In 2022 a swarm of Russian helicopters descended on Ukraine’s Hostomel Airport on the false pretense of being “liberators” – because a capitol city nearby was in Putin’s disinformation crosshairs. They were there to “denazify” Ukraine, to “rescue” it from “corrupt influences,” to “restore” it to its rightful place in the Russian world. The invasion wasn’t painted as invasion, but rather to be seen as “strong men” performing a cleansing of “enemies within.”

Obviously that plan to ignite a fraudulent civil war failed, leading to Russia declaring war on Ukraine instead, but does any of this sound eerily familiar in 2025 America?

Just as Putin planned to install non-Ukrainian loyalists into power while claiming they represent “true Ukraine”, America faces its own imported strongmen claiming to represent “true America” – a South African tech billionaire positioning himself to reshape American institutions while declaring himself more American than Americans (because… he’s a white man).

False Narrative Underlying Power Capture

Putin’s framing of Ukraine as riddled with internal enemies mirrors today’s American rhetoric about “deep state” operatives, “woke ideology,” and the need to “take back our country” from diversity (DEI).

Just as Putin labeled Ukrainian defenders as “Nazi sympathizers,” we see American institutional defenders branded unfairly as “corrupt ideologues” or targeted with McCarthy-era hateful phrases like “diversity hire incompetents.”

This is all about the chess moves well known in information warfare circles, with Russia attempting to drive Americans into a tactical trap:

• Resist slower: End up like Prague in 1968
• Resist faster: Get painted as proving the “enemies within” narrative
• Either way: Institutional collapse is being setup to be blamed on the institutional defenders

Remember Prague?

Notably, Ukrainian remember well what happened in the 1960s, the 1970s… Czechoslovakia’s response to Soviet invasion shows the cost of hesitation, allowing for asymmetry in power to choke off resistance even at national scale.

By the time Czech citizens in 1968 began organizing resistance, the Soviets already had landed and expanded:

• Seized control of key infrastructure
• Replaced key personnel
• Established new command structures
• Made institutional capture irreversible

The tragedy of Prague wasn’t just that resistance was slow to materialize compared with “insiders” seizing control – it’s that early resistance might have been labeled “anti-Soviet provocation” anyway. They faced the same tactical trap but chose a form of paralysis that undermined their own chances of safety.

How Ukraine Exposed the Paper Putin

Ukraine masterfully found a way through the double-bind. Arguably, because they knew their Soviet history so well, they flipped the script on Putin’s geriatric attack plans, refusing to accept foreign-born loyalists as legitimate representatives of Ukrainian interests.

Similarly, American institutions must now resist foreign-born billionaires claiming sole authority – being corrupt and fraudulent strong white men – to define American values.

Belarus also shows how this playbook works, given foreign-backed figures claim deeper patriotism than natives, while systematically replacing local institutional knowledge with imported loyalists. Sound familiar, Tesla shareholders? The founders of Tesla were abruptly pushed out and replaced with Elon Musk and his cousins, right?

The Ukrainian defense of integrity and anti-corruption model thus offers crucial lessons:

1. Institutional Resilience
   • Built redundant systems that couldn’t be easily centralized
   • Maintained professional networks outside official channels
   • Documented everything to preserve institutional memory
   • Created backup communication systems
   • Prioritized protecting critical databases and infrastructure
2. Smart Resistance
   • Focused on defending systems, not winning rhetorical battles
   • Built broad coalitions that transcended political labels
   • Maintained professional standards even when branded as corrupt
   • Created distributed leadership to prevent decapitation strikes
   • Protected technical infrastructure from both capture and collapse

Threading the Dictator’s Needle

Resistance to the end of freedom and democracy in America, given today’s context, therefore requires:

1. Preemptive Protection
   • Secure critical databases before they can be compromised
   • Create backup systems for essential functions
   • Document institutional procedures and safeguards
   • Build professional networks that can survive purges
   • Establish clear protocols for protecting critical systems
2. Strategic Response
   • Focus on protecting functions, not fighting narratives
   • Maintain professional standards as proof against “incompetence” claims
   • Build cross-institutional support networks
   • Create distributed rather than centralized resistance
   • Preserve technical expertise and institutional knowledge
3. Resilient Systems
   • Design systems that can’t be easily centralized
   • Create redundancies in critical functions
   • Maintain independent communication channels
   • Document everything to prevent memory holes
   • Build coalition networks that transcend political labels

False Choice Seduction

The tactical trap offered by Putin and then Musk, as enabled by their puppet Trump, presents a false choice between resistance and survival. Ukraine proved how to take on the “inside” threat and do both by:

• Focusing on functional rather than symbolic resistance
• Building resilient systems rather than rigid hierarchies
• Maintaining professional standards as a form of defense
• Creating distributed networks rather than central points of failure
• Protecting critical infrastructure while avoiding escalation traps

Three years after Ukraine won its Hostomel moment, America stands facing the same threat but with a crucial difference – we can learn from both Ukraine’s success and Prague’s tragedy. The choice isn’t between resistance and accommodation, but between smart resistance and fatal hesitation.

The “enemies within” narrative has been building for years either way. Elon Musk tweets “civil war is coming” like twenty times a day, as if trying to invoke it on his own. The only question is whether we’ll have preserved our institutions against a South African immigrant who rushes to replace American government with a cabal of young Seymour-like sycophants.

Time is short. The Tesla vehicles are in the streets, the SpaceX spy satellites are overhead, SpaceX rockets descending. Will we protect our infrastructure, or wait until protection becomes impossible?

The White House’s 2025 Black History Month proclamation reveals systematic bias through calculated linguistic choices that reinforce racial hierarchies. Its superficially celebratory language masks a deeper pattern of exclusion, evident in pronoun usage (“they/their” vs “we/our”), selective representation (focusing on conservative figures), and strategic omissions of civil rights history. Drawing on well-known Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks, the rhetorical structure of the White House language systematically positions whites as the unmarked norm while othering Blacks as perpetual outsiders – a pattern particularly evident in its consistent use of racial qualifiers before “American.”

Through careful examination of language patterns, word choice, and rhetorical structures, the proclamation reveals concerning patterns of marginalization masked behind celebratory language.

Exclusion Through Language

The proclamation’s systematic othering operates through precise grammatical choices that linguistically distance Blacks from American identity. This manifests in three key patterns:

First, consistent use of third-person pronouns (“they,” “their”) rather than inclusive first-person (“our,” “we”) when discussing Black achievements, creating what linguists term “exclusionary deixis.”

Second, passive voice constructions that minimize Black agency, as in phrases like “have been among our country’s most consequential leaders” rather than active constructions that center Black leadership.

Third, the repeated qualification of “American” with racial modifiers creates a linguistic hierarchy where unmodified “American” implicitly means white, while others require hyphenation – a pattern dating to segregationist discourse.

Selective Representatives

The proclamation’s careful curation of Black representatives reveals a calculated political strategy through three distinct patterns.

First, it pairs historically radical abolitionists (Douglass and Tubman) with contemporary conservative voices (Sowell and Thomas), creating a false equivalence that obscures these figures’ sharply different stances on systemic racism.

Second, by elevating only conservative Black voices from recent decades, the document implicitly delegitimizes modern civil rights leadership and progressive Black thought.

Third, in choosing Tiger Woods as the sole cultural representative, the proclamation not only reduces Black cultural achievement to athletics but specifically selects an athlete known for distancing himself from Black identity – reinforcing the document’s broader pattern of elevating those who minimize racial critique.

Strategic Erasure

The proclamation’s most revealing feature lies not in what it says, but in what it systematically erases through calculated omission. This erasure operates on three temporal levels to minimize Black resistance and agency:

Historical erasure: The document entirely omits the civil rights movement, obscuring the mass mobilization and collective struggle that forced institutional change. By jumping from abolitionists directly to contemporary conservative figures, it creates what historians call a “silence gap” that erases decades of organized Black resistance.

Contemporary erasure: The proclamation ignores modern Black excellence across multiple fields – the scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators who continue to shape American culture and technology. This omission reinforces the document’s reductive focus on athletics and conservative politics as the only spheres of Black achievement.

Future erasure: By avoiding any mention of ongoing systemic challenges – from wealth inequality to criminal justice reform – the proclamation preemptively delegitimizes current civil rights advocacy. This creates what critical discourse analysts term a “closure effect,” where past achievements are used to suggest that no further struggle is necessary.

Together, these carefully crafted omissions work to present a sanitized narrative that erases both historical resistance and contemporary critique.

Political Manipulation

The proclamation’s rhetorical strategy systematically subordinates Black history to political self-promotion through several calculated moves. The document’s pivotal phrase – “as America prepares to enter a historic Golden Age” – reveals this manipulation in three ways:

First, it repurposes Black achievement as merely instrumental to a future defined by the current administration rather than celebrating historical contributions in their own right.

Second, it employs what critical discourse analysts call “temporal displacement,” shifting focus from historical injustices to an imagined future while avoiding discussion of present-day challenges.

Third, by positioning the administration as the agent of this “Golden Age,” the text transforms what should be a commemoration of Black resistance and achievement into a vehicle for white political authority – a rhetorical move that paradoxically reinforces racial hierarchies within a document meant to challenge them.

Regressive Bias in Language

Even basic style choices reveal bias. The proclamation uses lowercase “black” when referring to Blacks, ignoring current editorial standards that recognize “Black” as proper noun when referring to racial and cultural identity. This deviation from contemporary standards suggests either careless oversight or a deliberate calculated rejection of linguistic norms around racial discourse.

The proclamation’s framing of “black American” rather than simply “American” perpetuates a deeply rooted linguistic tradition of exclusion dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s successful “America First” Presidential re-election campaign of 1916.

This horribly racist slogan, emerging from earlier racist nativist movements, established a rhetorical framework where “American” implicitly meant “white,” while all others required qualifying adjectives – “Black American,” “Chinese American,” etc. By consistently placing racial and ethnic identifiers before “American,” this linguistic pattern reinforced who could and couldn’t claim unmodified “American” identity.

The 2025 proclamation returns to this long-gone error: even in a document meant to celebrate Black achievement, the text never refers to its subjects simply as “Americans,” but always with the preceding racial qualifier. The White House thus has resurrected Wilson-era KKK rhetoric that “America First” linguistically marks certain races (“black Americans”) as perpetually denied the category of “true” Americans.

Drawing on theories of “linguistic subordination,” this pattern of modified Americanness serves to continuously reaffirm a racial hierarchy where whiteness remains unmarked and normative, while other identities are perpetually marked as different and secondary. The intentional racism in “America First” is thus to signal to non-whites they are American second and thus always outsiders.

Institutional Power Through Language

The above analysis hopefully has clarified how the White House’s 2025 proclamation operates as an instrument of racial hierarchy by implementing three interlocking mechanisms of linguistic power:

First, it employs grammatical structures that systematically position Blacks as objects rather than agents of American history – from exclusionary pronouns to passive voice constructions that minimize Black agency.

Second, through strategic representation and calculated omission, it constructs a narrative that delegitimizes collective resistance while celebrating individual achievement in ways that reinforce existing power structures.

Third, its temporal manipulation – moving between selective past and mythologized future while avoiding the contested present – creates what critical discourse analysts call “narrative closure,” where acknowledgment of historical figures serves to deny contemporary injustice.

These patterns matter because presidential proclamations don’t merely describe reality – they actively shape it. Military intelligence officers know this. Disinformation and propaganda experts recognize this.

When the highest office in American government employs linguistic strategies meant to subtly reinforce racial hierarchies while appearing to celebrate diversity, it reveals how institutional power operates through corrupted language to maintain racial hierarchies while denying their existence.