Strongmen and the mobs

Putin, Netanyahu, Jinping, Trump, and cultivating deadly mobs

President Donald Trump posted that Russian President Vladimir Putin has gone “CRAZY,” after Russia has repeatedly amped up its nationwide drone and missile attacks on Ukraine to record levels. It seems that all the diplomacy in the world, forcing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to the table, and negotiations with Russia have yielded precisely nothing. Putin isn’t crazy, he’s a genuine strongman with a large nuclear arsenal.

Trump also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly commenting he wants Israel to end the situation in Gaza “as quickly as possible.” Last week, Trump and Netanyahu reportedly clashed on a phone call regarding the handling of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear aspirations. Trump wants to make a deal, while Netanyahu believes that Iran is not a good faith player and military action will always be the answer.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News, regarding Trump, “he wants this prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to be on the same page with him.”

Netanyahu is not going to stop in Gaza. He believes that Hamas is on the ropes, and can be smashed into capitulation, so that all the remaining hostages will be returned, and the Gazan Palestinians will overthrow their rule. He is also far from being on the same page as Trump regarding Iran. Even if Israel has to go it alone in military action, Trump will have a difficult time stopping our ally.

Netanyahu is not the kind of strongman that Putin is, but after decades building power coalitions in Israel, he has yet to meet anyone who can stop him.

Chinese President Xi Jinping doesn’t want to risk his country’s economy by forcing Trump’s hand in tariffs, but he also has advantages the U.S. president lacks. Trump has to get his “big, beautiful bill” past the Senate, and despite the whipping and advocating by House Speaker Mike Johnson, there’s a lot of political water that still has to move under the bridge. Jinping simply decrees what he wants.

In the economic war with China, the U.S. is not getting its way. Bytedance still controls Tiktok. U.S. businesses are being harmed more by tariffs than Chinese businesses that the CCP controls. And while Trump fights the green energy movement, going back to “drill, baby, drill” and natural gas, China’s BYD has made big strides in vehicle production, introducing a “flash charge” megawatt-capable system that can bring its advanced “blade” batteries to full capacity in just five minutes. This is beyond anything Tesla has developed.

Strongmen, the real ones, are not being moved by Trump, who, despite his own comeback story, remains a rococo pretender to the title. Not that we want him to gain the actual thing, or that it would be good for America if he did.

As for the mobs, individuals are feeling more and more emboldened to take violent action against whatever perceived issues they have. From the cult of Luigi Mangione, who murdered a healthcare CEO, to the young Israeli couple murdered outside the Capitol Jewish Museum, the people who are committing these crimes are not crazies. They are dead serious in blaming innocent people for the actions of strongmen and governments.

Yaron Lischinsky, the 30-year-old who was killed with his fiancee, Sarah Milgrim, 26, in Washington, was buried in Beit Zayit, Israel, on Sunday. They were killed by Elias Rodriguez, a 31-year-old from Chicago. As for now, I don’t think there was a specific motive to kill these two people, other than they were at the event and they seemed to be Israeli, or Jewish.

What is not widely reported (but it has been covered in the Jewish and Christian press) is that both Lischinsky and Milgram were Messianic Jews—followers of Jesus. They believed in Christianity. Milgram was to travel to Israel to meet Lischinsky’s family this week, but they never got to meet her. She is being buried today near her hometown in Kansas City.

The strongmen are not crazy, or random. The mob is both crazy, and random. The mob is frequently wrong in who it targets, and always wrong in its calculations. There is a difference between a movement, like the one for civil rights, and a mob. Even when the killers act as “lone wolves,” they are part of a mob. Their beliefs and biases have been cultivated and fed.

In places like communist China and Putin’s Russia, mobs are not tolerated. In the U.S., even a wannabe strongman like Trump cannot stop the mobs. And the conspiracy-flinging media crews Trump consorts with feed them, shelter them, and carefully plant poisonous beliefs.

We must oppose both the strongmen and the mobs. I support Israel, full stop. I oppose Hamas and the murderous rapists who perpetrated October 7th. But I don’t think Netanyahu’s eye-for-an-eye strategy will ultimately work. In Ukraine, I believe there is no chance outside the U.S. and NATO’s military participation, for Ukraine to take back its seized territory. I believe time is on Putin’s side.

I believe time is also on Iran’s side, and China’s side. I believe our dithering with strongmen will not help America, or nations that share our western values. I believe that the further our nation strays from the core values that the Bible teaches, and that God instructs, the more we will enable strongmen and mobs. For that, the “bridge builders” (as Lischinsky was known as in his work) have suffered martyrdom.

They will not be the last.

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