Via The Cradle

Over the past four years, the Ukrainian government “systematically sabotaged” oversight of the country’s state-owned companies and weapons procurement processes, “allowing graft to flourish,” a freshly published New York Times investigation has revealed.

The investigation details how the government of Volodymyr Zelensky sidelined outside experts from the US and EU serving on advisory boards responsible for monitoring spending, appointing executives, and preventing corruption.

EPA/Shutterstock

“President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration has stacked boards with loyalists, left seats empty, or stalled them from being set up at all. Leaders in Kiev even rewrote company charters to limit oversight, keeping the government in control and allowing hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent without outsiders poking around,” the NYT report says.

The investigation was published amid a corruption scandal centering on close associates of the Ukrainian president. Anti-corruption authorities have accused members of Zelensky’s inner circle of embezzling $100 million from the state-owned nuclear power company, Energoatom.

“Mr. Zelensky’s administration has blamed Energoatom’s supervisory board for failing to stop the corruption. But it was Mr. Zelensky’s government itself that neutered Energoatom’s supervisory board,” the NYT writes.

The investigation also found that Zelensky sidelined the supervisory boards of the state-owned electricity company Ukrenergo and Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency.

European leaders have justified funneling billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to Ukraine despite knowledge of the systematic corruption and theft plaguing the country. “We do care about good governance, but we have to accept that risk,” said Christian Syse, the special envoy to Ukraine from Norway.

Detective Ruslan Magamedrasulov from the NABU, who was jailed in July due to accusations by the SBU of attempting to sell technical info to Russia, has been released.

Today, during the appeal hearing, the judge ruled to free the NABU detective from custody without any preventive… pic.twitter.com/9LOCV8NqKy

— Clash Report (@clashreport) December 3, 2025

“Because it’s war. Because it’s in our own interest to help Ukraine financially. Because Ukraine is defending Europe from Russian attacks,” he added.

Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, resigned late last month amid the Energoatom corruption scandal and just hours after police raided his home. Ukrainska Pravda reported that he had left for Israel, of which he is a citizen, just hours before the raid.

Yermak is widely considered the second-most-powerful official in the country, with influence over domestic politics, military issues, and foreign policy, Axios noted.

For everyone who still believes the bedtime stories that Zelensky and Yermak have nothing to do with top-level corruption in the energy and defense sectors — you might want to read the latest interview with NABU detective Ruslan Magamedrasulov.

Zelensky’s loyal attack dogs… pic.twitter.com/oZvNMSjpyy

— Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta) November 19, 2025

Businessman Timur Mindich, who co-founded the entertainment company Kvartal 95 with Zelensky, allegedly led the embezzlement scheme. Mindich also escaped to Israel, where he enjoys citizenship, hours before a separate raid on his luxury apartment by police from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

“Timur had an apartment with golden toilets that was in the same building as Zelensky’s,” a former Ukrainian government official told Fox News.

While the U.S. ended federal Prohibition in 1933, local restrictions on alcohol still persist across the country to this day.

As Visual Capitalist shows in the map below, based on work by Wikipedia user Mr. Matté, many counties remain “dry,” banning the sale of alcohol entirely, or “moist,” allowing only limited sales.

Where Alcohol is Still Restricted

The data, crowdsourced from local government sites and media reports, reveals that alcohol restrictions are concentrated in the South, particularly in states like Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

Arkansas stands out the most in the map above, with a patchwork of red and orange counties indicating either total bans or partial restrictions on alcohol sales. In fact, the state has long struggled with outdated liquor laws, where even grocery stores in “moist” counties may be prohibited from selling wine or spirits.

Alcohol Status: It’s Complicated

Here’s what the terminology means:

Dry county: No alcohol sales allowed by law

Moist county: Alcohol sales are partially restricted (e.g. allowed in restaurants but not in stores)

Wet county: Alcohol can be sold without county-level restriction

Even within “wet” counties, individual towns may choose to remain dry, and in “dry” counties, specific towns or establishments can apply for exemptions, creating a legal maze for consumers and businesses alike.

Declining Dryness Over Time

According to the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association, the number of dry counties has dropped significantly since the mid-20th century. In Texas, for example, only three dry counties remain.

Nonetheless, the persistence of these regulations reflects longstanding cultural attitudes and the influence of local referenda. While national consumption of spirits is rising, especially in certain states, the map shows that alcohol availability is still very much a local matter.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Americans are spending less on spirits…besides tequila on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Authored by Michael T. Flynn LTG USA (RET),

The American people have just taken their first full breath after surviving an attempt to smother the Republic through a Marxist-inspired cultural campaign carried out largely through the administrative state, media, academia, and politicized elements of the national security bureaucracy. Most citizens did not fully perceive it while it was happening. Many in the intelligence community either passively accepted it or actively furthered it. The architects of this project are not finished, but their effort has been damaged and delayed. It is only by the grace of God that the country has endured to this point.

The American version of the cultural revolution is distinct from the Maoist model that ravaged China in the twentieth century. It did not coalesce around a single charismatic revolutionary figure. Instead, it spread along the arteries of bureaucracy, higher education, corporate structures, and activist networks. The long march through the institutions, as described by Antonio Gramsci, became the operational template. Rather than Red Guards filling the streets under the orders of an identifiable supreme leader, the United States experienced a coordinated convergence of agencies, NGOs, foundations, media outlets, and activist fronts, all advancing the same ideological project under different labels.

Because federal agencies differ widely in size, mission, culture, and internal resistance, this revolution unfolded unevenly. It never achieved total dominance in a single decisive stroke. Instead, it advanced by fragmentary gains and suffered fragmentary defeats. Wherever the ideological project captured an HR department, a training pipeline, a public school system, or a central media platform, it encountered resistance in state governments, independent media, individual courts, and networks of citizens who refused to comply. This piecemeal quality of implementation slowed the collapse and gave the American people time to see what was happening and respond.

Even as these battles played out in public, darker currents moved beneath the surface. We now assess that thousands of religious and conservative federal employees were quietly identified and referred to a little-known federal entity, the Pre-Trial Services Agency. Accounts and initial documentation indicate that this agency may have been used to catalog individuals solely on the basis of ideology and religious conviction, under the pretext of January 6, and vaccine-related non-compliance. The intention appears to have been not only administrative removal but also potential criminalization. This matter demands immediate, transparent investigation by any future administration that claims to be serious about the rule of law.

To understand the broader context, it is necessary to define what we mean by the concept of the welfare state. We are not merely describing traditional social programs. We refer instead to a constellation of fully funded professional activist groups that present themselves as separate causes but in reality form a single revolutionary bloc. Over the last decade, organizations under the banners of antifascism, racial justice, radical feminism, abortion on demand, certain LGBTQ plus factions, environmental extremism, and gun control advocacy have shown remarkable cohesion. They share donors, staff, narrative frameworks, and street-level tactics. Their membership overlaps. Their messaging is synchronized. They rapidly support one another’s campaigns and protests.

These groups present themselves as grassroots movements. In reality, they function much more like a professionalized revolutionary caste. Their core is composed not of ordinary citizens but of trained activists who treat agitation as a full-time occupation. They are funded through a mix of private foundations, wealthy donors, and, in some cases, federal and state resources. They serve as the street and digital arm of a broader ideological project whose goal is not reform but transformation. They are bound together by a worldview that is explicitly revolutionary and implicitly Marxist, even if many of their foot soldiers do not use that language.

Within this structure, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion plays a central role. DEI is not a harmless corporate fad. It is a cultural and psychological weapon system. In practice, DEI training and enforcement operate as a mechanism for behavioral conditioning, using guilt, struggle sessions, and the constant threat of social or professional punishment to bring individuals into line. The language of microaggressions, privilege, and systemic bias functions as a soft form of ideological policing. It compels people to monitor their speech, second-guess their instincts, and submit to an ever-expanding set of forbidden words and mandatory rituals.

This is not inclusion. It is coerced conformity disguised as virtue. The outcomes within institutions are fear, silence, and self-censorship. People learn quickly that specific questions cannot be asked, certain facts cannot be stated, and certain perspectives cannot be acknowledged without risking their careers. This is not an accidental side effect. It is the point. If you can compel people to lie about obvious realities in public, you own them. DEI is therefore best understood as a domestic application of political reeducation, aligned with Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches to cultural change.

Red washing is the term we use for the systematic erasure of material that exposes Marxism’s history, tactics, and consequences. When civics and traditional American history are removed from curricula and replaced with grievance narratives, the ground is prepared for a new ideology. When the record of socialist atrocities is buried or dismissed, whole generations lose the ability to recognize patterns that their grandparents would have seen immediately. This did not happen accidentally. Higher education, media, and entertainment became primary targets for this rewriting of memory.

By 2020, the United States had been subjected to decades of this cultural reshaping. The country entered that year already weakened and divided. The combined impact of a global pandemic, a Chinese Communist Party information campaign, and unprecedented civil unrest brought the country to a state of exhaustion. Law enforcement was undermanned and demoralized. The medical system was stretched to the limit. Schools at every level were shuttered or reduced to screens. The basic functions that distinguish a first-world nation were placed under siege.

These conditions were ideal for revolutionary actors who understood the Bolshevik concept of the spark. In Mao’s China, youth brigades became instruments of chaos once police authority had been stripped and traditional structures weakened. In the United States, policies calling for the defunding and delegitimizing of police, combined with political protection for rioters, produced something similar in spirit. The rolling riots of 2020 were not a spontaneous eruption. They were a conditioning phase, designed to hollow out public confidence, normalize political violence from the left, and set the emotional stage for a more targeted crisis.

That crisis came on January 6. Here, the doctrine of moderated violence is essential to understand. This tactic seeks to provoke an adversary into a desperate or unwise act that can then be weaponized to justify a crackdown. For a year, Americans watched their cities burn and were told it was mostly peaceful. Then, in a single day, a protest on Capitol grounds was framed as an insurrection, an existential threat to “democracy,” and the moral foundation for a years-long campaign of arrests, surveillance, and persecution. The left’s riots stopped instantly. The narrative flipped overnight. That abrupt shift reveals design, not coincidence.

January 6 was the planned inflection point that allowed the bureaucratic and activist alliance to declare open season on conservative and religious Americans. It became the lens through which all dissent could be labeled dangerous and disloyal. The people who entered the Capitol that day, many of them peaceful and bewildered, became the pretext for a broader project aimed at remaking the national security apparatus from within.

What came next moved beyond street-level activism or cultural capture. It entered the bloodstream of the national security state. The aftermath of January 6, the collapse of Afghanistan, and the federal vaccine mandates combined into an unprecedented attempt to remake the federal workforce through coercion, intimidation, and ideological purification. Inside the CIA and across the national security apparatus, the internal revolution reached its apex and then began to fracture under its own contradictions.

Societal collapse is never a singular event. It is a process.

*   *   * 

The search term “color revolution” has been catapulted into the mainstream. Google Search Trends shows the term has soared to the highest levels since the Marxist BLM rioters began burning city blocks across Democratic-run metro areas in 2020.

Last month, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn told Alex Jones that the Trump administration must address the nation about what he called a sinister regime-change plot, one operating through billionaire-funded NGOs. 

Breaking! General Flynn Calls On President Trump To Immediately Address The Nation Concerning The Color Revolution Being Fomented By The Seditious 6 And The CIA As He Lays Out The String Of Illegal Investigations And Law-fare That The Leftist Have Engaged In Since DJT’s Historic… pic.twitter.com/HYeXQwCNim

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) November 26, 2025

“People need to understand that if this operation succeeds, things will move quickly – Trump would be removed from the scene almost immediately. Elite defection isn’t an early warning sign of an overthrow; it’s the final stage before one,” DataRepublican recently warned, adding, “This is why the ‘Seditious Six’ must face the most severe penalties the law allows.”

To sum up, for the first time, the American people are beginning to learn about the regime-change efforts that Democrats and their billionaire-funded NGO network have been pursuing over the past decade. It amounts to nothing but a color revolution. Time for reforms, especially across the nonprofit world.