, and I pray we are never in one. But that doesn't mean that we in America aren't in an ideological one.
We are. And we have been in one for a while now. And it is one that we, heirs to the Enlightenment and to the American experiment, are losing. We are losing because we're unserious. We say, I'm a brand. Follow me. Like me. And Zelensky says, I am not iconic. Ukraine is iconic. We ask, is America ill-gotten? Zelensky says, Ukraine is mine.
We say, words, podcasts, comedians, they put us in danger. Zelensky says, I will never surrender. We LARP on Twitter and work hard to get people fired for bad jokes or Halloween costumes. Ukrainians line up for guns and say, I want to defend everything that I love. We take down statues of Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson, and they say, glory to Ukraine. We say,
There is no truth. There's only power. And they say, no, might does not make right. We say, anyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi, which, by the way, is exactly what Putin said to justify this invasion. And they say, no, right now we are one people, united. The world is changing fast, though.
We are watching as history roars back to life, and the difference between the world of Zelensky's Ukraine and ours is only a matter of degrees and of time. One of the core lessons I'm taking away from what's happening right now in Ukraine is that fighting for noble causes matters. It is the only thing that matters, because it can mean the difference between life and death, between freedom and subjugation, between freedom and slavery.
Everything happening in Ukraine right now is happening because human beings in a smaller, weaker country are willing to fight against a superpower. They are willing to bend the arc of history in their favor. And I wonder, watching them, if we could be stirred to care about causes bigger than ourselves, bigger than our comforts, our reputations, or what comes up when we Google ourselves. If we in America are the home front of the free world,
And I still believe that we are and that we must be. What are the principles that should guide us? What are the things worth fighting for? I want to suggest three of them. The first is individual liberty. Individual liberty, the bedrock value of this country, that is worth fighting for.
Since Russia's war in Ukraine began, the following things have happened. This weekend, police were called to Russia House in DuPont Circle to investigate a hate crime. Its owners, who are American citizens, said someone broke several of the restaurant's windows.
Russia House, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., right near DuPont Circle. COVID restrictions already hurt that business. They planned to reopen in mid-March, but now they'll be closed indefinitely. It's been vandalized more than once. Its windows were broken. Its door was smashed in. Some people are divided, and it's just breaking my heart. In Vancouver, this is the front door to Victoria's
St. Sophia Russian Orthodox Church splattered with red paint by vandals sometime between 2 and 4 p.m. on Wednesday. St. Sophia's Russian Orthodox Church had red paint thrown on its front doors. At this bakery in Vancouver's Harbour Centre, they've started receiving harassing calls. The owner is a Canadian citizen born in Russia. Some people swear. People who just start conversation, are you still open? And swear, swear, swear.
The Montreal Symphony canceled a performance by the Russian virtuoso Alexander Milofiev. A Russian superstar soprano will no longer perform at the Metropolitan Opera. And in the meantime, the Met in New York dropped one of its most celebrated sopranos. She has performed with the Met Opera Company for 20 years. The Met says Nick Trebko will be replaced this season by a Ukrainian soprano. In the UK, a planned tour of the Russian State Ballet of Siberia canceled.
A Formula One racing team fired a Russian driver. The Paralympics Games. These are Olympic Games for handicapped people. Athletes from both Russia and Belarus are now banned from the Paralympic Winter Games in Beijing. Banned Russians from participating. In order to preserve the integrity of these games, we have decided to refuse the athlete entries from RPC and NPC Belarus. Oh, and let's not forget the cats.
Yes, that's right. The International Cat Federation has banned Russian felines. I wish I was kidding. Michael McFaul, who served as Obama's ambassador to Russia, wrote on Twitter, Think about that for a second. There are no more innocent, neutral Russians anymore.
And ask yourself where you might have stood after Pearl Harbor when we were told how important it was to put Americans of Japanese descent into giant holding pens. Now, this is a very incomplete list. Only a few of the latest victims in a series of seemingly never-ending moral panics that we live through in this country. But this mob mentality, which a week from now will move on to something else, but right now is presenting itself as a frenzy of anti-Russian bigotry,
can never, ever be made normal because it cuts against the most foundational principle of liberal democracy. That is the principle of individual liberty. As my friend Jacob Siegel put it in Tablet Magazine, the notion that individuals should have their employment conditioned on the actions of a foreign government or their willingness to denounce those actions is gross and authoritarian. It's the kind of thing I was raised to believe happened in Russia, not the United States.
In free and just societies, we judge people as individuals, not as members of a group. We judge them based on their deeds, not based on the deeds of their parents or where those parents were born or people of the same gender or zip code or skin color. Fetishizing group identity, whether religious or racial or sexual or whatever, it is poison.
It leads us and has already led us to a zero-sum war within groups and the subjugation and ultimately the dehumanization of the dignity of the individual. The great achievement of America, of so many great achievements, was that for the first time in history, it moved human beings beyond bloodline. It said, we are not constrained to the circumstances of our birth or the sins or the merits of our mothers and our fathers.
We are bound together not by clan or tribe, but by a commitment to rights and principles that supersede all of us. This distinction, the prioritizing of the value of individual life over that of the kinship group, is core to what makes America exceptional. And that is why any ideology, by whatever name it goes by, no matter how pretty it sounds or how seductive, that grants some people a demerit and others extra credit because of how they were born,
is an ideology that denies our individual liberty, our common humanity, it is illiberal, and it is anti-American. Those ideologies must be rejected and uprooted. To build a strong home front requires us to recover the radical world-transforming proposition that we are all created equal because we are all created in the image of God. So the first thing is individual liberty. That is the first thing worth fighting for. The second thing worth fighting for
is America. America is worth the fight. The other day I saw this clip from The View. It's certainly not sacred. All right, let's start there. The Constitution is kind of trash. And I watched as a man with a Harvard Law degree and a lot of other important distinctions to his name
stumbled on the real problem facing the world. Let's just, again, let's just talk as adults first. What did you say? It's what? It's kind of trash. Trash? It was written by slavers and colonists and white people who were willing to make deals with slavers and colonists.
The Constitution is trash, he said. And I say that if that is the starting point, the very least we can do is ignore what those slavers and colonists and misogynists thought and interpret the Constitution in a way that makes sense for our modern world. Do you want to rewrite it? I could, right? I could rewrite parts of it in a tweet.
Now, if you're looking for the definition of the privilege of living in America, of living in a country with a First Amendment, it's this. It's the ability to say something so foolish on daytime television. But what struck me on second thought was that he actually homed in on the right pressure point. And that's the Constitution. The thing he was so blithely tearing down is precisely the thing we need to recover.
Above all, we need to recover this one line, which is blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And the way that we do this is just as the founders did. It's by resisting tyranny, no matter its form. First of all, that means refusing to participate personally in moral panics. It means resisting mob mentality because mob justice is not justice at all.
And it means opposing any entity that uses its power to undermine democracy and strip us of individual liberty. There are a thousand examples I could point to, and maybe you're thinking of some yourself. But just consider one. Facebook announced last week that even though it's wrong to call for some people to be killed, it's not wrong to call for others to be. I'm serious. You heard me correctly.
Facebook, which bars users from expressing hate speech, which, by the way, includes things like misgendering people, decided to allow people in Ukraine, Poland and Russia to call for violence against Russia, Russian soldiers and for death to Putin. Then a few days later, perhaps because of all of the backlash, the company reversed course. So no assassination advocacy allowed on Instagram anymore, or at least for now.
Now, I hope it's entirely clear that I think what Vladimir Putin is doing is beyond evil. But what's allowed to be said and not said should not be left to the mandarins of Menlo Park. Why have we resigned ourselves to living in a country where a few companies have arrogated to themselves the power of government, even though we never elected them? How is it that a handful of companies control the 21st century public square?
but have no obligations to any kind of digital First Amendment. I doubt the founders were able to imagine something like the internet or Google, but they surely understood the danger of a centralized force that had the power to determine what people could say and what they couldn't. And they had a word for that, and that word was tyranny. If you want to understand why some people have been so cynical about this war, why some on the right and the left almost seem to be rooting for Putin and for Russia,
This is one of the major reasons why. It's because they notice that some of the most powerful forces in America are exhibiting exactly the kind of behavior we expect from countries like Russia and that they aren't being opposed by those who claim to be our moral betters. Instead, they're being cheered on. They see American companies toying with our freedom of conscience, with our free will, with our free expression. And they wonder, sorry, which country has the problem with totalitarianism?
Which country actually has something like a social credit system? They see an elite that has lied to them about what a peaceful protest is and isn't, about Russiagate, about masks and the effect of school closures. They see an attorney general who suggested that parents who stood up for kids and science were actually domestic terrorists. They see a CDC that told noble lies, a president that abandoned our allies and our promises in Afghanistan.
They see a White House right now at this very moment that is crying crocodile tears for Ukraine while using Moscow to negotiate a deal with Iran. They see an administration that says fracking is evil and nuclear energy is evil while they buy oil and gas from despots. They see a group that tells us to follow the science while also insisting that there are no biological differences between men and women.
that says words are violence, but that violence you see in the streets of your city, that's just a hallucination. They see an elite that leaps between BLM and COVID mandates and Palestine and Afghanistan and anti-Asian hate, and they think, nope, I'm out. The smart bet is to bet against whatever that is. I want to say two things about this posture.
The first is that it's possible to acknowledge the lies and hypocrisy of our experts and our institutions. But seeing that sorry reality says nothing about the reality that Russia is actually bombing maternity hospitals, that it is killing journalists today and innocent people. And if you have hardened yourself to that, if you hate us or part of us more than you hate that, then I think you've lost the plot.
I think you're justifying the unjustifiable. The second thing I want to say is that you can oppose the lies and hypocrisies without giving up on America and its exceptional proposition. The way to recover America isn't to become moral relativists or isolationists or apologists for evil. It is to look our myriad moral and practical failings in the face and fix them.
So it's not wrong to see what we've gotten wrong, but it's wrong to acquiesce to that. It's also to recognize what we have gotten right. I heard that the other day in Katenji Brown Jackson's unapologetic formulation of gratitude when she was nominated to the Supreme Court. If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed as the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, I can only hope that my life and career...
My love of this country and the Constitution and my commitment to upholding the rule of law and the sacred principles upon which this great nation was founded will inspire future generations of Americans. How shocking in its clarity that statement was. I listened to a talk the other day in which a historian, an expert on Russia, said that societies that are conquered from outside can recover.
But societies that destroy themselves from within cannot. We need to right our ship. We need to right our ship for ourselves, but also for the world. Because the world needs us to be the moral actors that we promise to be. And we need to be those actors because we need to defend civilization. And we need to be that because civilization has to be defended. So individual liberty is the first thing. America is the second. And the last, at least for now,
civilization. Civilization is worth fighting for. If the past three weeks have reminded us of anything, at bottom, it is the reminder that the line between civilization and uncivilization is paper thin. Just ask the people of Odessa. Four weeks ago, people in Odessa were going to the opera and parks and movie theaters. And right now,
And you can look up pictures of this. Mothers and their children are filling sandbags and learning how to shoot. Ordinary people in that city, they are standing at the borderland between democracy and subjugation. They will tell you how thin that line is. Or ask Sergei Parabenis. Last week, his wife Tatiana, who was 43, along with his daughter Alice and his son Nikita, tried to flee the town of Erpin, which is a suburb about 15 minutes from Kiev.
They had dashed across this partially destroyed bridge when a Russian mortar hit. All three of them were killed on the spot. Sergei was in eastern Ukraine at the time. He was helping his sick mother. He found out that his entire family had been murdered after seeing a photo of their dead bodies on Twitter. Tatiana was the chief accountant of a startup in Palo Alto called SE Ranking. And I keep thinking to myself, what would the life of this family be
If they had not been born into a country that Vladimir Putin decided actually belongs to him? What if they had been born here? That difference in luck is the difference between a weekend family hike and a weekend family funeral. Now, reckoning with the flaws and failings of our past, grappling with the hard parts of our history, those acts are part of the civilization for which we are fighting. But that cannot be confused for a second
with the zeal we are seeing in our culture to purge and purify, to cancel and punish and tear down, to the nihilists who say that we actually have to throw away the tools that allow us to improve and progress and forgive, the tools that have made our civilization the freest in all of human history. Western civilization, I don't care what they say on whatever college campus, it's an unbelievable achievement.
It's the gradual development of thousands of years of human will and wisdom and a political and economic and cultural capital. And we should treat it with the preciousness that it deserves. Pretending as if what we have is bad is beyond ignorant. And the ideologues that are trying to drag us back into pre-enlightenment tribalism should be seen for what they are. Useful idiots doing the bidding of places like Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran.
We should never indulge their ideas. We should say they're wrong plainly and without apology. Now is the time to set that kind of thinking aside. Now is the time to judge and discern. Now is the time to choose. There are really complicated debates to be had and are being had about no-fly zones and NATO expansion and weaponry. But there are other questions. And these are questions that every single American is equipped to answer. Do we root for Russia and its partners in Beijing and Tehran?
Or do we cheer on Zelensky and with him London, Paris, and Washington? Do we imagine a future in which each citizen is closely monitored by the state, assigned a social score, and tracked by tech giants that record her every move? Or do we think there's actually something to free and unfettered speech and a respect for privacy? Are we okay with concentration camps for religious minorities and corporations whose profits are downstream of genocide? Or do we say no?
Every human life is sacred and that is unacceptable. Do we say, sorry, nothing we can do about the Chinese Communist Party. It's too strong and we're too intertwined with them and the price is just going to be too high. Or do we say, no, that's not true. Do we say, look at what Churchill did in 1940 and look at what Zelensky is doing right now. Look at what a nation can achieve when the stakes are their highest and when people's hearts and minds are focused on one mission. Do we believe in nation states with sovereignty?
or land grabs? Do we believe in the fight for civilization? Or do we resign ourselves to decline? Do we insist that nothing is destined, that nothing is predetermined, and that the choice of decline or ascendance is ours? I know exactly what I choose. There are people who fought very, very hard for the freedoms and privileges that we get to enjoy. And a lot of Americans right now are using those freedoms
to put the target on the back of other Americans, and to suggest that disagreeing about this war makes them traitors. That's wrong. Other Americans, though, are sleepwalking. They're giving up these freedoms without a second thought. And that's what Putin and the rest of the world's tyrants are counting on, by the way. They're counting on the fact that the world's superpower, that now considers receiving groceries in under an hour its major achievement, won't interrupt a good online sale for anyone else's sake. Zelensky's wisdom.
And what he is calling on in each one of us watching this is a rejection of that smallness, is a rejection of that myopia. The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness. Now, I don't know if Zelensky's ever heard that line from Pope Benedict, but he is its contemporary embodiment. He knows it in his bones. And once upon a time, so did we. It was America that once gave the world the courage and the inspiration to
to keep the noble fight going. It was our founders that themselves stood against evil tyrants who demanded glory for their fledgling democracy. These days, it's the guy in Kiev with the army green t-shirt and the millions of Ukrainians that he has rallied to his banner. God bless him, and may we all take on his fight, for Ukraine's sake, but also for ours.
We'll be right back.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Thanks for listening. If you'd like to read this piece or print it out, just go to barryweiss.substack.com.
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