On August 15, US president Donald Trump met with Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin in Alaska. On August 18, Trump met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and a collection of European politicians in Washington. The goal of both meetings: Bringing an end to the Russia-Ukraine war now well into its fourth year.

Media coverage of both events centered more on Trump than on the other participants, and more on Trump’s motives and competence than on either the desired outcome or how that outcome might transpire.

Trump, we’re told, got rolled — used and humiliated — by Putin in Alaska.

Trump, we’re told, played the Emperor in his new clothes to a fawning Zelenskyy et al., hiding his cankles and flaunting his crackpottery.

And in both cases, we’re told, Trump’s motives are impure: He’s just after a Nobel Peace Prize and sees ending the war, on any terms, as a way to get it.

I can’t think of any way to sufficiently emphasize my opinion on those speculations, so let’s just go with all caps and too many periods:

I. DON’T. CARE.

I don’t care if Trump’s an easy mark for Putin.

I don’t care if Trump’s mad as a hatter or if other world “leaders” try to placate him by pretending otherwise.

I don’t care if Trump’s obsessed with cadging yet another participation trophy for his mantel.

Nor do I care whether the Moscow gang or the Kyiv gang gets to treat the people damaged and displaced by this war as livestock at best, slaves as the norm, and meat for their mutual slaughterhouse project at worst.

The ideal answer is “neither, and none,” and the second-best answer is “let those people decide for themselves,” but the only thing on the table at the moment seems to be shutting down the slaughterhouse part.

If Trump can help make that happen, award him all the ribbons, plaques, and trophies he craves and let him babble nonsense to his heart’s content on whatever subject he pleases.

Two important things to remember:

First, millions of people have been killed, injured, abducted, detained, enslaved, displaced, or some combination of those things, over the last 42 months. That needs to stop.

Second, we’ve gone 42 months with no one else succeeding in stopping it.

So how about just letting Trump take his best shot at getting the job  done, instead of quibbling over the details (which we can’t even know from moment to moment), or over his supposed motives or inadequacies?

It’s not like there’s any shortage of things to complain about when it comes to Trump. Why turn this into one of those things?

If Trump can help end this war, he has my support and should have yours.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

At a 1992 debate, an audience member hit incumbent US president George H.W. Bush, as well as candidates Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, with an interesting question. I personally recall the moment, and found it somewhat odd at the time, but I’m trusting AI on the exact quote, so don’t ask for my oath on its accuracy:

“I ask the three of you to look into the camera and talk to us about how you would be as a president, as a father of the country. Why should we entrust you with our future, our hopes, and our children?”

At the time, I remember thinking to myself “What? The president as our national parent? How could anyone fall for that kind of nonsense?”

But the three candidates actually took the audience member’s question seriously instead of pushing back, and the 33 years between then and now answer my own follow-up question dispositively. The answer is “the vast majority of voters.”

How did we arrive at the near-complete abdication of real parental responsibility, in favor of government proxy, that we see around us today? It’s tempting to just blame opportunistic politicians, but in this case it definitely took two to tango.

The late right-wing pundit Andrew Breitbart confidently asserted that “politics is downstream from culture.” The interplay seems more complex than that to me — politicians both curry, and respond to, moral panic — but he had a point.

Government has increasingly taken charge of all our lives — almost always yelling that it’s “for the children” — because we’ve not just allowed it to, but demanded that it do so.

That’s neither a “left-wing” nor a “right-wing” phenomenon. It’s everywhere.

Three incidents over the last decade:

During the 2016 presidential election cycle, I recall students at a university complaining to the school administration that some sidewalk chalk — “Trump 2016” — made them feel “unsafe,” and asking for SOMETHING TO BE DONE, because their feelz were more important than freedom of speech in the public square.

Post-COVID, parents on the other side of the political fence demanded legislation to “protect their parental rights” by requiring tax-paid teachers at tax-funded schools to invade students’ privacy and report anything indicating a child might be LGBTQ-curious, because their “parental rights” entitled them to free private investigator services at taxpayer expense.

On August 15, online game platform Roblox prostrated itself before, among other politicians, Louisiana attorney general Liz Murill, announcing new content controls to “protect” the “safety” of minors on the platform, lest they be exposed to imaginary alcohol consumption, fantasy sex, etc., and, just possibly, real predators seeking offline molestation opportunities.

As a parent, it’s YOUR job to explain to your kids that free speech doesn’t harm them, to discus sexual orientation/gender identity (and your values) with them, and to monitor their online activity for hazards, not the government’s job to control everyone else so you can ignore your kids and watch football.

When you fob your parental responsibilities off ON the government, you’re giving your kids (and everyone else’s) TO the government.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

From here on out, Americans can annually celebrate July 8 as “Freedom From Compulsory Podiatric Nudity Day” That’s the day the US Transportation Security Administration stopped requiring air travelers to remove their shoes while waiting in line to get ogled and felt up by government-employed pervs before boarding their flights.

Government rule reform tends to move at a glacial pace.

It took five years for TSA to adopt the “shoe removal” rule after Richard Reid’s comically unsuccessful “shoe bomb” attack on American Airlines Flight 63 in 2001.

Then it took 19 MORE years for them to finally admit that the rule, in addition to being annoying and time-consuming, provided no benefit whatsoever to anyone but badged foot fetishists.

Number of terror attacks prevented by the rule: Zero.

Cumulative amount of time passengers spent un-shoeing and re-shoeing, according to Slate’s Henry Grabar, using a conservative estimate of one minute per passenger per flight: 250,000 years. Yes, years.

To put it in economic terms, at the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the TSA SHOULD have to cough up a total of about $16 billion in wages to air travelers for their time.

Instead, those travelers (and everyone else) fund TSA to the tune of more than $10 billion per year.

It’s time to defund and disband the agency entirely.

TSA hasn’t prevented “the next 9/11,” and wouldn’t have prevented “the first 9/11” if it had existed prior to September 11, 2001.

Obviously the pre-existing airport/airplane security system didn’t prevent the first one either. It did, in fact, happen.

But if that pre-existing system, funded and managed by airlines and airports based on their assessments of security needs instead of bureaucrats’ and lobbyists’ desire for new regulatory power and cash cows, had remained in place, it would almost certainly have delivered better security going forward, at lower cost and with less annoyance and discomfort to travelers, than TSA has.

According to an American Airlines survey, 90% of Americans have flown at least once in their lifetimes. An entire generation of those travelers has never known an air travel paradigm that didn’t entail  spending hours in airports awaiting constitutionally prohibited searches and creepy “pat-downs” by haughty government agents. They probably hear about those bygone days from their parents, but they’ve never lived the experience for themselves.

We should bring that golden age back for them. Not as a conditional “gift,” but as the one debt we owe to their generation and future generations: Freedom.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY