Toastmasters Can Help You Get Comfortable With Public Speaking

As pervasive as “traitor” accusations were during the Trump presidency, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has elevated this "treason” mania to never-before-seen heights. Everyone and anyone who questions or deviates in any way from the prevailing bipartisan consensus is accused of being a treasonous Russian agent based on the slightest infraction. The two public figures most vilified as traitors in the lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine were former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), now a U.S. Army Reserves Lt. Colonel, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In that pre-invasion vilification campaign, a preview was offered for how intolerant the climate would be for any questioning, no matter how rational or partial, and how casually the treason accusation would be weaponized against anyone who spoke off-key.

Indeed, the comments of the former Congresswoman and the Fox cable host which triggered this avalanche of public accusations were stunningly benign. Gabbard's crime was that she echoed twenty years of statements by U.S. officials and scholars across the spectrum by arguing that NATO expansion up to the Russian borders, and particularly the prospect of membership for Ukraine, was genuinely threatening to Moscow; thus, she argued, the U.S. and NATO, in order to attempt to diplomatically avert a horrific war, should formalize its intent not to offer NATO membership to the country occupying the most sensitive and vulnerable part of the border with Russia. Carlson’s sin was also to express a view that many in Washington — including former presidents Obama and Trump — had long affirmed: namely, that while Ukraine is not a vital interest to the U.S., it is and always will be to Russia, and therefore there is no reason the U.S. should even consider involvement in a military confrontation between the two over that country. As The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg put it after extensively interviewing Obama in 2016 about his foreign policy "doctrine”:

Obama's theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there. . . . "The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do," [Obama] said.

One need not agree with Gabbard's proposed pre-war diplomatic solution to see the utter madness of accusing her of being a traitor or Russian agent for advocating it (we will never know whether it would have worked, since Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeatedly rejected such a concession based on the apparently sacrosanct determination that the U.S. “will uphold the principle of NATO's open door" even if that "open door" is situated right on the most sensitive region of Russia's border, which was twice used in the 20th Century alone to attack them, costing them tens of millions of Russian lives). Nor must one agree with Carlson's view — that Ukraine and its borders are of insufficient strategic importance to the U.S. to warrant risking American treasure or lives (to say nothing of a potential nuclear war) to defend it — in order to find repugnant the notion that this is a "treasonous” thought to express. Yet each of them was repeatedly and vocally accused of treason and being a Kremlin apologist if not an outright asset merely for advocating such intrinsically rational perspectives, ones long deemed mainstream in Washington until about three weeks ago, when they instantly became taboo.