Il patto del 1974 diceva: petrolio in dollari in cambio di protezione. Oggi la protezione non c’è e il petrolio non passa. A Levante questa sera, mercoledì 14 ottobre 2026, Margherita Furlan dialoga con Moni Ovadia, Gianmarco Pisa e Guido Grossi sul giorno in cui il sistema ha mostrato la crepa: Hormuz chiuso, Riad sotto i missili degli Houthi, Trump che compra gasolio da Putin e Meloni che al Senato definisce quell’intesa «molto rischiosa». Hormuz è chiuso dal 28 febbraio. L’unica via d’uscita del greggio saudita è la Petroline verso il Mar Rosso, cioè sotto il tiro degli Houthi. Aeroporto di Riad colpito due volte in una settimana, un edificio Aramco in fiamme a Dhahran, missili intercettati sulla capitale. Trump non può proteggere i sauditi senza chiudere anche Bab el-Mandeb. E allora telefona a Mosca: 300.000 tonnellate di gasolio russo per far scendere il prezzo alla pompa prima delle elezioni di metà mandato. Meloni al Senato: l’accordo Trump-Putin «legittima Mosca», il caro carburante dipende dalla guerra in Iran, e intanto i militari italiani lasciano l’Iraq per l’Arabia Saudita. Che cos’è il petrodollaro, perché ha retto cinquant’anni e che cosa si è rotto davvero: crisi di prezzo o crisi di sistema? Lo Yemen che nessuno racconta: l’Oms conta casi di colera triplicati in tre settimane. GLI OSPITI Moni Ovadia, attore, musicista, scrittore, voce ebraica contro le guerre di questi anni. Gianmarco Pisa, operatore e formatore di pace, Corpi civili di pace in Kosovo, Rete italiana Pace e Disarmo. Guido Grossi, giurista ed economista, per anni ai vertici della Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, studioso della moneta e del debito. LIBRI DEGLI OSPITI Moni Ovadia, «Un ebreo contro», Edizioni Gruppo Abele, 2021. Gianmarco Pisa, «Più eterno del bronzo. Educazione alla cultura e semantica del monumento», Multimage. Gianmarco Pisa, «Paesaggi kosovari 1998-2018», Multimage. SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente autofinanziato. Per donazioni: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV Membership YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleT… Analista Multipolare €5/mese Inviato della Verità €15/mese Architetto del Futuro €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel Sito: casadelsole.tv #Levante #CasadelSoleTV #MargheritaFurlan #Geopolitica #Multipolarismo #Petrodollaro #Hormuz #Houthi #ArabiaSaudita #Trump #Putin #Meloni #MoniOvadia #GianmarcoPisa #GuidoGrossi

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Despite admitting mass immigration is damaging the country, the ruling classes fail to secure the border while clamping down on dissent. It's accelerating Britain towards crisis, say David Betz and Michael Rainsborough.

The post Britain is Accelerating Towards Crisis appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses President Trump’s announced diesel deal with Russia, the administration’s abandonment of Ukraine, and why Trump is giving up so much to gain very little.

Then, David is joined from Kyiv by Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian journalist and the author of the new book The Land of Tears and Hope. David and Illia talk about the history of Ukraine, its current state as the war with Russia rages on, and how and why the Trump administration seems so hostile to the country.

Finally, David concludes with discussion about why so little literature exists about the history of slavery in Eastern Europe.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion. But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans.

[Music]

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Illia Ponomarenko, author of a new history of Ukraine, Land of Tears and Hope, available from Bloomsbury in the month of November. Illia and I will discuss the deep history of Ukraine, the recent onslaught of Russian drones and missiles on Ukrainian cities, and how Ukrainians feel about their abandonment by the Trump administration.

This week’s book will also be Eastern European–focused. It’s not a book that exists. It’s a book that I would like to read, and I set out a research assignment for some intrepid Eastern Europeanist to deliver a book I would like to know more about in, again, in the deep history of the lands that are now Ukraine, now Poland, and now Russia.

But before either the dialogue with Illia or the book discussion, some opening thoughts about the most shocking recent turn in the U.S.-Ukraine story.

When Illia and I recorded our dialogue, we did not yet know about this announcement that was pending from the Trump administration, declaring or imagining or proposing, or whatever the word is, for what is likely vaporware. Not a real deal; a big purchase, a massive—in the words of President Trump—a massive purchase of Russian diesel fuel for the United States.

Now, I wrote an article for The Atlantic this past weekend with the facts and figures about just how negligible an achievement this so-called deal really is. The United States is a diesel superpower. It’s probably the largest producer of diesel on Earth. We don’t exactly know that for sure, because we don’t know really how much China produces, but probably the United States is the largest producer of diesel in the world. It is certainly the largest exporter of diesel in the world. And it produces much more than it uses at home. So it exports about a million and a half barrels of diesel fuel a day.

The reason American prices have been rising so fast for truckers and farmers and others who use diesel fuel is not because of anything that’s happening in the U.S. market, or even the North American market. The United States imports a little diesel fuel from Canada because it’s easier sometimes to import from Canada and then to export from the Gulf Coast than to supply the United States entirely from its own resources. The reason that the price has been rising is because of disturbances in the global market. What matters is world demand and world supply of diesel, not U.S. demand and U.S. supply of diesel.

Now, if this Russian deal exists at all, it’s a matter of a few hours’ worth of U.S. production and U.S. consumption. It’s not a big event, and it won’t change world prices because Russia doesn’t have a lot of diesel to sell. Although Russia used to be a big diesel producer, Russian oil facilities have been damaged so intensely by Ukrainian missile and drone fire that Russia has very little diesel to contribute. In fact, Russia has had an export ban on diesel since July. If Russia has any diesel to sell, it’s going to take it from another consumer; India, maybe. And by diverting diesel oil from India to the United States, it doesn’t do anything for the United States, which has more than enough diesel here at home. It makes life a little tougher for India, and it doesn’t change the world price at all, because nothing happens in global supply and demand. The whole thing is a complete nothingburger.

But it does two things that are important. The first is: The Russians have dangled in front of the Trump inner circle the prospect of enormous wealth for them if American sanctions on Russia are dismantled. And it’s taken a first step toward the dismantling of those sanctions and put the United States on the path to confrontation with Ukraine, because President Trump now has to worry the only way he can get Russian diesel is if the Ukrainians stop attacking Russian energy facilities, which they are doing in retaliation for the Russian attacks on their cities and schools and historical societies and hospitals, on their civilian population. They have struck back against Russian energy infrastructure to cramp Russia’s war-making ability.

President Trump has now created a situation where his goal of seeming to do something about diesel and maybe also enriching a lot of people who are in his inner circle is in conflict with Ukraine’s self-defense, and the only way he can get what he wants is by ordering Ukraine to stop defending itself. And we have seen already Trump’s pressure on Ukraine: If you continue to strike the Russian energy infrastructure, you are making an enemy of me.

He is taking away Ukraine’s war-making ability for his own reasons, in ways that will not help American motorists even slightly, American farmers, American truckers. And of course, he is doing nothing to bring about a resolution of the conflict in the Persian Gulf, which has removed so much diesel fuel from Europe and Asia because that’s where those countries get their supplies from.

Trump from the beginning of this second presidency has taken Ukraine as a kind of personal affront. Now, a lot of this is a little hard to understand, but maybe we don’t need to understand it. You know, when I was working on my story about Trump’s vaporware diesel deal, an editor asked me, Do you think Trump believes it? Do you think he imagines that these few barrels he’s getting from Russia are, in fact, going to make any difference to American supply? Or is he totally delusional? And I had to answer, I don’t actually—of course, I don’t know the answer to that question. My instinct—it’s just an instinct—is that President Trump was much more of a self-aware con man when he entered politics a decade ago than he is now. He now may be kind of lost: truly in a world of illusions, where he no longer himself knows what is true and what is a lie.

But it doesn’t matter, because there’s a consistent through line, whether these are deceptions of others or deceptions of himself. The through line is: He just is tantalized by the prospect of vast wealth for himself and others by doing deals with Russia. And he’s willing to sacrifice the lives and security and independence of Ukraine to his ambition. And he treats Ukraine’s self-assertion and self-defense as an act of impudence and defiance—not against those who are trying to invade and aggress and annex Ukraine, but against himself. Because Ukraine bothers him, and he doesn’t like it, and he wants it to go away.

What he’s leaving all Americans with is one of the most shameful passages in the history of American foreign policy. A people that are defending their national sovereignty, that are fighting back under the most difficult conditions with the supremest forms of human bravery. Who ask only from the United States the wherewithal with which to defend themselves, and who are being denied that wherewithal by President Trump for reasons we can’t understand, but none of which look good. I hope anyone who can hear my voice will join me in sharing their dismay and their shame at what President Trump has done to the good name of American democracy and American world leadership.

And now my dialogue with Illia Ponomarenko.

[Music]

Frum: Illia Ponomarenko was born in 1992 in a small town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. He studied at Mariupol State University. When Russia invaded his home region in 2014, Illia began his career as a reporter. He has never stopped.

His first book, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, was published in 2024 to global acclaim. Illness closed his path to military service, so he turned to a deeper fight: the fight over whether Ukraine has a history of its own. His new book, The Land of Tears and Hope, tells the Ukrainian story from the Slavic tribes and the Vikings through the Cossacks, Soviet terror, and the Maidan to this very war today. It will be published next month. Order it now.

Illia Ponomarenko, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Illia Ponomarenko: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Frum: Illia, you have written this deeply moving history of Ukraine, and I want to address it in full, but the events of the past days in Ukraine have been so dramatic and so horrible I think we must start there.

So tell us, we’re speaking in the early part of October, tell us the situation as it is now and what has happened in the past days to your country.

Illia Ponomarenko: Well, of course, the centerpiece of any news and the spotlight is Kyiv, this capital city, and what’s happening. The air battle over Kyiv that’s going on nonstop for days and weeks already, with drones, missiles. Never stopping, day and night.

So the central attention is given to the defense of the capital and to preserving life in the capital. And Russians are really trying to abrupt the very existence of the city, to instill fear, to abrupt transportation, normal food supply, water supplies. Bridges over the Dnipro River that divides the city, which is extremely vital. So Russians have switched to this tactic of trying to absolutely paralyze the very heart of the country—to install fear, to enforce the capitulation, since they can’t get any substantial military success for the fifth year of this war.

But I must say that, you know, I live just outside Kyiv in suburbs, and also in several places in Kyiv Oblast, in the outskirts. But I spend as much time as I can in the city, in many ways just to be there with my city, in there. And I would say that over the last three days, which is what I said on social media, the air battle—this constant attack—the entire environment had become a little less stressful, a little calmer. I would say I think, this my feeling, that Ukrainians managed—the Ukrainian military managed to overcome this surprise and shock and managed to adapt to this new situation. And I think if the situation continues, we might say that Russians have weakened in terms of their ability to strike Kyiv on the daily basis. So Ukrainians have made another move to adapt to what Russia does, and it goes on and on and on. So it’s constant battle between Ukrainian adaptation and Russian attempts to paralyze the city.

Frum: Let me try a little context. I think from the point of view of a lot of people in the Western world, in the United States—we’re so far away. It seems like this is an endless story of Russian attacks, Ukrainian defense. But there was a true intensification of the Russian air attack on the capital of Ukraine beginning at about the end of September, with some new technologies, some new methods. And the first effect was very devastating. A much greater loss of life, much greater damage than had been the case until the later part of September, the beginning of October. And so it is this new campaign—this intensified campaign at the end of September, beginning of October—that you say is now running out of impetus and faltering a little bit?

Ponomarenko: It gets significantly visibly weaker in terms of the number of drones, Russian drones, that made it to the capital and strike. So there are far less booms in the sky over Kyiv over the last few days, which is good. Which is something that enlightens us, because the military also reports a lot of new technologies, counter-technologies that are being applied to intercept jet-powered Russian drones that are super difficult targets to get.

Frum: These jet-powered drones, this is the new—because drones, until now, have been slow. And they could be shot down with a .50-caliber machine gun if the weapon-wielder was fast and skillful enough. But a jet-powered drone moves much faster, and so can’t be intercepted by a machine gun. You need a much more sophisticated technology to catch the jet-powered drone.

Ponomarenko: Yeah. One of the bright pictures of life in Kyiv is always seeing, in the streets, pickups with machine guns—sometimes it’s M2 Browning machine guns—with the mobile air-defense groups that try to shoot these things down.

But when it comes to jet-powered drones, which is the next step essentially, and especially when it comes to mass-produced, jet-powered drones, it’s a huge problem. Because they move at velocity of 700, 600 kilometers per hour. So it’s an insanely complicated target to get. And they are cheap; they are easy, simple. They are massive. So could be swarms of them over the Ukrainian cities.

Nonetheless, within weeks we started getting new solutions to this. There are—you know, Ukrainian defense in many ways is comprised of many, many private companies that suggest many, many technical solutions. Right now we have five or six prototype interceptor drones that are engine-powered, or jet-powered, that are being presented by various companies in Ukraine. And they are simply showing the first results, just the first results, on videos intercepting these Russian jet-powered drones. So surprisingly, it goes fast. The entire Russian campaign against Kyiv was a shock. It was sharp. It intensified really quickly and shockingly. But at the same time, the Ukrainian response to this is very fast and very sharp. So our big question is whether we could launch the mass production of a successful prototype that works well. And this is exactly, essentially, how this war works.

Frum: Ukraine is striking deeply at Russian targets, especially energy-production targets, ever farther into Russia. And there are reports—I don’t know how much weight to put on them—of surrenders among Russian ground troops, of deteriorating performance among Russian ground troops, that make us think that maybe something deeper is happening in the war than just the strike, counter-strike—the cycle of innovation and counter-innovation you describe.

Ponomarenko: But also, another front of this war is actual battlefield war, that’s happening along from the frozen front line in Ukraine’s south and east. And we have a situation in which Ukrainian military, in one of the most important, if not the most important axis of Russian attack, which is near the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk—the very core of the industrial part of Donbas that’s still under Ukrainian control, and also the belt of the fortress cities in Ukraine’s east.

The Ukrainian military, over the months of very careful, very clandestine operations, managed to inflict a very, very serious defeat to local Russian forces. So that’s why we get pictures of surrendered Russian troops, because they got encircled; they got captured. That’s how the Ukrainian military, and it’s pretty open, and it could be independently verified that Ukrainian military have tactical gains. And also they managed to cut off one of the accesses of Russian attacks on these fortress cities: the northern claw, as we call it.

So Ukraine, despite all the bombs, despite all the bravado from the Russian side, Ukraine has pretty significant tactical successes on the field, on the battlefield. Which are pretty impressive on the scale of this war, five years on.

Frum: What can you tell us about the present state of American assistance to Ukraine?

The Trump administration has cut off aid to Ukraine. Such American weapons as you get are paid for by your European counterparts and allies. Is there any American intelligence flowing to Ukraine? Is there any non-material assistance you’re getting? Or is the attitude truly as hostile in Ukraine as it seems to be from the point of view of Washington, D.C.?

Ponomarenko: Well, of course, we are very far from being in the place where we’ve been under the previous administration when we had consistent and very serious and very regular packages of assistance. Right now, you are right to say that what’s being delivered to Ukraine from the United States is being purchased as part of the Pearl program by European backers. It’s mostly about supplies, technical maintenance, things that help maintain the U.S.-made hardware in possession of Ukraine. Very important part of this American participation is, of course, the intelligence. And I must say that despite all the complexities or all the complications that Ukrainian administration has with the United States, this intelligence sharing is one of the most important things that Ukraine has from outside the country, because it’s about saving lives. It’s about giving early warnings about Russian missile attacks. This is what we get from Americans, essentially.

So in many ways, what you see, from the point of view of [President Volodymyr] Zelensky—the way he talks to Donald Trump, the way he tries to preserve a more or less stable relationship with the United States and with the Trump administration—it’s about intelligence. Because this is something that we would be extremely, extremely reluctant to lose. Because it’s about saving lives; it’s about air defense.

Frum: Can you offer any generalization about how Ukrainians today feel about their relationship with the United States? And what the United States has done for them as it has become less generous, but not yet zero generosity?

Ponomarenko: Well, I’m really trying to give you a very average attitude that’s been present in the Ukrainian public opinion. Of course, a lot of people are dissatisfied. A lot of people are stressed about this, because one of the things that we always thought of as unshakable, as static as the Earth itself, is the American support. Bipartisan support in both house chambers of the Congress, in the White House. We always thought that our interests are 100 percent complacent with America’s interests, and this is what we thought was unshakable and unmovable.

I am not going to lie to you that Donald Trump remains one of the least popular figures in Ukraine. Because of many reasons, mostly because of a lot of words that he said about Ukraine. And I cannot lie to you that this image also affects really badly on the image of the United States as a country, or on the United States as a people, in the eyes of Ukrainians. A lot of emotions are involved into this. We must understand that war, being at war, is a very emotional thing. It’s about a lot of strong words; a lot of strong thoughts about this.

But I would not say that a lot of people here still respect the United States, still consider America to be the leader of the free world, the cornerstone of this free world. And despite everything that has happened over the last couple of years, still consider America to be probably back anytime soon in terms of its presence and its posture and its leadership.

So I would say that, you know, of course, feelings are very complicated. Feelings are very emotional about Americans. I cannot say that I agree with a lot of those things that I hear from my fellow Ukrainians about Americans and American aid. I really try, and I think it’s extremely fair and just to separate what this administration, what politicians do, what they say about, about us, what they do. And also, I try to remind my fellow Ukrainians of how many Americans do support Ukraine up to this day. We have figures between 60 and 70 percent on both sides of the political spectrum. I cannot stress this enough that, after all these years, having so many people across the ocean being so eager in terms of supporting Ukraine—the country that they probably never heard about before this war—is something that is to be deeply appreciated and something that is very ours to have.

Frum: For those of us who, like you, believe in the role of the United States as the guarantor of the free world, and who believe that the phrase free world means something, this has been a shameful hour. And the patience, and maybe someday the understanding and even forgiveness of the Ukrainian people to this deviation from America’s role in the world, is felt here too, and should be felt.

Let me talk to you about your book. And again, the title is The Land of Tears and Hope. It is, as you say, it’s emotional. And it is not a classic history written with chapter one, chapter two, that we—you jump like a film director from scene to scene, and pass over a lot of years, and have a very arresting technique.

Frum: Ukraine is one of the world’s newest states. Or the present Ukrainian state is one of the world’s newest states, founded in 1991. You make us feel the antiquity of Ukrainian culture, language, sensibility. How do you manage this contrast between the newness of the government, the newness of the constitution, the newness of the state, and the antiquity of everything that the state is built on?

Ponomarenko: That’s a very interesting thing about modern Ukraine. By saying modern Ukraine, I mean the country that was built after the revolution of 2014, which is the newest phase of Ukrainian existence. Because Ukraine is very young in terms of being a political entity, especially when it comes to being very independently thinking, sensing itself as an independent nation-state, not someone’s backyard, not as also Russia. But in terms of feeling itself like an entity, a country, a nation with its own home. It’s a very new thing to Ukraine even compared to its just 35 years of its independence.

And at the same time, Ukrainians—and Ukrainian people in general as a people, as ethnicity—have a very long historical memory. And a lot of things that are dearest to us, that are part of our culture, of our everyday thinking about traditions, of the fairy tale that we tell to our children through the night, and many of those things date back to medieval times. Date back to the early modernity, like Ukrainian Cossacks. They date back to pre-Christian times, ancient Slavic tribes.

You know, when I was writing this book, it was a surprise even to me when I realized this: how many things we have from our everyday traditions, from our holiday celebrations, from our sayings that we get back from pre-Christian times, from thousands of years ago. A lot of things in our life go back to those times—when there was no Ukraine, neither as a nation, neither as a state, neither as in, even in a word in this. But they live with us.

Frum: I think this is something that Americans especially have a hard time understanding. Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion, about verbal undertakings to Mikhail Gorbachev back when there was a Soviet Union. And then what, well, what does it say in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994?

But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans. For them, this war is about whether Ukraine exists—as a culture, as a polity, as a society—or whether you’re just sort of charming primitive, rural Russians who don’t understand that you need to belong to the greater entity of Mother Russia.

And you talk a lot about that in the book, about the distinctiveness of Ukraine. And maybe begin with this question: So, how many years separate the founding of the city of Kyiv from the founding of the city of Moscow?

Ponomarenko: Whoa. It’s even a complicated question to answer when the city of Kyiv, as we know it, was founded. Because there are lots of evidence, lots of arguments among scientists. But let’s try to set the beginnings of Kyiv as a continuous city around the fall of the Roman Empire’s time. And when it comes to Moscow, a lot of people barely realize that. They imagine Kyiv and Ukraine and what ended up being Ukraine, and then what ended up being Russia, as in the model that Moscow gave birth to Kyiv, gave birth to Ukraine. It’s an offshoot of great Russian tradition. But at the same time, the situation was just exactly vice versa.

There was ancient Kyiv—ancient great kingdom of those people who are ancestors. And those people, once upon a time, many years after their best time, after their blossoming time, they established what was a very distant fort in the forest that was named Moscow. So essentially, those cities, those lands that ended up being the historical core of Russia—we’re talking about the city of Vladimir, of Suzdal, the very core of Russia—they were settlers. They were settled from, say, historical Kyiv to those places, because people were seeking land, new territories. So, simple truth is that what ended up being Ukraine gave birth to what ended up being Russia—not vice versa.

But at the same time I do give this information, I do provide the reader with these thoughts about the past and the common roots of Eastern Slavic peoples, Russians, Ukrainian people, Russians. But at the same time, I do not stick to this very nationalistic and very radical and simplified view that Ukraine is the only country that has the roots in this long past, and no one else does. I think that Russians and Ukrainians have a common origin, and also Belorussians.

But Ukraine—what we have right now in Ukraine—has the biggest share of these roots belonging to it. So that’s my position about this. And why I wrote about this book is that in Ukraine of today, a very important part of life is getting back to these roots, appreciating this. Stopping to think about us, ourselves and this country as the backyard of Russia—but a country that has its roots back through to the Middle Ages, to ancient times, that was the cradle of Christianity in this region of human civilization. That has very ancient and very beautiful and in many ways unique historical wonders in this land. A huge part of Ukrainian life right now in this national awakening is getting back to its roots, its ancient roots.

Frum: In more recent times, and by that I mean the past few hundred years, Ukraine has been entangled in very grim, bloody, complex relations with not only with the Russian neighbors, but with Poles and with its Jewish minority. And these swirl together in stories that are sometimes very powerfully resonant, but sometimes very ugly and bloody. And you talk about that a lot: about the Ukrainian-Polish duality, the Ukrainian-Jewish duality, as well as the Ukrainian-Russian duality.

Ponomarenko: I do talk about this. And my central point in this regard is that Ukraine is a very rich country. Ukraine is a very beautiful country. And because of this, it has a very tragic history. And Timothy Snyder, historian that is insanely popular in Ukraine, he was just brutally right to include Ukraine as part of the so-called bloodlands. Because Ukraine, with all its riches, with all its geographical position, it has always been a target for many empires that wanted to possess Ukraine and its riches. And its geographical positions, its human resources, its brains.

So in many ways, the Ukrainian history—and I realized it myself as I was preparing for this book—I realized that we are essentially as a people, Ukrainian people have been moving for many centuries in this closed circle of trying to get independence and its own nationhood, and losing it again. And becoming a powerhouse for new empires and a donor of resources for new wars, new empires. Such as the Russian Empire was in many, many ways built on the conquest and possession of Ukrainian riches. Same goes about Stalin’s USSR. Hitler wanted Ukraine badly as part of his Lebensraum, because Ukraine is a very fertile land. It’s a very pleasant land to be on.

Ukraine is a part of human civilization where it’s really good to be a master in. You have a really rich empire if you have Ukraine. And this moving on this vicious circle of history, it always comes with insane blood, with insane national intra-ethnic feuds, violence, social tensions. Such as with Jewish population, with Polish population. So my very central point of this book eventually is that it’s a land of tears because of many, many wars; many, many tragedies. Some of the worst tragedies of human history happened in Ukrainian lands between parties that wanted to possess this land. But also a land of hope, because we hope that with this independent Ukraine and in this war in which Ukraine may again lose its freedom and its independence, there is hope that at least at this time—for the first time in many, many centuries—we could break through this vicious circle, and upheld this democratic, free, strong Ukraine that would never be a powerhouse and a donor for new empires and new wars.

Frum: I grew up in Canada, which was the center of a lot of diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity. And I don’t want to make this too much of a generalization, but I would say, when I was young anyway, that diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity tended very much to the reactionary side: ultra-nationalist and very defensive of Ukraine and all that it had done. And so there was a tendency to say, to think that the bloodshed between Ukrainians and Poles, it stretches back to the 1600s, but was very intense during the Second World War. The Ukrainians were innocent; the Poles were guilty. The crimes against the Jews, well, they didn’t happen, and if they happened, the Jews deserved them.

And what has been striking about Ukrainian culture since 1991, and especially since 2014, and very much in your book, is the ability to tell a story of national pride while integrating national shames, without letting those shames detract from the future. And understanding that Ukrainians and Poles had a very tangled history. Ukrainians and Jews have had a tangled history, a lot of suffering. And yet something new and modern and liberal can emerge from this by recognizing the full truth and all the components of the Ukrainian national identity.

Ponomarenko: In my book, I specifically stay away from radical views or idealizing the history of this land. I state it very clear, and I think it’s a very just thing to say that Ukraine is a very complicated place. It’s a very brutal place in history. It’s a very terrible place in terms of all the blood that was shed for this country, and in this country. It’s one of the crossroads of this world where many people wanted to be a master in.

So I specifically say that when it comes to, for instance, the killings of Jewish and pogroms. For instance, we have a national hero of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who led the greatest and the biggest rebellion of Ukrainian Cossacks since the 17th century, that almost led to the installment of the Ukrainian nationhood within the old Polish crown. And right now, especially in the last 100 years, Bohdan Khmelnytsky is idolized. It’s his own monuments. He’s on Ukrainian money. He’s the symbol of the founding fathers of the Ukrainian nationhood. But at the same time, one of the darkest pages of Ukrainian history is the way the Jewish population was treated during those uprisings, because the uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks against the Polish crown in the 17th century was the outburst of anger of extremely poor people. Of extremely oppressed people in terms of their religion, in terms of their money. It was an outburst of anger against the very system they were living in, with nobles being absolutely unpunishable with religious oppression. So it naturally fell upon Jews, as part of this system that was also unjust toward them in this regard.

Frum: Because the Polish nobles were far away, and the Jews were neighbors right next door.

Ponomarenko: Yeah; it was a very complicated social system. In which Jews, for instance, when it comes to 17th century—in that period, for instance—Jews were laid upon with duties like taxes, or they were the only ones that are allowed to with banking operations. And who loves people who you owe money, or who collect taxes, or who run bars, for instance. Who have monopoly on producing drinks, for instance.

So it was about a lot of hatred, about a lot of injustices. And try to explain to a very angry peasant—who has been robbed, who has been poor, extremely destitute, who has barely any education when it comes to basic things—when emotions go through, try to explain to these people, to this angry crowd ready to take up arms and commit massacres, that, for instance, Jews are not guilty of this; that they are surviving also on the last wheels.

So in general, Ukrainian history is full of such things. And in my book, I do not represent any radical. I do not provide any justifications. I explain how it happened, what happened. But I do not idealize. And I simply speak on behalf of very average, young Ukrainian that’s thinking about this country with no nationalism, with no radical points, with no attempts to idealize Ukraine and its history.

Ukraine is a complicated place. And what’s important also about this country, especially when it comes to the Ukraine of today, is that I see it with my own eyes from everyday life in my country. That we have overcome a lot of those things that drag us down from the past. We mentioned Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Despite all this past, despite such a bloody history of pogroms dating back to 20th century, what we have right now in Ukraine is that the chief rabbi of Ukraine is a hard advocate for Ukrainian victory, and he spends basically entire his life advocating support for Ukraine. His son, his adopted son, died fighting for Ukraine as a volunteer in the armed forces. When it comes to Islam, for instance, we have a chief mufti, former chief mufti of Ukraine—which is the top priest, or top clergyman, for Ukrainian Muslim community—he resigned from his position, and he’s a battlefield medic with the Ukrainian military.

We have Jewish presidents as of now.

Frum: Well, I sometimes think that it’s going to be fascinating to explain when my grandchildren or great-grandchildren visit Kyiv that the biggest statue in Kyiv is Khmelnytsky—who ranks along with, just behind Hitler as one of the greatest villains in Jewish history—and the second-biggest statue in Kyiv will be of President Zelensky.

Ponomarenko: I’m not sure about this, because Ukrainians tend to be highly critical towards the leader that they have as of the moment.

Frum: While he’s alive, sure.

Ponomarenko: Yeah; as of the moment, yeah. One of the things that really saved this country and continues moving forward is that we have a tendency of being extremely critical towards any sort of authority. So, Zelensky might, could have been like a war hero. He could be a president that was elected by a landslide. But it always happens that Ukrainians fall in love very quickly, and they get dissatisfied and extremely critical very quickly, even quicker than that.

But when it comes to—you have a very good point about monuments. I take a walk in downtown Kyiv, and I see a monument for Sholem Aleichem, the great Jewish writer. We have a museum for him in downtown Kyiv. We have—what’s the word for this? It’s the placard with the commemorative placard, commemorative plate. Toward, yeah—that marks the building where Golda Meir was born and raised in Kyiv. She’s a girl from Kyiv.

At the same time, we have a lot of Jewish places. There are Middle Eastern cuisine restaurants, and what’s important in this is that they often share the same street with Muslim places, with halal places for Muslims. One of the most important and popular Kyiv restaurants is, it’s called Musafir. It’s Crimean Tatar food. Like a Muslim place that gives you, essentially, gives you a vibe of a Muslim homecoming and Muslim cuisine. And I can give you a lot of examples of such things in a predominantly Slavic country with Christian churches and all those things.

But what I really appreciate about my country—and I really feel about this—is that I see that in this country, with its feeling of purpose that unites confessions, religions, many ethnicities. I really like this, about my Ukraine.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about another painful historical passage. And there’s been, especially in very recent weeks, an attempt to stoke Polish-Ukrainian animosities that date back to the events of the Second World War. Poland and Ukraine had claims on overlapping territories. The ebb and tide of wars sometimes favoring the Poles, sometimes favoring the Ukrainians. Led to terrible massacres. And Poland has been an indispensable ally of Ukraine in its struggle for freedom, but there have been attempts politically to sort of trigger, push those painful memories of the past in a way that would sever the Polish-Ukrainian relationship. How does that play in Ukrainian culture? How does that play in Ukrainian politics?

Ponomarenko: I too confidently can say that something that could be called “a Polish question” is absolutely absent in Ukrainian politics. Nobody talks about Poland. Nobody talks about the complicated Polish-Ukrainian history. Average Ukrainian—especially when it comes to those who are beside arguments on Twitter with Poles—average Ukrainian thinks about Poland as a neighboring country that has not wasted any time, just like we did, with its independence. That has gained enormous successes as an economy. Essentially the example of what could have happened to Ukraine if we haven’t wasted our time.

Frum: I mean, both of you—Poland in 1989 was almost as poor as Ukraine was in 1989.

Ponomarenko: Yeah, if not poorer. If not poorer, yes.

Frum: And Poland made a series of very bold free-market choices, ripped the bandage off, took a real—I was there in 1990. It was tough. But Poland has had this remarkable growth. The free-market policies have paid off, and Poland is now on its way to becoming a fully developed—if it’s not already a fully developed country, it’s minutes away from being a fully developed country.

Illia Ponomarenko: It’s very cool. It’s very impressive in this regard. And my entire point in my book, and in my entire presence on social media and everywhere, is that I’m trying to talk like an average, simple Ukrainian, that has no extreme political views of this. An average, simple Ukrainian says that Poland is a cool place. It’s very impressive that they have achieved this. Two million, if my memory doesn’t fail me, two million Ukrainians live in Poland and work in Poland. And we spend a lot of time using Polish airports, in general using Poland as a hub. Not only for, you know, the military supplies and everything, but also for substituting things that are not available to us because of the wartime.

Most of the people go—if we need airports, most of the people in Ukraine still go to Poland to cross the border and to get to the airports and travel for anything. So, it’s really sad to see that from the Polish side, we see that this complicated history between Ukrainians and Poles often gets used as a political tool within Poland.

I definitely can say that nobody talks about this in Ukraine, because we have far more pressing problems on our heads, to be honest. But I must say that it’s really sad, and it was pretty shocking to me to see that, beyond those fiery rhetorics and playing politics about this, we have pretty material things happening. Like continuing and shocking attacks on Ukrainians in Poland. That’s happening. They are popping up in the news, way too frequent, which is kind of shocking to disregard.

Frum: One thing that you very eloquently write about is something that Ukrainians, as you say, do feel strongly about, and that is the flag of the European Union. And you have this very poetic passage in the book where you describe as Ukraine was negotiating a kind of auxiliary membership in the European Union, just before the Maidan in 2014, that the European flags began to appear. And I think in most of Europe, the European flag is associated with regulations on fishing, food safety, air [control]—you know, what kind of coolant you can use in a refrigerator. A series of boring bureaucratic technicalities to make sure that goods and services can move across borders.

It isn’t any kind of inspirational idea anymore. It’s just a bunch of rules. But you describe very movingly how, for Ukrainians, it became an idea.

Ponomarenko: We have a pretty long history of this European Union flag of being a symbol. It dates back to 20, 25 years ago, when Ukrainians started massively thinking about going west, essentially turning away from Russia.

Essentially it’s about the emergence of my generation, of the people in their 20s and 30s. It is in our childhood that we started getting things like democracy from school. Human rights; the rule of law. We started understanding this as something very normal—something very good to aspire to.

So I’m not sure if I had this in my book. But there was, in early days of Euromaidan revolution, it was late 2013 in Mariupol. We had a little rally in support of signing this association agreement with the European Union, and I remember myself leading a small crowd of my friends, students, and also a couple of lecturers. And all holding this European flag and moving through Mariupol avenues.

It has always been a symbol of hope. It has always been a symbol of a generation that is pretty different from our parents. It has always been a symbol of us really wanting to be in this place where our biggest problem is regulations—you know, the temperature in our ACs, boring laws, these arguments over percentages. It’s just an idealized, very romantic dream of Ukraine overcoming a lot of things that drag us behind. And a romantic dream of Ukraine as a nation, as a state. Just getting closer to who we were. Very modern, very Westernized in our mindsets, in our tastes and everything. A generation that is really not different from any generation right now in the West.

But we had a state that was incompatible with our values, especially when it comes to hyper-corruption during the [Viktor] Yanukovych presidency. And this state, the mafia state, under the wing of Moscow, has become so incompatible with our values—with our aspirations for the future, with the way we think about our country, the way we want it to be—that it essentially led to a revolution. And the symbol was moving towards that place where people argue about ACs as their biggest problems, instead of us.

Frum: It’s now a dozen years since that revolution in the Maidan. Historians write about the past. I don’t know if you consider yourself an historian. I don’t know whether your next book will also be in history, but sometimes they’re tempted to make a comment about the future. Can you look out and say—if your future self could write one more chapter of the book, what would that chapter look like?

Ponomarenko: If I could, I would want to give an afterword in the history, in the book, about the way it came to be for Ukraine after the end. Because I end not on a strictly positive mode. My book’s ending is about hope. It brings a reader to a moment when the full-scale Russian invasion starts in 2022. And I’m not promising myself and the reader a victory. I’m not promising myself, and the victory a success. I’m not saying that Ukraine will win. I’m talking about hope, and essentially the last word in my book is hope. The hope that we will prevail—we will break through this vicious circle that we have been discussing right now.

And one of the images that I had in my head, and I expressed in my final words in this book, is this idea of Christmastime. Christmas Eve in Kyiv in the evening, in the frosty night, in the first Christmas after the war. Kyiv is one of the most beautiful places to celebrate Christmas in terms of the spirit, the spirit of Christmas here.

And I would want to write an afterword of how this first Christmas after the war in free, independent Ukraine would take place. Because it’s just like the European Union flag—it’s a dream. It’s something to aspire to. It’s something to hope for. And it would mean that our hope came true: of saving this country and giving it, handing it over to our children.

Christmas in postwar Kyiv, in independent Ukraine—that would be my afterword, I’d say. Yeah.

Frum: And Christmas is so symbolic for Ukrainians, because even the date on which you celebrate Christmas expresses your vision of the kind of future you want for your country. Whether that is December 25th, as would be celebrated to your west, or a different date, as would be celebrated to your east.

Ponomarenko: We officially switched to having two Christmases. Officially in Ukraine, there are two Christmases, so it serves both traditions. [December] 25th or January 7th. And, of course, it’s part of the de-Russification, the getting out of the Russian-style traditions. With—it goes along with the disgust with everything that’s represented by Russian church, Russian traditions, Russian way of life and everything. And I truly believed that this thing with Christmas on December 25th was more of a formal thing, or more about the youth, you know? Westernized youth; we want the same Christmas, just like on Home Alone day. It’s more about us being too westernized as distant from, you know, most of the population that sticks to the older traditions.

But at the same time, with every year of this war, I see it with every Christmas. That really, far more people that I expected do celebrate and switch to Christmas on December.

Frum: Whatever day it is, I wish you that future Christmas in peace and freedom. I hope it comes soon. Illia, thank you so much for joining me. The book is The Land of Tears and Hope. It will be published in November by Bloomsbury. As you said, it was written originally in English. It’s a very moving book. It is very cinematic, very dramatic. And it was both exciting and very touching to read, and I was grateful to have a chance to read an early edition of it. Illia Ponomarenko, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Ponomarenko: Thank you. Thank you very much for this.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Thanks so much to Illia Ponomarenko for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is not a book I have read. It’s not a book I can read, because it’s a book that doesn’t exist yet, but that I want to read. Let me explain.

Our modern world has been shaped by slavery and the traffic in slaves. Illia makes the point, in his remarkable history of Ukraine, that Ukraine was a target of slaving through much of the past 500 years.

That point is made briefly in Illia’s book, because there’s not a lot that is known about that compared to the other great slave traffics that made the modern world.

Imagine a map of Western Eurasia. Draw a line from the Ural Mountains that separates European from Asian-Russia through the Middle East, putting Iran on our one side of the line and India and what’s now Pakistan on the other side of the line, around Africa and into the Western world, North America, South America. In that world, in the past 500 years, there have been four massive, horrifying slave traffics.

By far the best known is the one that took African slaves across the Atlantic to the New World. That slave traffic is very well documented. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to the website slavevoyages.org, and there you will find a database of every known slave ship that crossed the Atlantic over the past 500 years. About 36,000 ships’ voyages, in all, that moved about 12 million people. Twelve and a half million people got on the boats; about 10 and a half million people got off the boats. Of those people—the 10 and a half million who got off the boats in the New World—about 46 percent went to Brazil, the rest to elsewhere in Spanish America. About three and a half percent went to what became the United States. Their fates, their destinies, their horrors, their sufferings: Those are as well studied as any topic in modern history.

But there are three other slave traffics that are not nearly so well known. Maybe the runner-up in terms of well-knownness is the slave traffic that took people from Italy, southern France, southern Spain, as far away as England and even Iceland, into the western part of North Africa, to what’s now Algeria and Tunisia, the Barbary Coast. That also is reasonably well studied, because the languages of the people who were enslaved are well known to Western scholars. They spoke French; they spoke Spanish; they spoke Italian. And the slavers spoke Arabic, a language that is also quite well known to Western scholarship. And there’s an estimate that in the 200 years or 250 years from 1530 to 1780, about a million people were taken from France, Italy, Spain—as far away as England, Ireland, and Iceland—into western North Africa.

The two other traffics, however, are not nearly so well known. The traffic from Africa east into the Middle East. That’s not so well known. And the traffic from what is now Ukraine, Poland, and Russia into what is now the Middle East, into what was then the Ottoman Empire, is also very poorly studied. And that last is the book that I want to read about.

The estimate that scholars have—and it’s a very rough estimate—is that over the past 500 years, about 2 million people were taken from what is now Poland, Ukraine, Western Russia, into what is now the Middle East, into the Ottoman Empire. The records on this are very poor, and they are in languages that are not well understood in the West. They’re in the Ottoman archives. They’re in other small languages of Eastern Europe. And of course, Eastern Europe has been subject to all kinds of horrifying violence in recent times that destroyed archives, that destroyed archeological sites. So it’s kind of a mysterious topic.

And the topic has also been distorted because, for much of the past 100 years, Eastern European history was channeled through institutions dominated by the former Soviet Union, which propounded a heavy-handed Marxism that—for reasons of its own ideological internal necessity—didn’t take seriously the slave operations. Of what affected the foreign slave operations. They’re very interested in serfdom: the people who were held to the land inside Eastern Europe. But not so interested in the people who were removed from it.

But as Ukraine and Poland and these other countries find their own destiny, this is a topic I think we need to know better. Slavery is violence. Slavery is inflicted by people more capable of organized violence on people less capable of organized violence. People and nations. What does it do to a nation to be on the receiving end of organized violence, foreign-organized violence, century after century in the way that Eastern Europeans were? How does it change them? How does it shape their national sense of themselves? That’s a subject I’d like to know a lot more about, and there isn’t the literature to tell me about it. But as Ukraine and Poland and the others find their place in the modern world, I think it’s a story that we need to know more about, and that I’d like to read more about.

So if there’s anyone out there who has fluency or familiarity or even competence in Ottoman archives—Turkish language, Polish language, Ukrainian language, Russian language—here’s an assignment for you: Help us understand what it did to Eastern Europe to be on the receiving end of this organized violence for so many hundreds of years. And how that experience feeds, if it does feed, into the rising national consciousness of Eastern Europe today.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you will share this program on whatever platforms are available to you. Remember, as always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you’re minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Please consider that. See you soon here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

A federal judge ruled late Tuesday that President Trump cannot ban news organizations from covering him at the White House because he does not like the nature of their coverage - at least, not until the matter goes to a formal trial.

(Image credit: Graeme Sloan)

Per ottenere da Bruxelles il permesso di indebitarsi, l’Italia accetta di spendere 7,2 miliardi l’anno in armi: le tutele sociali di lavoratori e ceto medio sono ormai subordinate all’acquisto di sistemi d’arma. A Levante questa sera, martedì 13 ottobre 2026, Margherita Furlan dialoga con Alessandro Volpi, storico ed economista, e Paolo Borgognone, saggista e storico delle idee, sulla Legge di Bilancio 2027 e sul prezzo, politico ed economico, che il Paese paga per farla quadrare. La manovra da 30 miliardi regge su una clausola di salvaguardia per un extradeficit dello 0,6% del PIL: oltre 14 miliardi l’anno di nuovi BTP, con l’obbligo di destinarne metà al riarmo. Il debito per le armi diventa il lasciapassare contabile per non tagliare sanità e pensioni. Intanto il debito pubblico e privato globale ha toccato i 370 mila miliardi di dollari, mentre il 5% della popolazione detiene quasi 300 mila miliardi di ricchezza. Chi dovrebbe pagare la montagna debitoria? In Italia sono in corso le esercitazioni NATO, compresa quella nucleare, senza un passaggio parlamentare. Che cosa significa ospitarle nella stessa settimana in cui si vota una manovra che finanzia la difesa a debito? E mentre l’Europa si indebita per prepararsi alla guerra con Mosca, dopo la telefonata tra Putin e Trump il gasolio russo torna a scorrere verso gli Stati Uniti. Chi decide il riarmo non è chi lo paga. Affrontiamo insieme: I numeri veri della Legge di Bilancio 2027 e il gioco di prestigio contabile dell’extradeficit Da «burro o cannoni» ad «armi a pranzo»: quando il riarmo smette di essere un’alternativa e diventa una condizione La spesa per interessi verso il 4,6% del PIL e la spirale che divora gli spazi fiscali Il 5% che possiede il mondo e la tassazione che nessun governo osa proporre Le esercitazioni NATO in Italia e la sovranità sottratta Il gasolio di Putin a Trump: multipolarismo o condominio tra potenze? LIBRI DEGLI OSPITI Alessandro Volpi, La finanza è colpevole, Laterza, 2026 Alessandro Volpi, I padroni del mondo. Come i fondi finanziari stanno distruggendo il mercato e la democrazia, Laterza, 2024 Alessandro Volpi, Nelle mani dei fondi, Altreconomia, 2023 Paolo Borgognone, Generazione Erasmus, Zambon, 2018 Paolo Borgognone, Deplorevoli? Rappresentazioni dei ceti popolari in Occidente, Zambon, 2017 Paolo Borgognone, Capire la Russia, Zambon, 2016 SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente, autofinanziato da sei anni, senza editori e senza partiti. Per donazioni: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV Membership YouTube:    / @casadelsoletvchannel   Analista Multipolare €5/mese Inviato della Verità €15/mese Architetto del Futuro €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel #Levante #CasadelSoleTV #MargheritaFurlan #Geopolitica #Multipolarismo #AlessandroVolpi #PaoloBorgognone #LeggeDiBilancio #Riarmo #NATO #DebitoPubblico #Manovra2027

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Donald Trump is the quantum president: simultaneously all-powerful and also a wee, innocent figurehead, blithely unaware of what his aides are doing.

The first Trump, the one who declares that he “alone can fix it,” was in the Oval Office last week, asserting his unfettered power to persecute his political opponents. “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” he said. “I can do whatever I want, if I want.” But after federal law enforcement conducted a search at the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, yesterday morning, Trump insisted he was completely uninvolved.

Without more information, the search—conducted by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE that handles complicated probes—is deeply troubling. The Trump administration has deployed a series of probes, searches, and indictments, many of which are plainly pretextual or political, against outspoken critics. (This is a crucial distinction from an August 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago, which yielded many boxes of highly sensitive material, haphazardly stored.) Black women, including Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, have been particular but not exclusive targets. The search also breaks a norm against public action in highly political cases in the 60 days before an election. Attempts to intimidate or criminalize an opposition party are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

There is much about the search that we do not know, including what evidence was used to obtain the warrant (though The New York Times reports it “was the subject of significant back and forth between prosecutors and the federal judge who eventually approved it”); what agents might have found; and what charges, if any, the government might be contemplating. Some reporting states that prosecutors are exploring whether Omar’s late father lied or made omissions on immigration applications. (The administration has focused on trying to strip citizenship from people who gave false responses on applications.) The congresswoman came to the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen at 17.

To hear Trump tell it, he also knows little about the probe. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said yesterday. “I have nothing to do with it.” (The Department of Justice told the Times that the search was part of an ongoing investigation but declined to comment further.) This is a pattern I previously identified: When faced with difficult questions or strong pushback, the president tends to insist that the lawyers are in charge and he’s not apprised of what’s going on.

But his claim is hard to believe. Trump has repeatedly said that he has a “right” to direct federal prosecutors to investigate whomever he wishes, and although he generally insists that he has not done so, evidence suggests otherwise. Last September, Trump posted on Truth Social instructing then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against critics, including James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote. Several news outlets later reported that the missive was intended as a private message. Bondi was removed this spring, reportedly because of Trump’s frustration that his attempts at retribution were moving too slowly.

In February, FBI agents searched an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, in pursuit of evidence for Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. (Their warrant was largely based on debunked claims.) The following day, Trump spoke directly to some of the agents involved, an extraordinary intervention.

Comey was ultimately charged with threatening the president, after he posted a photograph of shells he found on a beach that read 86 47, a set of numbers that supporters have said connotes wanting to remove Trump from office. DOJ has insisted the post was a threat of violence (which Comey has denied). Documents released by Comey’s lawyers this summer show that Trump was closely involved in the case, demanding briefings and notes from interviews with Comey prior to his indictment.

Adding to the impression that the Omar case is a White House effort, Katie Miller, the former Trump aide and the wife of Stephen Miller, posted about the story on X yesterday, saying, “Promise made, promise kept.” She later deleted the post.

But even if Trump is not personally engaged, he has made clear through his statements that he wants Omar investigated and punished. In 2019, he suggested that members of the progressive “Squad,” which included Omar, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few days later, after he criticized Omar at a rally, he watched as a crowd chanted, “Send her back!” In December, he called Omar “garbage” and said that Somalis should leave the U.S.: “Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.” The next month, when Omar was attacked at an event, Trump accused her of setting it up. This March, Vice President Vance told an interviewer, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” The message from the White House is clear enough to make King Henry II blush.

If Trump is as engaged in prosecutions of his political opponents as public evidence indicates, then his behavior is inappropriate and damaging to the rule of law. If, however, he truly knows nothing about what’s going on, then he’s not the heroic, powerful leader he claims to be. Which would he prefer the public conclude?

Related:

• Trump is hiding behind his lawyers.
• Trump shrugs off the Ilhan Omar attack.

Il pieno da Putin | Putrino, Maddaloni e Mazzeo a Levante Trecentomila tonnellate di gasolio non spostano un prezzo: spostano un ordine. A Levante questa sera, lunedì 12 ottobre 2026, Margherita Furlan dialoga con Michele Putrino, filosofo e saggista, Vincenzo Maddaloni, giornalista, già corrispondente da Mosca e direttore del Centro studi Berlin89, e Antonio Mazzeo, giornalista d’inchiesta e ricercatore sulla militarizzazione del Mediterraneo. Novanta minuti al telefono tra Trump e Putin, una licenza del Tesoro americano che autorizza il diesel russo fino ad aprile 2027, una legge sulle sanzioni firmata tre settimane prima e già aggirata. In tre giorni: Trump che chiede all’Ucraina «un nuovo presidente», una tregua energetica annunciata su Truth Social e smentita da Mosca, 1.600 nuove sanzioni europee. Il socio di maggioranza compra, i soci di minoranza sanzionano. E in Italia il gasolio resta a 2,25 euro al litro. Affrontiamo insieme: La Russia con le «pezze al sedere» o con i margini più alti del decennio? Raffinerie colpite, bilancio in deficit, Duma blindata Il prezzo alla pompa come variabile sovrana fino al voto del 3 novembre, e il piano del Pentagono contro l’Iran che aspetta dopo le elezioni Teheran paga il conto? Il trattato Russia-Iran, l’articolo 3 e la differenza tra alleanza e non belligeranza Pechino «non pervenuta»: il vincitore silenzioso che taglia le importazioni e incassa le armi non consegnate a Taiwan L’Europa che sanziona da sola mentre Washington le chiede le riserve e la chiama «ipocrita» Italia: non mancano le raffinerie, manca lo Stato. Priolo, Sarroch, Augusta, Milazzo e la lezione di Mattei La menzogna che organizza l’attenzione: Arendt, Machiavelli, Gramsci e il senso comune che non sa contare. LIBRI DEGLI OSPITI Michele Putrino, Liberi dalla paura, Uno Editori, 2021. Michele Putrino, Manuale di resistenza al potere, Uno Editori, 2019. Vincenzo Maddaloni, Voglia di rivoluzione, Nexus, 2024. Vincenzo Maddaloni (con Modini), L’atomica degli ayatollah, Nutrimenti, 2006. Antonio Mazzeo, La scuola va alla guerra. Inchiesta sulla militarizzazione dell’istruzione in Italia, Manifestolibri, 2024. Antonio Mazzeo, Il MUOStro di Niscemi, Editpress, 2013. Antonio Mazzeo, I padrini del ponte. Affari di mafia sullo Stretto di Messina, Edizioni Alegre, 2010. L’ARTICOLO DA CUI NASCE LA PUNTATA Margherita Furlan, «Il gasolio del nemico», 12 ottobre 2026 SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente autofinanziato. Esiste perché esistete voi. Per donazioni: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV Membership YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleT… Analista Multipolare €5/mese Inviato della Verità €15/mese Architetto del Futuro €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel Sito: casadelsole.tv #Levante #CasadelSoleTV #MargheritaFurlan #Geopolitica #Multipolarismo #TrumpPutin #Gasolio #Sanzioni #Hormuz #SovranitàEnergetica #MichelePutrino #AntonioMazzeo #VincenzoMaddaloni

L'articolo 🔴 IL PIENO DA PUTIN | LEVANTE LIVE proviene da Casa del Sole TV.

You need 35 years of National Insurance contributions to get the full state pension. Ah, says David Craig, but the unemployed get 'pension credit', which pays exactly the same and comes with piles of freebies thrown in.

The post Want the Highest State Pension? Don’t Bother Working Too Much appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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The majority of Americans believe that every human being has an immaterial soul, and they tend to base their sense of human dignity and equality on this belief. Yet the culture at large often operates under the assumption that physical reality is all there is. Which view is correct? In this episode of The Permanent Questions, self-described “spookiest” David Brooks talks with Shelly Kagan, a best-selling philosopher who insists souls do not exist—and that we don’t need them in order to embrace the wonder and mystery of human experience.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Brooks: I think the essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn was accurately capturing parts of America when, in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, she wrote, “It is meaningless to speak of the soul in the 21st century. It has become a dead metaphor, one of those words that survive in language long after a culture has lost faith in the concept."

Yet here’s the funny thing: According to the Pew Research Center, 85 percent of Americans say that they have a soul. They really do believe they have a mystical, immaterial, spooky, ghostlike thing at the center of who they are. And I have a confession to make: I’m one of those people. Furthermore, this metaphorical and spiritual meaning of the word soul is pretty central to the way I see the world. Long before I ever believed in God, I was firmly convinced that each person you meet has some piece of themselves that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives them infinite value and dignity.

In today’s conversation, we’re gonna address the question: Do humans have souls? I’ve laid my cards on the table. I think they do. We’re gonna be joined by Shelly Kagan, and he does not think we do. Kagan is the Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. For over 40 years, stretching back to his days at the University of Illinois, Chicago, he has taught a course on death to undergrads, which, naturally enough, takes up the subject of the soul.

Shelly Kagan (from lecture): Last time, I distinguished between two ways in which thinking about the facts about the nature of death could influence our behavior. On the one hand, it could give us reasons to behave or respond differently, and on the other hand, it could merely cause us to behave differently.

The course has become globally famous because it’s on YouTube. Those lectures have been seen 33 million times in China alone. Part of his success is his intellect, but part derives from the fact that for a guy who doesn’t believe in enchantment, he’s a completely enchanting guy.

I’m pleased to welcome Shelly Kagan to this table.

Shelly Kagan, welcome to The Permanent Questions. We are honored to have you here. Now, there’s a chapter in your life I’m confused about. It concerns the time you go to Wesleyan in 1972. You grew up in Skokie, Illinois, right?

Shelly Kagan: That’s correct.

Brooks: And you go to Wesleyan, and you’re a religion major for some period of that time. But you also read John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, which suggests to me that you’re trending in the direction you’re trending, which we’ll talk about. But then in your senior year, you apply to rabbinic school. So in my mind, you’re trending toward a utilitarian, maybe non-believing form of life, and then you apply to become a rabbi. What’s up with that?

Kagan: I had planned to be a rabbi starting at some point in high school, and that was what I anticipated all through college. As you say, I applied to rabbinical school, a particular rabbinical school, in fall of my senior year. I got the rejection letter, spring of my senior year. So I graduated from college and was suddenly in the situation that most of my friends had been in for four years, asking myself, So what do I want to do with my life? I thought I had known what I wanted to do with my life. But I had already come into college knowing I was also interested in philosophy, which, as it happens, I’d gotten into through Judaica.

Brooks: I guess my question is: Did you believe in God, and you thought, Well, I’d like to serve God by being a rabbi?

Kagan: Well, I believed in the importance of Judaism, and I suppose any traditional Jew will say something like, “I believe in God.” But what it is to believe in God—as I imagine you know—from the Jewish point of view, that’s left much more up to you. Judaism doesn’t have a central set of religious dogmas. How you interpret this, as well as other central Jewish thoughts, like revelation—there are rival thinkers.

Judaism was important to me through college. Judaism stayed important to me after I got rejected from rabbinical school. After college, I asked myself, Should I reapply to rabbinical school? Should I get a secular Judaic degree? Or—and this was literally the very first time the question ever crossed my mind—Maybe I should become a philosopher. Since I thought I had known what I was going to do, the question had literally never occurred to me.

Brooks: When you thought about philosophy, did you think, I just wanna talk about big ideas, or is it, Like being a rabbi, I’m sort of ministering to people’s minds?

Kagan: I think it’s not a coincidence that of all the different topics in philosophy, the area I ended up specializing in is ethics and moral philosophy. I continue to think about questions about value, which were certainly the things that most drove me to wanting to be a rabbi as well.

Brooks: Now you teach this famous course on death, which has become internationally known. It’s unlike a lot of courses, where the professor offers: “Here’s this person’s view, here’s that person’s view, here’s this person’s view.” As I understand the course on death, and I’ve seen it on YouTube, you say, “Here’s my point of view. What do you think?” Could you summarize the argument of that course?

Kagan: As you say, in a number of classes, including several of my own classes, when I teach introductory ethics, I say, “Here’s four or five prominent views. Here are the arguments for; here’s the arguments against." I try to keep my cards pretty close to my chest. In the death class, as I began to put it together, I decided that wasn’t the way to go. I wasn’t going to pretend. I say on the very first day, “Here’s a bunch of things that lots of people believe about death, and I’m going to spend the semester arguing, trying to convince you that they’re not so.” I try to be fair—I hope I’m fair—to the views that I’m rejecting, but I don’t hide what my considered conclusions are.

So as I say, most people, at least lots of people, believe in a soul. By that term, using it as a piece of jargon, I mean that we have some immaterial, nonphysical part of us, maybe the essence of what we really are, and that thing can survive the death of our body. It’s good to believe in such a thing because mortality is bad. It would be good to live forever. If it’s not true, then death is something terrifying. Suicide never makes sense. There’s a variety of views like this. Death is very mysterious. What exactly is it? Something we can’t know, can’t really get our head around.

Over the course of the semester, I try to argue that there is no soul, that there’s nothing especially mysterious about death or dying, that immortality would not be desirable, that fear of death does not make sense, that there are circumstances in which suicide can be rational. I work through the various positions and try to lay out what strike me as the most promising arguments for the views before turning around and explaining why I think those arguments aren’t compelling.

Brooks: I want to get into the substance of this, but I’m just curious: These are undergrads; they’re 20 years old, 21, 19. Why are they interested in death? It’s so far away.

Kagan: When I first started teaching the class—that was before I came to Yale. I was at the University of Illinois Chicago. I taught the class a handful of times there, maybe four times in the nine years I was there, and almost nobody took it. But when I came to Yale, I thought, Well, it’s worth trying it again. Now, at the time, this is more than 30 years ago, because there was no preregistration, I had no idea how many people would show up. I thought, Maybe 50 people will show up. To be safe, I’ll run off 75 copies of the syllabus. Three hundred and twenty odd people showed up, and I realized I’ve hit a nerve here in ways that I really hadn’t anticipated. Of course, it’s a subject that everybody cares about. It’s a subject that everybody thinks about.

Interestingly enough, from the pedagogical perspective, as a philosophy professor, it’s a wonderful subject for an introductory class because it allows you to move from questions in metaphysics and epistemology and value theory and ethics and philosophy of mind and the like.

Brooks: Do they push back? Are they offended by what you’re saying? Do they embrace what you’re saying?

Kagan: I tell them that my goal in the class—although in some sense is to persuade them of a variety of claims, what’s most important to me is that they end up thinking through these issues. If they’ve genuinely given the matter thought and have come away disagreeing with me, that’s great. Philosophical questions are ones in which—this is a theme throughout all of my classes—reasonable people can disagree. So the class is really an invitation to think about some really important questions.

Brooks: We reasonably disagree whether people have souls. Even when I didn’t believe in God, which was most of my adult life, the way I would put it is that each of us has a piece of us that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives us infinite value and dignity. That accords with my sense of just looking around the world—that everybody I meet seems to have some sacred dignity. So if that’s my sense of where human dignity comes from …

Kagan: Let’s start with no size. What was it? No size, no shape?

Brooks: Color or shape.

Kagan: So let’s start with something totally trivial. You believe that seven times eight equals 56.

Does that thought have color? Does it have weight? Does it have shape? Well, presumably not. In philosopher jargon, that’s some sort of category mistake to think that things like that have to have color and shape, like this glass of water.

The very first thing we have to understand is that you can believe, as I do believe, that I’m just a material object and that you’re just a material object—the people watching this show are just material objects—and so we have size, color, shape. Not everything that’s true of us is helpfully described in those terms. What I think is that you’re a material object that is able to think. You’re able to think about simple mathematical facts, and depending on how far you got in your math education—

Brooks: You hit the limit of it right there.

Kagan: You’re able to think about more complicated facts. You’re able to make plans. You’re able to communicate with me. And the question is: Can we point to various properties like that and explain how a material object can have the ability to think, to be creative, to fall in love, and so forth?

There are aspects about us which give us a special kind of—you used the Kantian phrase— dignity. I’m happy to talk that way. I don’t think that’s a mistake. I don’t think that gives us reason to think that there’s something nonphysical about us. You would then have to ask the question: By virtue of what is it true that we count morally? And this is a contested philosophical question.  If you want, I can rattle off three theories, but I’m not sure how much in the weeds you wanna get.

Brooks: Yeah, let’s go there.

Kagan: Let me start with one that I think is probably part of the story but won’t get you all the way to dignity—at least all the way to dignity in the sense I think you mean it.

As I say to my intro ethics students, if I were to bring in a cat, douse it with gasoline, and then set it on fire, and then it shrieks in agony, most of us would agree—maybe not everybody, but most of us would agree—that that would be wrong. It counts morally. It’s a stray cat, let’s pretend, so I’m not hurting its owner, right? I’m doing something wrong to the cat. The cat counts in its own right. By virtue of what?

A natural plausible thought is that it counts by virtue of the fact that it can feel pleasure and pain. I think that’s true about cats. One might think it isn’t true about animals. That’s up to you. But suppose it’s what most of us do think, that cats feel pleasure and pain. That makes them count in a certain way, and it would explain why it would be wrong for me to douse one in gasoline and set it on fire. In part, it would also explain why it would be wrong for me to douse you with gasoline and set you on fire.

So that’s one story. I don’t think that’s probably the whole story and maybe not the most important part of the story. You used the Kantian word dignity. Immanuel Kant, a great German philosopher, thought that our moral standing, which differentiates us from animals—Kantians have a hard time explaining why animals should count, too—but Kantians basically think it has something to do with our freedom, with our rationality, with our autonomy, with the ability to set ends for ourselves, to decide how we wanna act, and to reason about what goals and actions make sense.

I find that a very plausible and attractive idea. You’re an autonomous being. The etymology here is “auto,” self, “nomos,” law. You’re the kind of being that can give laws to yourself, decide for yourself how you wanna live. By virtue of your being an autonomous being, you count in a special way. Animals that merely feel pleasure and pain but don’t have that kind of freedom; they count, I think, in a lesser way.

So I think that you have that special moral status. We can use the word dignity to try to mark it. There’d be more wrong about setting you on fire than merely the fact that it would hurt. If I killed you painlessly, it would still be wrong, because as an autonomous being, you’ve set various goals for yourself. There are things you want to accomplish with your life.

It’s a controversial philosophical question, but I don’t see why bringing that in necessarily means you have to bring in a soul, if by a soul we mean something nonphysical, immaterial, distinct from our body. Just like we need to be able to tell a story about how a material object can believe seven times eight equals 56, we’ll need a story—it’ll be more complicated—about how a material being can come to set goals and reconsider them and reevaluate them and so forth.

Brooks: You said Kant believes humans have dignity. Do you? Would you say that humans have—I used the term “infinite dignity,” which is going up to 11?

Kagan: I will confess, dignity is not one of the words that typically I’ll find myself using. But I’m not troubled by using it. What is it that one means when one talks about a person having dignity? I’m perfectly comfortable talking that way, but it’s just a placeholder. Then we have to start talking about what are the sorts of things that come with being a creature with dignity. How it can be treated, how it should not be treated, what things it’s permissible to do to it, what things you have to do for it, what things you may not do to it.

To throw out more jargon, Kant was a deontologist. He thought that if you took these notions of morality being grounded in autonomy, generating a certain kind of dignity that demands respect, that this leads to a family of theories within moral philosophy called deontological views. According to deontologists, there are certain actions that it would be wrong to do to somebody even if the results would be better if you were to do them.

Against that, there are rival schools of thought that say, “No, if results really would be better, it becomes permissible." My own view is that Kant was right about morality being grounded in autonomy, freedom, rationality. He was wrong in believing that this leads to deontology as opposed to—to introduce another piece of jargon—a more consequence-oriented approach. But I’m happy to go with Kant about the foundations of ethics, because not everybody thinks autonomy is the core of ethics.

Brooks: I was gonna go there.

Kagan: Thomas Hobbes, another great philosopher. He’s British—1650, I think that’s when Leviathan gets published, something like that. Hobbes thought the ultimate basis of morality has to do with the fact that, roughly speaking, we can hurt each other, and we need help from one another. If we try to imagine a world with no moral requirements, we’ll all be at each other’s throats. You have some food, I’ll cut your throat, if I can. When you’re looking the other way, I’ll steal your food, but then when I’m falling asleep, somebody else will come along and steal my throat.

As Hobbes famously put it, in the absence of morality, we’d be in the state of nature. We’d be in the war of all against all. Now let’s see if I can get the quote right: “Life would be nasty, poor, brutish, solitary and short.” A friend of mine who teaches moral philosophy at Michigan said, “If life’s gonna be nasty, poor, solitary, and brutish, being short isn’t so bad." But Hobbes’s thought was, This is what morality is about, the social contract. Hobbes is a kind of contractarian, at least in the interpretation I accept.

Basically, we all strike a deal: I agree not to slit your throat in exchange for your agreeing not to slit my throat. Autonomy is not crucial there. What’s crucial there is our finitude, the fact that any one person can be killed by enough other people. Nobody’s Superman; nobody can do it by themselves. That’s a quite different story from the Kantian story about what ethics is all about. As it happens, I’m more sympathetic to the Kantian story.

Brooks: Now I’m gonna ask you a few questions that people like me always ask people like you. I’m sure you’ve heard them a zillion times, but I’m just curious what you would say. The first is: Why is rape worse than a punch in the nose? To me, a rape is worse than a punch in the nose because a person contains a soul, and rape is an insult to the soul in a way that the punch in the nose is not.

Kagan: I agree, rape seems like an especially horrific thought. To make it even easier: Why is rape a horrible thing to happen to you in a way that your backache is not? The backache could be a more intense pain, but it wouldn’t normally be nearly as psychologically overwhelming, because rape is a direct attack on your autonomy, on your ability to decide for yourself, in central ways, how you want your life to go. Your sexual decisions are among the most central decisions. Rape overrides that in an especially horrific way. Another thing that I think is similar in that way is torture. Torture is deliberately trying to break the person as opposed to merely trying to cause them pain. Certain truths that are central to organizing our worldview shouldn’t be beaten out of us.

I believe all of that, but I don’t see why one needs to bring in a soul. When I torture you, or if I were to rape you—there are probably other things of a similar sort—what I would be doing in the most fundamental way is undermining your ability to choose for yourself how your life wants to go. That’s where the autonomy comes in.

So the question just gets pushed off. To get ethics going in the way I want it to get going, we need a story about how you can have a creature that is able to set its own goals, to step back. Lots and lots of animals have pretty accurate beliefs about their environment. They make reasonable decisions about how to satisfy their desires in light of the immediate environment. What seems special about us—maybe not unique about us, but certainly special about us—is that we can step back from that. We can say, Yes, I want this. Does it make sense to want that? Yes, doing this would satisfy that desire. Does it make sense to satisfy it in that way or not? That’s where rationality comes in, and rationality and autonomy are tightly connected. So the question becomes: Do you need to believe in anything immaterial in order to believe in this kind of ability?

If we were having this conversation 100 years ago or even 50 years ago or maybe even 20 years ago and asked, “Could we really have machines that could reason?,” we’d say, “I don’t know. The jury’s out.” I don’t think the jury’s yet quite come back. But I think it becomes more and more credible to think a physical object is probably capable of reasoning.

Brooks: I’m going to try another reason why the concept of a soul appeals to me, aside from my experience of it. My view is that we’re not equal in our level of brain power, and we’re not equal in our level of muscle power. But we are all equal on the level of the soul. We all have the soul of infinite and equal dignity. To me, that’s the basis of human equality.

Kagan: I do think it’s an interesting question. If you’ve got a story about the ultimate basis of having moral standing—my own view is that animals count, but they don’t count as much as people do. I owe anybody who’s gonna be on my side a story about what is it that gives you standing that can come in varying degrees. As you say, it’s going then to be an interesting question: Will people differ in that regard? Because if they do, then they maybe will also have different strength rights, or something like that.

Suppose you accepted the Hobbesian story. Then it doesn’t matter that you’re stronger than me because I can get three other people and together we can beat you up. You still have to fall asleep. Hobbes, perfectly cognizant of this point, talked about—another piece of jargon—a kind of practical or rough equality. For all practical purposes, any one of us needs the moral contract and so will hold out. It doesn’t matter that you’re smarter than I am, or it doesn’t matter that you’re stronger than I am, or it doesn’t matter that you’re more creative than I am, or whatever it might be—or that I’m needier than you are. I’m not going to agree to avoid killing you and taking your food unless you agree to give me the same rights that you have.

Hobbesians have one kind answer. Kant thinks about it in terms of autonomy, and then one might wonder: Are we all equally autonomous? I suspect not.

Brooks: Not even close.

Kagan: No, not even close. Anybody who’s a deontologist and thinks that it’s ultimately based on autonomy needs to recognize that animals also have autonomy to varying degrees. So maybe they have weaker rights than we have.

So you’re going to bring in a soul. You believe in souls. So one question would be: By virtue of what is it true that souls are a plausible story about why we count morally? Second, even if you could tell me a story about that, do souls come in degrees? I take it as a part of the assumption that they don’t. Is that true?

St. Francis of Assisi famously preaches to the birds because he believes animals have souls. I haven’t read enough about him to know: Did he think that the birds had souls of a grade-A type? Or did they have grade-B souls? Once you start allowing souls, then maybe all humans have grade-A souls, but maybe you’ve got an A-minus soul, but St. Francis of Assisi had an A-plus soul. Tell me, do you think that souls come in only one-size-fits-all?

Brooks: Yes, absolutely.

Kagan: Based on what?

Brooks: Based on the idea that it would be horrific to think that I was superior to the homeless guy on the street. That would be a morally reprehensible belief. If that’s a morally reprehensible belief, then it must be we all have some level that’s equal, and I think it’s our spiritual natures.

Kagan: That’s not bad. Some people would say that’s an illegitimate argument, where you want it to be the case that we all count morally, so you’re going to believe whatever it is that you need metaphysically speaking in order to get that to fall out. I’m not hostile to that kind of argument.

Famously, Kant also argues this way. Kant thinks you can argue from moral conclusions to belief in a soul, belief in an afterlife, belief in a God, belief in reward and punishment. It’s loaded—How much does one need to assume in order to get the ethical? Hobbes, as I suggested a moment ago, thinks you don’t need to believe in the soul at all. There might be other ways that you could get that conclusion.

If you set yourself the goal of designing a moral system, one thing you need to take into account is: What are people like? And: Are people very good at sussing out micro differences in intelligence or degrees of autonomy or what have you? I think from the point of view of designing moral rules, were I God giving rules to all of mankind, I would think there’s gonna be limits to people’s abilities to understand very complicated rules—rules with too many exception clauses or too many subclauses, or rules that the left-handed people get to do this. There’ll be a kind of pressure to have the rules be similar for everybody. And that might give us equal rights without needing to bring in souls.

Brooks: Let me ask you the grandfather of all questions that people like me ask people like you, which is: How did consciousness arise in the brain?

Kagan: When people like you ask people like me, I say that’s not my area of philosophy. There’s a whole subarea of philosophy called philosophy of mind. One of the big debates in philosophy of mind is: How do you explain consciousness? Immediately, I’m gonna ask: What do you mean by consciousness? Because people, even philosophers, will use this term for different things.

Let me draw two broad categories of things. Sometimes what ordinary people mean by consciousness is having thoughts, beliefs, desires—putting these things together to make plans and so consequently having intentions. Your thermostat can turn the furnace on and off when it’s warm or cold, but it’s not conscious. It doesn’t have thoughts. It doesn’t have beliefs. If that’s what you mean by consciousness, the question becomes: Can we tell a story about how a physical object can have beliefs, have desires?

I think we’ve got the beginnings of a pretty good story, because we can already build machines that can represent environments. To take the trivial example, because it’s as complicated as I get, a chess-playing computer. When you’re playing that program on your computer, it represents the chessboard in a certain way. So it has what I’m perfectly content to say are beliefs about where your bishop is—and does it threaten or does it not threaten its king?—and so forth.

Brooks: That strikes me as a very weird definition of consciousness. We program certain algorithms into it, or in AI we’ve programmed the ability to predict the next words or whatever it is.

Kagan: No, I’m not sure that the ability to predict the next word counts as that. What I had in mind with the chess-playing computer was that, when it moves its queen to take my bishop, I find it perfectly natural to say something like, “It wanted to capture my bishops because it wants to protect its king from being checked.” Now I find that perfectly congenial, and all I wanted to say was if that’s what you mean by consciousness—having beliefs, having desires, being able to report what those beliefs and desires are, being able to make plans on the basis of them—we already can do that in some rudimentary ways, and we’re getting better and better at it.

You say, “That’s not what I mean by consciousness.” I say: “Fine. Here’s the second thing people mean by consciousness. This one is harder to describe, though I imagine everybody’s gonna be familiar with it.”

You punch me, and I feel pain. There’ll be various behaviors that I’ll engage in. But there’s something about the experience of pain that we have not yet captured, and maybe that’s what we mean by consciousness.

And it’s not limited to the ability to feel pleasure and pain. Right now on the desk, you’ve got a copy of my book. My eyes happen to be going to little red strip on it. So there’s something happening in my mind right now, the experience of red. I take it that when you look at the book—and hold it up so that people rush off to the bookstore to buy a copy of it—you and they will also have something going on inside the experience of red. So sometimes we, or philosophers, mean that inner aspect, by consciousness.

Then the question, and I think it’s a great question, is: How do we explain consciousness from a physical point of view? If physicalism is the view that all I am, all you are, is just a physical material object, how do you explain this ability to have this inner aspect of experience? Can a physical object have that? And if so, how do we explain the origins of that? Now the answer is: I don’t know.

I think that is the pressing question for physicalists to answer. There are physicalists, there are philosophers who have pet theories about this. I don’t myself. Although it’s not an area of expertise, I don’t find any of them especially attractive. But I don’t think bringing in the soul helps. Suppose you say—I mean, I’m not giving you a chance to say—but suppose you say, “Ah, this is why I believe in a soul; posit a soul, and now we can explain how it can happen.”

I say, “You haven’t explained anything. You’ve just said, ‘Imagine there’s a thing that somehow can generate consciousness. I don’t know how it can do it.’” You don’t have a theory, and I don’t have a theory. So that doesn’t give us any special reason to start positing souls.

Brooks: I would put it a little differently. I would say we have three pounds of meat in our brain, and we produce ecstasy. We produce “Ode to Joy.” I’m realizing that one of our distinctions is you’re a physicalist, I’m a spookiest. I think the world is spooky. So it doesn’t really surprise me that meat could produce consciousness. But for you, if you think meat is all there is, then the fact that you can’t explain the fundamental human experience, which is subjective experience, is kind of a problem for your worldview.

Kagan: Well, it is a problem in the sense that it’s an unsolved problem. First of all, I think the world is spooky and strange and weird too. Philosophers are basically people who never got over the thought that, Boy, the world’s a really weird place, and I don’t understand very much of it. Aristotle famously said, “Philosophy begins in wonder." And I just wanna say that it continues in complete bafflement.

Brooks: I can’t help pointing out that Descartes said that wonder is a surprise of the soul, so I’ll just add that.

Kagan: Again, I’m not unhappy using soul talk. When you start saying, “And by a soul, I mean to be stipulating something nonphysical,” then I say, “Why is that the best hypothesis as to all this cool stuff, all this weird ability to fall in love and to write poetry and to feel ecstasy?”

I think we can offer certain explanations for creativity from a physicalist point of view. I don’t think we can yet do it for consciousness. But does this trouble me? Well, I take some comfort in the thought that we’re just beginning to do brain science. To say we’re in the Middle Ages is too generous. We’re in the dawn of time in terms of brain science.

So the analogy I always give in my death class is: 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 300 years ago, 500 years ago, if you asked people how to explain life, the answer would’ve been: We haven’t a clue how you could explain life in physical terms. It must be that there’s something nonphysical going on there. And the answer was: Come back in 300 years, 500 years, 700 years. It turns out now we have an explanation. We don’t know all the details, but we know enough to know we can offer. My money—it’s nothing more than that—but I conjecture, come back in 300 years, 700 years, we’ll have a story as to how consciousness could emerge from three pounds of meat.

Brooks: You could answer any argument with that, though.

Kagan: Look, I’ll concede, I do concede. I make a point of emphasizing this. I don’t think we have a story yet. But the question is: To believe in a soul, you’ve gotta think it’s got the upper hand somewhere, and I would agree with that if you could give me even the outlines of a story. How is an immaterial thing going to experience an inner life?

Brooks: Let me read a sentence from your book, which I disagreed with.

Kagan: Great.

Brooks: You write, “Try introspecting for a moment. Turn your mind’s eye inward and ask, ‘Do you see a soul inside you?’ I don’t think you will. Like me, you may observe various sensations in your body. You may observe various thoughts and feelings, but you won’t observe a soul."

Now, I do. When I wake up in the morning, or I’m in the middle of my day, sometimes my soul is soaring, and sometimes my soul is degraded. The Psalmist famously says, “Why are you downcast, O my soul?"

The way I experience my soul mostly is in yearning. Yearning for self-transcendence. Yearning to expand outside myself. The stuff I pour into my soul, the different experiences, have different effects on it. Furthermore, what I’m describing is not uncommon.

Kagan: Of course.

Brooks: I actually looked up all these words in different cultures for soul. You know the one in Hebrew, it’s nephesh; Egyptian, ka; Chinese, hun; Arabic, nafs; Ghana, okra. All these different cultures all around the world independently have a central concept in all their cultures: Humans have souls. And it’s a spiritual, immaterial thing. Why are all these cultures wrong?

Kagan: They don’t all have the immaterial thing. They have a word that we can translate as soul. Then the question is: What does the word soul mean in English ,and are we translating it properly or not? Dualism—the view that there is this immaterial thing in addition to the body—is a philosophical conjecture that some people believe and other people don’t believe, and some religious traditions teach and other religious traditions don’t teach.

Even Christianity hasn’t always been dualist. The early Christians believed in part in bodily resurrection because there was no way to be around after your death without your body because they didn’t believe in souls. And then Plato comes along—

Brooks: But they would say the spirit infused every piece of them. It wasn’t separate.

Kagan: You gave a number of moving sentences a minute or two minutes ago, before I interrupted. I wish I had a transcript of those sentences. When you say, “My soul soars,” if I’d gone through, and any place you said soul, I just said, “I soar, I’m ecstatic, I’m moved, I’m down in the dumps,” I’m not sure what we would’ve lost.

Now, there’s a use of the word soul in English, as in lots of other cultures, where it’s a way of talking about the fact that when you listen to Mozart or I listen to Dylan, something is happening to me that is not happening to me, I will confess, when I listen to Lady Gaga. Something happens to me. I am moved by that. Fine, I believe in all of that, and I’m not remotely troubled in saying I want to reserve the word soul, or at least I want to use the word soul, in those contexts.

If we wanted to talk about our essence—the deepest, most central parts about our beliefs, our desires, our values, the memories that are most cherished—and you want to say “sacred,” I have no problems with that kind of language at all. I think soul is a useful word for characterizing those aspects, those elements, those components.

If we use the word personality for all of your beliefs, all of your memories, all of your goals, all of your desires, and then soul for that central subset that you would feel like you had died if you had to give those things up, I’m perfectly happy with that. The mistake is to think that if we are gonna talk that way, you must be positing something nonphysical.

Brooks: Let me describe to you what I think a soul is, because I think we probably have a little overlap.

So I have a hobby. Well, it’s my job. But I interview neuroscientists, because I’m just interested in what they’re doing. When I started doing this, 25 years ago, they were super interested in where things were happening in the brain. You’d go to conferences, and there’d be some BS corporate consultant, and he would say, “This shows the amygdala’s lighting up, and therefore, that shows blah, blah, blah,” and it was all nonsense. But now they don’t think that way. They talk about these vast neural coalitions that cross a lot of different regions.

There’s a neuroscientist, I wanna give him credit, Luiz Pessoa, who compares these networks, these vast, widely distributed networks. He calls them neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions, and he compares them to a murmuring of swallows. My intuition, though I don’t know, is that consciousness emerges from that murmuration. But I would say, also, the soul emerges from that. So it’s not without physical basis. We’re infused. But the soul emerges from the swirl. The soul is the swirl.

And emergent properties, as you know very well—you take a bunch of physical things, and out of their interaction, a new quality emerges. Some people have a low version of emergent that you can understand that high quality by looking at the physical low qualities. Other people have a strong version of emergence, which is you can’t understand the high quality. It takes on independent conditions that are its own thing, and then it has a downward pressure on everything underneath.

I take a strong emergent view. All of that swirl, all that energy state, creates this new thing. The quality of our soul then influences how we feel, how we act, how we do, what we want.

Kagan: So maybe you really are a physicalist as well. It’s just that you think that you want to save the word soul, and you want to think about soul as this thing that emerges at the global level, which is fine.

I’m perfectly happy to think about consciousness as something that emerges at the global level. You put enough neurons together the right way, and we’ll get either consciousness or something like that. Okay, great. I’m even happy—maybe, depending on how much you mean—in thinking that there’ll be things where the fundamental explanation needs to be done at the global level, not at the micro level.

But you don’t have to pretend that physicalism isn’t true. Or you shouldn’t persuade yourself, would be a better way to put it, that physicalism isn’t true to believe in this kind of emergent stuff at the global level.

Brooks: I’m trying to give some reasons why I think there’s a soul.

But there’s a set of experiences I’ve had that are not reasonable. I’ll tell you one story. I was in New York, like, 11 years ago. In New York City, a city I love, the ugliest spot on the face of the Earth—used to be … it’s still pretty ugly—is Penn Station, the train station. There’s only one possibly uglier spot, which is the subway station next to Penn Station.

So I’m there on whatever Eighth Avenue line, and I look around the car one morning, and I get the sensation that everybody in this car has souls. My sensation is these souls, in each case, are in movement. Some are going up and some are going down, degraded. Thomas Aquinas talks about all these movements. And then I thought, Well, I feel this.

That is not the only (what they call) “numinous” experience that I’ve had. In nature, with my kids, whatever. When I have those experiences, the arguments almost don’t matter.

Kagan: I’m glad you brought this up again because this allows me to do something I meant to do several minutes ago, when you quoted the sentence about peering inside and not seeing soul. This is a point I just learned from David Hume, another British philosopher. When he peers inside, he can sense experiences, pleasures, pains, thoughts, wishes, hopes, desires. He doesn’t experience any soul. Putting words into his mouth, that’s a philosophical conjecture as to how these things can occur.

So I just wanna say, yeah, you were in this moment, and I’ve had similar moments as well. You’re just taken by the magnificence of humanity, the fact that every one of us is a unique individual and has the things that we’re trying to do, and some of us are getting there, and some of us are not getting there, and some of us are on the wrong path, but hopefully we’ll make and others never will.

We can have all these thoughts. Having these thoughts is important. Again, I’m not any kind of foe of spiritual talk. If you find it most comfortable to express these thoughts in spiritual language, I won’t deny you them. It’s only when you start doing metaphysics—

Brooks: So we have a metaphysical difference. But I guess one of my questions is: What difference does it make? We have totally different viewpoints on this, but how do our different viewpoints affect our lives and how we should live our lives? It sounds like you’re saying it almost makes no difference. I’ve invented some word soul, which you think doesn’t exist. But do you think it affects lives when you shift from being a physicalist to a spookiest?

Kagan: It needn’t, in the same way that it needn’t when you go from being a spookiest to being a physicalist. I’m afraid I no longer remember, but I conjecture that when I was young, I believed in something nonphysical. And it was through doing philosophy I came to see that, as far as I could see, one could continue to espouse the things that were important to me about, call it, the spiritual side of life, without buying into a bunch of metaphysical baggage that I no longer find myself inclined to think was the most plausible metaphysics. Didn’t have to give it up.

Now for some people, giving up religion just is part and parcel of a transformation in which they give up not just the spiritual, but they give up the moral, and they give up the ethics. I’ve had any number of discussions with religious figures who basically look at me and say, “How can you have morality without God or a soul?” Hobbes has a story about how you could have it. And I think Kant has a story about how you could have it..

There’s no logical reason—if you want to believe in right and wrong and equality and human dignity—that you’ll have an easier time of it if you believe that there’s this nonmaterial object that maybe continues to exist after our biological organism decays. I don’t think that extra bit of metaphysics gets you anywhere closer to the ethics stuff and the value stuff and the spiritual stuff that you and I are in agreement is important.

Brooks: Well, Shelly Kagan, it’s such a pleasure to talk with you.

Kagan: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Brooks: Thanks for joining my conversation with Shelly Kagan. As you could tell, we probably disagree pretty drastically on some of the biggest issues of life. But what I love about Shelly is that even though he doesn’t believe there’s a soul, he doesn’t believe there’s a purpose to the universe, he doesn’t believe there’s an afterlife, that has not made him a cold and technical and overly rational person.

He’s a deeply moral person. He’s a deeply warm person. I don’t know if Shelly would like me saying this, but you could even describe him as soulful.

This podcast is produced by The Atlantic and made possible by support from Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

See you next week.

Federico Caffè insegnava che l’economia deve servire il lavoro, non la rendita; che la piena occupazione è un dovere dello Stato; che la finanza lasciata a sé stessa diventa un potere senza volto. Quarant’anni dopo, quelle idee tornano d’attualità. Nello stretto di Hormuz si torna a colpire le navi e il Brent risale oltre i 100 dollari. L’inflazione italiana sale al 4,2 per cento, trascinata da un’energia rincarata del 22 per cento. La BCE alza i tassi e il decennale italiano tocca i rendimenti più alti del 2026. Bruxelles prepara il pacchetto di sanzioni più ampio dall’inizio della guerra e finanzia Kiev con nuovo debito comune. Chi paga il conto? Famiglie e imprese. Eppure gli italiani possiedono oltre 6.400 miliardi di ricchezza finanziaria, e il manifatturiero italiano torna a crescere. L’Italia potrebbe fare molto di più, partendo dallo stampare statonote e finanziare progetti risolutivi nella Sanità, nell’istruzione e nelle piccole e medie imprese di questo paese. Niente slogan: soluzioni praticabili, con i loro limiti. Ne parliamo con Nino Galloni, economista post-keynesiano, collaboratore di Federico Caffè, già funzionario del Ministero del Bilancio e della Programmazione economica e direttore generale al Ministero del Lavoro. Intervista a cura di Jeff Hoffman Affrontiamo insieme: Le idee di Federico Caffè e perché oggi fanno paura Le statonote: come funzionerebbero davvero e chi si opporrebbe Moneta fiscale, crediti d’imposta e debiti della Pubblica amministrazione verso le imprese La rinascita delle piccole e medie imprese italiane: credito, energia, filiere I risparmi degli italiani: come tenerli in Italia prima che li drenino i grandi fondi Sanzioni, guerre e Hormuz: quanto costano all’economia reale Quali margini di sovranità restano davvero all’Italia LE INTERVISTE PRECEDENTI CON NINO GALLONI Statonote e spazi di sovranità    • Statonote e spazi di sovranità   Crisi energetica, che ne sarà del fu Belpaese?    • Nino Galloni: crisi energetica, che ne sar…      •  NINO GALLONI: LA FINE DEL SISTEMA INFINI…   I LIBRI DI NINO GALLONI Il superamento del capitalismo. Il mondo post-angloamericano. Oltre l’economia della moneta a debito, Arianna Editrice, 2025 (postfazione di Roberta Lasi) Economia quantistica, irrazionalità e coscienza, Byoblu, 2022 La rivolta delle coscienze. Siamo troppi, inutili e dannosi?, Byoblu, 2022 Il grande mutuo. Le ragioni profonde della prossima crisi finanziaria, Editori Riuniti, 2007 La moneta copernicana (con Marco Della Luna), Nexus Edizioni, 2008 La Sicilia protagonista della rivoluzione sovranista costituzionale, Edizioni Arianna SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente autofinanziato. Nessun editore, nessun partito. Per donazioni: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV Membership YouTube:    / @casadelsoletvchannel   Analista Multipolare €5/mese Inviato della Verità €15/mese Architetto del Futuro €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) Iscrivetevi al canale e attivate la campanella: è grazie a voi che siamo qui ogni sera. #NinoGalloni #FedericoCaffè #Statonote #MonetaFiscale #SovranitàMonetaria #Risparmio #PMI #PiccoleMedieImprese #MadeInItaly #Inflazione #BCE #Spread #Sanzioni #Hormuz #CrisiEnergetica #Italia #CasadelSoleTV #Multipolarismo

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Late last night, President Trump announced a “massive” deal to buy diesel fuel from Russia. For the American truckers and farmers Trump claims to be serving, the deal means little or nothing. Trump may not know or may not care that his latest gambit will not reduce diesel prices. His poll numbers are plunging to Herbert Hoover levels. He needs a last-minute electioneering gimmick.

But while the deal will not benefit American consumers, it has immense consequences for others. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the deal is a potential lifesaver. For war-ravaged Ukraine, it is the most outrageous and heartless Trump betrayal to date. For Trump’s entourage, the deal promises corruption opportunities on a multibillion-dollar scale. And for people trying to understand the Trump presidency, the deal is further proof of the accusation that Nancy Pelosi flung in Trump’s face in 2019: “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”

The United States is a diesel superpower. It is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of diesel fuel. U.S. refineries produce about 5.2 million barrels of diesel a day. Americans consume about 3.7 million barrels a day. The surplus is sold abroad: In recent months exports have run above 1.5 million barrels a day.

The United States imports some diesel fuel from Canada, about 154,000 barrels a day, owing to the peculiarities of pipeline and shipping networks: It’s cheaper to supply New England from the Canadian refinery in New Brunswick than from U.S. refineries along the Gulf Coast. By comparison, Trump’s Russia deal is for 2.25 million barrels: the equivalent of about 16 hours’ worth of U.S. consumption, 10 hours’ worth of U.S. production, or 14 days’ worth of Canadian imports.

Unfortunately for U.S. diesel consumers, the price of diesel fuel is set by global markets, not North American ones. Trump’s Iran war has disrupted fuel supplies from the Middle East, including diesel supplies. Before the war, Europe imported more than half a million barrels of diesel a day from the Persian Gulf. The world’s second-biggest diesel exporter used to be Russia, which shipped about 817,000 barrels a day in 2025. When the Iran war raised energy prices, Russia was positioned to profit.

[David Frum: Why Trump didn’t predict the gas-price spike]

The United States in the past tried to help Ukraine by sanctioning Russian energy exports. Trump sometimes pretended to support this policy. In September 2025, for example, Trump proclaimed a tariff on India, ostensibly to punish India for buying Russian oil—but then lifted it in February.

So the Ukrainians took matters into their own hands. As Russia has intensified its horrific drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians, Ukraine has struck back with a devastating campaign against Russian energy infrastructure, including diesel. By late summer 2026, the Ukrainians estimated that they had shut down 43 percent of Russian refinery capacity. According to Ukrainian reports, Russian production of oil of all kinds plunged from 5.6 million barrels a day before the Iran war to 4.1 million barrels by late summer 2026. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in July. That ban has been extended into October.

Friends of Ukraine hailed the attacks on Russian energy infrastructure as a war-changing success. Trump saw a threat to Republican hopes in the midterms. Curbs on Russian fuel exports helped push the price of diesel fuel in the U.S. above $5 a gallon in July, then higher than $6 a gallon in September.

Since Trump’s return to power in 2025, the Putin regime has dangled lucrative deals in front of the president’s entourage.

The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2025 about secret conversations in Miami the previous month between the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, and Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner:

“For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”

The report noted that Dmitriev “found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.” The New York Times reported last week about an even more brazen Russian offering: a multibillion-dollar oil deal for assets owned by Russia’s Lukoil, which would directly benefit a Trump donor and two Middle Eastern groups that have done business with Kushner or Witkoff’s family. (A spokesman for Steve Witkoff said of the Times story that Witkoff “has no conflict of interest and no financial stake in this matter.” Of the Wall Street Journal story, a source described as “familiar with Witkoff’s thinking” said “the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.”)

But all these apparently enticing Russian schemes come with a catch: Russian energy assets are not worth much if those assets are regularly wrecked by Ukrainian drones. This makes plain the implicit quid pro quo in these lucrative deals offered to Trump’s family and friends: If you compel Ukraine to surrender, we will enrich you beyond reckoning.

Putin is attempting to leverage Russia’s most strategic asset in his war on Ukraine: Trump’s weakness for corruption. The 2.25 million barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on world energy markets or the world price of diesel. But accepting those barrels will collapse the U.S.-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against the Ukrainian air attacks on Russian energy production.

Trump stopped providing aid to Ukraine long ago. But the U.S. still provides Ukraine with crucial intelligence information. If Putin can entice Trump to cut Ukraine off from U.S. intelligence, he can do real damage to Ukraine’s capabilities. Russian diesel fuel is the cheese in that mousetrap. Trump’s negotiators are sniffing at the bait: The Kyiv Post reported today that Witkoff and Kushner are already threatening to stop information-sharing if Ukraine continues to strike Russian energy assets. And meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly planning his own trip to Russia—one that members of Congress are urging him to cancel, as my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick recently reported.

There is much about Putin’s offer of diesel that remains doubtful. Does Trump have the legal authority to buy previously sanctioned Russian oil? Does Russia even possess the diesel to sell? But one thing at least remains as clear as ever: With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.

Sabato siamo partiti dal volo Flydubai e dall’«11 settembre sventato» evocato da Netanyahu: come si costruisce un racconto prima dei fatti. Stasera scendiamo un livello più in profondità: perché la nostra mente accetta anche ciò che non è vero, e che cosa accade quando la storia viene riscritta dal potere mentre accade. Ne parliamo con con Stefano Re, criminologo, saggista ed esperto di metacomunicazione, autore di «Mindfucking», e con Roberto Quaglia, scrittore e saggista, autore de «Il mito dell’11 settembre» e de «Il fondamentalismo hollywoodista». Affrontiamo insieme: Il volo Flydubai una settimana dopo: che cosa resta del racconto quando le conferme non arrivano Ripetere per convincere: l’effetto verità illusoria Perché le smentite non cancellano la prima versione Dissonanza cognitiva: quando i fatti contraddicono ciò in cui crediamo Credere per appartenere: conformismo e spirale del silenzio La storia riscritta: Il popolo palestinese che «non esiste» Il paradosso della memoria distorta Come difendersi, anche dalle contro-narrazioni I LIBRI DEGLI OSPITI Stefano Re LaScienzah. Quando la scienza si trasforma in fanatismo religioso, Arianna Editrice, 2025 Mindfucking. Dai manuali segreti della CIA al marketing, le tecniche di condizionamento mentale, Arianna Editrice, 2024 (edizione ampliata) Roberto Quaglia Guerra e pace e zombi. Democrazia totalitaria contro mondo multipolare, Youcanprint, 2025 Hollywoodism. The Invisible Ideology, Youcanprint, 2025 Il fondamentalismo hollywoodista. Viaggio in Iran alla scoperta dell’invisibile ideologia dell’Occidente, Youcanprint, 2020 Il mito dell’11 settembre. I versetti satanici della democrazia occidentale, Youcanprint, 2020 SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente autofinanziato. Nessun editore, nessun partito. Per donazioni: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV Membership YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleT… Analista Multipolare €5/mese Inviato della Verità €15/mese Architetto del Futuro €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) LA PRIMA PUNTATA Re e Quaglia: il volo Flydubai e l’11 settembre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzUsh… PRECEDENTI CONVERSAZIONI Stefano Re: giornalismo, metacomunicazione e percezione della realtà https://casadelsole.tv/stefano-re-gio… Stefano Re, Federico Greco: codice Epstein, dal metalinguaggio all’analfabetismo indotto https://casadelsole.tv/stefano-re-fed… Iscrivetevi al canale e attivate la campanella: è grazie a voi che siamo qui ogni sera. #StefanoRe #RobertoQuaglia #Propaganda #Narrazioni #GuerraCognitiva #Flydubai #11Settembre #Netanyahu #Gaza #Palestina #Sionismo #Antisionismo #NetureiKarta #Satmar #Metacomunicazione #Psicologia #Disinformazione #CasaDelSoleTV #Multipolarismo

L'articolo Realtà su ordinazione proviene da Casa del Sole TV.

A Samsung memory chip worker earning about $60,000 a year could receive roughly $560,000 in bonuses before tax, according to the company’s largest union. Its estimate includes both Samsung’s existing profit-sharing bonus and a new special payment. Samsung hasn’t confirmed the amount. On October 7, the company outlined how that special bonus would work: 10.5% […]

The post Samsung dangles $560,000 bonuses to keep engineers from China appeared first on Asia Times.

Gli Stati Uniti hanno bombardato l’Iran durante i negoziati, e il Pentagono ha già pronti i piani per una nuova campagna dopo il 3 novembre. Intanto a scegliere i bersagli sono sempre più spesso sistemi di intelligenza artificiale sviluppati dai giganti della tecnologia: Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Google. E l’Italia? Il ministro Crosetto conferma 500 militari in Arabia Saudita, un nostro Eurofighter colpito a Ta’if e l’esercitazione nucleare Nato Steadfast Noon nei nostri cieli. “Non siamo in guerra”, dice. Ma allora che cos’è? Petrolio sopra i 100 dollari, gas alle stelle, Hormuz al minimo dei transiti. Ucraina: strage di civili a Kramatorsk e nuovo tavolo a Miami. Cisgiordania: i coloni aggrediscono i raccoglitori di olive. Gaza: due milioni di persone verso il quarto inverno senza riparo. Ne parliamo con: Tiziana Alterio: giornalista indipendente e scrittrice, già Rai e Mediaset, reporter in Africa, Asia, Sud America e Paesi arabi. Padroni nell’ombra (2025) · Putin. L’uomo di ghiaccio che sfida l’Occidente (2022) Gianmarco Pisa: operatore e formatore di pace dell’IPRI-CCP, con i Corpi Civili di Pace in Kosovo; ricercatore RESeT e IRES Campania, membro della Rete italiana Pace e Disarmo. Più eterno del bronzo (Multimage) · Paesaggi kosovari 1998-2018 Conduce Jeff Hoffman SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente, autofinanziato, senza editori né partiti. IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV ABBONAMENTO YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleT… Analista Multipolare: €5/mese Inviato della Verità: €15/mese Architetto del Futuro: €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN «BRICS Scacco Matto», disponibile in italiano, inglese e russo SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel #Levante #CasaDelSoleTV #IntelligenzaArtificiale #AI #Iran #Israele #USA #Palantir #BigTech #Gaza #Cisgiordania #Ucraina #Crosetto #ArabiaSaudita #CrisiEnergetica #Hormuz #Geopolitica #Pace #InformazioneIndipendente #TizianaAlterio #GianmarcoPisa #Padroninellombra

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