Julia Ioffe

A few hours ago, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired two short segments with guest Julia Ioffe, a writer, reporter and feminist born in Moscow, now an American citizen.

I had never heard of her before, and I missed an infamous episode of Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show. In it, she said, he kept cutting her off, not allowing her to answer his questions, and she took to social media to reprimand him for “mansplaining” to her.

I love her.

She’s been known to get caught making mistakes, but who hasn’t? And the fact that she charges at full boil on occasion shows humanity, but her willingness to own up and apologize makes her honest and in these times, that’s refreshing.

She even grew up in Columbia, MD, my own adopted hometown.

I have nothing to say about her that you can’t read on Wikipedia, except for what I think.

For one thing, she once said that the East Wing was, in Trump’s first term, going to be Ivanka’s domain. Ioffe wrote, hilariously, that “Either Donald Trump is fucking his daughter” or he’s ignoring the nepotism laws.

The East Wing is the First Lady’s domain.

For my money, she was right on both of those, but wrong about the East Wing, which no longer exists.

Ioffe has a history of making waves, and that one got her fired from Politico, something I don’t think I’ve ever heard of happening before.

Yet despite its error, I immediately wondered if the wing was destroyed, in part, at least, because he holds deep grudges and remembers accusations against him, right or wrong. That would be sick, but it would also be hysterical. Like talking to the press from the White House roof. Who else has ever done that?

Besides, he’s a sick man and nothing surprises me anymore.

Ioffe said that Trump had promised to get into Venezuela, Greenland and more, but I missed or forgot the Venezuela part. That shouldn’t have shocked me, but it did. Now I’m shock-proof. Ioffe was asked if she thought Venezuela was a quid pro quo with Putin, in which he would withdraw support from Ukraine if Putin left Venezuela alone. That’s nuts, right?

Wrong. Nothing is nuts anymore. It is a distinct possibility. I have seen a video in which some man, I don’t recall his name, posited that Venezuela had made a deal to stop accepting the US dollar as its trade standard. If that happened, we would have lost our economy. Everyone would drop the dollar overnight. That’s a certain catastrophe. The US has lots of oil, but it’s what the guy called “sweet crude,” which our refineries cannot handle. Those are set up for heavy crude, requiring import. Venezuela has the largest known deposits of heavy crude in the world.

Now unless this man was lying through his teeth, it is true. If true, everything makes sense. Maduro is motivation, the excuse. Oil was always the real target. And while I despise all acts of human rights violators, and Maduro being gone may be a good thing, this operation was wrong, immoral and a stupid move.

I’ve seen the footage of the attacks and one doesn’t need to be of particularly high intelligence to know that those fireballs on the horizon that night killed people. And that is all I need to call it evil.

What’s next?

Ioffe said that Trump made good on his word: he wanted Venezuela and so he took it.

He said the same about Greenland and Cuba. And recently, Colombia. Ioffe said that we shouldn’t be surprised if he makes good on those plans as well.

Ioffe is a remarkable woman, and maybe her remark about Trump’s possible relationship with his daughter was out of line even if it was true, but not grievously so, because most people were saying that same thing.

But she is a keen analyst and writer, and I like her. Feminists have often been my heroes, even if one once accused me of mansplaining. She wasn’t heroic, just angry and hostile. Nobody listens to the hostiles on any account.

Like so many women before her, Ioffe is a fighter. And in the Trump era, which saw the overturn of Roe v. Wade, we need her. We all do. When the balance of any given thing is removed, everything is in danger.