Remembering Normandy

Commemorating D-Day is typically a solemn occasion. Visiting dignitaries are asked to do one thing and one thing only - honor the dead. Approximately 70,000 allied soldiers died at the Battle of Normandy. Another 150,000 were wounded. This battle turned the tide in WWII, defeating Nazi Germany on a second front after the Soviet Union had pushed back the Nazis at Stalingrad. Yet, for whatever "grotesquely stupid" reason of his own, Petey Hegseth decided to turn this somber commemoration into an anti-immigration speech.

The Trump administration has been busy stirring up trouble in Europe this year, hoping to turn elections across the continent. Immigration is their ideological weapon of choice. VP Vance had stumbled into the Henry Nowak murder case with little or no knowledge of what actually happened. Deputy PM David Lammy tried to set the Vice-President straight but to no avail because Vance had one aim and one aim only, to give his buddy Nigel Farage a chest bump in the elections heating up across Britain.

The US is actively working to promote right-wing candidates across Europe, using the State Dept. to boost these ultra-nationalist candidates by what they call their "free speech initiative." This is eerily similar to what the Kremlin has been doing for the last two decades in an effort to boost pro-Russian parties and candidates. Often the US and Russia are on the same page, supporting political figures like Orban, Fico and Babiš, with the prime aim being to drive a wedge in the EU and NATO. 

Orban was recently defeated in Hungary, much to the Vice-President's chagrin. Vance actively campaigned for his political pal on the last day of the election only to see the Fidesz Party crushed at the polls. Since then Orban has been hiding out at Mar-a-Lago while the new Prime Minister Peter Magyar opened the doors to the lavish private offices of the former authoritarian, showcasing the level of corruption that existed for the last 16 years. It was a scene eerily similar to when Ukraine pushed Viktor Yanukovych out of power in 2014 and turned his lavish estates into "museums of corruption."

You can argue that all politicians are corrupt but some are definitely more corrupt than others and none more corrupt than Nigel Farage, who has been getting millions from mysterious backers in his latest election bid. After UKIP went belly up following Brexit, you would think Brits would have no time for this fraud but his Reform Party won a string of shocking victories in local elections throughout England and Wales that left the Labour Party reeling. You have to ask why knowing what everyone should know about Nigel Farage?

He was the one who spearheaded the Brexit movement back in 2015 that also helped launch Trump's improbable campaign that landed him in the White House the following year. We all know how that went and yet here we are again with Trump in the White House and Farage making a bid to shake up local politics and remake himself a prominent UK figure.

Farage is just one of many extremists threatening the status quo in Europe. Their aim is to return the continent to a bickering set of semi-feudal states that would be easy pickings for Russia and the US in their effort to re-align the continent based on their spheres of influence. No more EU, no more NATO. Every country large or small would fall under the shadow of the US or Russia.

This seems particularly odd given that US trade with the EU amounts to 1.85 trillion euros annually. That dwarfs any trade the US has with any other country. Annual trade with China is a little more than 600 billion per year. To do what the US and Russia are attempting to do would not only plunge the continent into chaos but the entire global economy, as the EU has massive trade agreements with China, nearly 800 billion euros, Japan 200 billion euros and right down the line. Instead, the US and Russia would prefer to carve up Europe for their own territorial ambitions.

This all started with Trump making his case for Greenland over the Christmas holidays before his administration chose to invade Venezuela at the start of the year. This had a particularly detrimental effect on Danish politics. The right-wing Danish Peoples Party was leading in the polls last year before Trump chose to stick his finger into Danish affairs. Over night the ultra-nationalist party plummeted in the polls because its leader had closely attached himself to Trump by visiting Mar-a-Lago earlier in 2025. An angry Morton Messerschmidt lashed out at everyone around him as he saw his political ambitions turned to dust.

Yet, the Trump administration doesn't seem to realize it isn't helping anyone by encouraging "free speech." The backlash has been felt across the continent as Europeans now feel Trump is as much a danger as is Putin to their survival. In Denmark, Trump enjoys his worst approval ratings with only 3% of Danes having a favorable impression of him. He wouldn't win any elections here.

So why does Trump and his minions persist in their attempt to influence European elections when they should see they are not helping anyone? I suppose when you view the world through MAGA-tinted sunglasses, opinion polls be damned. Trump genuinely believes he is popular in Europe, at least he did when European leaders were cozying up to him last year in an effort to get him to show greater support for Ukraine. Even with all his reckless talk and actions, he still believes this, leading one to wonder what he actually scored on all those cognitive tests he has been given.

Meanwhile, his "war department," led by Petey Hegseth, is working overtime to dismantle historic military relationships in Europe. It's not just in Germany that the Trump administration wants to reduce its military commitment. Hegseth has announced drawbacks throughout the Eastern flank that would leave many Eastern European countries vulnerable to Russian attack. Here in Lithuania we already experienced our first red alert last month.

This leads one to the inescapable conclusion that the US is actively working with Russia to weaken European security. As if to drive this point home, Rodney Mims Cook Jr. has led an American delegation to St. Petersburg, Russia, for Putin's economic forum at a time the Kremlin desperately needs funding to continue its war effort in Ukraine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was unaware of this delegation but then he seems rather clueless about everything these days.

You get the sense this American administration is nothing more than a trojan horse for tech billionaires to wreak havoc on the world. They've already insinuated themselves into American politics and now they want to take over European politics. As a result, the EU is severely limiting the amount of campaign contributions and ads that come from non-EU parties, namely tech barons like Musk, Ellison and Thiel. I rapacious beast like Hegseth is simply a distraction, a dangerous one to be sure, but of little consequence in the overall plan these mendacious tech billionaires have conjured up. They want to rule the world one country at at time, even Russia and China, and they may very well do so if we don't do a better jab of limiting their imperial ambitions.

We've long seen how these billionaires control Davos, the annual economic summit held at an exclusive ski resort in Switzerland. Many countries now stage these "Davos" summits hoping to attract investors. Even Lithuania, which doesn't even bother to change the name. It's like Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged come to life with Elon Musk imagining himself as John Galt. It wouldn't bother them at all to see the world plummet into another global recession like we saw in 2008 because they would benefit from all the foreclosures and more easily put in place a world of data centers that they envision controlling every aspect of our lives through AI.

So, they use countries like the US and Russia to serve as disruptors, tearing apart the fragile world order with wars that greatly jeopardize the economic balance and lead to the eventual collapse of multi-national institutions that hinder their operations. They have two years to pull this off, and here was Hegseth offering an ominous forewarning, as this takeover has nothing to do with immigrants storming the beaches of Europe but with unfiltered AI data centers overtaking the continent, like we see taking place in the United States.

Maybe Petey wasn't so stupid after all, but simply offering a convenient distraction that the media quickly seized upon while far more dangerous threats lurk on the event horizon. It scares me to think how quickly long-held alliances fall apart when pernicious greed comes to dominate politics.