Adam Kinzinger, the Quintessential American Idiot

At 5:58 pm on December 18, 2022, the Twitter account, @blackintheempir (“Black in the Empire”, belonging to an “Anti Establishment Vet w/ commentary from experience inside the war machine and life in the civilian world as a Black man”) posted the following tweet:

Black in the Empire @blackintheempir

If Russia's military is so pitiful, why hasn't NATO beat them yet?

A fair question, given the reality that the 10-month-old war raging in Ukraine has, from its very inception, been a conflict between Russia and the “collective West,” where Ukraine has functioned as a de facto proxy for the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

This status did not evolve because of “Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression” against Ukraine, a common western narrative, but rather functions as a direct result of the intent of NATO, expressed through a policy more than a dozen years in the making, to use Ukraine as a vehicle to undermine and weaken Russia through a proxy war of attrition, one where NATO was willing to sacrifice the national integrity, sovereignty, viability, blood, and treasure of Ukraine for its intended purpose.

We know this how? The memorandum written by William Burns, the current Director of the CIA, and former US Ambassador of the US to Russia, on January 30, 2008, regarding NATO efforts to bring Ukraine into its fold, provides a good starting point. In short, Burns predicted that any effort to make Ukraine a NATO member would lead to civil war in Ukraine between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic-Russians that would compel a Russian military intervention—classic cause-effect analysis.

Scott Ritter will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Episode 33 January 3.

Despite this stark warning, in April 2008, during the NATO Summit held in Bucharest, Romania, the organization announced that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the organization, a move that the US Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert Gates, decried as “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.”

Thanks to the stunning admissions of both former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, we now know that the 2014 and 1015 Minsk Accords, negotiated by Germany and France (both NATO members), together with Ukraine, were nothing more than a sham designed to buy time for NATO to build a Ukrainian military capable of defeating ethnic Russians who opposed the February 2014 coup that ousted the constitutionally-elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich, replacing him with a government which embraced the odious ideology of the ultra-nationalist (and one-time ally of Adolf Hitler), Stepan Bandera.

The Minsk agreements ostensibly set in motion a ceasefire which saw the ethnic Russian opponents of the Ukrainian nationalists trade their military advantage (they had surrounded and were preparing to defeat a significant portion of the Ukrainian military in and around the town of Debaltseve) for the prospects of a negotiated peace that would see the breakaway territories of the Donbas remain under Ukrainian sovereign control in exchange for constitutionally-guaranteed autonomy that protected their Russian cultural heritage.

But neither Ukraine nor its NATO masters had any intention of seeing the Minsk agreements reach fruition. Instead, in 2015, the US and NATO established the Yavoriv Combat Training Center in western Ukraine, near the city of Lvov where, for the next seven years, more than 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers (10% of the regular establishment of the Ukrainian Army and including thousands of pro-Nazi members of the Azov Regiment) were trained for the sole purpose of fighting Russians in eastern Ukraine.

There is no doubt that the current conflict in Ukraine is a byproduct of a NATO master plan which sought to bring Ukraine into its ranks for the sole purpose of promulgating a conflict with Russia where Ukraine would function as NATO’s proxy to weaken, and eventually defeat, Russia through a war of attrition that NATO planners knew would result in the destruction of Ukraine.

With this background in mind, @blackintheempir’s tweet seemed like a fair question, especially since this was a war that NATO had been preparing for since at least 2008.

Enter Adam Kinzinger, stage right. On December 19, 2022, the Republican Representative from Illinois tweeted out a response:

Adam Kinzinger #fella @AdamKinzinger

I’m hoping this is a joke. NATO vs Russia would be like a real three day operation.

Black in the Empire @blackintheempir

If Russia's military is so pitiful, why hasn't NATO beat them yet?

Kinzinger’s Twitter bio defines the Congressman as a “Husband, dad, pilot, Lt. Col in @AirNatlGuard, founder of @Country_F1rst. US Congressman challenging conspiracy theories, always standing for truth. #NAFO.”

I was struck by the unprofessional language used by someone who openly embraces his status as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard, namely that a war between NATO and Russia (two nuclear armed entities) would be, like, “a real” (as opposed to “fake”) 3-day operation.

Besides the college frat-boy semantics involved (like, wow), Kinzinger’s tweet exposes a level of ignorance which, unfortunately, is not unique to the wannabe tough guy from the Illinois National Guard.

Kinzinger knows nothing about the kind of “real war” that would be waged between NATO and Russia for the simple fact that he spent that past two decades participating in the “fake” wars waged by the US in both Iraq and Afghanistan—the man flew KC-135 tankers, before transitioning to the smaller RC-26B twin-engine spy plane, which Kinzinger flew in the permissive airspace over Iraq, supporting US special operations forces as they hunted down Iraqi insurgents.

I’m not denigrating Kinzinger’s service—the US military is a team, and as a former intelligence officer myself, I know that it takes every member of the military team to execute a successful military operation. But let’s not delude ourselves—Kinzinger was more at risk of being knocked out of the sky by a bird strike than hostile fire. Kinzinger may know a thing or two about flying small aircraft high in the sky over the deserts of Iraq, but he knows nothing about “real war.”

Pro-hint, Adam—you and your RC-26B would have a life-expectancy measured in seconds if you were operating in the skies over Ukraine.

While Kinzinger may have some passing familiarity with NATO operations in Afghanistan, he knows absolutely nothing when it comes to NATO’s ability to wage large-scale ground combat in Europe, if for no other reason than Kinzinger has no experience with large-scale ground combat in any context.

Ukraine and Russia have been waging large-scale ground combat for 10 months now. That’s 10 months longer than any NATO military in the past two decades. The reality is most NATO militaries would not be able to sustain themselves over the course of three days of sustained large-scale ground combat, let alone prevailing against an opponent as large and capable as Russia.

One is left to ponder why Adam Kinzinger would embarrass himself by tweeting out such a nonsensical claim. And then one takes note of the final entry in his Twitter bio, and everything becomes clear.

Kinzinger is a “fella.”

A card-carrying member of NAFO—the “North American Fella’s Organization,” an internet social media movement dedicated to “countering Russian propaganda and disinformation about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine” using memes that feature images of Shiba Inu dogs.

NAFO specializes in “shit-posting,” the art of tweeting aggressively absurd commentary responding to any online content deemed sympathetic to the Russian point of view solely “to generate content for the entertainment and status of their own members.” It is a process that requires no understanding or comprehension of Russia, and yet openly comments on all things Russian.

When seen in this context, Kinzinger’s frat boy style tweet now makes sense—a man-child, posting nonsense for the pleasure of other man-children, about matters they know nothing about.

Adam Kinzinger is a NAFO “fella” who, like his fellow “fellas,” serves as an embarrassment to the United States military even though he continues to wear the uniform of a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard.

He is, simply put, the quintessential American idiot.