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Iranians in the city of Mashdad were filmed last week chanting, ‘Long live Israel, down with Palestine.”
A video going viral today shows Iranians in Mashhad, one of the most religious cities, chanting:
“Long live Israel, Down with Palestine.” pic.twitter.com/Ymdr6u3KIM
— Adam Albilya – אדם אלביליה (@AdamAlbilya) April 22, 2023
The post UNBELIEVABLE: Iranians defy Mullahs, rally in favor of Israel appeared first on World Israel News.
“Israel should use this moment to step up anti-missile and anti-drone support to Ukraine and help protect civilians from Russia’s war of aggression,” Yermak said.
By Associated Press
Russia fired more than 20 cruise missiles and two drones at Ukraine early Friday, killing at least 23 people, almost all of them when two missiles slammed into an apartment building in a terrifying nighttime attack, officials said. Three children were among the dead.
The missile attacks included the first one against Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in nearly two months, although there were no reports of any targets hit. The city government said Ukraine’s air force intercepted 11 cruise missiles and two unmanned aerial vehicles over Kyiv.
The strikes on the nine-story residential building in central Ukraine occurred in Uman, a city located around 215 kilometers (134 miles) south of Kyiv. Twenty-one people died in that attack, according to Ukraine’s National Police. They included two 10-year-old children and a toddler.
Another of the victims was a 75-year-old woman who lived in a neighboring building and suffered internal bleeding from the huge blast’s shock wave, according to emergency personnel at the scene.
The Ukrainian national police said 17 people were wounded and three children were rescued from the rubble. Nine were hospitalized.
The bombardment was nowhere near the war’s sprawling front lines or active combat zones in eastern Ukraine, where a grinding war of attrition has taken hold. Moscow has frequently launched long-range missile attacks during the 14-month war, often indiscriminately hitting civilian areas.
#RussiaIsATerroristState pic.twitter.com/goXNmKYsAw
— Andriy Yermak (@AndriyYermak) April 28, 2023
Ukrainian officials and analysts have alleged such strikes are part of a deliberate intimidation strategy by the Kremlin.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the long-range cruise missiles launched overnight were aimed at places where Ukrainian military reserve units were staying before their deployment to the battlefield.
“The strike has achieved its goal. All the designated facilities have been hit,” Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Defense Ministry’s spokesperson, said. He didn’t mention any specific areas or residential buildings getting hit.
Survivors of the Uman strikes recounted terrifying moments as the missiles hit when it still was dark outside.
Three body bags lay next to the building as smoke continued to billow hours after the attack. Soldiers, civilians and emergency crews searched through the rubble outside for more victims, while residents dragged belongings out of the damaged building.
Yulia Norovkova, spokeswoman for emergency rescue crews on the scene, said local volunteers were helping nearly 150 emergency personnel. Two aid stations, including psychologists, were operating, she said.
A 31-year-old woman and her two-year-old daughter were also killed in the eastern city of Dnipro in another attack, regional Governor Serhii Lysak said. Four people were wounded, and a private home and business were damaged.
The attacks came days after President Volodymyr Zelensky said that he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a “long and meaningful” phone call where Xi said his government will send a peace envoy to Ukraine and other nations.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Friday’s bombardment showed the Kremlin isn’t interested in a peace deal.
“Missile strikes killing innocent Ukrainians in their sleep, including a two-year-old child, is Russia’s response to all peace initiatives,” he tweeted. “The way to peace is to kick Russia out of Ukraine.”
Czech President Petr Pavel, on a visit to Ukraine, was unconvinced by the Kremlin’s past denials of responsibility for such bloodshed.
“The number of attacks on civilian targets leads to an only conclusion that it is intentional,” Pavel told Czech media. “It’s a clear plan intended to cause chaos, horrors among the civilian population.”
Shortly after Moscow unleashed the barrage, the Russian Defense Ministry posted a photo on Telegram showing a missile launch and saying, “Right on target.”
The message triggered outrage among Ukrainians on social media and some officials, who viewed it as gloating over the casualties.
“The Ministry of Homicide of the Russian Federation is happy that it hit a residential building with a rocket and killed civilians,” said Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office.
In Kyiv, fragments from intercepted missiles or drones damaged power lines and a road in one neighborhood. No casualties were reported.
In Ukrainka, a town about 10 kilometers (6 miles) south of Kyiv, debris from shot down missiles or drones left holes in the walls of some apartment buildings, and a smashed pink stroller in the street.
“It feels like this nightmare has been going on for two years, but I still can’t wake up,” local resident Olena, 62, said. She asked for her surname not to be used, saying her son lived in a sensitive military area.
Ukraine officials said last week that they had taken delivery of American-made Patriot missiles, providing Kyiv with a long-sought new shield against Russian airstrikes, but there was no word on whether the system was used Friday.
The city’s anti-aircraft system was activated, according to the Kyiv City Administration. Air raid sirens started at about 4 a.m., and the alert ended about two hours later.
In a statement on Friday, the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak appealed to Israel for more support and weapons, The Jerusalem Post reported.
“The latest chapter in Russia’s war crimes epidemic has seen missiles rain down indiscriminately on civilians as they slept in the holy city of Uman,” he said.
“So far, 18 people have been killed. Among them are three children, and the numbers are climbing. All Israelis – those who visit Uman” – where thousands of Israelis visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov each Rosh Hashana – “and those who never have but know what missiles raining down on civilians feels like, should take note.
“There is a new genocide in Europe and it is being executed by the Kremlin. Israel should use this moment to step up anti-missile and anti-drone support to Ukraine and help protect civilians from Russia’s war of aggression,” Yermak said.
Uman. 23 dead, including 5 children.
We need more support, more weapons to stop the Russian missile rain. Russia kills civilians everywhere, even in the holy city of Uman.
We need more support from Israel. Said it to @Jerusalem_Post.https://t.co/3DtDobKPZq
— Andriy Yermak (@AndriyYermak) April 29, 2023
The missile attack was the first on the capital since March 9. Air defenses have thwarted Russian drone attacks more recently.
The missiles were fired from aircraft operating in the Caspian Sea region, according to Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander in Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
Overall, he said, Ukraine intercepted 21 of 23 Kh-101 and Kh-555 type cruise missiles launched, as well as the two drones.
The war largely ground to a halt over the winter, becoming a war of attrition as each side has shelled the other’s positions from a distance. Ukraine has been building up its mechanized brigades with armor supplied by its Western allies, who have also been training Ukrainian troops and sending ammunition, as Kyiv eyes a possible counteroffensive.
Meanwhile, the Moscow-appointed mayor of the Russia-held city of Donetsk, Alexei Kulemzin, said a Ukrainian rocket killed seven civilians in the center of the city Friday. He said the victims died when a minibus was hit.
World Israel News contributed to this report.
The post Russian attack in Uman kills 21; Ukraine appeals to Israel for help appeared first on World Israel News.
“We are told that if the reform passes there will be a dictatorship. There is no bigger lie than that,” Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin told the crowd.
By David Isaac, JNS
The “March of the Million” near the Knesset in Jerusalem on Thursday evening may not have hit its target (organizers say 600,000 attended; police say 200,000), but it succeeded in putting to bed opposition claims that Israelis are united against judicial reform. It also provided much-needed backing to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s beleaguered government.
Supporters of reform have been slow to respond to months of protests against it, which have forced the coalition back on its heels, leading Netanyahu to pause the process and enter into negotiations with the opposition under the auspices of President Isaac Herzog.
Those favoring reform worry that the result will be a watered-down version of the legislation. Among the crowd’s chants at the rally: “Stop being afraid” and “We don’t want compromise.”
Of the many politicians and right-wing figures who addressed the assembled, the biggest cheers went to the chief architects of judicial reform: Justice Minister Yariv Levin of Likud and Knesset Member Simcha Rothman of the Religious Zionism Party, who chairs the parliament’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.
“Over 2 million Israelis voted six months ago in the real referendum: the election. They voted in favor of legal reform,” declared Levin. “We are here on this stage with 64 mandates to right an injustice. No more inequality, no one-sided judicial system, no court whose judges are above the Knesset and above the government.
“We are told that if the reform passes there will be a dictatorship. There is no bigger lie than that. Show me a single democracy in which the legal advisers decide [government policy] instead of the government,” said Levin, adding to cheers, “I will do everything in my power to bring the desired change to the judicial system.
“If someone were to tell me a few years ago that in 2023 there would be such a broad consensus in Israeli society for the need for judicial reform and that the situation today isn’t democratic, I would have told him he was delusional,” Rothman said. “Correcting the judicial system is my life’s mission and I will continue to promote it in every way.”
Likud Knesset member Avichay Boaron acted as master of ceremonies. “The purpose of the demonstration is to remind and demand from our elected officials in the government and the coalition that the people want judicial reform, that the people are behind them, that the people give them strength,” he said.
Netanyahu, who didn’t attend for security reasons, tweeted, “I am deeply moved by the tremendous support of the national camp that came to Jerusalem this evening en masse. All of us, 64 mandates that brought on our victory, are first-class citizens. You warmed my heart very much, and I thank each and every one of you.”
Twenty-nine NGOs sponsored the protest, foremost among them Tekuma 23, an NGO founded by political activist Berale Crombie together with Boaron. Its mission is to build support for judicial reform in the wake of the protests against it.
The pro-reform rally was different in tone from its anti-reform counterparts, which are grim affairs with warnings of pending dictatorship, clashes with police, solemn torchlit marches and women dressed as Margaret Atwood-inspired handmaids with heads lowered.
This rally was boisterous, resembling a giant block party. Music pumped through large speaker systems. Protesters danced and sang. Strangers backslapped one another. It was festive. The optimism was palpable.
‘Deterrence against terrorists’
Encountering Herzl Hajaj of Choosing Life, a forum of Israeli terror victims and bereaved families, JNS asked him to explain the difference.
“The right is always happier,” he said. “There’s a lot of money driving the left’s protests. The folks who make all the noise and confusion do it for a payment. People here have left work. They came from Eilat, Metulla, Dimona because their hearts are with this government.”
Another notable difference was the age of the protesters. At Thursday’s rally, youth was the rule with thousands of teens in attendance. Young families with infants were not uncommon.
Israel’s right argues that the Supreme Court turned activist starting in the 1990s under then-Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, who orchestrated what he termed the “Constitutional Revolution.” The government says its judicial reform program seeks to fix the problem that has grown over the years and restore the balance of power between the three branches of government.
Rothman told JNS earlier in the week that for the opposition the protests aren’t really about judicial reform but a clash between two visions of what Israel should be—a secular state on the lines of Denmark or a Jewish state deeply connected to its particular religious and cultural traditions.
If such is the case, the young teens chanting “Rothman” at Thursday’s rally symbolize opponents’ fear that demographics are against them. They see the Supreme Court as a check on right-wing ascendance, which explains their determination to defend its power.
Reformers are just as determined to drive through changes to the court, which they say rules according to a left-wing, globalist worldview.
Hajaj said, “Bereaved families, victims of terror, are here because the Supreme Court plays a big role in undermining deterrence against terrorists. They give them rights that no other country gives them. And we paid with the blood of our children. And the citizens of Israel will continue to pay with their blood until we change this.”
JNS also met Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, director of legal strategies at Palestinian Media Watch, who served in senior positions in the IDF Military Advocate General’s Corps.
“What brings me here is the understanding that the legal system has to change. I was part of that ecosystem for 20 years. I was an assistant district prosecutor. And I understand that the legal system as it is today has completely failed,” he told JNS, highlighting the self-selection process that goes on in the judicial system and precludes a diversity of views on the bench.
“We have members of the Bar Association appointing judges, lawyers appointing their friends to be judges with the assistance of Supreme Court judges, ensuring that they only appoint lawyers who are the same as they—in their image. Nothing changes. There’s only one way of thinking,” said Hirsch.
Im Tirtzu, an NGO and one of the rally organizers, oversaw street theater highlighting the Supreme Court’s power. It featured people lined up in orange prison jumpsuits, representing a nation imprisoned by the court’s rulings. Each carried a sign with a different ruling: “The Supreme Court requires National Insurance payments to terrorists,” “The Supreme Court rejected petitions against the building of illegal mosques on the Temple Mount,” “The Supreme Court prevents the removal of illegal [aliens] even when they’re violent.”
One protester wearing a mask of current Supreme Court president Esther Hayut held a stick with which he pretended to threaten and beat the uniformed protesters should they get out of line.
The post ‘March of the Million’ shatters opposition claim nation opposes judicial reform appeared first on World Israel News.
When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing wars on Syria and Iraq, the war on Yemen, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East
The post “Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East appeared first on Global Research.
In recent months, the social and political situation in Mparntwe/Alice Springs has been making headlines internationally and across Australia. Facing pressure from business groups, the government introduced alcohol purchasing restrictions in the city as well as blanket bans on alcohol in town camps and remote communities in the Northern Territory. Arrernte activists and supporters have […]
The previous essay on proper authority took its bearings from the fact that human beings, as human beings, have a divinely appointed responsibility to care about order and justice. We see this at the very beginning, in the cradle garden. God says to Himself, “Let us make mankind in our image.” Precisely what this means is multi-faceted and complex. Some of it, however, is quite plain and can be found in the clause that immediately follows: “Let us make mankind in our image and let him have dominion over all the earth.” Dominion is not domination. Human beings were never meant to simply lord over creation and to bend it arbitrarily toward their will. Instead, human authority is always marked by responsibility and a participant in Divine Law. Human authority is a vehicle for the proper exercise of stewardship.
That, of course, is merely part one of the Edenic plotline. Immediately following the mandate to exercise stewardship is the human refusal to do so. God man mankind in order that He might love mankind and that mankind might love him. Love, however, must be freely given or it is not, in fact, love. Freedom has costs. One of those costs is risk, including the risk that human beings might choose not to love God. I presume it is not a spoiler to observe that humanity did, in fact, rebel. From that moment onward, stewardship—dominion—has to account for the fact of ongoing human rebellion.
In light of the fall and of human responsibility to maintain the conditions of justice, order, and peace, the fundamental question before us is, “when might just societies have to employ force against those who violate order, justice, and peace?” In response, the just war framework, taking its cue from Thomas Aquinas, envisages three causes: protection of the innocent, recovery of what has been wrongly taken, and the punishment of evil.
The qualifier in each of these causes—‘innocent,’ ‘wrongly,’ ‘evil’—is crucial. The reason can be most easily seen by examining the first cause. It would be insufficient to declare—as positive international law declares—simply self-defense, as such, as a just cause. When commenting on just cause, Thomas explicitly lists only recovery of what has been wrongly taken and punishment of evil. It is not that he does not believe a sovereign has the right to defend his realm against attack. On the contrary, Thomas makes a greater allowance than Augustine for private self-defense.
But, in the classical just war view, the defense of the common good is the central rationale for just war as a whole. Insofar as the need for defense provides a just cause, it does so on the basis of the sovereign’s responsibility to protect order and justice. The reason that the qualifier in “protect the innocent” is so important is now clear: only the innocent have a right to be defended. To insist otherwise, to propose national sovereignty without qualification as a human good, and thereby to make national self-defense simply the model of justified war, is amoral. It ignores questions of motive, intention, cause, and the moral quality of the regime. It implies, as Nigel Biggar has insisted, for example, that as soon as the Allies invaded the borders of Germany in 1945, Hitler’s belligerency became self-defensive and so justified, and the Allies’ war-making became aggressive and so unjustified. A more domestic-oriented popular example concerns an armed burglar who has taken hostage the residents of a home he is robbing. When the police arrive and fire at him, he does not have a “right” to fire back. He has no moral permission to defend himself. Only the innocent do. Of course, if the details of the example scenario change significantly enough then the robber’s right to defend himself might return.
For reasons including these, a Christian realist view of just war refuses to take national self-defense as its paradigm. The Christian view is that since justified war is always a response to a grave injustice, it must always aim to rectify that injustice. This response may take defensive or aggressive forms. It may move seamlessly from defense to aggression, or it may begin with aggression. Justified aggression is what so-called “humanitarian intervention” is all about. The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is, in effect, an attempted reassertion of the Christian paradigm of justified war. Luther’s—and others’—cautions against making matters worse, often through unintentionally swapping tyranny for anarchy, remain important considerations.
In any case, this responsive, reactive posture is essential. The just war view can never countenance the initiation of violence. Force, justly deployed, can only ever be reactionary—never inaugural. When given a simple choice between violence or non-violence, in which either will equally effectively requite an injustice, protect the innocent, or mete out appropriate punishment, the just warrior will always choose non-violence. The point is that just war analysis kicks in only when unjustified violence or the clear and credible threat of unjustified violence is already unjustly perpetrated, and the only thing now in question is the manner of response.
Put another way, the Christian view of just cause allows that a war is justified only when it intends to stop and correct a grave injustice that threatens genuine and important human goods or those social and political matrices upon which the flourishing of individual persons depends. Because it reacts against injustice and defends justice, the just war use of force is also, in essence, punitive. This makes war a necessarily moral enterprise. It is not about defending, Biggar insists, without evaluation, “whatever borders history or positive law happens to have posited, nor about maintaining a stable regional status quo, regardless of the evils behind those borders or the justice that could be done in transgressing them.”
Some argue that such a view of war risks fostering moral self-righteousness and loosening the reins of war. It is true that the Christian just war tradition has most often encouraged intervention, but it is untrue that it encourages conflict. The fact that there is cause to intervene in the first place means that the opportunity to avoid conflict is already past. Conflict has already erupted someplace. Of course, it is not necessarily the case that the just response to conflict has to be, itself, violent. Intervention can begin and end with a rebuke. Escalation will depend almost entirely on whether, at what point, and under what terms the aggressor is willing to stand down.
While it is also true that this will require some to make moral judgments over others, this ought not to deter us. The political ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain once quipped that “human nature is a complex admixture…good Harry Potter with a bit of evil Voldemortian temptation thrown in.” Knowing something about the poor condition of their own souls, Christians, above all others, Biggar stresses, should be allergic to simple binaries in thinking that the just warrior stands against the unjust perpetrator as simply righteous against unrighteous, clean against unclean. In fact, the punitive nature of just war is grounded in the recognition of the dignity of those punished. To respond appropriately to the moral choices of others is to take their status as moral beings seriously. It is to acknowledge that what they decide to do actually matters. It says they and their choices are significant.
It is here that the rather uncomfortable idea that punishment of evil is a justified cause for going to war. Justice might be a single thing, but it has many species—including retributive. Retribution is, in essence, moral payback. We can tell it is a species of justice because you are paying back what is owed to someone. In this case, what is owed is correction—also known as punishment. Ideally, punishment is not its own end. We punish—we correct—because we want not only to keep the innocent safe from someone else’s misdeeds, but also because we desire what is best for the person being corrected. If we understand sin correctly, then we understand that the person most harmed by sin is, in the end, the sinner.
There are likely no morally neutral actions when it comes to human relations. Everything we do either nudges or propels others closer toward or further from being that kind of creature likely to say “yes” to Christ. Everything we do shapes our own heart into that kind of creature that either longs for heaven or who longs to continue trying to drag the universe into orbit around themselves for all of eternity. A part of correcting those around us from doing evil is to help shape their lives into that kind of creature that lives to be pleasing to God.
While this might seem reasonably clear when it comes to using war as a means to punish monsters such as Hitler, Pol Pot, or bin Laden or—on a group scale–terrorists, it is not likely to be the case that war is a means to punish the typical rank and file soldier arrayed against us. But war is not typically waged against the average soldier as such, but only against their regime—of which they find themselves, to varying degrees of willingness, a representative of. How a just warrior relates to one such as these is a matter for a future essay.
For now, it is enough to close with an assertion. The presence of a justified cause for war is not, in most cases, merely a mild permission for the mobilization and deployment of sufficient to address and rectify the just cause—it is likely a mandate. Stewardship requires that we do not let the innocent be trampled, injustice to go unrequited, or evil to remain unpunished. The rest of the ad bellum framework, including proper intention, proportionality, probability of success, and whether there are less destructive means available to right the wrong help the authority to decide whether the only thing likely to reestablish order, justice, and peace is proportionate and discriminate force.
Then, and only then, is there cause–even mandate–to unleash the dogs of war.
The post Just War 101 – E6: Just Cause appeared first on Providence.
Rioters tipping over a car in the 1993 Montreal Stanley Cup riots, from news footage of the event. (CBC)
It was surprising to see Montreal’s 1993 Stanley Cup riot included in the “Blood Sports” section of Jacobin’s “Nationalism” issue. While most of the details were correct, it was the explanation that the riot had been caused by “incensed Los Angeles Kings fans” that hit a discordant tone. There were many contributing factors that led to that riot, but nationalist rivalry wasn’t among them.
After all, Montreal fans have a history of rioting when the Canadiens win.
News reports clearly identified Montreal fans as being responsible for the riot, and linked it with what was considered a growing global phenomenon of “hooliganism.” It wasn’t without precedent either: fans rioted the previous time the Canadiens won the cup as well. The 1986 riot — which saw several thousand jubilant fans looting stores along Montreal’s main commercial thoroughfare, Saint Catherine Street — caught the city and its police force by surprise. Most of the blame was attributed to police’s slow response rather than the “few bad apples” whose “exuberance got the better of them.” Then chairman of Montreal’s public security committee, Guy Descary, defended police inaction at the time, saying that had police employed their batons it would have made things worse.
While competition between nations was not the underlying cause of the 1993 riot, nationalism still played a role — albeit indirectly. The riot wasn’t a consequence of one nation’s anger at another’s victory. Rather, it was an expression of intense frustration resulting from Quebec’s fading hope for self-determination, misgivings over the appropriation of an important cultural export, and the crushing experience of neoliberalism and deindustrialization in the province and its metropolis.
The 1990s was a tough decade for Montreal. The difficulty of the decade was presaged by the horror of Montreal’s day of infamy, December 6, 1989. Until it was surpassed by the Columbine High School massacre a decade later, the École Polytechnique massacre held the ignoble distinction of being the world’s worst school shooting. The dead and most of the wounded were women, representatives of the first generation of Quebec women to enter STEM fields in large numbers. The killer entered a classroom, ordered the men to leave, accused the women of being feminists, and then began shooting. Politicians and pundits chastised male students for not overpowering the gunman, and scolded women for having the temerity to suggest a mass femicide might be driven by, in Quebec’s case, a deeply rooted societal tradition of misogyny.
A few months later Canada entered a major recession, by some accounts the worst since World War II, and the effects of which would be particularly pronounced in Montreal. The city had already spent much of the 1980s losing economic ground to archrival Toronto. The passing of the title of “Canada’s economic capital” from Montreal to Toronto had begun in earnest in the latter half of the 1970s, with the election of the sovereignist Parti Québécois (PQ) government in 1976. The PQ was nationalist — in the sense that it wanted to create an independent Quebec nation — albeit within the context of what its supporters saw as a larger global effort at decolonization.
The PQ had clearly articulated goals: a public referendum on the future of Quebec’s place within Canada (generally interpreted as a referendum on whether or not to secede), and making French the sole official language of the province. These two factors convinced several major corporations to move their operations to Toronto (an instance of such significant capital flight that the effects of it can still be seen today) and kickstarted an exodus of the province’s English-speaking minority.
By the time the early-1990s recession began, Montreal’s economy had been weakened by these factors as well as the deleterious impact of free trade agreements on the city’s urban blue-collar sector. Additionally, three decades of population loss to the suburbs had siphoned away a large chunk of the city’s tax base.
According to one estimate, in 1991, roughly 25 percent of Montreal’s population was living below the poverty line.
Free trade’s impact on Montreal’s textile and apparel sector was particularly devastating, as almost overnight what was once a vibrant sector of the economy imploded. One estimate suggested that as many as half a million Canadian manufacturing jobs, many of which would have been unionized and located in urban areas, were killed off in just a few scant years after the signing of the Canada-US free trade agreement in 1989. Montreal lost forty-two thousand jobs in 1991. A devastating sixty-two thousand jobs were lost — including over seventeen thousand in the clothing industry and over fourteen thousand in the hotel and restaurant industry — in 1992. A further twelve thousand jobs would be lost in August of 1993, two months after the riot, while another fifteen thousand workers gave up looking for work altogether.
By June of 1993, Montreal and Quebec were still struggling to recuperate from a recession the rest of Canada had already recovered from, with real unemployment standing stubbornly above 11 percent in the city. According to one estimate, in 1991, roughly 25 percent of Montreal’s population was living below the poverty line.
The origins of professional ice hockey in North America can be traced back to the elite schools and exclusive athletic clubs of Montreal’s English-speaking elite. But hockey became a lucrative business and professional sport in large part because of working-class French-Canadian players and spectators. And if hockey is Quebec’s secular religion, then the Montreal Canadiens are its saints. The team is deeply rooted in the culture and society of Quebec, such that the team’s official name (Canadiens) and its nickname (the Habs — short for ‘Les Habitants’) are both references to the French-speaking population that colonized Quebec beginning in the fifteenth century.
Between 1965 and 1980 the Canadiens brought the Stanley Cup home no less than ten times, and in the late 1970s won the cup four times in a row.
The Canadiens are the most-winning team in the National Hockey League (NHL), holding twenty-four Stanley Cup titles. They are also the longest continuously operating professional hockey team in the world, and the only NHL team whose founding predates the creation of the league. The connection between Montreal and professional hockey goes even further: the first modern game of ice hockey was played there in 1875, the length of a modern ice hockey rink is the distance between two streets in downtown Montreal, and the NHL was founded in a Montreal hotel. To say that Montrealers have a proprietary interest in hockey is something of an understatement.
Between 1965 and 1980 the Canadiens brought the Stanley Cup home no less than ten times, and in the late 1970s won the cup four times in a row. But the 1980s would mark the beginning of a new era, both for Quebec and Montreal, as well as professional hockey. The NHL began an aggressive expansion project in 1967 with the addition of six new teams, all of which were based in the United States. With the exception of the Canadiens’ win in 1986, the cup would be won by an expansion team every other year of the decade. Tying the city’s economic decline to its apparent loss of dominance over the game it helped create, the NHL left Montreal for New York City in 1989.
Quebec’s game was lost to other cities in the United States and Western Canada as Stanley Cup wins accrued outside Montreal throughout the 1980s. At the same time, the province’s economic situation was being aggravated by political instability. Though federalists won the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau undertook an aggressive program of constitutional reform with the hope that Quebec’s frustrations might be quelled through a negotiated settlement.
For the next fifteen years, Canadians would be engaged in a nearly unending series of acrimonious constitutional negotiations between the federal government and Canada’s provinces. Though these negotiations would bring about Canada’s constitution in 1982, Quebec never ratified the agreement. Additional constitutional accords, negotiated between 1987 and 1990, and then again in 1992, would prove fruitless.
The first of these accords failed because of the objection of an indigenous legislator from Manitoba, Elijah Harper, who refused to ratify an accord negotiated without the input of the indigenous community. Because the Manitoba legislature required unanimous consent to approve the accord, it ultimately failed, with the proposed amendments lapsing on June 23, 1990, the day before Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day — Quebec’s “national” holiday.
Within Quebec the failure of the accord was seen as a rejection of the province by “English Canada,” and half a million Quebecers demonstrated for independence at Quebec City’s Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations. Eighteen days later, Quebec’s provincial police force raided a Kanienʼkehá:ka (Mohawk) barricade protesting a planned expansion of a golf course onto traditional Kanienʼkehá:ka land in the Montreal suburb of Oka. The raid was a disaster. Not only was the raiding SWAT team repelled by Kanienʼkehá:ka land defenders, one of its officers — Corporal Marcel Lemay — was killed in what was likely a friendly-fire incident.
The Kanienʼkehá:ka Resistance of 1990 would involve blockades of Quebec highways and bridges around Montreal for seventy-eight days, and would further involve the deployment of thousands of Quebec police officers and the lion’s share of a historically French-speaking brigade of the Canadian Army.
Five days after the botched sneak attack against indigenous land defenders, Montreal police raided a nightclub popular within the city’s LGBTQ community. Though overtly homophobic nightclub raids had been fairly common in Montreal in the 1970s, the attack on Sex Garage seemed to come out of left field — unexpected, unwarranted, and particularly brutal. Photos of police phalanxes mock-masturbating their batons and badge-less constables smashing their truncheons into terrified patrons were carried by Montreal’s newspapers the following day. When city and police officials failed to meet with community representatives, a mass “kiss-in” was held in the middle of an intersection next to a major downtown police station.
With television cameras broadcasting live from the scene, Montreal police were filmed once again beating people senseless. Throughout 1990, there would be several more incidents of police brutality, and an equal number of incidents demonstrating jaw-dropping police incompetence.
Faith in the political establishment was fading as well. The ascension of three politicians of different political stripes — at different levels of government — had seemed to offer a degree of stability in the middle years of the 1980s. But their luster was gone by the early 1990s.
At the federal level, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney led a Progressive Conservative Party that won a landslide victory in 1984. Mulroney, a Quebec native, promised renewed prosperity through privatization and free trade. Unlike his predecessor, Pierre Trudeau (the brief premiership of John Turner being more a blip than a changing of the guard), Mulroney was viewed as a unifier who could find common cause amongst Canada’s divergent regional interests.
At the provincial level, the PQ government that had lost both the 1980 referendum and constitutional debates was swept from power by the economist Robert Bourassa in 1985. Bourassa aimed to develop a strong Quebec within a united Canada.
At the municipal level, Jean Doré ascended to the mayoralty of Montreal in 1986 after the twenty-six-year reign of the previous mayor, the autocratic Jean Drapeau. A breath of fresh air seemed to waft across the political spectrum.
But whatever promise these men presented in the mid-1980s was gone by 1993. Mulroney would resign at the end of June 1993 as one of the least popular prime ministers in Canadian history, his government embroiled in scandal and his two principle economic policies — free trade and a general services tax — both deeply unpopular and ineffective.
Bourassa was similarly unpopular, having missed two opportunities to secure Quebec’s position in Confederation and also dealing with ineffective economic policies that couldn’t raise Quebec out of the early-1990s recession. And at Montreal’s city hall, the progressive “people power” policies that had brought Doré to the mayoralty were losing ground to the politics of staying in power.
Despite widespread social, political, and economic problems facing his citizens, Doré overfocused on bread-and-circus solutions, going all-in on celebrating the city’s 350th anniversary in 1992. A riot at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium following an aborted Metallica–Guns N’ Roses double bill in August presaged the Stanley Cup riot ten months later. Both upheavals featured unexpected violence, and an equally surprising unwillingness of the police to intervene.
By 1993 Doré was being lambasted for spending $300,000 on a new window for his recently renovated office. He was pilloried as well for his involvement in an ill-conceived (and ultimately aborted) dinosaur museum meant to capitalize on the popularity of Jurassic Park, promoted by a convicted fraudster.
Just ten days before the riot, perhaps as many as one hundred thousand public and para-public workers held a massive demonstration against government austerity measures.
Government priorities increasingly seemed completely detached from reality. A billion dollars in tax increases were levied against the already-cash-strapped population, while the government continued to pour money into building a retractable roof for a professional baseball stadium and spent $95 million on a new casino. Just ten days before the riot, perhaps as many as one hundred thousand public and para-public workers held a massive demonstration against government austerity measures.
Hockey was a popular cultural export for Quebec, but its wasn’t of any particular economic benefit. Rather, Canada and Quebec’s poor economic performance was making the game appear to be untenable in its home country. The NHL’s successful expansion was bringing Quebecois hockey talent to exotic locations with no history of or cultural attachment to professional hockey, like San Jose, Tampa Bay, and Anaheim. At the same time, Canadian teams faced the possibility of relocation despite collections of Stanley Cup trophies and loyal fan bases.
And while the Hollywood glitterati took their seats at the Los Angeles Forum, the working class Montrealers who had seen the team through thick and thin were largely shut out of the 1993 contest, with most of the tickets held by wealthy season-ticket holders. Those few tickets that were left for the general public were often snapped up in minutes, while scalpers demanded extraordinary sums for the stands.
Whereas blame for the 1986 riot focused on the police’s unpreparedness, blame for the 1993 riot was cast on the police as much as the revelers. Mayor Doré blamed the looting on organized gangs, while store owners and merchants put the blame back on the police. Perhaps mindful of the then-shocking displays of police brutality (and its consequences) coming out of Los Angeles in the early 1990s, police defended their apparent disinterest in crowd control by arguing that they didn’t wish to violate people’s human rights.
Police chief Alain St Germain argued that his strategy was to avoid confrontation, while also suggesting that the looting was carried out by organized gangs of teenagers, something that seemed to be confirmed by eyewitnesses both at the time and in retrospectives years later.
However, the idea that millions of dollars of damage and looting could be caused by well-organized gangs of youths, intent on using postgame revelry as a cover for their coordinated looting operation, seems implausible on its face. There was no guarantee the Canadiens would win that night, and there were hundreds of police officers deployed around the Montreal Forum and on Saint Catherine Street. The partial explanation of police reluctance to intervene seems more likely, particularly given that just days before the riot, a judgement issued by a Quebec Superior Court investigation of the 1986 riot placed at least some of the blame on negligent officers.
While there are plenty of examples of nationalism infecting the world of sport, Montreal’s 1993 Stanley Cup riot was not a blood feud between nations. It was a unique expression of anger, disillusionment, and frustration masquerading as jubilation. It is worth noting that, by contrast, there were no major incidents of violence two years later in the context of the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum. Nor was there any rioting by Canadian nationalists after the Unity Rally (potentially the largest single demonstration in Canadian history), or by Quebec nationalists after their razor-thin referendum defeat.
St Germain called the riot a breakdown of the social order. He was right, though he may not have fully articulated or realized the breadth of that breakdown. An anonymous looter, interviewed on the street by an Associated Press reporter, succinctly summarized a widely-shared social and cultural emotional state when they said, “The Habs won the cup and big bonuses. This is what we get.”
Tucker Carlson speaks during the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Feszt on August 7, 2021 in Esztergom, Hungary. (Janos Kummer / Getty Images)
Right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson has broken his silence for the first time since he was fired by Fox News at the beginning of the week. He released a short video full of scathing criticisms of the bipartisan establishment and the barren wasteland of cable news. It ends with a strong implication that we’ll be hearing from him soon in a new venue.
I’m sure that’s true. In 2023, no one with a significant following goes away just because they lose a job. He might end up with a smaller platform, but he’ll undoubtedly land somewhere.
Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023
But what message will he be promoting on the new platform?
The impression you’d get from the video is that Carlson is someone who worries about “war” and “corporate power” and sides with the working class. Or at least the native-born section of the working class — he mentions “demographic change” along with the other two topics when he lists important things we don’t see substantive debates about on cable news.
But it’s all hot air. He doesn’t even support a higher minimum wage. And he’s all too eager for a new Cold War with China. The truth is that while he’s deviated from conservative orthodoxy on some issues, at his core Tucker Carlson is the same preppy Republican he was twenty years ago when he was wearing a bowtie and defending the Bush administration on CNN’s Crossfire. “Heterodox antiwar populist” is the character he plays on TV.
The germ of truth in the myth of Carlson the Populist is that he really has shifted on some important questions over the decades. He’s defended Julian Assange’s right to publish information the Pentagon would prefer to keep secret, for example — a stance that would have been unthinkable during his Crossfire era.
Not all of this evolution is recent. Back in 2009, he joined the libertarian Cato Institute as a senior fellow. Cato’s press release skimped over his full-throated defense of Bush’s hawkishness in the early years of the “war on terror,” which notoriously included calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” who should “shut up and obey” the United States because they “can’t govern themselves.” Instead of dwelling on his past positions, Cato in 2009 stressed that Carlson “became” a critic of “numerous Bush administration policies, including wasteful spending and the war in Iraq.”
Even now, that evolution away from neoconservatism is incomplete. Carlson often talks like a critic of the military-industrial complex when he discusses America’s global rivalry with Russia — a right-wing isolationist critic rather than a left-wing internationalist one, but a critic nonetheless. Compare, for instance, Carlson’s segment pushing back against the idea that we should “hate” warmongering Russian president Vladimir Putin with the attitude of socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, who went to jail for his fiery speech opposing US entry into World War I — but took it for granted that he should also denounce the German kaiser and show solidarity with his antiwar comrades in Germany.
But as Branko Marcetic points out, when it comes to America’s global rivalry with China, Carlson switches gears and becomes the biggest booster of the military-industrial complex. He’s suggested that America should be doing more to build up a “strong military and, yes, a strong CIA” to counter the Chinese threat. Connecting the two subjects, he’s said that “our main enemy is China” and that “the US ought to be in a relationship with Russia, allied against China.”
So the “antiwar” part of the “antiwar populist” image is more than a little dubious. But it’s true enough that he’s improved on civil liberties since his Crossfire days, that he went from supporting America’s wars in the Middle East to seeing them as misguided, and that he’s been dovish on relations between Russia and the United States.
That evolution was already well underway in 2009. But what about the issues where he’s supposed to have changed since leaving Cato in 2015?
Here’s what Carlson wrote about Medicare for All in 2019, well after his “populist” rebranding:
“Medicare-for-all” is actual socialism, for-real socialism. Health care spending amounts to about a fifth of the entire American economy. Elizabeth Warren demands total control of all of it — immediately. . . .
So how do you pay for “Medicare-for-all”? It’s not a minor detail we can settle later. It’s the single most important question about the program. Why do you think we don’t have it already? Because we can’t afford it.
Reality check: The reason we don’t have Medicare for All isn’t that the United States is less capable of making the finances work than other advanced democracies that have implemented similar programs. It’s that the bipartisan establishment Carlson rails against when it suits him does the bidding of the powerful and profitable private health-insurance industry.
In fact, the year before Carlson wrote this, the libertarian Mercatus Center — hardly primed to back such proposals — crunched the numbers on Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan and found that it would be more cost-efficient than the current system. (They tried to bury that finding by emphasizing how much money it would cost rather than the fact that this price tag is less than our society spends on health care right now.) A middle-income taxpayer who currently has private insurance might pay a higher tax rate, but the combined cost of their current taxes and their current premiums, co-pays, and deductibles would be greater than that higher tax bill.
You might think a “populist” like Carlson would care about putting more money in the pockets of ordinary people. You’d be wrong. He prefers to spout insurance-industry talking points.
Similarly, Carlson is opposed to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Talking very much like the Cato Institute senior fellow he used to be, he claimed in 2021 that the wage hike would cost the economy a million jobs. He awkwardly tried to turn this into a “populist” talking point by claiming that “these big businesses would actually be in favor of a higher minimum wage if they thought it would drive their competitors out of business” and saying that he’d be fine with raising the minimum wage for large firms but not small ones.
Similarly, in a conversation last year with Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls — whom Carlson seems to have invited on his show in the hopes that Smalls would take the opportunity to criticize progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom Smalls had previously argued on Twitter — Carlson casually said that he’d never been “particularly pro-union” but that he’d like to see Amazon owner Jeff Bezos have his business unionized.
These attempts to split the difference between libertarianism and “populism” are telling. At best, the regular people Carlson sympathizes with when he rails against Wall Street or corporate America aren’t the working class. They’re small-business owners. If you’re one of the sixty million Americans who works for a small business, Carlson wants you to continue to earn poverty wages to prop up your employers against their larger competitors.
And even that might be giving him too much credit. He claims he’d favor a hypothetical à la carte minimum wage hike on big companies, but the top-line consequence of his position is that he rejects attempts to raise the minimum wage in the real world — and thus lands on the side of big corporations that like wage rates just fine as is.
Carlson’s response to the baby formula shortage last year wasn’t to blame the profit-seeking greed of the giant companies that manufacture the great bulk of the product in the United States. It was to blame a government program that provides vouchers for low-income mothers to buy formula.
Carlson wrote:
The problem right now is that the Abbott Nutrition Company has made the baby formula for the vast majority of WIC contracts. The government had all its eggs virtually in Abbott’s basket. Unfortunately, Abbott just closed its plant in Sturgis, Michigan because of contamination, and that means that millions of people who used WIC to buy Abbott products are forced to buy competing formulas and they’re doing it all at once.
Got that? Carlson doesn’t even pause to ask why the contamination happened, what this had to do with Abbot’s lax safety practices, or whether more regulation might have helped stop this from happening. He just homes in on too many poor mothers getting baby formula with government vouchers as “the” problem leading to shortages for everyone else.
But perhaps most telling of all is Carlson’s response to the fentanyl crisis. The supposed antiwar populist’s preferred culprit for the tens of millions of fentanyl death every year isn’t widespread poverty and despair caused by decades of capital running roughshod over a disempowered working class.
Instead, his preferred story about the roots of the fentanyl crisis can be summarized in one word: China.
Many of Carlson’s admirers assume that he was fired for one or more of his genuinely heterodox positions — like opposing US intervention in Ukraine. But right now, evidence strongly suggests that he was let go for more mundane reasons.
Multiple lawsuits against Fox implicate Carlson in one way or another, and in some of the text messages and off-air videos that have recently emerged, Carlson expresses opinions that are embarrassing to his employer. Some involve insults directed at Fox News management. Others reveal a severe gap between how he talked about Trump and claims about election fraud on air and how he spoke about these subjects in private. Still others include off-camera jokes about his “‘postmenopausal fans’ and whether they will approve of how he looks on the air.”
Carlson is, in other words, the kind of brave truth-teller who thinks very little of his audience and avoids telling them things they don’t want to hear. And the kind of antiwar populist who longs for a full-fledged Cold War with China and opposes raising the minimum wage.
What he really is, at the end of the day, is a clown. This is a man who devoted multiple segments to ranting about “woke” candy manufacturer Mars Wrigley changing its animated green M&M to make her less sexy.
He might have lost his gig at Fox, but I have no doubt he’ll be reapplying his clown makeup and setting up a tent at some other circus soon enough. Tucker Carlson isn’t going anywhere. We should be so lucky.
Jerry Springer attends the Galaxy British Book Awards at Grosvenor House Hotel on April 3, 2009 in London, United Kingdom. (Danny Martindale / Getty Images)
Jerry Springer, who died this past week at the age of seventy-nine, might end up being remembered for being a lot of things: the disgraced city councilman who paid for sex with a check; the Cincinnati mayor with a social conscience who once said, “if a man has five bucks that he wants to use to take his wife to a movie, but there’s a poor person out there with a real need . . . it’s a legitimate function of government to reallocate that man’s entertainment money to help out the poor”; the daytime TV talk-show king who was accused, not unfairly, of later exploiting those same people for ratings and entertainment.
What he’s not likely to be remembered for is the little-known 2004 Dolph Lundgren movie The Defender.
That’s too bad. Because while The Defender isn’t anyone’s idea of great cinema, today it’s a fascinating artifact from the George W. Bush years. The film is a rare cultural product that didn’t just sound the alarm about the dangers of Bush’s presidency or the “war on terror” — it dared to suggest that the entire foundation of that war and how it was fought was backward, and then full-throatedly endorsed a nonmilitary alternative.
The Defender, Lundgren’s directorial debut, effectively presents a liberal alternate reality of Bush’s America, one governed by an unnamed president played by, and who for all intents and purposes is, Springer himself. In this world, three years into the war on terror, President Springer has decided that the country’s approach to combating terrorism has hit a dead end and aims instead to pursue a bold alternative: a peace initiative.
“We’ve stood firm and fought strong,” his national security adviser, Dr Roberta Jones — unmistakably this world’s dovish version of fellow PhD Condoleezza Rice — tells a reporter. “But when that effort itself gives rise to a state of fear and deception around the world, what have we accomplished?”
But this runs afoul of a shadowy Deep State faction that views Springer as a “traitor” who is “ruining the country.” That faction is a right-wing cabal that, in a somewhat unsettling parallel to recent history, has its tentacles in the very Secret Service meant to be protecting the president. Of course, it’s not just a matter of ideology.
“War is big business, Lance, and that means a lot of money,” Jones later explains.
The Lance in question is Dolph Lundgren’s stoic Lance Rockford, a loyal, heroic Secret Service agent who’s Seen Some Shit, and ends up the only thing standing between Jerry Springer and a Deep State coup.
He’s got his hands full, because besides the occasional bout of PTSD and the small army of mercenaries sent to assassinate Jones, there’s also the high-stakes pressure and secrecy of Springer and Jones’s diplomatic project.
Dolph Lundgren as Lance, under fire. (Bauer Martinez Studios, 2004).
Jones, you see, is secretly meeting with terrorist Mohamed Jamar, the film’s Osama bin Laden analogue, and if anyone finds out about it, Jones warns Rockford, “the entire credibility of the United States would be destroyed, and with it will go any sense of stability around the world.”
If the risk of assassination weren’t bad enough, the Springer administration also has to contend with an arguably fiercer enemy: a recalcitrant Washington establishment opposed to the president’s initiative, in the form of a hawkish press corps and grandstanding congressmembers lecturing about weakness and surrender. (Europe, on the other hand, is fully on board with the Springer peace plan, viewing it as “the only way forward.”)
“If this goes wrong, it could bring down your entire administration,” an adviser warns Springer.
“Don’t kid yourself,” says Springer. “If this goes wrong, it brings down the entire Western alliance.”
In the end, the forces of peace and restraint prevail, not just because of Rockford’s handiness with a gun and bowie knife, but because of what turns out to be a clever (and somewhat inexplicably successful) trap run jointly by the CIA and FBI — an institutional faith that a little jarringly exposes the film’s fundamental liberalism. Jones wasn’t meeting with Jamar as part of a peace process, it turns out. Jamar and his Middle Eastern–looking handler are actually CIA and MI5, respectively, and the meeting was part of a plan to flush the coup-plotters out.
In the aftermath, the treacherous Secret Service official shoots himself, the plotters are arrested, Congress passes the president’s peace initiative, Rockford gets a medal, and Springer delivers a generic prime-time address about America as an idea.
It doesn’t pay to think too hard about what you’re watching — like the fact that were it not for Rockford’s extraordinary killing ability, Jones would have been effectively condemned to death as part of this plan, given how severely undermanned and under-resourced the team protecting her was.
The movie is, of course, fiction, and to a large extent, liberal Bush-era wish fulfillment. But over two decades on, Bush’s war on terror is still with us — in fact, Afghanistan withdrawal aside, it’s expanded well beyond where it was under Bush, as this week’s failed vote to get US troops out of Somalia reminds us. So is the military-first anti-terrorism logic that Bush sold the country on, which, as Joe Biden’s triumphant announcement of yet another dead terrorist leader exhibits, still has no real challenge or alternative in mainstream discourse.
With this in mind, today it’s somewhat startling to watch characters, let alone a fictional president, unapologetically voice entirely correct antiwar talking points that are almost completely absent from our political vocabulary today.
“Giving concessions, won’t that be called, ‘giving in,’ ‘being weak,’ by a great many people?” a reporter asks the president at one point.
“No, I call it, ‘Giving peace a chance,’” Springer replies. “The war on terrorism is not a conventional war, and it therefore cannot be won by conventional means.”
Jerry Springer (L) in The Defender. (Bauer Martinez Studios, 2004)
Meanwhile, for all its low-budget schlock, the film’s portrayal of US foreign policy debate is depressingly true to life. Congress greets President Springer’s peace initiative with “skepticism” and “mixed reviews,” we’re told, while conservative groups call it “irresponsible and un-American.”
“If the president attempts to negotiate, if the president vacillates, then this will be seen by our friends and our enemies abroad as a sign of weakness,” the California senator opposing Springer’s plan (and who, incidentally, ends up being one of the coup-plotters) tells TV viewers. If he was in the president’s shoes, he later says, he wouldn’t negotiate — “not now, not at this moment in time.”
This is hardly brilliant writing. Yet you could virtually cut and paste these lines into the ultra-hawkish discourse regarding US diplomacy and the Ukraine war that we’ve watched play out this past year and never tell the difference. It’s beyond depressing that the actual, real-world nature of US political debate on matters of war and peace strays so little from a straight-to-DVD Dolph Lundgren action flick.
So if you want to pay tribute to the late daytime TV king this weekend, but feel understandably icky about firing up one of his old talk show episodes, you could do worse than spending ninety minutes watching The Defender and marveling at how a twenty-year-old movie starring Jerry Springer is more thoughtful about US foreign policy than most of what happens in Washington. If nothing else, it’s all worth it to watch the man himself sternly admonish the coup leaders: “You messed with the wrong country, and you fucked with the wrong president.”