Hey, folks.

Today at 12 p.m. ET, I will be interviewing , a former New York State representative who is running to unseat Congressman Ritchie Torres in the 15th congressional district in the Democratic primary next week.

We’ll be discussing Trump’s attack on democracy, Democrats’ chances of winning the house, AIPAC, Gaza, Ukraine and much more.

Join the discussion via this link.

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Had a great conversation with , former director of counterintelligence at the FBI, about how Donald Trump’s racist takeover of federal law enforcement is exposing America’s resolve to defend itself against foreign threats.

Frank will be a monthly guest of mine moving forward to discuss the intersection of race and law enforcement. Let me know what you think of our conversation.

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Hey, folks!

I’ll be going Live with , former director of counterintelligence at the FBI.

We’ll be talking about the racist and authoritarian nature in which Donald Trump is using the FBI to threaten his political adversaries and carry out his domestic policy of white supremacy. More specifically, we’ll discuss the lack of security clearance protocol Trump’s aides go through, his use of the DOJ to go after his enemies, his relationship with Russia, Jan. 6 pardons and much more.

Frank has decades of federal law enforcement experience at the highest levels that will help inform our hourlong conversation.

You can join at this link at 12 p.m ET. See you soon!

Iukhymovych is a queer writer whose work focuses on the intersection of enduring the dangers of war while also advocating for LGBTQ+ rights and what that exactly looks like.

The two of us discussed what’s it like to seek shelter during air strikes, going to work after a missile attack, PTSD, being queer in Ukraine, dating and partying during the war and so much more.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Terrell Jermaine Starr in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Today, I’ll be talking with , a Ukrainian writer who lives in Kyiv and regularly writes about the intersections of living through Russia’s ongoing invasion and being queer.

We’ll be speaking about about how LGBTQ people are fighting for their rights to live as full human beings, all while enduring Russian drone attacks and dealing with the brutal realities of not knowing if you will wake up the next day.

It’ll be a great conversation about day-to-day life that’s often missing from mainstream news reporting. See you soon!

Join us today at 12 p.m. ET at this link.

Voters are challenging the lack of moral consistency in how the U.S. responds to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine versus its deferential treatment to Israel as it wages a genocide in Gaza.

Today, I had the pleasure of live-streaming with , a foreign expert based in Egypt. We spent a lot of time on whether the rules-based order is still relevant in today’s environment and, of course, we deep dove into Trump’s handing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is using his acting background to craft effective foreign policy and keep his country on everyone’s mind.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Please join me to day at 12 p.m. ET on Substack Live for an audience discussion on the primaries, as well as Ukraine news. If you are not a paid subscriber, please consider it. I am trying to get 2000 paid subscribers before I return to Ukraine in July so I can expand my reporting beyond Kyiv. I could really use your support!

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A few days ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote one of the most bad-ass letters a world leader could write to a neighbouring adversary that’s actively occupying much of his land.

Zelenskyy pretty much told Vladimir Putin that, yeah, your invasion is hurting us, but your bite isn’t as strong as you think it is. You definitely are leaving us with marks and black eyes. Certainly your teeth break skin, but you ain’t breaking enough bones to cripple Ukraine’s resolve to keep fighting you. Ukraine has endured harsh winters while you tried to destroy our energy system. We held firm – and even in darkness and cold, the resilience of Ukrainians remained intact.

Yet, Ukraine is emerging and turning the tide of the war to its advantage. You wanted to make us quit. But the opposite is happening and Zelenskyy made it plain:

We brought the war on to your territory, and you would not have been able to cope with it without North Korea’s help. You are the first ruler of Russia to turn to Pyongyang for assistance.

And today you are fully dependent on China – also for the first time in Russia’s history.

Basically, Zelenskyy told Putin that Europe has all but shut you out. All of the work former German Chancellor Angela Merkel put into integrating Russia into the European economy is down the drain. And for what? Greed. Colonial conquest.

Now you have to beg North Korea for soldiers because you’re too scared to mobilize your own population and have to visit Pyongyang to ask for arms because you can’t terrorize a country more than several dozen or so sizes smaller than yours on your own?

As for China, Beijing really doesn’t care for Russia. They are supporting you, but not because they truly see you as an ally. It’s because they can exploit the geopolitics of Russia’s own vulnerable position to weaken Moscow’s threat to China’s own quest for world dominance. Keeping you dependent on China (economically and financially) when most of the world has shut you out is in Chinese government’s interests.

In short, big, powerful Russia was hanging with the cool European kids in the play pen. But you were too uncivilised to see the benefits of it started acting greedy and the cool kids kicked you out the club, with no access to the financial and networking benefits. Yeah, Europe needs Russian gas and will begrudgingly pay for it. But even with that, Europe is seeking to divest for sources independent of Russia. Now, you is stuck with the kid almost no one likes (North Korea) and the other kid is a predator lender who courts you like a customer with bad credit.

And then there is this part of the letter:

But now we can all see that Russians are finally becoming less comfortable with this reality – with the fact that the war is bringing more and more negative consequences to Russia.

They do not like our drones and missiles.

They do not like gasoline shortages and constantly rising prices.

They do not like constant restrictions.

They do not like your intention to launch a second wave of mobilisation in order to expand the war into another direction in Ukraine or to use it against other countries neighbouring Russia.

They do not like the fact that there is no end in sight to your war.

Yes, you can still force Russians to exist this way. But your resources are shrinking significantly.

You will not have enough money or political capital to keep buying the loyalty of Russians the way you have for the past 26 years.

And we will do everything we can to ensure that the world helps bring that moment closer.

Translation: Hey Putin, you thought you controlled the clock and that time was on your side exclusively. Naw, fam. The tides have turned and we are now assuming some control over the hands of time.

Zelenskyy mentioned in the letter that Ukrainians withstood the harshest winter in recent memory after Russia hit its power grids, leaving millions without electricity, hot water and heating for months. I was in Ukraine the whole winter and I can tell you from first-hand experience that it sucked. People died during those months and locals were forced to set up tents in their own flats to keep warm and cook outside on wood stoves.

But no one went to the streets to demand that Zelenskyy negotiate with Putin. In fact, the more Putin bombed Ukraine, the more Ukrainians hatred for Putin grew.

Zelenskyy asked, without directly asking, “Will your people back you like they back me?”

Of course, we know much of the Ukrainian population doesn’t care for Zelenskyy (those opinion polls showing high favourability are misleading, but that is for another article), but they stand behind him when it comes to defending Ukraine.

What I also think people are not getting from the letter is that the words were also directed at NATO and, specifically, Donald Trump.

I’m sure that Putin calculated, correctly, that Trump would scale back military support for Kyiv when he entered office, Not only did he end Joe Biden’s arms transfers, Trump was outright hostile to Zelenskyy and favoured capitulation to Russia’s demands. Putin figured, wrongly, that Kyiv would cave in to the pressure of fighting without significant Western arms and pressure from European capitals to end the war.

That has not happened and Zelenskyy reminded him that they are more than capable of fighting largely on its own and are slowing building out their own capacity to fight back:

Yesterday, I received a report on the losses of your army on the front in Ukraine during May. Once again, the number exceeded 30,000 Russian soldiers killed and seriously wounded. We have been maintaining that level month after month, and we have video confirmation of every one of your losses – these are not empty claims.

We know that 63% of your battlefield losses are killed, while only 37% are wounded. In the 21st century, no army can afford such a ratio. And the share of those killed will continue to grow.

Most of those loses come as a result of drone attacks. Or as drone expert wrote in herSubstack, drone assault units. Basically, Ukraine uses drones more than humans, which preserves their own soldiers and kill Russians at a fraction of the cost. Kryzhanivska is not sure Ukraine’s improvements are shifting the tide of the war as many suggest but recent operations like those targeting Putin’s forum in St. Petersburg deserve attention.

I’ll try to get Kryzhanivska on my LIVE this week to discuss her reporting. But I bring up drones because Zelenskyy is saying that Ukraine has found a way to neutralise Russia’s numerical troop advantage. He’s saying that, sure, Trump is pressuring me to stop fighting, give up land and is withholding aid. Even if the legislation the U.S. House passed to restore military aid to Ukraine fails in the Senate, we are developing our own long-range strike capabilities without Washington.

Translation:

We want Trump’s support, but we really do not need it to make you suffer.

Now, how long will you continue to fight with such loses without having to mobilize your middle class Russian population? Because there aren’t enough Africans and North Koreans you can exploit to fill your manpower gaps.

Essentially, Ukraine is telling Putin and the rest of the world that it has been willing to suffer for its sovereignty and that all of the death on its side is worth it. What is also not stated explicitly in this letter is that Ukrainians have as high a tolerance for pain (lack of power, hot water, deadly, non-stop drone attacks etc) as Russians have for Putin’s authoritarianism. In fact, one could argue the Ukrainian population’s resolve is stronger than that of Russia’s and Zelenskyy is daring him to a contest of will of their peoples.

Zelenskyy is daring Putin to prove otherwise.

Overall, this letter is world class PR (the man is an actor!), but it is also high IQ diplomacy that takes shot an authoritarian who very much cares about his strong man image. When Putin responded (surprisingly) to the letter, he essentially flinch.

That was the whole point. And, Brussels was also put on notice that it cannot pressure Ukraine into land concessions that, let’s be real, they’d be fine with. Europe would have been fine with Russia taking over Kyiv, but that didn’t happen. So they, too, must adjust to Ukraine’s new-found strength and lasting power.

(We don’t talk enough about how Europe sees Ukraine as a major inconvenience, but I will get into this with during my Substack Live at 12 ET.)

Zelenskyy was in London with European leaders in a show of solidarity with demands of Russia (without Trump’s support) to come to negotiation table. His letter, in a nutshell, was telling Putin, “I’m tired of this shit, but I have no problem staying in the shits because I bet you can’t eat, sleep and live in it like I can. I’m built for this shit. Are you?”

Something tells me Putin can’t stay in the shits for too long, and Ukraine is bringing the shits to Russia even more. And neither Putin nor his people will be able to withstand the stench without wanting to tap out eventually.

Russia has unleashed yet another drone and missile attack on Ukraine that has left carnage. Tuesday’s attack was no less brutal with at least 17 killed and more than 100 injured, with Kyiv feeling the brunt of the attack.

I’m usually in Ukraine when Russia launches these massive airstrikes on Ukraine that leaves many dead and wounded, but I am home here in Brooklyn. People often ask me why Russia continues to bomb Ukraine and how the locals react to attacks. I tell them what I am writing to you: no matter how savage Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s airstrikes become, Ukrainians will not submit to his cruelty and the indifference of the Russian population who supports him.

Russia’s battlefield victories are few and far between. Their offensives are not yielding any meaningful results because of Ukraine’s advances in drone warfare and relentless attacks on Russian logistics routes. International sanctions are beginning to pinch Putin and leave him with fewer options moving forward. Not to the point where he’d mobilize his population because that would show Russia’s losing the war and people would likely revolt against him.

He can’t get massive wins on the battlefield, so he kills civilians as a consolation prize.

Usually after a major airstrike like the one that happened today, I check in on my friends to see how they are doing. Luckily none of my friends have died in airstrikes. Just a scary night of feeling your building shake if the strikes are nearby and praying the drones that fly above your building are shot down.

What you do not see are people protesting in the streets for Volodymyr Zelenskyy to step down, people angry with NATO or the United States. They go to their jobs, use public transportation, shop at the local markets. They just go on with life. It almost feels surreal. I have been to the gym after a massive bombing to see the usual crowd working out. My coffee shop nearby opens as usual. Nothing closes unless it was damaged during the strikes (sometimes, they still work in defiance if they can operate). People just get on with it.

The hate for Russia gets more ingrained. No one will surrender because they’d rather suffer and fight than surrender and become Russian. Those are the only options. Russia will not stop bombing until they feel they can break Ukrainians. That day will not come. So they will endure the bombings and hate Russians even more.

I honestly think everyone assumed that Ukrainians would give up after the U.S. stopped supplying aid. But Kyiv simply innovated. Washington announced that it would no longer participate in negotiations to end the war, but it honestly doesn’t matter. The U.S. position was the same as Moscow’s: give Putin all that he wants, so Donald Trump can say he ended the war.

It’s actually a good thing that Trump got bored, so at least they’re no longer pressuring Kyiv to cave to Putin. They can struggle on their own, wait out Trump’s term and hope Americans elected a Democrat who will restart military aid that is decisive and force Putin to negotiate in Kyiv’s favor. That scenario is more than two years away, but that is the harsh reality that Ukrainians have accepted without actually saying it.

These airstrikes are extremely brutal. But Ukrainians will push through it.

I hate saying that Ukrainians are resilient. They are, but those descriptors strip them of their humanity and it doesn’t speak to the human toll these strikes have on people. Ukraine is a country full of people with PTSD and other traumas that will last generations.

Make no mistake: Ukrainians are suffering as intensely as they are persevering.

But no one will force Zelenskyy to accept Russia’s terms because they know the bombs that kill their bodies will be replaced with imperial occupation that will kill their national identity with similarly brutality. We have the Russian-occupied territories to reference for what comes when Russia gets its way.

I interviewed a teenage girl (who I don’t have permission to identify) that escaped from the city of Donetsk last year. She said life for people is deplorable. Water supply is spotty, electricity works when it wants to and the city feels like a ghost town. The worst part of occupation for young girls is that Russian soldiers would frequent the schools looking for girls to sexually assault. That was common, she told me.

The toughest part of living in occupation was not knowing how well or poorly Ukraine was righting back against Russia. She was amazed to see how her country was functioning when she finally made it to Kyiv. But she said something at the end of our interview that stuck with me.

“People in Donetsk are waiting to be liberated,” she said.

And as unrealistic as that may sound to many people, Ukraine is waiting to liberate them.

There is nothing worse than a cheap-ass gift.

I say this as someone who loves to give gifts, even if it’s as simple as a well-written postcard with meaning or something inexpensive in monetary value but priceless in sentiment.

It’s the thought that counts, as the saying goes. But with “Little Marco,” (formerly known as Marco Rubio when he had balls) it seems this man doesn’t think much about anything other than how better to kiss the Orange Occupant’s old, wrinkled up, decrepit ass.

Little Marco is in Vatican City to play nice with Pope Leo XIV, even though his boss, who was elected president by a certain group of people (racist white folks), continues to insult him on virtually every media platform.

(In case you don’t know, Trump nicknamed him “Little Rubio” during the 2016 presidential race because, back then, Rubio was a redeemable personnel who warned the GOP about how bad Trump would be for the party and the country—until he didn’t)

Rubio, a Catholic, is visiting not only as U.S. Secretary of State, but also a representative of the Catholic faith. He’s supposed to be the smooth, diplomatic face of a shameless, ungraceful, incompetent and utterly disgusting human being.

But it seems like Cheeto Mussolini’s uncouth, unrefined ways have infected Little Marco.

In front of all of those cameras broadcasting across the world, Rubio took a moment to present the Pope a gift. This is a very age-old traditional in high-level diplomacy in which heads of state and other high-ranking officials show gratitude to their counterparts by offering something that reflects the essence of the nation they represent. It’s also a sign of respect to show goodwill and, in some instances, to curry political favor.

But before I tell you what Rubio gifted The Pope, let’s discuss what leaders of the past have given their counterparts to show you what the standard is.

In 2024, Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris gave President Biden a letter written by John F. Kennedy in 1963. The Northern Territory Government in Australia gifted the Obamas an insurance policy of $50,000 in case Barack was eaten by a crocodile. A French President Francois Hollande was gifted a camel during his trip to Mali, in 2013, and Argentinian President gave George W. Bush 300 pounds of raw lamb in 2003.

The list goes on. No matter how luxurious or weird, there was thought put into the gift.

(Note: at least with U.S. officials, they cannot accept gifts valued above a certain amount and often the gifts are ceremonial; Trump has shit on ethics entirely, but that is a different article)

As for Rubio, this mofo gave the Pope (THE POPE!!!) a State Department-branded, glass miniature crystal football. “It has state department on it,” Rubio said sheepishly, as if he knew he was giving the Pope, (THE POPE) some shit from the dollar store. And, yes, something can be made from crystal and still be cheap. It is not the material that makes something valuable. It is the intent of the item, who made it, why it was made.

First off, Pope Leo VIX is a baseball fan. He loves the Chicago White Sox and even attended a 2005 World Series game the White Sox played in. A basic Google search would have told you that. There is almost no note of the pope saying he loves football.

At least they could have given the Pope a crystal baseball.

I don’t think Little Marco or his team put any thought into this cheap-ass gift. How this usually works at the government level is that someone on your team, likely the Office of the Chief of Protocol at State Department in consultation with Rubio’s chief of staff and senior advisors, would have devoted some time to picking a suitable, thoughtful gift for a man who may go down as the most popular Pope in history. (I am not Catholic and I am a fan)

But Little Marco is more spin doctor than diplomat.

Instead of functioning as a serious, competent senior statesman, he is nothing more than a willing cuck for Trump. He’s took busy kissing ass and being a simp than being a statesman.

Back to this cheap-ass gift.

This is an extreme insult. I honestly think Rubio was on the plane and while over the Atlantic Ocean, thought, “Oh, we need to give the Pope something.” Then, one of his aides searched the plane and found one of those cheap swag toys they give to any-ole’ body who visits the State Department building, in D.C. Gifts are a form of respect and sign that you value the relationship and want to build on it. And what you give shows the degree of dedication to that partnership. Rubio made clear that he doesn’t think about any of this. He didn’t even have the balls to go maverick and give the Pope something that showed he respected his fellow Catholic and the head of the church claims to prove his conservative bonfires.

The cynical side of me speculates that Rubio gave him the football as an underhanded slight, at the direction of Trump. But as Dr. Jason Johnson says, “Don’t assign to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.”

And the Trump Administration is very incompetent.

I can’t speak for Catholics, (maybe Dr. Nola Hayes over at can advise) but I’d be looking at Brotha Rubio sideways in the pews about that cheap ass gift this when I see at Mass.

Compare Rubio’s cheap football toy to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s gift to the Pope. It was a “Holy Mother with an infant” icon painted on a wooden panel from a crate that stored artillery shells. The piece of wood and the painting represented children killed, wounded and deported by Russia.

You know, those same abducted Ukrainian children Little Marco’s State Department no longer tracks because Trump cut the funding.

Zelenskyy’s was a thoughtful gift and speaks to the Pope’s conscience about protecting innocent lives—especially children— and his calls for peace. It also brought home the reality of the war without being too explicit. For example, an icon on an artillery shell would not have been appropriate (too obvious) and neither would a religious depiction painted on a rife (same reason). The wood panel is a piece of material from a box that holds weapons without it looking like a weapon.

It subtly reminds the Pope about the war without being too militant about it.

Meanwhile, Little Rubio gave the Pope what essentially is a cheap-ass, dollar store football low-level employees give sixth-graders when they visit the State Department on a field trip from Nebraska. If there is anyone left at State’s protocol department who isn’t a Trump kiss ass, I’m sure they are burying their heads in the palms of their hands in embarrassment.

You make think these are small details, but they are not.

Trump, JD Vance another shameless Catholic who had the nerve to chastise the Pope about theology, and the MAGA media ecosystem have denigrated the Pope to no end. Little Marco had a primetime opportunity to extend the head of the church he claims to love a token of respect that, for just a moment, could have shown the world that someone in Trump’s orbit isn’t a shameless, thoughtless-ass MAGA simp.

Rubio could not even do that.

What Rubio showed us is that, in addition to being a cuck, a punk and a shameless puppet, he is also cheap, thoughtless and lazy.

I was scrolling down my X timeline when I saw conservative commentator Bill Kristol post that “the GOP’s Louisiana is basically (Victor) Orbán‘s Hungary.”

He was referring to the Louisiana state legislature voting to eliminate the Orleans Parish criminal court clerk position Calvin Duncan won in a recent election. Duncan spent more than two decades in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, so his win was notable given his backstory. But the racist GOP in the state couldn’t stand to see a Black man hold power. So they stripped it from him, at the urging of Gov. Jeff Landry.

When I saw this news, my first thought was, “America gon’ America.”

Kristol’s reaction was, “this reminds me of Hungary.”

It’s clear we live in two Americans: one in which Black people are used to its country abusing its civil rights. And another America that thinks it’s better than it actually is. To Kristol’s credit, he has been a sharp critic of Trump, the current state of the GOP and is actually using his platform to lead pro-democracy efforts.

I have no issue with him personally, so much as this habit of using ex-communist states as cautionary tales of where America could go if we don’t change course, as if the Jim Crow era we lived through just over 55 years ago is that far in the past. We do not need to reference Hitler’s Germany, for example, to warn America of the fascist trajectory we’re headed. This is a sentiment that Black Americans articulated when Hitler won power in the 1930s.

Why look to Hungary for democratic backsliding when we have an even better, local sample pool: the majority of White Americans who voted for Trump and his anti-democracy views in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections.

They voted for a man who has been convicted of dozens of felonies, found liable for sexually assaulting a woman and credibly accused of similar acts by dozens of others, impeached twice, caught on audio recording pressing Georgia state officials to reverse the 2020 election results in his favor, used his position as president to make billions, insult every ethnicity that isn’t white and a litany of other horrible things.

And white America said, “OK. We like that.“

Kleptocracy, authoritarianism and oligarchy aren’t alien to the American experience. They are the personification of it, primarily through racism and sexism.

This tendecy to compare all of the bad political developments happening to the U.S. with anti-democratic states abroad suggests many believe this isn’t supposed to happen because we’re above it. You know, the country that generated its centuries-old wealth through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, roughly 250 years of chattel slavery, nearly a century of Jim Crow and 50-plus years of post-Civil Rights Era, GOP-led efforts to reverse every advancement in human rights Black people have enjoyed.

Yeah, that country.

What happened in Louisiana with Duncan’s seat is not a play from the Victor Orbán book. That action comes straight from the racist, anti-Black politics that have permeated American society since its founding.

What happened in Louisiana reminds me of the 1898 Willington Race Riots in which white elected officials overthrew the local government in the port city because they refused to see Black elected officials in power. It reminds me of the 1898 Phoenix Race Riots, in Greenwood County, South Carolina, when a white mob attacked a Republican election official who took affidavits from Black voters who were prevented from voting. I’m reminded of those fatal race riots in New Orleans in,1866, when a white mob and local cops assaulted delegates to a state convention who were assembling in support of voting rights. The KKK has historically targeted and killed Black and white people who worked to empower Black voters.

None of that reminds me of Hungary. It reminds me of America.

Even after 1968, the end of the Civil Rights Era, Republican-run states have attacked the rights of Black voters. The states that restrict early voting, advocate against vote-by-mail, close down available polling stations and other mechanisms for people to cast ballots are GOP-controlled.

(Fun fact: Gov. Landry is Trump’s envoy to Greenland. You know, the autonomous territory of Denmark he threaten to annex by force. In fact he is attending a business conference there later this month that he was not invited to.)

All of these practices were firmly in place before trump was considered a serious candidate for public office. I’m not a fan of Orbán (RIP 2010-2026), but neither he nor Hungary have anything to do with the fuckery for which the vast majority of white Americans voted.

At least the people there had the common sense to vote Orbán out of office.

There has been this very concerted effort from progressive thinkings and “Never Trump” Republicans to explain MAGA’s attack on democratic institutions as behavior that only happens in nations that have broke away from communism in the early 1990s—as if breaking away from Jim Crow 20 years before the Berlin Wall fell gave us that much of a head start on democracy.

Much of the American electorate did not have full access to the ballot until the passing of the 1965 Voter Rights Act. Orbán didn’t do that. White America did.

By assigning a foreign, authoritarian marker to what is a solely American product (racism) isn’t the analogy Kristol or others think it is. It’s a cop out. More than that, by insinuating that America is better than Hungary or similar to it, we’re suggesting that America is much more advanced in its Democratic development than post-Warsaw Pact or ex-USSR nations. It also presumes a dearth of political maturity in ex-communist states that American voters presumably have.

Frankly, white Americans grapple with the meaning of democracy as intensely as people in some Eastern European states. I could argue that MAGA voters who fawn over Trump like a prophet are virtually identical with Russians who look at Putin like a God-sent emperor. Both electorates are easily drawn to strongman types who destroy democracy, use the church as nectar to justify national and ethnic superiority and turn a blind eye to any evil and graft their dear leaders Putin and Trump do.

This July, the United States will celebrate 250 years of existence. What many in the mainstream ecosystem will proclaim is a nation leading the world in democratic values. In reality, 88 of those years were in slavery, Jim Crow lasted roughly 90 years and, if we are to start at 1968, only the last 58 years have been a multi-racial democracy that the majority of white Americans truly never accepted and have actively fought against.

If we’re being honest, America has only been a true democracy for under 60 years. if you want to consider slavery and Jim Crow as markers of democracy then we can’t have this conversation in good faith.

In 2013, the SCOTUS ruled 5-4 in County vs Holder that jurisdictions under the Voter Rights Act of 1965 that had to get pre-clearance before changing local laws to ensure they weren’t racist no longer needed to because racism isn’t the issue it once was. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that the county has changed since the 1960s and that the formula it used to determine compliance with the act was outdated. He was a Bush appointee. Much of the unraveling of voter rights have come from Republican efforts at the state level and stem from that 2013 decision.

Yes, what happened in Louisiana with Duncan’s election was undemocratic and racist. But Republicans were terrible before Trump won office. They just weren’t as brash and uncouth. Louisiana is not Hungary.

The Louisiana GOP reminds me of the racist, white, Republican Party it has been since my lifetime.

GOP Florida Congressman Randy Fine’s milkshake is so racist that it even brings the Armenians to the yard.

Yep, Armenians. They are pissed at him. And for good reason.

I guess he’s taken a break from insulting Muslims and Arabs, so Armenians are the next best thing. Fine, who represents Florida’s sixth Congressional district, said during a recent appearance on the Jenny Beth show that “We don’t want Armenians to be able to serve in Congress” when asked about social media influencer Dan Bilzerian’s GOP primary challenge for his seat.

(By the way, I am not defending Bilzerian. His anti-Semitic remarks are well-documented)

Below are Fine’s full comments with the most inflammatory langauge in bold:

Israel just put out a list of the top 10 most dangerous anti-Semites in the world. And to my amazement, a guy I’d never even heard of until about three weeks ago was ranked number one. He’s got a very large social media following, not from Florida, he lives in Las Vegas when he’s not in his foreign country of Armenia. But you know, he’s just a terrible anti-Semite. I think what he’s trying to show is that this group of hate-filled lunatics and losers can take hold in the Republican Party.

But look, my, constituents are smart. The little Armenian said, I think that President Trump was a pedophile rapist who should be impeached. That’s not a winning argument. It may work in Armenia, where he’s from [sic], but that’s not an argument. That’s not gonna work in the United States.

So, it’s bad. We have to take it seriously because we don’t want this to take root in our party. We don’t want Armenians to be able to serve in Congress. But I’m not gonna lose too much sleep about it.

Yeah, that’s pretty fuckin’ racist and here’s why.

(Also, I find it interesting how he talks about “hate-filled lunatics” when he is a…”hate-filled lunatic.)

First, we need to appreciate the context of the person making the remark, the remark itself and who is the target of said racism. In context, Fine is an Islamophobe. He regularly attacks people of color, comparing them to terrorists just because of their faith and skin color.

He has targeted his Democratic colleague Ilan Omar and New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani for being terrorists and has even said Muslims must “be destroyed.”

Pretty nasty shit. But let’s breakdown his most inflammatory remarks.

“It may work in Armenia” is certainly xenophobic because it targets a person based on nationality. Belzeria is a dual citizen of Armenia, even though he was born and raised in Florida.

There is also no law forbidding members of Congress to hold dual citizenship. Sen. Ted Cruz served in state government and the U.S. Senate as a citizen of Canada before the Dallas Morning News reported on his Canadian citizenship in 2015 and he immediately renounced it. To his credit, Cruz said he was unaware of his Canadian citizenship because he was born in Canada to an American mom.

We can discuss if there should be a rule against dual citizenship. But as it stands, it is not illegal.

As for “the little Armenia” remark. Come on, man. Could you imagine if Belzerian, who is known for his own anti-Semitic language, called Fine a “fat Jew”?

Fine’s objective was simple: he wants voters of his district to see Belzerian as non-white. Belzerian doesn’t fit the phenotypical look of the average white American his MAGA base celebrates, like a Pete Hegseth, for example. Darker-skinned and bearded, Belzerian doesn’t look like the “square jaw” white pilot Charlie Kirk preferred to see when he boarded a plane.

(I am pretty sure there are plenty of qualified, square jaw, pilots down there in hell to fly him around)

He is othering Belzerian. He doesn’t look Iike us, Fine, insinuates. Furthermore, when Fine hones in on Belzerian’s nationality, he, I think, alludes to him being something scary, like Muslims, Islam or any of the other people he has insulted. His base is used to his racism and xenophobia, so Belzerian’s looks can be interpreted as anything that isn’t white. By pointing out his Armenian citizenship, Fine can also play into Trump’s attacks on Latinos whom MAGA accuses of crossing the border illegally to commit high rates of crime (Which is not true). Belzerian can be interpreted as someone who threatens the security of white America.

He is one of them (non-white), which means he isn’t one us (white). Fine does not have to explicitly state any of this. The point is that it’s implied.

You do not have to be a Black person or person of color to be racialized. You only have to serve as a conduit for racism.

Let’s be real: if you look at Bilzerian, he doesn’t give off traditional, middle America, square jaw white man. He looks like he could be something other than white. And that little bit of ambiguity is enough to racialize Bilzerian’s ethnic Armenian heritage.

Race is a social construct, as you all know. It doesn’t describe the true essence of who we are as human beings so much as it determines how we view each other under a white supremacist context. I work in Eastern Europe as an independent reporter and have lived in the Caucasus, primarily Georgia. I’ve been to Armenia and I can definitely tell you their history of experiencing genocide is not a white experience.

How they exist in the U.S. is a different story.

Armenians do not fit the neat definition of white as some of us think they do, no matter how much some of you may despise the Kardashian family—which is a separate topic to itself.

Whiteness is predicated off white, Protestant, English ancestry that denotes a particular type of look: blue eyes, pale skin, etc. And, yes, you can make the argument that Armenians have integrated into American whiteness. But American race norms cannot erase the fact that Armenians do not always neatly fit into that category, when you account for their own ethnic features and how they experience race outside of the U.S.

In Russia, for example, Armenians are subjected to racism and are considered “Black” because of their darker skin compared to the average Russia. Armenians are from the Caucasus region that has been subject to centuries of Russian racial stereotypes (big nose insults, etc). So Armenians may be viewed as white to many in the U.S., but they certainly aren’t seen as white (or more specifically, Slavic or Russian) in Russia—because they aren’t.

Armenians are racially profiled by police in traffic stops and landlords are documented for refusing to lease to them because of their ethnicity.

Decades of scholarship have been devoted to exploring racism against Armenians in Russia, be it the USSR or the current Russian Federation. So, yes, Armenians face racism in the world and there is plenty of scholarly research and other documentation to prove it.

In the case of Fine’s comments, Bilzerian can be viewed as “chorniy,” but in a racist American context. So, yes, Armenians can be racialized. Dan Belzerian was a direct target of Fine’s racist rhetoric. And he didn’t have to be a person of color to be subjected to it.

What I’m reading today

Each Monday, I will share articles that I find interesting and encouge you to read them as well. I’ll also provide a similar list each Friday to enter the weekend.

1. Read this amazing feature report in The Guardian by Luke Harding about a Ukrainian soldier who was stuck in a dugout with a Russian soldier for two weeks and his story of surviving the ordeal. (Link)

2. The Kyiv Independent is the premiere English language newspaper in Ukraine and they produce gold-standard journalism. This report about the ongoing corruption scandal involving President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a must read. Not just because of Zelenskyy’s possibly culpability, but the fact that journalists are still reporting on corruption during a full-scale invasion. (Link)

3. Latosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, wrote a piece for Contraband Camp, about how Americans should respond to the recent Supreme Court ruling that essentially erases Black electoral power in Louisiana. (Link)

What I’m up to this week

I’ll be headed to Sumy to search out a few stories for Substack and my new YouTube channel. I am deleting my old one and starting anew. More on that soon. This is my last week in Kyiv before I head to Warsaw Sunday and then to Denmark. From there I will be home in New York Wednesday. It’ll be a three-week stay and then I return to Kyiv.

Me!

Moving forward, I am gonna end each article with a photo of me from that day. Here is me today at Patron Pet Center, a shelter here in Kyiv for cats and dogs impacted by Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Working on a story about their work.

Have a great start to your week!

Anytime I tell folks I’m pro-Palestine and pro-Ukraine, I lose followers on my social media platforms, get accused of spreading pro-Hamas propaganda or, the most common retort, “you’re anti-Semitic.”

Fuck ‘em. None of it stops me from saying the truth: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians and at least nearly a dozen human rights organizations say so.

If you somehow conflate that with me hating Jews, that is not my problem.

That said, I’m happy two Ukrainians have decided to get on the Morally Consistent wagon by joining the Global Summit flotilla to Gaza in solidarity with Palestinians who are being subjected to genocide by the Israeli government. Nina Potarska and Andrii Movchan published a new Instagram account , @sumud_ukr, stating their reasons for joining the flotilla.

The first post is of them posing on a dock with Palestinian flags prominently flying in the background.

“As Ukrainians, representatives of a nation resisting aggression and occupation we cannot stand aside,” they said in a joint video statement. “We cannot leave the Palestinian people alone. If we are against annexation, if we are against settler colonialism, if we are against violation of international law, then it is our duty to stand with the people of Palestine.”

The boat on which Andrii and Nina’s boat were traveling was intercepted by Israeli forces before reaching Gaza. The plan was to deliver food and medical supplies. The instagram account documenting the Ukrainian pair’s journey alleges the two were “kidnapped” and injured by Israeli authorities. At one point, organizers lost contact with them. Eventually, the account said they were accounted for. As of the publication of this article, Andrii and Nina are receiving treatment at a hospital in Greece.

I reached out to the organization representing them requesting an interview with Andrii and Nina and was told to expect a response soon. I will update you when I get a chance to talk with these two brave Ukrainians.

Here in Ukraine, people tend to be very pro-Israel (even though Israel isn’t especially “Pro-Ukraine”). After October 7, Israeli flags were displayed on monitors and billboards throughout the country and elected officials declared their support. But then, the extreme reaction to the attacks followed. Going well beyond containing Hamas, Israel has gone on what many human rights organizations claim is a genocidal attack against the Palestinian population. South Africa filed a case against Israel before the International Court of Justice alleging genocide, accusations Israel has denied.

Ukrainians I talk with in person and online tend to view the atrocities Palestinian civilians experience not as acts of unjustified violence, but avoidable consequences for being thoughtless supporters of Hamas. Another issue is that local media in Ukraine doesn’t do a particularly good job of providing nuanced coverage of what is happening in Gaza and is very pro-Israeli in its reporting. I am not one to talk about fair media coverage because my own country, the U.S., also pushes Israeli propaganda at the expense of Palestinians. In fact, a major U.S. news outlet reportedly insists that its journalists take a pro-Israel stance or find work elsewhere.

To be fair, Ukraine isn’t as egregiously pro Israel as many assume. Kyiv does recognize Palestine as an independent state (the U.S. does not) and has supported some notable resolutions favoring Palestine. That is something.

It is not clear to what degree Nina and Andrii’s activism on behalf of Palestine will go or if they have any plans beyond their attempts to transport aid to Gaza. But the mere fact that they have even used their Ukrianian identity and struggle to connect with Palestinians is remarkable. Few people, anywhere, want to risk the professional and personal hit of backing Palestine.

But Nina and Andrii already have.

Maybe, their bravery will help get more Ukrainians to speak up and draw links between Russian and Israeli colonialism. I’ll keep you posted on how this is catching on here in Kyiv and update you on Nina and Andrii’s health as I get information.

I look forward to interviewing them on my Substack live and hopefully in person about what motivates them to stand for Palestine and why they want more Ukrainians to join them.

But what do you think about their activism? Should Ukrainians link their struggles with Palestine? Let me know your thoughts.

MAGA has more fuel to stoke their race war over a Ukrainian refugee that they could give two shits about.

A psychiatric hospital in North Carolina has determined that Decarlos Brown, the man captured on CCTV stabbing Iryna Zarutska to death on public transport in August, is not fit to stand trial in her murder. A judge has determined his trial will start when he is deeded fit to participate in his own defense. That could be a year from now, according to some reports. Brown is in federal custody in Chicago in connection with her death.

As you could imagine, MAGA is loosing their shit over it.

Benny Johnson, who was fired from a journalism job back in 2014 for serial plagiarism, ranted on Twitter that Brown should get the death penalty and that it should be a “public execution.” If you search Iryna’s name, you’ll find plenty of racist garbage highlighting Black men accused of killing women and other white fear diatribes.

We all know (or should know) that this story is nothing more than a propaganda campaign masked as uproar over so-called rising violent crime to gin up white fear of immigrants and people of color whom they feel will replace them. There’s a reason Trump falsely said Brown entered the U.S. “through open borders,” even though he was born and raised in North Carolina.

That, in itself, is ironic. Trump, essentially, bestowed citizenship on a refugee and stripped it from a man who was born and raised in the U.S., like millions of other Black descendants from chattel slavery. Iryna’s whiteness made her eligible to become part of American white womanhood and revoked the citizenship of the man accused of killing her.

Those Ukrainians who aren’t politically useful for Trump, are arrested and deported.

MAGA’s propaganda campaign is a prime example of how U.S. racial politics and structures function not only for Americans, but people like Iryna who immigrate into it. It highlights to us all how the very real construct of race often ensnares those who did not ask to participate in its hierarchies, but are nonetheless key players in its politics—even in death.

Within the U.S. and global context, Iryna fits the construct of white. But that doesn’t define who she was, nor is it an accurate description of her Ukrainian Identity and the centuries of Russian occupation that culminated to the 2022 invasion that forced she and her family to flee for the U.S.

As I writing this article from my flat here in Kyiv, air ride sirens are blasting across the city, warning residents to seek shelter from Russian drone attacks. U.S. military aid that could help Ukraine defend against these aerial strikes have stopped since Trump entered office in 2025.

Europe now buys U.S. weapons and then sends them to Ukraine.

Since Iryna’s murder, dozens of “white women”—if we’re to use MAGA’s logic of racially classifying Ukrainians— and their children have lost their lives, due to Russian drone attacks that have hit civilian areas across the country. Trump’s State Department also ended a program at Yale that helps track children abducted by Russia. If Trump or his MAGA cult care about white women like, why defund a program aimed at finding their children?

Trump can order his DOJ to indict Brown for a federal crime for killing a white woman, yet he rolls out the red carpet for Putin, a man whose military has killed thousands of civilians—including “white women”— in Ukraine and is a fugitive wanted by the International Criminal Court for kidnapping their children?

Of course, no one is making light of Brown’s actions captured on CCTV. But why does Trump have more smoke for a mentally-ill man who is charged for killing one white woman but has none for a man who, with his full faculties, leads a military that is raping hundreds of them (estimates are believed to be much higher), stealing thousands of their kids and brainwashing them in military camps?

Neither Trump, his MAGA hoard nor the dozens of murals popping up in her so-called honor across the U.S. mention any of this. The horrors of Russian military violence Iryna suffered before she fled her native Kyiv and the history of her people is not a “white” experience.

It is a colonized, oppressed one.

Over here, Russian supremacy is the ruling construct of hatred and regional domination. Ukrainians, in particular, aren’t viewed as racially inferior, per se. Putin insists Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” and that their country is made up.

Trump wants you to view Iryna as white, but centuries of Russian colonialism against the Ukrainian people tell a difference story. One in which Russia has subjugated the Ukrainian language and culture, stole land and killed millions of its people in a man-made famine and persecuted and executed its intellectuals—all for defending Ukrainian identity. None of this fits within the confines of whiteness as we understand it in the U.S., nor do Ukrainians experience the privileges of that racial marker within their own regional context.

If you don’t believe me, ask the thousands of Ukrainians (those Russian speakers Putin swears he’s protecting) killed during his 12-plus year invasion and the millions in occupation against their will. None of this is a white experience.

But once Iryna left the geography of Russian oppression and immigrated to the U.S., she automatically became white. When a Black man killed her, she became a cause.

Trump is a white nationalist and is very good with creating symbols with which his base can resonate. That is all Iryna is for Trump. A prop. The MAGA-funded murals popping up around the country of her might as well be akin to Confederate statues. But instead of upholding the virtues of southern domination, these murals perform another purpose: a racist reminder that white women must be protected from imaginary, predatory Black men.

Trump can’t call for Black men to be lynched at random, as he could have back in the days of Jim Crow. (Though I wouldn’t put that past him). But he can make her killing a rallying cry for racists who wish they could. Memorializing her with white supremacist symbolism masks as public art will have to do.

The reality is that Trump doesn’t care about Iryna. He cares about what her death can do for him. If he truly cared about honoring her white womanhood, he’d at least provide weapons to Ukraine so that Russian soldiers can’t advance in her homeland’s territory, occupy villages and sexually assault women and kidnap their children.

But he cares too much about Russian money to do that.

MAGA isn’t upset that Brown is unfit for trial. They’re angry because they cannot exact Jim Crow-style revenge on Black men whom they feel threaten white woman and the natural order of things, as their racist thinking goes.

Iryna didn’t ask to be Trump’s white woman. But, based on the accusations of the dozens of women who’ve accused him of sexual assault, he’s not one to ask for consent anyhow.

When you realize how sickening MAGA’s use of Iryna’s death has been, it’s hard to tell between Brown and MAGA who is more mentally unfit.

Additional sources:

Suspect deemed incompetent to stand trial in Iryna Zarutska murder case (Link)

Iryna Zarutska Was Not A ‘White Woman’ (link)

Three Black Men Falsely Accused and Lynched in Duluth, Minnesota (link)

Trump Administration Shutters Research Lab Tracking Stolen Ukrainian Children (link)

But neither , an independent reporter who covers Russian influence in Africa, nor I believe this agreement will hold.

“The Russians need manpower and they are desperate,” Obaji Jr said. “So I don’t see how a country is desperate for fighters, but all of a sudden say, ‘Well, we don’t want to (recruit Kenyans anymore). So that’s not going to happen.”

At least 1,000 Kenyans are have been sent to fight in Russia. At least 16 are missing in Russia and 47 Kenyans have been repatriated back home, according to the BBC.

Some reports estimate that nationals from 36 African nations are participating in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This is just one of the news items Obaji and I talked about during our livestream. Russia is showing no signs of stopping its illegal invasion of Ukraine. It is facing major manpower issues and has resorted to recruiting mercenaries from other countries, as well as luring unsuspecting people by promising high-paying jobs that are actually military contracts.

Many of these people who are tricked come from Africa. While many Africans who signed up to fight for Russia were, in fact, tricked, Obaji says those who fight for Russia do so willingly at this point.

“In the beginning, a lot of people did not understand,” he said. “Many of them were told that they were going to end up as drivers or working as the Mexican substitute in Russia. And eventually they found themselves on the front lines in Ukraine. But as the months went by, especially since last year, the vast majority of recruits knew what they were going to do.”

Each week, I’ll be leading conversations with African journalists about the role Russia plays on the continent, including recruitment for its war here in Ukraine, disinformation campaigns, Wagner operations and mining of its natural resources.

Obaji and I devoted an hour to discussing the latest news about Russia’s activities in Africa. Be sure to watch our conversation and share your thoughts in the comments.

Reading list:

You either fight or die’: Kenyans tricked into joining Russia-Ukraine war (Link)

Russian Crypto Payments Network Seeks Africa Expansion – (Link)

Russia confirms 16 Cameroonian soldiers killed in Ukraine war (Link)

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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But how have Black Iranians been impacted by all of this?

I see lots of posts across social media by Black Americans, in particular, who rightfully say they didn’t vote for Trump and, therefore, don’t want to be pulled into the ire of Iranian retaliation. If you haven’t been living under a rock, Trump has waged a war against Iran for no legitimate reason and it looks like it could escalate to a ground invasion with the deployment of 3,000 additional troops to the region.

We definitely didn’t vote for this—or him, for that matter. And neither did any other sensible person.

But some of the posts Black folks have been publishing go a bit too far in whitewashing the Iranian leadership’s so-called solidarity with Black Americans.

Most of the reels, like these, show Black people dancing around in celebrating the fact that the leadership has expressed sympathy for Black Americans facing racism or point to the 1979 hostage crisis in which Black Americans and women were released because it “wasn’t their fight.”

But Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda, a documentary filmmaker and founder of the Collective for Black Iranians, told me that those hostages weren’t let go because the regime truly believed in women’s rights or the liberation of Black people. They did it for positive PR.

Not to mention, the current Iranian government has used sexual assault to crush political dissent. At least 6,000 people have been confirmed killed in the latest anti-government protests back in January, with that number estimated to be at more than 30,000.

This is not the government Black folks, or anyone, need to cheer on.

As someone born and raised in Iran, Priscillia finds it disheartening that so many Black Americans seem to be falling for the propaganda that, somehow, as the regime kills its own people who dare to protest them, are somehow kind and equal in their treatment of Black people. Slavery ended in Iran in 1929, a fact that many scholars of the region say the current leadership and the monarchy before it refuses to acknowledge.

In an interview I conducted with her a few years ago, Priscillia told me of the ways in which Iranian society is racist against Black people, including her own experiences.

Indeed, the U.S and the west in general, has attacked Iran’s sovereignty—especially during the 1953 coup—and shown military aggression. Not to mention, the religious zealotry of U.S. politics towards Iran, arguably, is as bad as the theocracy of the current regime in Tehran.

None of that should allow for any whitewashing of how Iran treats Black people. I am not sure of the exact number of real accounts that are posting these reels praising the Iranians, but I know its way too many for comfort.

If we, as Black folks, are selective about who is invited to the cookout, we need to be sure not to invite the current Iranian regime because they certainly don’t deserve the big piece of chicken.

Watch my full conversation with Priscillia above.

We were all wrong. Dead wrong.

I went as far as to write a now-deleted thread that explaining, why the plan was similar. , an expert on arms control, responded by outlining how wrong I was. I took as an opportunity to 1. Acknowledge I was wrong 2. Model what it can look like to do so on social media and 3. Educate the rest of us on why comparing the Iran Deal with Trump’s terms undermines well-intentioned people whose bigger point is that Obama tried to avoid the very conflict Trump has put us in.

First, I am going to republish Nicole’s fact-check and explain why it’s critically important to understand the difference between Obama and Trump’s not just with the technical aspects, but the the robust expertise and diplomatic engagement in Obama’s approach and the lack of either with Trump’s/

First here is Nicole’s fact-check. The bold is her distinguishing the what was not in Obama’s Iran deal:

The majority of Trump’s 6 demands as reported by Axios were not part of the JCPOA.

1) No missile program for 5 years (not covered under JCPOA, no missile related issues except for the removal of UNSC sanctions related to arms embargos)

2) Zero uranium enrichment (No, Iran could enrich to 3.67% and have its stockpile of 300kg)

3) Decommissioning of nuclear reactors (pointless now point because Arak has been bombed but this was converted under JCPOA Annex B, unclear if this means Bushehr too)

4) Arms control treaties with regional countries (not JCPOA)

5) No financing for regional proxies (not JCPOA)

6) Strict outside observation protocols around the creation and use of centrifuges (JCPOA arguably covered this but unclear if the admin is thinking about this in terms of the JCPOA logic)

You may not think these detail distinctions matter, but they do. The main point, as I explain in the recorded livestream, is that Obama was razor focused on stopping Iran from enriching uranium and a long term goal of moderating Tehran’s aggressive posture towards the U.S. There are decades of history that justify that aggression, but that conversation is for another post. Obama took a diplomatic approach that required years of negotiations, technical knowhow and great timing.

Trump threw it all away with an maximalist approach and pull us into a the very type of conflict that Obama’s deal was designed to avoid.

If you want a full, technical breakdown of why those differences matter, please watch the recorded stream with Nicole.

Shout out to Nicole for correcting me and being a good sport for coming on my livestream to have what was a great conversation.

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Ukrainians may be considered white in the United States, but Donald Trump’s anti-Blackness and xenophobic campaign to purify the country’s bloodline didnt get the memo.

Exact numbers are elusive, but news reports make clear that ICE agents have arrested Ukrainians as part of Trump’s wider efforts to deport as many “non-Americans” as possible who are deemed a threat to U.S. security. One is Roman Surovtsev, who was arrested during a check-in with ICE back in August and hasn’t been released since. A Ukrainian woman in San Diego, Viktoria, was arrested by ICE during her green card interview in December and held for days; she was later released.

An arrest that really stuck out to me comes from an op-ed by Shakhnoza Mihboieva pleading for her husband to be released after he was arrested by ICE.

“We came to the United States legally,” she wrote. “We followed every rule. We believed in the welcome America offered to families fleeing war. I understand the importance of laws and procedures, but I do not believe the American people intended for humanitarian parole families, who were invited here legally, to be separated and detained like this.”

This sticks out to me becasue I wonder if Shakhnoza has any Black American friends. If she did, they would have told her that we, too, follow every rule and abide by the law and still find ourselves jammed up by the very criminal legal system that is supposed to protect us. Her words stand out because she sounds like a woman who is heartbroken and dismayed, as if she was lied to. She did everything right and was still screwed. She seems shell-shocked. This isn’t’ the America she has come to know.

This is the “Land of Opportunity” and Second Chances.

Black people know good and well that isn’t true for us. Roman, who has a criminal record, was supposed to be living his second chance. For one, it is clear from the CNN report that he has more than made up for his crime that happened more than 20 years ago. Besides having a clean record since then, he and his wife started a painting business and bought a home north of Dallas.

Comparatively, Trump, AKA Mr. Two Corinthians, has been convicted of 34 felonies, including a civil court conviction for sexually assaulting a woman, has shown no redemptive qualities at all and served no jail time for his crimes. In fact, he has pardoned more than 1,500 felons who tried to overthrow the U.S. government because he refused to concede the 2020 election he clearly lost. And let’s not get into the Georgia election results he tried to reverse and the recorded phone call has him caught red-handed.

This is the man who is judging Roman as a criminal unworthy of living in the U.S.

For Black people, this is the America we’ve come to expect. A country that disappoints us so often that we’re almost numb to her unfairness. Black people are used to white people —particularly white men—being given special treatment by the judicial system and being judge by those white men as if they are pure as the Virgin Mary.

Long before Trump targeted Ukrainians, he focused on people of color. He isn’t the only one. Under all U.S. presidents, the American legal system has disproportionately targeted Black men as criminals, disenfranchised us economically, politically and socially. The United States has been a republic for more than 250 years and racial authoritarianism has been its ruling form of government for a vast majority of that time, with the past 50 years being the only period in which we have been the fragile democracy we know today.

And it is that fragility that Trump is attacking with his use of ICE to revert us to that racial authoritarianism of Jim Crow he tells his base he wish we’d return to. European immigrants throughout U.S. history were largely free from the burden’s of racism and eventually integrated into the whiteness, despite their own challenges such as those experienced by the Irish, for example.

Ukrainians who fled the brutality of Putin’s colonialism and Russian supremacy were welcomed to the U.S. with open arms, unlike many Black and brown people who escaped their own horrors around the world. Relative to people of color refugees, Ukrianians were able to adjust to a country that did not view them as threats. The Biden Administration, rightfully, ensured they had a fairly easy transition into the country. I do not think they anticipated that Trump’s campaign rhetoric targeting Spanish-speaking immigrants because they didn’t fit the stereotypes that Trump propagandized about them: “illegal.” Criminal. Dangerous. Brown.

They had all of the paperwork, so they assumed they weren’t included in his racist rants because they were white. When Trump entered office, Ukrainians soon would learn that they aren’t white enough. They’re learning that white supremacy serves the state and the directives of its overloads and the most powerful who finances them. Trump has long lied that immigrants are responsible for the majority of rising crime, even as statistical data point to the polar opposite. Usually, those immigrants Trump visualized for his xenophobic stump speeches were Black and Brown people, particularly those from Spanish-speaking countries and Arabs—especially Muslims.

But when you’re trying to prove you’re freeing the country of criminals who are threatening white people, you need numbers to show your efforts. That some of those numbers include Ukrainians like Roman, who clearly has changed his life, or Viktoria, who has no criminal record at all, doesn’t matter. White nationalist fervor centers white people steeped in centuries-old settler colonial roots that have benefited from decades of privilege and institutional racism.

Though Ukrainians traditionally have had the complexion for the protection from the racism of American law enforcement, Trump’s style of xenophobia now targets them because he doesn’t respect immigration law. Just as the conservative U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at the rights that protect Black people, it has now granted Trump the right to racially profile people and target them under the guise of protecting the nation. At least with Black Americans born in the U.S., we have our freedom papers, meaning we always carry our ID, just as we carried our paperwork during slavery for inspection when a white man stopped us.

Ukrainians don’t even have that to rely on.

As someone who lives and works in Ukraine and focuses on the intersection of race, Russian colonialism and global democracy, I can tell you that most people in this country did not expect that the U.S. could treat its people so dismissively on the diplomatic stage and so cruelly as refugees fleeing an ongoing Russian invasion Trump shows little interest in ending. They did not expect this because they are not used to being given nigga treatment. They are learning that white supremacy is a undiscerning beast that consumes everything in its path—including white people too poor and disconnected from power to avoid its gluttony.

Ukrianians are leaning that they, too, are on the menu.

It isn’t because they stopped being white. It’s because whiteness was never the guarantee I think most of them believed it to be. It was a temporary alignment with the dominate culture that didn’t marginalize them like it did the Mexican immigrant or even the foundational Black American. Ukrainians are leaning that, in America, one can be viewed as white but that it’s conditional at best and disposable at its worst.

Black Americans have never misunderstand the system—we learned it.

Ukrainians are just now being introduced to it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way Donald Trump talks about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee who was killed in North Carolina last year.

His recent mentioning of her name during the State of the Union and his use of her mother, Anna, has especially been at the top of my mind. More specifically, I keep going back to the case of the Central Park Five and how their wrongful convictions connected to Trump’s use of Iryna’s murder. Five teenage boys—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise—were falsely accused of brutally assaulting a white woman jogging in Central Park, in 1989.

The media coverage was relentless and racial undertones were obvious to anyone paying attention. And Donald Trump jumped right into the middle of it.

He bought full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for the boys to be put to death. I think about that moment a lot now, because when I look back at those ads, what stands out to me is how clearly Trump understood the racial mythology he was tapping into. American history is full of stories about Black men being accused of harming white women. Those accusations have triggered lynch mobs, riots and generations of racial fear built on the stereotype that Black men are predators.

Trump didn’t invent that mythology. But he knew exactly how to use it—even with Iryna’s killing.

Years later, the five boys were exonerated. Another man confessed to the crime. The city of New York eventually paid the men $41 million in restitution for what had been done to them. But even after all that, Trump still insisted they were guilty. During his 2024 presidential campaign, he repeated the claim again. The now grown men, one of whom is a city councilman, have sued him for defamation.

Trump knows they were exonerated, but he doesn’t care.

The point is that his politics continue to exploit a familiar image: the dangerous Black man threatening a white woman. It’s one of the oldest racial myths in American political life, and Trump continues to use it because he knows it still resonates with a lot of racist white people who support him.

(Mind you, Trump has been accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, caught on camera making sexist remarks and was recently found civilly liable of sexual assault in New York)

That’s why, when I watched him talk about Iryna Zarutska during the State of the Union a few weeks ago, I immediately thought about the Central Park Five. Trump referred to the man who killed her as coming to America through “open borders,” even though he was born and raised in the United States.

He described Iryna as a “beautiful young woman” who had fled a terrible war, even though he does nothing to end it.

I spend most of my time reporting from Ukraine, so I know Trump doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine or helping Ukrainians defend themselves from Russia’s invasion—which is why Iryna fled and ended up in Charlotte in the first place. He has halted military assistance to Kyiv, levies no real sanctions against Moscow and continues to pressure Ukraine to accept territorial concessions that would effectively keep its sovereign land under Russian colonial rule.

At the same time, Ukrainians who fled the war and came to the United States are living with growing uncertainty about their own status. Many of them arrived under Uniting for Ukraine, a humanitarian parole program created in 2022 that allows Ukrainians to live and work legally in the United States for up to two years. Others have Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which protects them from deportation because of the war.

These programs were designed to give Ukrainians safety while their country fights for survival, but face uncertainty; some have left the U.S. for other countries as a result. My Ukrainian friends who are in the U.S. under those programs worry that those protections could disappear, especially as ICE targets and arrests them as they do Black and brown people.

So when I watched Iryna’s mother stand up during the State of the Union while the room applauded, I found myself wondering how secure her own future is in the U.S. How long before she outlives her usefulness to the political story that elevated her tragedy? You’d think he’d at least use that primetime moment to secure United for Ukraine and extend TPS for Ukrainians indefinitely, but he didn’t.

Trump’s words and the applause that followed weren’t about Iryna at all.

Her death has become political theater. Iryna’s story became another chapter in the same racial narrative Trump has been using for decades. And once I started looking at it that way, I noticed something else. The same week Iryna Zarutska was killed in Charlotte, a white man in Tulsa, Oklahoma stabbed a white woman in the throat on a city bus and almost killed her. Trump didn’t mention that case. Neither did the MAGA ecosystem that spends so much time warning that white women are under attack.

Some people might say the story didn’t gain national attention because the woman survived, but that’s not the point. A white woman was attacked. If MAGA truly believed white women were under siege, that story should have mattered. But the man who stabbed her was white. And in Trump’s racial narrative, that makes the story politically useless.

It cannot reinforce the myth that danger always has a darker face.

The same pattern emerged again in another case that barely registered in the national conversation. Another Ukrainian refugee, Kateryna Tovmash, was murdered in North Carolina on Valentine’s Day along with her partner. Authorities say the man accused of killing them—Caleb Barnes—drove seven hours from Ohio to commit the murders.

Trump and the MAGA movement said nothing about Kateryna.

We know why. The alleged killer was a white man named Caleb.

His mugshot does not evoke the racial fears that American politics has relied on for centuries. We know the person who killed Iryna did it becasue it was captured on camera. What is significant is when similar crimes are committed by whittle men and the silence from MAGA that follows. This is why I keep coming back to the Central Park Five. That case shows the formula Trump has been using for most of his public life: a nonwhite face cast as the criminal and a white-looking face cast as the victim. As was the case with the five boys, it doesn’t matter that they didn’t commit the act. It matters that their Black faces, by default, presume they did.

When the perpetrator is Black (or alleged to be), the crime becomes a national spectacle.

When the perpetrator is white, the story fades away.

And when the victim is someone like Iryna Zarutska—a refugee whose story can be molded into a racial parable—her humanity becomes secondary to the political symbolism attached to her death. Reporting on Ukraine has made me think a lot about propaganda and the stories powerful people tell to justify their actions.

Ukrainians know this better than most people.

For years, Russian propaganda has insisted that Ukrainians are not a real nation—that their culture, language and history are somehow artificial. That kind of rhetoric strips people of their humanity. It makes their suffering easier to dismiss. Putin doesn’t talk about Ukrainians as people. He discusses Ukraine as not a real country, a land mass that belongs to Russia or a fake state controlled by western powers to threaten Russian national security. It’s all bullshit and lies, but this is a very effective narrative he has used to justify attacking and colonizing Ukraine over the past 12-plus years.

Ukrainians are stereotyped to the point where he lies to justify killing them. Trump uses racist stereotypes similarly to justify unconstitutional targeting of people of color by ICE and rhetoric to dehumanize Black men as predators of white women.

Russian Supremacy and White Supremacy are pretty similar, when you think about it.

Iryna’s death doesn’t matter Trump as much as the racial symbolism that can be extracted from it—same as the woman who was assaulted in Central Park in 1989. I look at what happened to those five boys in 1989, and observe the way Trump and MAGA talk about Iryna Zarutska, and I come to a simple conclusion.

In Trump’s politics, tragedy is never just tragedy. It’s a racial script.

Someone always has to play the Black villain. And that requires a white victim. But what Iryna’s killing tells us is that her murder only qualifies her as a white woman worth mentioning in MAGA’s ecosystem if the perpetrator is Black.

Kateryna, the Ukrainian killed on Valentine’s Day, was not a “white woman” worth mentioning because her perpetrator was a white man.

Just as in Putin’s Russia, Ukrainians are also invisible in Trump’s America

Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with , who was a medical student in Kharkiv before the war and had to start his education over in Germany where he eventually settled.

He has one of the most power stories of resilience you’ll ever hear. I asked him about racism in Ukraine and Germany. He told me how hard it is for medical students from Ukraine to earn professional recognition in Germany and what needs to change for the country to be more welcoming to refugees like him.

Looking forward to your thoughts about our conversation.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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A Ukrainian refugee was killed in North Carolina this weekend.

Kateryna Tovmash, 21, and her partner, Matthew Wade, 28, were shot dead inside their home in North Carolina on Feb. 14. Motives behind their murders are unclear, but authorities have identified her ex-boyfriend Caleb Hayden Fosnaugh, 25, as the suspect.

Fosnaugh, according to reports, drove seven hours from his home in Ohio, broke into Tovmash’s house and killed she and Wade. He was caught in Ohio soon after and has been charged with murder. Tovmash is the second Ukrainian refugee to be killed in the state of North Carolina in the span of six months. Iryna Zarutska was killed by a mentally ill man on public transport in Charlotte back in September in what is widely considered a random attack.

The only difference between Tovmash and Zarutska is the lack of MAGA outrage between the two killings: Zarutska’s killer is a Black man and Tovmash’s alleged killer is white.

I wrote back in September that the only reason MAGA raged on about Iryna’s killing was because her killer was a Black man whose face they could use to rile up their racist base. Over the centuries, in U.S. history, politicians have ginned up stereotypes and lies about Black people and crime—especially myths of the Black male predator who sexually assaults white women—to successfully win campaigns and influence public perception.

MAGA used Zarutska’s death to perpetuate the centuries-long lie that Black men prey on white women and that white America must stand firm to protect them moving forward. Mind you, MAGA makes little to no mention of her Ukrainian Identity. They erased it and replaced her humanity with whiteness, which speaks more to MAGA’s racism than to who Iryna was as a person.

Now that we have a second Ukrainian woman killed in the same state in six months, it’ll be interesting to see how MAGA responds now that we know law enforcement has arrested a white man as the alleged shooter. I do not expect Donald Trump, Elon Musk, JD Vance and the far-right influencers to rally for Kateryna Tovmash. Department of Justice won’t Tovmash’s killer with a federal crime, as they did with Iryna Zarutska. Andrew Tate, a misogynist who is accused of sex trafficking and assault in three countries, will not likely fund murals to be commissioned in Tovmash’s honor, as he did with Zarutska.

Why? Because there is no scary Black face from which to protect Tovmash’s white womanhood.

Tovmash was killed by a white man, which makes her just another statistic—at least in MAGA’s eyes. Her death has no utility for their racist attempts to expand its xenophobic electoral agenda that fits with its weaponization of ICE against non-whites (on the most part), targeting DEI, and other measures aimed at making racist white people feel someone is protecting them against the browning of America.

This is why whiteness is so toxic and how everyone—even Ukrainians—must reject it.

If MAGA made a big deal of Zarutska’s death and blasted her killers image across their media platforms, shouldn’t we see the same outrage over Tovmash? They were both white women, right? Both killed in North Carolina, right?

Nope. Tovmash was killed by a white boy. You can’t get any whiter than Caleb.

Also keep in mind that MAGA has no Black elected officials to target for, as they’d say, allowing crime to fester. It was easy for MAGA to target the Charlotte’s Black mayor, as well as the Black judge who presided over one of Iryna Zarutska’s killer’s cases because it plays into their race wars.

Black people tolerate crime.

And that tolerance of violence lead to Iryna’s murder.

Moore Country, where Tovmash as killed, is staunchly Republican and voted for Trump by a large margin. Trump nor his cult will call out the officials there. And I doubt that Pam Bondi will send officials to Moore County or Ohio to investigate how and why Caleb could do such a thing to Tovmash. There will be no ICE patrols in that GOP county.

Tovmash isn’t a white woman worth protecting because the man who killed her isn’t someone they feel you should fear. Caleb is white, just like Trump— a man who is accused of sexually assaulting dozens of white woman but whose base supports him anyway. White womanhood is to be protected, only if a non-white man violates it.

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Tovmash is just another refugee whose name will likely will not garner the same outcry because her murder, that of her partner and the trauma her siblings experienced as a result doesn’t provide political currency for MAGA’s white nationalist politics. Iryna was killed by a dreadlocked, scary Black dude named Decarlos Brown.

White men get a pass. And why not? Trump got a pass from MAGA for “grab ‘em by the pussy,” being liable for sexual assault in New York State in civil court and, again, allegedly sexually assaulting dozens of white women over several decades and was rewarded with the U.S. Presidency.

Twice.

Ukrianians are getting a very brutal introduction to American white supremacy. They largely have avoided being victims of white supremacy because they were not the primary targets. Until now. As we’ve seen with Ukrainians arrested by ICE agents who carry about Trump’s racist law enforcement, white skin doesn’t always garner white privilege.

And that is the point.

Whiteness, in many respects, is a both a conditional and political tool that protects selected people when useful and abandons them when they become inconvenient. The outrage over Zarutska’s death was never about protecting her. It was about weaponizing her black killer for political gain.

Looking white grants proximity, which can be revoked. When your suffering or personhood does not advance a racial or political agenda, you become disposable. I made this clear in another article in which I argue that Trump would support Ukraine if Putin was Black.

Kateryna’s death also exposes this truth.

Her murder is worthless to them because her alleged killer is the wrong color.

She’s not a white woman worth fighting for, in their eyes. Hell, she isn’t even Ukrainian. She doesn’t exist to them at all.

And we know why that is.