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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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As far as I can see, there are basically three narratives consistent with the publicly-available information.

  1. Something actually happened between September 2015 (when the first mutterings against Shokin show up) and March 2016 (when he is fired to near-universal praise) such that all important actors in Ukrainian politics turned against Shokin, and Biden was slightly ahead of the curve. Whatever this event was, it left no trace in English-language media.
  2. Someone working for Burisma (either directly or via Biden) pulled off a scheme to discredit Shokin such that everyone apparently independently turned against him and he was fired. But if you can pull that off, why the December request from Biden - a key rule for pulling off this type of scheme is that you spread the rumours first, then demand action on them.
  3. Biden successfully suborned the US Deep State, the EU, the IMF, the Kyiv Post, Vitaly Kasko, and large parts of Ukrainian civil society to tell lies in support of his corrupt scheme, and did so while leaving no fingerprints despite two US and one Ukrainian investigations.

As I was trying to say in my earlier post, none of these are particularly plausible. But whatever Joe Biden's motives were for making the demand in December, it was neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of Shokin's firing in March. Something else was going on.