The interventionist press is dusting off the 'pay it forward' pitch on Ukraine aid — asking working Americans to open their wallets for a foreign border while their own communities are taxed and governed without meaningful representation.
The Lewiston Morning Tribune ran an opinion piece this week framing U.S. military support for Ukraine as a moral debt owed to France, which backed the American Revolution. The argument: France helped us throw off a king, so we must now arm Ukraine against Vladimir Putin, cast here as a Soviet diehard bent on subjugation. The piece calls Ukraine's fight a parallel to 1776 — 'a feisty little wannabe nation tirelessly fighting to throw off the yoke of a powerful oppressor.'
What the Tribune's framing omits is the price tag and who profits. Every dollar shipped to Eastern Europe is a dollar not spent on the communities that actually fund this government. The piece never mentions the defense contractors who lobby for these packages, the revolving door between Capitol Hill and the arms industry, or the fact that much of this 'aid' cycles back into the coffers of American weapons manufacturers. That is not charity. That is a subsidy for Lockheed Martin and Raytheon with Ukrainian blood and American tax receipts. The Tribune also glosses over the restrictions on Ukraine's use of American weapons — noted in passing as 'nonsensical limitations' — without asking why successive administrations would prolong a war by constraining the very weapons they insist we must send. Follow the money: a drawn-out conflict means sustained contracts. Meanwhile, the Anchorage Daily News published a reminder of who actually lacks self-governance in this country: Americans. The piece, written by D.C. resident David Seidman, details how the 700,000 residents of Washington, D.C., pay federal taxes and serve in the military but have no voting member of Congress. The federal government has seized control of D.C. police and blocked the district from spending a billion dollars of its own local tax revenue. Alaska's National Guard has been ordered to patrol D.C. streets under federal orders — over the objections of Alaskans and D.C. residents alike. Alaska state representative and Guard veteran Andrew Gray warned the deployment would 'diminish the military's reputation in the eyes of the public.' The Daily News drew a straight line from Alaska's own fight for statehood — where Washington sided with 'cannery corporations of San Francisco and Seattle over the people of Alaska' — to D.C.'s current second-class status. Alaskans were taxed without representation for nearly a century before forcing the issue. Two opinion pieces, two very different priorities. One demands Americans sacrifice for a foreign nation's borders. The other shows Americans still fighting for the basic self-rule our Revolution was supposed to secure. The Tribune invokes the Founders to sell overseas entanglement; the Daily News invokes them to highlight unfinished business at home. Here is the open question: if the lobbying class can rally round-the-clock support for Ukraine's sovereignty, why does American sovereignty — secure borders, accountable government, representation for the taxed — always come second?
