I'm old enough to remember Ukraine before February 2022. Before the great PR makeover. Before billions in British public money started flowing. Before the swastikas were quietly airbrushed out of the picture and yesterday's neo-Nazi problem became today's inconvenient history.
Back in January 2015, Ross Kemp travelled to Ukraine for his Extreme World documentary series, investigating the rise of the far right and the Azov Battalion, including its neo-Nazi elements and symbolism.
This was British mainstream television, not Russian propaganda.
Funny how quickly history gets rewritten when the geopolitical interests change and the public chequebook comes out.
Of course, Ukraine's corruption, extremist movements and internal divisions didn't magically disappear in February 2022. But suddenly, mentioning what British journalists had openly reported for years was enough to get you branded a Kremlin sympathiser.
Well, here's Ross Kemp reporting from Ukraine in 2015, long before the political rebranding.
No Russian bots. No Kremlin script. Just the history they would rather you didn't remember.
Jim Nantz says Mike Ditka used to pay and tip for everything with $100 bills, and never ask for change
“I noticed early on that all he carried were $100 bills. All he did was peel off hundreds all the time. Buy a beer at the bar on the way out to dinner, ‘Yeah, give me a Budweiser.’ $100. Keep the change.”
“Coat check, comes into a restaurant, comes out, $100. Man on the street, homeless, there was one guy that kind of understood the routine and he was there every week. Mike, every time, $100 bill.”
“I finally got up the nerve to say, ‘Hey coach, why don’t you ever get change? Why just the hundreds?’ He says, ‘Hey, what’s the difference anyway?’”
“He said, ‘You know, the way I look at it, when I die and they drop me down into the ground, I hope there’s a little opening in that coffin and my last $100 bill comes flying out and goes up into the sky and drifts away. That would make me happy.’”
“So I said, ‘This gets a little pricey, doesn’t it?’ ‘It’s not that bad, Jim.’ He said, ‘Here’s the way I rationalize it in my head. We got 20 weeks. I come every single Friday to New York. I come in with 50 $100 bills, $5,000. And at the end of the season, I’m spending $100,000.’”
“He would say, ‘I’ve allocated $100,000 to the football season to go enjoy myself in New York. And that’s the way it is.’ I take $5,000 in cash in hundreds every single week. And that’s what he did.”
The Trump Press Secretary drama reminds me of one of the Biden Admin’s funniest running bits: anytime anything really serious happened they’d bench the black lesbian diversity hire press secretary and send out a random white man named “John Kirby” to face the press.
When Biden was POTUS and threw the border wide open, leftists claimed the states couldn’t act on their own to close it because it was a ‘federal issue.’
But when ICE tries to enforce federal immigration law - we get sanctuary cities. Suddenly the feds have no authority.