Submitted by alfcalderone t3_11wlmkn in vermont
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A group funded by Ben & Jerry’s founder Ben Cohen is running a media campaign against U.S. military support for Ukraine.
The organization—Eisenhower Media Network (EMN)—has been reaching out to reporters to push claims that the U.S. is spending too much money trying to help Ukraine fight off Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
EMN is a project run by the People’s Power Initiative, a group that counts Cohen as its president and a major backer. The ice-cream mogul and long-time Bernie Sanders campaigner has given more than $1 million to the People’s Power Initiative via the Ben Cohen Charitable Trust, according to public records.
Approached about his role in backing the group, Cohen told The Daily Beast: “I think the U.S. should use its power to negotiate an end to the war, not prolong the death and destruction by supplying more weapons.”
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The EMN project promotes a group of U.S. military veterans as experts and pundits willing to talk about the war in Ukraine. Some of them have been echoing Kremlin propaganda lines by claiming that U.S. military support for Ukraine is extending and intensifying the fighting, and suggesting that NATO expansion was one of the causes of the war. “We gave Putin just cause,” the director of EMN, Dennis Fritz, told The Daily Beast in an interview.
This left-wing critique of U.S. policy—which grows out of a deep-rooted anti-war sentiment—brings some on the left into line with the talking points of fringe Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who also argue that Washington is overspending in defense of Ukraine. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, claimed last week that defeating Putin was not in the U.S.’s “vital national interests.”