Free Republic

KYIV, Ukraine—As the Russian shells and rockets rained down on them in the frontline town of Debaltseve in February 2015, Ukrainian troops began to receive curious, anonymous text messages on their cellphones. “Your comrades nearby already left their positions, so you should leave yours as well,” one message read. The messages also claimed that Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president at that time, as well as Ukrainian military commanders, had “betrayed” their soldiers. The Ukrainian military later concluded that Russian military forces had taken over the local cellphone network with mobile jamming stations. The text messages were part of a psychological operation...

Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those who dissent from the accumulating theses of “Progressive” orthodoxy. (A particularly worrisome aspect of this is that those theses are in constant leftward motion, so that one never knows, based on what was sayable yesterday, what is unsayable today — the effect of which is...