Virtue Signaling as a War Policy

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2023

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

U.S. war planners have indicated that Ukraine plans to launch a spring offensive in an effort to retake territory lost in Russia’s invasion. Military analysts have also suggested that Kyiv, backed by the U.S.-led NATO alliance and its weapons shipments, is likely to attempt to purge Russia from Crimea. Russian President Vladimir Putin has indicated that he has no plans to cease his military operations, and the stage is being set for further bloodshed with no end in sight.

This week on Intercepted, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Beaucar Vlahos joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain for a wide-ranging discussion on the proxy war, the uniform support among Democrats for Joe Biden’s policies on Ukraine, and the growing opposition among Republicans to funding the war. Last week, a group of Republican lawmakers sent a letter to President Biden saying they will no longer support what they called “unrestrained” aid to Ukraine. And they added they “will adamantly oppose all future aid packages unless they are linked to a clear diplomatic strategy designed to bring this war to a rapid conclusion.” The letter, which was signed by 19 Republicans, included three senators: Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and J.D. Vance. Vlahos, Scahill, and Hussain also discuss the various factions comprising the current GOP and discuss how the enduring focus on Russiagate and the 2016 election has fed into the discourse on the war in Ukraine.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is intercepted.
0:30.0	Welcome to intercepted. I'm Jeremy Scayhill. And I'm Mertaza Hussein. Or are you Mertaza Hussein?
0:39.3	I don't see any blue check mark floating above your head anymore, Maas. No, actually I'm somebody
0:43.8	else who's joining you today. I need to sweep myself in here at the moment. There's no need for
0:49.4	verification. You know when I was doing all these investigations into Blackwater and then the joint
0:55.1	special operations command in the CIA. It was like when Twitter was really blowing up. And I was in
1:01.9	Yemen when I got my verification email, my blue check mark. I was in like a group of other people
1:08.4	journalists and some Yemenis. And I remember just thinking like, oh, that's weird. I didn't really
1:12.8	like grasp what it was. But then I had like some imitation accounts that were making fun of me.
1:19.3	And so like, now I'm trying to see if like maybe one of those accounts can get verified. And then the
1:24.1	real Jeremy can stand up again. Well, I think it's happened to a few people actually, some fake accounts
1:28.8	have impersonated them with the blue check and pretending to be them for at least a little while.
1:33.8	I think it's got funny actually. I think people are trying to shame me into again blue check on
1:38.4	behalf of democracy or paying Elon because it's something the moral thing to do now to help them out.
1:44.9	But I don't know. I think it's fine. I think that if they want to blow up this pseudo-cast system
1:49.8	of Twitter in this weird way, it's okay. The only thing I find concerning is that Twitter is
1:54.6	pretty useful for finding people or for surfacing raw information from time to time. I think it seems
2:00.6	like it's going to downgrade the experience and make you pay for the old experience back with the
2:05.7	blue check, which will kind of suck. But I think it's really disillusioned anyone who thinks that
2:11.5	these tech libertarian ideas are going to be good or be good, nice to be governed by these people.
2:16.3	If imagine being governed by the parallel Elon Musk, but from the microcosm,
2:21.4	see how he runs Twitter would not be very, very endearing.
	...

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