Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
President Trump has shared a text message that was sent to him by Mike Huckabee, the deranged Christian Zionist who serves as the current US ambassador to Israel, and it is one of the creepiest things I have ever seen in my life.
The text reads as follows:
“Mr President,
God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century — maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else.
You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice.
I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts.
No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you.
I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s.
You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave.
I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU!
It is my honor to serve you!
Mike Huckabee”
There are so many weird, creepy things about this message. The intensity. The religious fanaticism. The groveling, self-debasing obsequiousness, clearly designed to appeal to Trump’s enormous ego. But by far the most disturbing part was the reference to Truman in 1945 — a nod to the last and only time a national leader used nuclear weapons against an enemy state.
Trump claims to have experienced a religious transformation after surviving an assassination attempt last year. Nuclear weapons and doomsday cultism are poor bedfellows. I really hope this is just some bizarre madman diplomacy and not an accurate reflection of something that is actually occurring inside the president’s mind as he pushes toward direct confrontation with Iran.
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The US and Israel don’t oppose Iran getting nukes because they fear a nuclear attack by irrational tyrants, nor because they worry about Iran giving nukes to terrorist factions. They oppose Iran getting nukes because then all their regime change agendas go right out the window.
This isn’t actually about nukes. It’s about toppling Tehran so that the US and Israel can dominate the middle east. It’s about regional hegemony and geostrategic control, and nothing else.
They’d be pushing for regime change in Iran whether they believed Iran was seeking a nuke or not.
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How fucking stupid do you have to believe the lies about Iran? It’s just a much dumber, much more obvious version of the Iraq war narratives, pushed by a much dumber, much more obvious US president. With the benefit of having watched it all happen before.
At least with the Iraq invasion Bush had a year and a half of soaring approval where he got to posture as the Good Guy protecting Americans from the Bad Guys. This time it’s been a year and a half of the US backing history’s first live-streamed genocide, with Israel essentially telling the world “WE’RE HITLER, WE’RE THE NEW NAZIS, WE KILL KIDS” for 20 months, and now they’re getting ready to say that THIS is what US soldiers need to go fight and die for?
Come ON people. It’s the same movie. They barely even changed the name, they just switched the Q to an N. There is no excuse for failing to see what’s happening here.
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A new Economist/YouGov poll found that only 19 percent of Americans currently support a US war with Iran. Most Americans oppose such a war, including a majority of Trump supporters.
People advocating regime change interventionism in Iran are arguing that the US needs to ignore the will of its own electorate in the name of spreading democracy.
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There are no anti-war Trump supporters; if you’re still supporting Trump, you’re not anti-war. There are no anti-war Republicans; if you’re still a member of the Republican Party, you’re not anti-war. If you got scammed by Trump’s anti-war schtick that’s one thing, but it’s another thing entirely if you’re still buying into the scam after being taken by the hand and carefully shown that it’s a scam in excruciating detail throughout Trump’s second term.
If you supported Trump because you thought he was anti-war, the time is now to completely wash your hands of him and firmly take your stand against him. If you stood with the Republicans because you thought they were less warmongering than the Democrats, it’s time to leave the party and join the actual anti-war movement. If you’re not willing to do either of these things, it’s time to stop pretending you don’t love war.
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I don’t feel the same disdain toward people who got scammed by Trump’s fake antiwar schtick that I see others expressing. I understand it, but I don’t feel it. We live in an information ecosystem teeming with propaganda and deception, and people are going to get confused.
There’s no shame in being deceived. There IS shame in deceiving. There IS shame in continuing to support a warmonger after you discover that you were deceived about him. But BEING deceived in and of itself is no crime. That’s why the perpetrator goes to jail in fraud cases and not the victims.
Mark Twain said “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled,” and it’s SO true. As social animals, humans are so dominated by the need to conform to our tribal loyalties that we’ve got psychological barriers to admitting that our tribe/faction got things wrong. And as social animals, shame is a powerful driving force in our psychological lives, because we’re afraid of being seen as deficient by other humans.
But it’s irrational for us to view those who are deceived as deficient, and it’s irrational to feel shame about having gotten something wrong. I’ve gotten lots of things wrong over the years. I’m sure there are some things I’m still getting wrong. Being willing to see you got it wrong is the essential first step to getting it right. Always being open to the possibility that you could be wrong is necessary to forming a truth-based relationship with reality.
If you were duped by the MAGA scam, that’s okay. Just take what you learned and start working on re-orienting yourself toward truth. You know what’s false, so now you can start working on finding out what’s true. And you can start constructing a new worldview accordingly.
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Feature image via Wikimedia Commons.
