Chris Lutz, a humanitarian aid worker in Kyiv, told the BBC that Routh was known locally as a “recruitment cheerleader” but had no rights or powers to recruit for Ukraine’s international legion. “I wouldn’t call him crazy. He was just hyper-focused. He was trying his best to help Ukraine. But it was getting to an unhealthy level,” Mr Lutz said.
“He asked me for advice on how to get Afghans into Ukraine. However, I had no experience of the Ukrainian legal system, so I declined the request. When he said he could bring over thousands of Afghan fighters, I started to get suspicious.”
Well, maybe you wouldn’t call him crazy, but I would. The guy who tried to assassinate Donald Trump was a middle-age misfit with an extensive criminal history who, in 2022, became so obsessed with the war in Ukraine that he went to Kyiv and bothered the locals with a lot of wild talk about recruiting Afghans to fight against Russia:
A former volunteer for Ukraine’s International Legion has branded Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspect in a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, as “delusional” and a “liar” over his claims that he recruited for the Ukrainian organization.
Routh, 58, is in custody after an attempt was made on the life of Trump, 78, at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where shots were fired on Sunday.
Trump survived “what appears to be an assassination attempt” the FBI said. The former president was “safe following gunshots in his vicinity” at his golf club, the Trump campaign said. . . .
The suspected gunman claimed in a June 2022 interview with Newsweek Romania that he recruited volunteers for the International Legion Defense of Ukraine, a unit of Ukraine’s Ground Forces.
He also spoke with The New York Times in 2023, claiming to have attempted to recruit Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban to the Ukrainian army. …
But the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine said in a statement that Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina, had “never been part of, associated with, or linked” to it “in any capacity.”
Evelyn Aschenbrenner, a U.S. citizen from Detroit, Michigan, who worked with the International Legion beginning in March 2022—first in administration, and then as a recruiter—for a total of two years, also told Newsweek on Monday from Kyiv that they had been in contact with Routh since 2022, and that he is “delusional and a liar.”
Aschenbrenner, who left the International Legion in mid-June of this year, had warned on social media since June that Routh is “not, and never has been, associated with the International Legion or the Ukrainian Armed Forces at all.”
Routh messaged Aschenbrenner between March 2022 and March 2024, sending details of potential recruits, including a list of some 6,000 Afghani citizens. He would then become “hostile” and “manipulative” when told to refrain from doing so. “He said, ‘Oh you don’t really want to help Ukraine’. He was very emotionally, like, twisting like that, where if you refused to help or pushed back against him, he was very accusatory. He never listened to anything that I said, he didn’t register,” Aschenbrenner said.
“He sent me a PDF of, like, 6,000 Afghani citizens. They can’t legally enter Europe. He was combative. He was argumentative. He refused repeatedly to understand basic army policy,” Aschenbrenner said.
An encounter with Routh on August 24, 2022, Ukraine’s independence day, is when Aschenbrenner “first really realized [Routh] was not firing with all pistons up there.”
“There was an increased security alert [due to] strikes from Russia, and because of that, there was curfew. I think it was 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. in Kharkiv, and [he wanted] to get a foreign person over the border to join Legion. And I’m like, not today, dude,” Aschenbrenner said.
“I do think he seemed to be a little delusional, I don’t think he thought he was a real recruiter, but I thought he really he believed that he was helping Ukraine, and he was the only one who could help Ukraine doing what he did.”
Aschenbrenner was angered when Routh in February 2023 posted their personal details online, promising individuals the chance to fight in Ukraine.
“[He] started giving out my phone number, another person’s phone number, and after getting phone calls from soldiers from Uganda…I had several arguments with him on Signal to say, this is not a service that anyone wants or needs.”
“I don’t know if he’s ever been in Ukraine, but he seemed to have this…like he was the only one who could help save Ukraine — if you didn’t do exactly what he wanted when he wanted, somehow you were helping Russia win. I was like, that’s dramatic,” Aschenbrenner said.
Aschenbrenner added: “There seems to be a lot going on. There was delusions of grandeur and [he was] very disconnected from reality.”
Routh was bonkers, berserk, daft, demented, deranged, wacky, off his rocker, non compos mentis, nuttier than squirrel farts, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Which is to say, he was a typical Joe Biden voter. “Stochastic terrorism,” they call it, when hateful rhetoric is used to incite crazy people to violence. Somehow, the media have decided that Trump is to blame because (a) the media are utterly lacking in self-awareness and (b) they blame Trump for everything.
Of the many strange aspects of Ryan Routh’s history, none is stranger than this: In 2002, Routh barricaded himself inside a roofing business and had a three-hour armed standoff with police in Guilford County, North Carolina. Routh was charged with possession of a fully automatic machine gun in connection with that incident and yet, for some reason, received only probation. What the hell is going on in Guilford County? If you can’t send somebody to prison for that, exactly what can you imprison them for? Instead you turn him loose and, two decades later, he tries to assassinate a former president because . . . Ukraine?
“I prefer my women smiling and running toward me, not screaming and running away.” – Maj. Kaltin Gruder, from David Drake & S.M. Stirling’s The Steel.
I daresay all of us would agree with Major Gruder, no? This willing young lass comes to us courtesy of kbdabear on X. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
I’m trying to figure out what a miracle meant.
What an awful week. We were hoping to sweep the A’s and Dodgers, or at least take two out of three from them, but they both beat us like the family mule (especially embarrassing because the Dodgers have no hitting but still managed to score 11 runs off us in three games) so we’re in last place again at 65-89, four games behind the A’s. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Keep that word in mind — “underperforming” — as you contemplate the fact that Kamala Harris is campaigning in Pennsylvania, a state that Joe Biden (allegedly) won by more than 80,000 votes in 2020.
Let’s compare Kamala’s polls to Biden’s polls four years ago. On this date in 2020, the Real Clear Politics average showed Biden with a 4.3-point lead over Trump in Pennsylvania, and some polls (i.e., NBC News/Marist and Quinnipiac) had Biden leading by as many eight or nine points. In the end, Biden won by a margin of 1.2%, so we can say that the September RCP average in 2020 had D+3 bias. Now look at the current RCP average for Pennsylvania — Harris is up by one-10th of a percentage point, three of the four most recent polls show a tie, and the biggest lead she’s ever had (the most recent Bloomberg poll and an NYT/Siena poll in early August) was 4 points. Most importantly, no polls are showing Harris +8 or +9 in Pennsylvania, as there were for Biden four years ago.
Nate Silver has suggested that one reason Harris is underperforming in Pennsylvania is because she picked Tim Walz as her running mate, snubbing Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — and, let’s not kid ourselves, we know why she snubbed Shapiro. She was pandering to the Jew-hating pro-Hamas voters of Dearbornistan, and why? Because 100,000 Michigan voters in the Democratic primary voted “uncommitted” as a protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel. In 2020, Biden (allegedly) won Michigan by a margin of more than 150,000 votes. In other words, the pro-Hamas vote probably isn’t enough, by itself, to swing Michigan’s 15 Electoral College votes into Trump’s column. However, by snubbing Shapiro to pander to her party’s Jew-haters, Harris may lose Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes. Oops.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania — and with Arizona now leaning toward Trump — Harris’s path to 270 Electoral College votes is narrow. And it’s not just a couple of battleground states where Harris is underperforming. The RCP average of national polls has her at +1.7, but at this point in 2020, the RCP average had Biden +7.1 — meaning that Harris is underperforming Biden by more than five points and guess what? Biden’s final margin in 2020 was 4.5 points, meaning that if the Democrat-leaning bias of polls hasn’t changed, Harris is likely to lose the national popular vote. But, but, but . . . Yes, I know: We don’t have much polling data since Tuesday’s debate, and Harris is likely to get a poll “bounce” from that. So let’s look at one of the post-debate polls that is most favorable to Harris. Reuters has Harris +5 — 47% to Trump’s 42% — and guess what? At this point in 2020, Reuters had Biden +9.
Despite everything, in other words, Harris is still underperforming Biden by at least four points. We are still more than seven weeks away from Election Day, and a lot of things could change between now and then, but as matters stand today, Harris is on track to lose this election.
Kamala: "For example, thinking about developing and creating an opportunity economy where it's about investing in areas that really need a lot of work and maybe focusing on again the aspirations and the dreams but also just recognizing that at this moment in time some of this… pic.twitter.com/imSwSCbEHw
Not sure what I did right this time, but I got home to Tonopah FULL OF ENERGY. SF author Chuck Gannon has a Patreon. Free this month, 20% off October & November. Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.
