Re-branding alert: "The America-first case for globalist status quo"

Don't fall for their tricks all over again. There is now a major PR campaign to re-brand the globalist status quo as secretly good for the America-first crowd. See this editorial in the WSJ by Pentagon boarding party member and NSC Advisor H.R. McMaster, along with Chief Economic Advisor Gary "Wall Street" Cohen.

In it, they explain that nothing will change in America's policy around the world -- we will continue to attempt to militarily prop up our crumbling globalist empire, after so much success on that project in Iraq and Afghanistan, which now belong to Iran and the Taliban, respectively. However, we will officially drop the narrative rationalization that our goals are to spread democracy, free markets, human rights, and all-American values around the world for the benefit of other countries. We are officially only going to pursue our own interests with whoever aligns with us -- is that what you damned nationalists wanted to hear?

This shameless attempt to drop the disguise while maintaining the ugly substance underneath is meant to appeal to Americans whose main gripe is that they have to hear a bunch of altruistic multicultural BS about the need to spread American values and institutions overseas. Re-frame it as a naked pursuit of self-interest, and maybe they'll accept the same old policies that have flushed this country down the toilet.

And to be sure, there are plenty of Americans, even some Trump voters, who are mostly focused on the quality of political rhetoric and theatre. They just want to stop having to listen to all that airy-fairy crap about our duty toward other nations. They will accept Jeb Bush's policies, as long as they are packaged and performed in the persona and style a la Trump.

In fairness, if it does prove impossible to change the outcomes, we might as well enjoy a relief from the multicultural propaganda employed to justify the policies. Still, that's not what we voted for -- to continue the same practice, now with a less annoying theory to justify it.

In fact most Americans are turned off by political theatre altogether, and are only interested in "Is anything in the fundamentals going to change for the better?" Certainly the handful of swing voters across the Rust Belt states that decided the election did not decide to roll the dice on Trump in the hopes of getting to consume more palatable political entertainment. They voted on substance, not on presentation.

If anything, these Midwestern voters don't care at all for the brash no-BS New York persona. Giving them globalist policies they don't want, in a crudely self-interested presentation they abhor, will alienate them, not bring them closer to the GOP. They were hoping for Trump's policies with Kasich's presentation, not the other way around.

Conservatives especially ought to be wary, after so many arguments trying to sell the degenerate status quo as secretly conservative. "The conservative case for gay marriage" -- OK, so we'll stop pretending that gays care anything about monogamy, or raising children without molesting them or pimping them out to pedophiles and kiddie pornographers. We've gotten your feedback on that -- not buying it. OK, well hear us out on this new one -- unless we adopt gay marriage, we will lose elections, and that will prevent us from implementing the rest of our agenda. Isn't Paris worth a Mass?

In reality, these arguments have always turned out to be selling the audience a bill of goods. Adopting gay marriage was not about allowing Republicans to win elections in order to pass other, actually-conservative policies, which they never get around to. It was just Republicans caving in to liberal movements -- or already being supportive of those movements to begin with, and cynically branding themselves as conservative champions in order to get votes.

And in the case of trying to re-brand wide-ranging interventionism as self-interested and nationalist rather than altruistic and globalist, we've already been there once before -- under the Clinton administration, who were worried that in a still semi-conservative climate, they would be targeted as liberal internationalist do-gooders, and made the effort to brand themselves as calculating self-interested realists.

From an NYT article in 1993 ("U.S. Narrows Terms for Its Peacekeepers"):

Reflecting widespread anxiety within the Administration over open-ended peacekeeping missions in Somalia and Bosnia, the Administration is defining new limits for a future role in United Nations operations, senior Administration officials said today.

The evolving policy would require justifying involvement in terms of United States national interests and would limit situations in which American troops would serve under United Nations command, the officials added. ...

"It was not enough to say that the United States might be involved in future United Nations operations," said one senior Administration official. "We have to define what type of operation, and whether it would be something the United States has an interest in, or will only succeed if the United States leads." ...

Now the Administration seems intent on describing the limits of multilateralism rather than extolling its virtues.

[Sec State Warren] Christopher touched on the theme in a speech in New York on Monday, saying multilateralism "is warranted only when it serves the central purpose of American foreign policy, to protect American interests."

"This country will never subcontract its foreign policy to another power or another person," he said.

Less than two weeks after that article, the US fought the Battle of Mogadishu (Black Hawk Down) -- in that utmost of regions necessary for America to control, Somalia. Pure calculating national-interest at work. Then it was on to "blood for no oil" in the Iraq War (credit to Greg Cochran).

But now, thank God, we've finally started to get rational and self-interested. And what better way to promote our national interests than by marching toward Iran, who has never attacked us, as we provide hundreds of billions worth of weapons to Jihad University, sometimes referred to as Saudi Arabia. Hopefully this time, the jihadists won't wind up attacking their patrons in America like they did on September 11th.

No Trumpian executive orders since Establishment takeover, aside from trade

On the campaign trail, Trump said that he preferred to get things done by passing legislation through Congress, but that if they weren't up to the task of Making America Great Again, he would sign executive orders all day long -- both to undo or counter-sign those of Obama, as well as his own distinctive orders.

When he first took office, he did indeed sign one major executive order after another, complete with photo ops and Twitter updates. But it seems like it's been awhile since we've seen one of those. Sure enough, check out the list of executive actions so far.

Within the first 10 days, he ordered The Wall to be built, sanctuary cities to be defunded, and a travel ban placed on seven countries with jihadist problems. Then the ban on executive branch employees from becoming lobbyists (end the revolving door of corruption), looking at a new Glass-Steagall Act, the revised Muslim travel ban, and the last Trumpian order on March 13 -- a comprehensive plan to drain the swamp in the entire executive branch of government. Among others.

Since then, two and a half months ago, the only Trump-themed orders have dealt with America-first trade policies. That was a yuge part of his appeal during the primaries and general, particularly in Rust Belt states that he narrowly carried. This is the one issue where the Establishment has caved, since the GOP does actually want to control the executive branch at the national level, and that's not possible unless they give the Rust Belt voters something to turn out for. Even Establishment Republicans like Tom Cotton are speaking on behalf of "Buy American / Hire American".

And of course there have been other orders that will please Republican / Trump voters, such as ones favoring more lenient energy / oil policies and boilerplate about respecting religious freedom in health services, but those would have been implemented under any old Republican president. Jeb, Marco, Ted, all would have signed those if they'd ridden into the White House on the protectionist trade platform.

The same pattern holds in the presidential memoranda: immediately he issued memos on withdrawing from TPP, defeating ISIS, re-organizing the NSC to reduce the Pentagon and intel agencies' influence (later overturned), and the last Trumpian memo on March 6 -- extreme vetting of immigrants. At the end of April, several memos address trade imbalances.

Compared to the rapid-fire pace of major orders early on, the flatlining of the past two and a half months on everything except for trade, and the standard Republican fare (oil pipelines, deregulation), looks striking. Trump is a man of action who sleeps at most six hours each night, and came into office intent on not wasting a day when there's so much to do in so little time. At the very least he could spend part of each day counter-signing a bunch of Obama's orders (that list should have been researched and drawn up by Inauguration Day).

And when was the last time you remember those photo ops of Trump signing the order, with others watching nearby, him flashing the order to the cameras, and handing the pen to some lucky official? It's been since March for me. Those photo ops really established an image of experience for a man who came into office without ever working in government or the military, as well as emphasizing his own authority apart from that of Congress.

Indeed, rather than continue to pursue the MAGA agenda through executive orders, the White House has gotten bogged down in the boring and pointless legislative agenda of the do-nothing Congress. It got sucked into the healthcare quagmire beginning in March, and then various budget and tax code reform battles since then. That's all you hear about in the media -- healthcare, tax cuts -- and that's all there is from the White House's own team, because the White House has ceded the setting of the agenda to Congress (and to the Pentagon on war).

It's obvious that the GOP Congress plans to stall for time by pursuing issues that Trump did not win the primary or the general on, so that they'll never have to get around to the Trumpian issues, while he signs whatever BS they churn out on healthcare and taxes -- assuming they ever hammer out an agreement in Congress. They're going to keep sending bills back and forth on those two issues until Trump's term is over. That way, they don't outright defy the President by pursuing contrary policies, but they also don't have to get their cuckservative hands dirty with populist and nationalist outcomes either (aside from trade).

The timing of the shift from Trump the Order-Giver to Trump the Congress-Herder coincides with the general withdrawal of focus on Trumpian issues, other than trade. Most notably the total 180 on foreign policy, but also the non-results on immigration / deportations / refugees, draining the swamp, prosecuting leakers, the topic of illegal campaign surveillance, etc.

Sometime toward the end of March, he got The Talk from the Pentagon boarding party, letting him know that The Blob were through tolerating Trump being Trump, and either he get on board with the Establishment's agenda -- except for their one concession, trade -- or be marginalized, delegitimized, and perhaps even shoved out of office. The first key signal there was the Pentagon's strike on Syria in early April and insistence ever since on regime change, contradicting what the Secretary of State, UN Ambassador, Press Secretary, and of course the President himself had been saying less than a week before the strike.

The entire Establishment has let the anti-Russian witch hunt grow, fester, devour more and more of the news cycle, and threaten Trump's political capital in DC. If Trump goes back to the issues of his first two months, and all of the campaign season, they will ratchet up the intensity even more and begin impeachment proceedings. It's clear by now that they don't care about what the lowly voters want -- otherwise, they would be implementing the Trump agenda.

As the witch hunt only grows and grows, it is more necessary than ever for Trump to simply change the topic by signing one major executive order after another. If he cannot, for threat of impeachment, then just keep hammering on the trade theme over and over. Or counter-signing Obama's orders to gain favor with the GOP Establishment.

If he's feeling bold, take the sledgehammer to one of the Democrats' interest groups, so as to not upset the GOP Establishment. Order the Antitrust Division at DoJ to break up each of the five media monopoly companies into 10 apiece, of similar market share size. That ought to tie up the media from whining about Russia, and focus on their own very survival for once.

Anything to drive the news cycle away from the witch hunt -- and more importantly, to drive the actual goings-on in the government away from the witch hunt. Leave his enemies dealing with a stream of executive orders, rather than the constant defense against the witch hunt charge du jour.

Both Trump fans and Trump haters came into the new administration thinking he would be dictatorial, unrelenting, and a bull in a china shop. That lasted for about two months, before The Talk, and now it has become clear that if anything, the swamp will be dictating to him, as he has no leverage other than the size of his supporter base (useless in DC unless he wants to really mobilize us against the swamp, or until it's time for us to vote again). And he will have to wait as Congress and the courts drag their feet, while executive branch agencies including the Pentagon block his path with "leave this to the professionals".

Trump is not a powerful dictator, as he has stopped signing his style of decrees long ago, and many of them have been over-turned (travel ban, call for Glass-Steagall, anti-Pentagon structure for NSC, border wall). Instead, he is David trying to slay the totalitarian Goliath that is not only sidelining his agenda but actively trying to over-turn the election results and kick him out.

Intuition: If Kushner's out, good or bad?

On Facebook, Chuck Johnson from GotNews says, "Kushner looking at resigning over Russia probe". Johnson has proven to have reliable White House sources, e.g. on NeverTrumper Katie Walsh being a leaker (she got fired).

Kushner is not being investigated, let alone charged with anything or convicted. He tried to set up a diplomatic backchannel with Russia in order to deliver on Trump's campaign promise to "get along with Russia" rather than waste our political resources antagonizing them 25 years after the Cold War has died. He did not trust the standard channels for this task because they are all part of the Swamp that wants war with Russia.

The media themselves admit that he did nothing wrong and is not being charged with any crime -- it is simply part of the broader shape-shifting witch hunt against the Trump movement, especially the agenda item of "draining the Swamp".

In the comments to Johnson's Facebook post, many Trump fans are applauding in advance, saying "good riddance," etc. Similar comments are pouring in to Twitter posts that also mention a possible imminent departure by Kushner (e.g., replies to tweets by Jack Posobiec). Many on the Alt-Right have been crying for Kushner's head for months now.

So now that there may be some action taken on Kushner's status in the White House, test your intuition about whether that is a good thing or a bad thing for the Trump movement. Scroll down for the answer.

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Kushner leaving the White House would be bad for the Trump movement because he is a loyalist to the besieged President, because the context of his departure would be "Trump/Russia" and would therefore further feed that narrative and pour more blood into the water for Trump's attackers, and because his replacement would be far worse (the forces that push out a Trump loyalist are unlikely to push in a more committed Trumpian).

The limited track record so far proves this. NSC Advisor Flynn was not perfect, being a lobbyist for Turkey for awhile during the campaign, though not after the election. But he was in favor of detente and cooperation with Russia, against radical Islam, and in favor of restructuring and draining the swamp within the intelligence agencies. Plus he was a loyalist to Trump all throughout the campaign and after.

Flynn was pushed out as part of the Deep State witch hunt, and his replacement McMaster was a Pentagon boarding party member who is pushing for escalation in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Korea, who deflects blame from radical Islam and Saudi Arabia, who went over Trump's head to bring in fellow loyalists of warmonger Petraeus, who publicly blocked Trump's demand that South Korea pay for the THAAD anti-missile defense, and who has been leaking to the media (including the Israeli intel on the ISIS laptop bomb plot). This comes from Mike Cernovich's provably reliable WH sources.

Attorney General Sessions recused himself from the Trump/Russia probe, rather than nipping the witch hunt in the bud. His replacement in the matter, Rosenstein, is a swamp creature who allowed the appointment of a Special Counsel, which will open up the witch hunt into endless directions forever, and ultimately try to bring down Trump's people and Trump himself on procedural technicalities rather than substantive wrongdoing which isn't there. This Special Counsel, Mueller, is a swamp creature as former head of the FBI. Whether Rosenstein is better than Obama appointee Sally Yates, and whether Mueller did a better job than Comey, is irrelevant -- both are turns for the worse, compared to who we started with in power over the Trump/Russia probe, the populist and nationalist Trump loyalist, Jeff Sessions.

Trump responded negatively to both of these scalps being claimed by the Establishment, rightly so if you "trust Trump," as they furthered the witch hunt.

If Kushner leaves, it will likely follow the same pattern. People who are paying no attention to the shifting balance of power among the interest groups may be dreaming that if Kushner's out, then Roger Stone or Pat Buchanan or Ann Coulter or Based Stick Man will take his place. Wrong: it would likely be another Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Reince Priebus, or Mike Pence, who have never been targeted in the witch hunt, or indeed ever had any hit pieces written against them. They are pro-Establishment and pro-Swamp, so they are not only in no danger, they are guaranteed immunity by the media and Deep State.

Your intuition should be honed by this earlier post on power dynamics reflecting group-level strengths, where individuals are mere representatives of the groups in play. War is a collective affair, not every man for himself. The struggle for influence at the highest levels of political power takes the form of a war, and so there is no such thing as a free-for-all clash of individual personalities inside the White House or DC in general. It is not a soap opera or HBO serial drama.

Some of the main power groups -- the Pentagon, oil / energy industry, Wall Street, pharma, media, education sector, and so on and so forth. Individuals have influence only to the extent that they are representing one of these power groups, and drawing on the unique leverage that that group has to wield over the other groups. For example, the Pentagon's control of the armed forces, or Wall Street and the Fed's control over the macro economy, are a hell of a lot of leverage to use in order to get their way in policy outcomes.

In that post and extensively in the comments, I showed that Kushner has no influence in DC, as he represents none of the power groups and therefore has no leverage to push back against those who do. His only status derives from being the son-in-law (not even a blood relation) to the President, but Trump himself does not represent any of the power groups either -- quite the opposite. Trump's only leverage is his immense base of supporters among the citizenry who he could mobilize for or against some item of business in Washington. Kushner has no resonance with Trump's support base, so he does not even have that piece of leverage to use for influence.

But General Petraeus' PR firm (funded by a Saudi media budget) has, through McMaster, put out a bunch of anti-Kushner hit pieces, painting a false picture of a deep ideological rift between Kushner and Bannon, who are in fact closer to each other than they are apart. The goal was to target the Trump movement, and drive a wedge between them and one of the few Trump loyalists in the government, Kushner, who could then be set up by the witch hunt and forced out. So far, that Deep State operation is running according to plan, thanks to the deeply paranoid and overly emotional strain within the Right.

True, we'd rather not have Trump's senior advisor be a member of the family who's also a liberal Jew from the New York metro. But so far, people are angry at him for who he is, rather than anything that he has done. Maybe they're also jealous that he's the one sleeping with Ivanka, and not them. But if he's working for Trump, he's working for Trump. If he gets ousted over the anti-Russian witch hunt, it is unlikely that his replacement would be better than him on nationalism and "America first".

Overly emotional people need to stop fixating on an individual personality they don't like, and look one and two steps down the line to see where his departure would lead, based on the group power dynamics.

If the Trump movement refuses to do this cool-headed analysis, another scalp will be claimed by the incipient Deep State coup.

The Zucker-Borg vs. Trumpism: Hedonistic decline or communal revitalization?

While the clueless geezers of the Establishment continue to dismiss the Bernie and Trump phenomena as flukes that will pass once the emotional catharsis of election season is over, the younger leaders of globalism have already begun working in earnest to pacify and co-opt what they accurately understand as a long-term discontent among the general public toward their rulers.

Yet unlike the handful of responsible stewards within the elite, like Trump himself, the Zuckerbergs of the world are not trying to earnestly meet the needs of the people in order to prevent the festering anger from exploding into bloody revolution. They are not trying to protect the people from the savage beatings they've been taking -- they are instead trying to promise painkillers so that the victims at least will not have to suffer while getting abused, so that they will therefore not feel motivated to strike back, and so that they can get killed off in peace.

Recently Zuckerberg has floated the idea of a Universal Basic Income from the government, supposedly to provide enough to meet basic material needs so that people can be liberated to pursue higher goals on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs -- to experiment around with a diversity of values and experiences, and after a vision quest in the sweat lodge of the "gig economy," to ultimately discover their inner entrepreneurial badass.

Nobody, including Zuckerberg himself, takes this pitch seriously as a policy proposal, but it is the larger vision that he is really selling -- that the government's foremost responsibility to its citizens must now be to provide a comfy and stimulating little cocoon to numb your awareness of Medieval levels of material insecurity, and a manufactured persona of self-importance to make you not feel so pathetic while powerful groups seize control over every aspect of your life.

By now, everybody can see the writing on the wall, and they will not resonate with tone-deaf appeals to the failed promises of the past several decades -- "Just go to college, take your degree to the nearest employer, and begin collecting enough money to live independently." Absolutely nobody believes this bullshit any longer, except for the Boomers who will always be stuck back in the easy-breezy Seventies and the go-go Eighties.

Since the status-striving vision has proven unable to deliver the goods, a vacuum of values has been opened up. Now the only question is, What will take the place of the elitist message? Naturally it will be some form of populism, but that still leaves a wide array of variations on the theme.

The Zuckerberg pitch is defeatist populism -- just accept that the elites are only going to get ever more wealthy and powerful, the society ever more fragmented, the culture ever more artificial, the technology ever more intrusive, and the population ever more Babel-ized. But not to worry! -- here's enough free money to afford living in a little storage locker like some appliance that's been taken out of regular use. And here's enough free money for a smartphone and WiFi, and a latte from the coffee hive that you'll be lounging around in all day long, and back home again at night, a self-cleaning vibrator or rubber sock.

Against that vision of converting society into one great big languorous opium den, stands the movement to revitalize our decaying communities. The big picture: a roomy home in a small town, wife and husband raising children, stimulation from social contact with neighbors and extended families, and public spaces meant for walking around while being close to others (parks, trails, main streets, malls). And instead of the income needed for these things coming from hand-outs, a rich set of highly profitable industries, whereby higher profit margins mean more is passed on to the workers (even more so with the collective bargaining power of labor unions) -- manufacturing and trades rather than retail or food service.

The values it pursues are communalism over individualism, natalism over childlessness, satiety rather than addiction, organic rather than artificial culture, and honestly earning a living instead of being taken care of like someone's pet.

In strategy, what distinguishes this movement from its alternative of "managed decline" is collective confrontation against The Powers That Be, rather than individual resignation. And therefore, accepting somewhat higher risk but also a higher return -- and with that extra risk still being diminished per person thanks to safety in numbers, rather than bearing the brunt of a failure all by oneself. The collective strategy also distinguishes it from the therapeutic approach that tries to treat individuals one-by-one on an inner level -- straight edge, NoFap, paleo lifestyle, gorilla mindset, etc. Nothing wrong with those choices that can change the person, but they are not going to change the world.

Coming up I'll be going over some more concrete policy proposals, just big-picture stuff rather than quibbling over details. For the time being, the important thing is to recognize that there is now a concerted effort by the opposition to neuter the nascent populist uprising.

It is not stupid enough to try denying the reality we face -- only the sheltered and pampered Boomers in the Democrat party are responding to us with "America is already great!" and only the SJWs in the younger group are complaining that "America was never great". Normal people can sense how awful things are, contra the Boomers, and that contra the SJWs this is a dramatic change from the old days that we've seen on The Wonder Years, Mad Men, or online gurus of all things vintage.

This is not the first time that society depended on choosing the wholesome path out of an inegalitarian laissez-faire climate -- over the course of the Gilded Age, it became clear that business as usual was not going to make life any better. One choice was the atomized escapist hedonism of the brothels, saloons, cafes, and cabarets. But just as popular during the fin-de-siecle zeitgeist was the Temperance movement that worked alongside the labor union movement to bring society out of decadence and into the age of Progressivism (what we would call populism today).

If we've already managed once to transform our society from one great big Red Light District into a network of wholesome neighborhoods, there's no reason we can't do it again.

Iran deal shows Wall St vs. Pentagon split, and Dem vs. GOP parties they control

Now that there's a major push by the US-Gulf-Israel military coalition to antagonize Iran, who has never attacked us or spread jihadism in the region, we see why the two American political parties treat Iran the way they do.

Remember: the Democrats are the Wall Street party, and the GOP is the Pentagon party. Those are the primary interest groups that control each party, based on their enormous leverage to make things go from good to bad if they don't get what they want, one in a financial way and the other in a security way.

The Pentagon wants to weaken Iran because they are a historically powerful nation in the region, and threaten to upset the existing balance of power, whereby the US supports the jihadist states of the oil-rich Gulf, their terrorist proxies throughout the region, and bringing Israel along as a sidekick (no oil). Once the Iranian Revolution removed themselves from the list of client states of Uncle Sam (under the Shah), the Reagan and Bush administrations targeted them for weakening. That went somewhat dormant under Clinton, but reached another fever pitch under Bush Jr. (they were part of the "Axis of Evil" speech). That fell dormant again under Obama, and has picked up again under Trump's Pentagon-controlled foreign policy.

Recall that Trump himself has always preferred detente with Iran and wants to make deals with them. But between a total political neophyte with minimal political capital, and the institution that controls the armed forces, that view has lost out to the standard neocon BS.

Why were Clinton and Obama relatively less hostile toward Iran, including the major deal that the Obama team led to get them to reduce their nuclear program in exchange for removal of economic sanctions? The Democrats are controlled by Wall Street, who is not interested in playing the geopolitical chess game -- they just want to make shitloads of money from whoever they can, however they can. Iran is a nation of 80 million people, stable compared to other Middle Eastern countries, increasingly prosperous, and sitting on a ton of oil wealth that could be spent on consumption of foreign goods and services.

This early after the sanctions have been lifted, most of the foreign companies doing business in Iran are manufacturers, and not big banks -- but give it time. Here is a review from the WSJ a couple months ago:

After years shunning Iran, Western businesses are bursting through the country's doors -- but U.S. companies are noticeably absent.

Dozens of development projects and deals have been hammered out since Iran's nuclear accord with world powers in 2015 lifted a range of sanctions. Among them, France's Peugeot and Renault SA are building cars. The U.K.'s Vodafone Group PLC is teaming up with an Iranian firm to build up network infrastructure. Major oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell PLC have signed provisional agreements to develop energy resources. And infrastructure giants, including Germany's Siemens AG, have entered into agreements for large projects. ...

Government-approved foreign direct investment shot up to more than $11 billion last year, official figures show, from $1.26 billion in 2015. Pedram Soltani, the vice president of Iran's Chamber of Commerce, said more than 200 foreign business delegations have visited Iran since the nuclear deal took effect.

So far most of the foreign investors are from Europe or China, with the US still too anxious to get deeply involved. Probably because the European governments are not so heavily committed to antagonizing Iran in the geopolitical game, meaning less risk for those investing over there. The American companies must always be worried if the Pentagon party wins the White House and starts targeting them for doing business in the country that the Pentagon most wants to weaken and contain.

American manufacturers may not be able to participate so much, but the Wall Street money men are globalist in outlook, and just want to open up Iran to foreign direct investment already, and the Americans get to join whenever they get to join.

The half-baked view is that Obama sought the Iran deal because he's a Muslim-lover whose main goal was apologizing for past American imperialism. In reality, he was a figurehead whose entire Cabinet was hand-picked by Wall Street, and they just wanted access to a new market. In the half-baked view, Trump is Mr. Muslim Ban hell-bent on undoing the Iran deal -- in reality, his Pentagon overseers just gave hundreds of billions in arms to the custodians of the Two Holiest Cities, and only want to contain Iran for geopolitical reasons.

More and more policies start to make sense when we see the Democrats as the Wall Street party, and the Republicans as the Pentagon party. It also helps us make sense of Trump before he got boarded by the Pentagon, back when he was just a commentator or candidate. He was kind of a Republican but also kind of a Democrat -- wanting to open up Iran for American companies, though presumably with greater deals for manufacturers than banks, and with as much of that investment consisting of finished goods sent over there rather than locally manufactured, to help out American workers.

As long as the Pentagon is aligned with the dissolute and nearly bankrupt jihadist Gulf nations, though, American workers will never get their products sold into large, stable, and relatively prosperous Iran.

More Sunni Arab jihadism, not Shia Iranian, in Manchester suicide bombing

Although the Gulf Arabians, Israeli Zionists, and their Pentagon sponsors are currently railing against the Persians of Iran spreading their "Shia Crescent" throughout the Middle East, back on Planet Earth the jihadist in the Manchester suicide bombing was a Sunni Arab whose family fled Libya when Qaddafi was in charge.

That means his family was a bunch of Islamist fanatics who couldn't tolerate the secular nationalist government of the Qaddafi era; the fact that many of them returned to Libya after Qaddafi was toppled, and jihadists had filled in the power vacuum, shows that it was not only this one guy who was an Islamist extremist in the family.

These are the people we are taking into our borders when we prioritize "refugees" from a country run by a secular strongman. That strongman is using force to keep the Islamists from exploding the country into anarchic jihadism, so those most likely to be fleeing such a country are those very potential jihadists. The Manchester suicide bomber's family was fleeing Libya under Qaddafi in the '90s, while future suicide bombers are fleeing Syria under Assad right now, incubating within America's and Europe's borders and destined to explode in the not too distant future.

While in Britain, the family must have been further radicalized by the extremist mosques in the country, most of which are run by the Deobandi movement, whose most infamous followers are the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is similar to the Wahhabi / Salafi extremism promoted by the Saudi government in the Middle East, which has given the world al-Qaeda and ISIS. The Deobandi movement comes from the Sunni branch of Islam in South Asia, where they are a substantial minority of the population (around 20% of Muslims), but exert an outsized influence in the religious schools (where they are about 60%) and religious militant groups (where they are about the only gang in town).

The Muslims of Britain are mostly South Asians, so this pattern is reproduced in that country as well.

Of the four schools of Sunni Islam, some are more prone to extremism, such as the Hanbali school of jihadist ground zero, Saudi Arabia, but also the Shafi'i school of Somalia and the Saudi-sympathizing region of Yemen. Those are the schools that urge female genital mutilation.

The Hanafi school found in the Near East and South Asia is relatively more moderate, but they are still prone to radicalization. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Erdogan regime in Turkey, the al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria, Hamas in Palestine, and the Deobandi movement in South Asia, are all testament to how susceptible the Hanafi regions are to periodic radicalization, despite earlier periods of relative religious moderation.

Of course the schools that are naturally more extremist provide funding and other support to Hanafi regions in order to inflame the latent potential there, which has now stabilized into a Saudi-Pakistani axis of radical mosques.

Notably absent from the jihadist phenomenon is the Shia branch of Islam, and particularly Iran. Just go ahead and name for us all those Iranian suicide bombers in foreign nations, 9/11 hijackers, and invaders who convert others by the gun, and who destroy religious sites not favored by their narrow sect for being offenses against idolatry.

Hezbollah in the Levant is a national liberation militia, designed to expel unwanted foreigners by force. As long as unwanted foreign nations do not occupy their land, they don't care and don't attack them, let alone pro-actively invade to convert others to their sect, destroy monuments, and so on. They are defensive rather than invasive.

The same is true of the Iranian Revolution, which was designed to end its status as a client state of the US under the Shah. They did not forcibly convert or murder the non-Shia minorities, and during the 1980s they were at war with another Shia nation (Iraq), albeit one whose government was led by a Sunni. That was all about defending national sovereignty, not religious sectarian conquest.

There is something about Shia Islam that makes it less prone to intolerance toward other sects, proselytizing, revivals in the fundamentalist literalist puritanical direction, and attempts to radicalize members into jihadism. In outward behavior, it is more like the Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity, whereas the Protestant branch is more prone to periodic radicalization (even from members within the otherwise staid Mainline churches), with some Protestant churches being permanently radicalized.

That analogy is a topic for another post, but in the meantime have a look at a compare-and-contrast between Sunni and Shia Islam, topic by topic (you can ignore the third column). It's striking how Protestant the Sunni branch is, and how Catholic and Orthodox the Shia branch is, across a number of dimensions. I speculate that this stems from the Shia branch being deeply rooted around an early center of the religion, Baghdad, just as the Catholics are rooted in Rome, and the Orthodox in Antioch and Alexandria, the three early centers of Christianity.

The various Sunni schools are farther away from the eastern Fertile Crescent, and if they felt like "getting back to their roots," they would turn elsewhere back to the very beginning in Mecca and Medina. Similar to Protestants being rooted outside of the early Christian centers, and harking back to the Holy Land itself, and during Jesus' own time, for revival.

Going back to the very beginning unwinds all of the traditions that have developed in the meantime, so those groups without a root at the very beginning are less stabilized by tradition, and are more prone to radicalization.

Just a few initial thoughts, and something to explore at a later time.

The tone of Twin Peaks, original and return

From the reviews I've read so far of the Twin Peaks return, and not having seen the episodes myself, it sounds like its emotional tone is more in the vein of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive than Blue Velvet or the original Twin Peaks. Closer to uniformly dark, whereas the original was a distinctive blend of light and dark, innocent and scarred, wholesome and seedy, cheerful and somber, comedic and tragic, normal and paranormal.

Whether or not the return ends up striking the same tone, is what will determine how closely the new series feels to the original. The fanboy types boil the success of the original down to its characters, stylized cinematography, and motifs like black coffee, cherry pie, and fir trees. But all of those persisted into the film adaptation of that world, Fire Walk With Me, and it felt almost nothing like the TV series, for better or worse.

Meanwhile Blue Velvet did not share any of the characters, plot points, or pop culture references with Twin Peaks (except as different examples of the same archetype), yet they felt like two stories from the same world, owing to the shared tone.

Tone is more like a texture that things in the world are made of. We can imagine a world where everything feels softer, and another where everything feels harder. Two settings with different landscapes and objects would feel of the same world if the elements in them were both soft (or both hard), whereas identical landscapes and arrays of objects would feel of different worlds if one was soft and the other hard. Or more to the point here, if one setting was uniformly hard (or soft), while another was a blend of soft and hard.

Of all aspects of a cultural work, emotional tone is most strongly affected by the social mood or atmosphere in which it is performed. That's why cover songs or tribute songs from two different social climates, e.g. one more optimistic and one more pessimistic, do not sound the same.

The outgoing social climate during the filming of Blue Velvet and the original Twin Peaks shaped and was shaped by the rising crime rate, which began around 1960. Over the course of the '90s, people shifted to a cocooning behavior and the crime rate plummeted, both trends continuing through today.

So I'd expect the return of Twin Peaks to have a more uniformly noir-ish tone, like there was during the cocooning Midcentury (Kiss Me Deadly, Nighthawks at the Diner, and so on). Classic film noir does not have the same hopefulness and tenderness that the "neo-noir" genre would acquire during the '80s.

That's been the case so far with all these re-makes, reboots, sequels, prequels, and spin-offs from originals made during the outgoing and rising-crime social climate of the 1960s through the early '90s. We can't get the feel of the original back because the social climate of that period is so alien to today's climate of cocooning and falling crime. By the same token, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks were able to channel the early-mid 1960s since both fell within the same social climate period.

These phases go in cycles, so give it a few decades, and it will be possible to perform a more faithful revival of those cultural works.

Related posts on tone that discussed Twin Peaks as an example, and going on at greater length about the links to the social climate and crime rate:

First, Torture porn and lack of empathy (TP as the opposite)

Second, Forgiving vs. belittling satires (TP as forgiving satire)

Third, Can camp be played straight (TP as a rare success)

Cracks in the Zionist-Saudi jihadist alliance: Israel-1st culture warriors vs. Arabist Pentagon

Over the decades, Israel has gradually joined the Sunni nations of the Middle East based on their common rival of Iran, which is neither Jewish nor Sunni, but Persian and Shia. That is despite the initial tension between the Jewish state and the Arab Muslim states in the region, who were often at war over Israel's very presence. But anti-Iranian politics makes strange bedfellows.

Iran will always serve as a force that other nearby nations will think about balancing against, because it has tended to absorb others within its sphere of influence rather than the other way around, since around 500 BC (Achaemenid Empire). The last time it was under foreign control for any length of time was in the 1400s under the Mongolian / Turkic rule of the Timurid Empire. Unlike the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, it fought off Ottoman imperialism (the Persians -- very tough negotiators, folks).

But now it seems that the Sunni players in the anti-Iran coalition may feel strong enough to start getting rid of Israel, who never really fit into their club of Arab Muslims. At least, if the Sunni extremist nations led by Saudi Arabia can get a quantum leap in their military power from Uncle Sam, who is also going to try to help put together a NATO-like alliance for the Sunni Arab nations.

When President Trump arrives in Riyadh this week, he will lay out his vision for a new regional security architecture White House officials call an “Arab NATO,” to guide the fight against terrorism and push back against Iran. As a cornerstone of the plan, Trump will also announce one of the largest arms-sales deals in history. ...

One main objective is to put forth a framework and basic principles for a unified Sunni coalition of countries, which would set the stage for a more formal NATO-like organizational structure down the line. [source]

So far, the potential members of Arab NATO are Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, and Egypt. If the purpose were simply anti-Iran, they could have made a "non-Persian NATO" that included Israel. Whether or not they eventually let in Israel, they certainly seem uneasy or unwilling to do so at the start.

The largest arms deal perhaps in history is also going to make Israel nervous because they might lose their edge in the region:

Finally — and this is the most speculative of everything I've mentioned — it's possible you'll see an announcement of the U.S. and Saudis working together on identifying Saudi defense needs over a 10-year period and talking about what the U.S. is prepared to sell the Saudis over that period. This part will be complicated because the U.S. must coordinate with the Israelis to maintain their "Qualitative Military Edge," the formal name for the U.S. policy of ensuring that Israel maintains military superiority over its neighbors. [source]

The cracks in the anti-Iran coalition over there are also starting to appear in the anti-Iran coalition back here.

On the one hand are the evangelical Judaizers who never quote the New Testament and worship Israel as their homeland. This is a grassroots phenomenon, which percolates up to the Congressional level, where conservative Republicans have to pledge to defend Israel in order to get elected. Democrats must do so as well because Jews are one of the key ethnic groups in their coalition based on minority identity politics. The media relies on a grassroots audience, so it too portrays Iran negatively vis-a-vis Israel, which the news consumers culturally identify more with than Saudi Arabia.

So, the Cultural Left and Cultural Right in Congress, along with the media, have a mostly Zionist angle on hating Iran.

On the other hand are the military brass who style themselves as the administrators of a global empire including the Middle East, where the primary commodity is oil (this attracts the energy industry alongside the Pentagon). Saudi Arabia has the #1 oil reserves, but it was also not under control of a European imperial rival of the US that could have blocked the Americans from taking it on as a client. (After WWI, Britain and France inherited the remnants of the dead Ottoman Empire outside of Turkey, and the Ottomans never got the Arabian Desert where the Saudi clan hailed from.)

This has caused the US military to become deeply committed to the main source of jihadism in the M-E and around the world, and that's why you rarely hear the brass use terms like jihad, Islamic terrorism, etc. That would implicate their ally Saudi Arabia, so they go with the vague "terrorism" phrase, which you can accuse any nation of supporting, and obscures the Islamic connection.

So, the Pentagon and the energy industry have a mostly Saudi angle on hating Iran.

This creates a tension between the power groups that oppose Iran for cultural reasons and favor Israel first (Cultural Right and Left, the media) and those that oppose it for geopolitical and economic reasons and favor Saudi Arabia first (Pentagon, Big Oil).

Here, for example, is some world-class kvetching from a Jew complaining about the Secretary of Defense saying that Israel's capital is not Jerusalem, that the Israeli settlements on Palestinian land are a sticking point in the M-E peace process, and that if that continues Israel will become an apartheid state:

Mattis’s ignorance is understandable because he hails from the US Military’s Central Command. The Pentagon’s area command responsible for the Middle East has one debilitating problem. It is a problem that guarantees that Centcom officers will fail to understand the Middle East and fail to win America’s wars in the region.

Centcom’s problem is that it deliberately does not include Israel.

As far as Centcom is concerned, Israel is not part of the Middle East. Israel is in Europe.

Centcom officers speak only to Arabs. And their Arab counterparts insist that Israel is the problem.

Rather than critically analyze this claim, Centcom officers internalize it. [source]

And bringing it back to the Arab NATO trip, here are some complaints that a Christian conservative Ted Cruz supporter has about the Pentagon's more Arab-friendly stance toward Israel:

NSC Advisor McMaster at a press briefing declined to say that Jerusalem belonged to Israel, and has been undermining the US relationship with Israel ahead of the Arab NATO trip, according to reporting by Mike Cernovich (whose sources have proven correct at least back to the tip-off about the airstrike on Syria, not to mention the scoop he had on Susan Rice being the unmasker of Trump officials' names in surveillance).

In fact (listen to Cernovich's report here), the alleged leak of classified information during Trump's recent meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister did not take place, since Trump just brought up a topic that had been in public media reports for months -- that ISIS was trying to find ways to get a bomb on a plane inside of a laptop battery. Instead, the real leak of classified info was to the Washington Post, from their source, who knew far more granular detail than the President (who does not get every little detail of every little report, unless it's "need to know").

That info could compromise an Israeli spy who is embedded with ISIS, who first found out about the laptop battery bomb plot. So the leak of all the specific details to WaPo from a White House source with extensive knowledge, is being treated as a major national security breach, that could also severely damage our relationship with Israel, who must now be wondering if the US can be trusted to keep a basic secret provided to them by Israeli intelligence agencies.

According to Cernovich's sources, McMaster is the only one who knew all of the pieces presented to WaPo, although his deputy Dina Powell could have known also, but they are really just two members from the same Pentagon / Deep State team.

Scoop - "McMaster is the only person who had all of the pieces. He is the person being looked at most closely as source of leak."

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) May 17, 2017

McMaster and Powell picked a fight with the Israelis by leaking information to WaPo that Trump never had. Bigly mistake, you might say.

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) May 18, 2017

The Pentagon faction of the anti-Iran coalition in America has made a decisive pre-emptive strike against their supposed anti-Iran partners from the cultural politics faction. The armed forces and oil industries will prevail over the cultural domains of the media, organized Jewry, and evangelical Christianity because US governmental support for nations in the Middle East is based on geopolitics and economics, not cultural affiliation.

Many on the Left and the Right portray Israel as having special powers over US policy, but we're already seeing how it's the jihadist nations that truly drive our policy. Israel used to be allied with them for a little while, so you could have said either one was the driver. But now it's clear.

Actually, it was clear before then -- we sided with Egypt over Israel in the Suez Crisis in 1956, and only brought on Israel as a source of local muscle when we saw them whip everyone's ass in the 1970s. And yet, the Arabians still have all that oil, and a much longer history of being our ally -- and when was the last time Israel whipped everyone's ass anyway? Ten years ago, they got driven out of Lebanon by a ragtag local militia (Hezbollah).

After its explosive birth, Israel looked to be a latter-day David slaying Goliath, perhaps bound to expand throughout the region after they took the Sinai peninsula, southern Lebanon, and the Golan Heights of Syria. But now they're turning out to be just another statelet in the Levant, a place that has never spawned a (land-based) empire that included key other places around the region. As demographic trends make a small minority out of the Ashkenazi Jews who are not parasitic Haredim, the brief South African style attempt at European colonialism will become a Middle Eastern country again (Palestinians and Mizrahi / Sephardi Jews).

If history is any guide, they will ultimately fall under the sphere of influence of long-term regional powers Egypt or Turkey. If Iran continues its influence in Syria, that would presumably block Turkey from becoming Israel's patron state to the north, and it would turn south toward Egypt for partnership. Egypt is also less prone to Islamic extremism than Turkey, especially now with Erdogan leading Turkey and el-Sisi leading Egypt. And Egypt would be the member of Arab NATO most likely to split off as a strong power of its own, not wanting to be made an equal to Saudi Arabia.

If the Zionists want to return to their ancient roots, what better way than by seeking refuge under Egypt's wings?

But we should not be so excited to become less burdened by Israel if it means we intensify our alliance with the jihadists in Saudi Arabia. We've already had one September 11th too many to trust those backstabbing Bedouin, and now their radical mosques are infecting Muslims right here in America who commit jihadist violence without even having to get through our borders.

Unfortunately, it will probably take some catastrophe to convince our military brass to finally GTFO of the Middle Eastern black hole. Russia and Iran vs. America and Saudi Arabia -- we've had so much success there, why not up the ante to include a nuclear rival?

The Pentagon has been going on one great long psychotic fugue for the better part of 30 years in the Middle East, and if it means allying with Israel and the pro-Israeli culture warriors in America in the short term, it would be worth it to out-maneuver the Pentagon from marching us into nuclear Armageddon.

To prevent coup by brass, Trump must rally rank-and-file troops and agents

It's clear now that the Deep State will never stop its coup attempts against the People's President, whether they are soft or hard, and whether they come monthly or yearly.

The factions here are not only the three-letter intelligence agencies whose leverage is ability to leak damaging information, but also the Pentagon whose leverage is control over the armed forces.

Trump arrived in Washington with minimal political leverage, at least in the currency that the local swamp creatures trade in -- favors, connections, blackmail, campaign war chests, and the like. He was catapaulted over the White House gates by his voters, not by party elites, donors, media hacks, etc.

Rather, Trump's only leverage is the size of his support base that he can call into action -- to display signs, to attend rallies, to make phone calls, to spread info online, and to cast a ballot on Election Day.

That is the bargaining chip that Trump has at the negotiating table, but which the Establishment does not -- and which the Establishment would like Trump to call off and put away, lest the people march on their state capitol buildings, hold protests at the Pentagon, and so on and so forth, disrupting business as usual for the swamp.

This appeal to the forgotten people at the bottom of the hierarchy must also be leveraged within each of the major Deep State groups that threaten to push him out of office. There is no way that Trump commands the loyalty of the Pentagon brass, else they would not have sent their own boarding party into the Cabinet early on (Mattis, Kelly, McMaster).

The Trump movement's vision for foreign and military policy is at odds with the Pentagon consensus in too many ways, and at too severe of a magnitude, for them to just tolerate his planned re-orientation of their agency. They are still hell-bent on making Russia their #1 enemy, and antagonizing any of the nations that refused to fall under the US sphere of influence during the Cold War (Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Iran). Trump says let's focus on combating jihadism, with Saudi Arabia being the main enabler of Islamic terrorism, including the terrorists who blew us up on September 11th.

Likewise the three-letter intel agency brass are dead set on aggrandizing their own power to manipulate domestic and foreign affairs, rather than assess threats and respond to them in the interests of the American nation as a whole, instead of in the interests of the Deep State and power establishment itself. Trump says drain the swamp, prosecute damaging leaks, and restore fairness to the justice system.

A collision course is unavoidable between Trump and the Deep State leaders. Trump has little to defend himself with at the elite level -- not only would those intel and military brass undermine him, so would "his own" party's leaders in Congress, who are part of the Establishment. Nor does he have much weaponry to go on the offense with at the elite level. At best he could try to play one elite faction off against another, but they appear to be forming enough of a united front to avoid that obvious of a play.

So Trump must resort to what his only strength has been all along -- his popular appeal to the lowly and middle layers of society's pyramids. His populist and nationalist message speaks most to their concerns, and his no-BS charisma and tone resonate the most with them.

The rank-and-file troops just want to protect the homeland from serious foreign threats, not to police far-off zones of a crumbling global empire. And the rank-and-file intel agents just want to figure out who's up to bad things and prevent them from carrying through, not to weaponize information in order to destroy political figures who the boss has a vendetta against.

Trump must do this deliberately, frequently, and energetically -- as though he were once again in "rally the troops" mode leading up to an election where it would be his army of voters vs. the other candidate's army of voters. Hold small gatherings, large rallies, and anything in between that will build the emotional energy between him and them. That will keep the rank-and-file in the Deep State agencies engaged, sympathetic, and even enthusiastic to support their leader.

In any coup attempt, it would be these rank-and-file who would be pressed into service as foot soldiers against the President by their agency's brass. If the rank-and-file are unwilling to commit the high crime of sedition, their elites will have no way of pulling off a coup.

That does not mean Trump has to openly bring up the topic of Deep State coups, nor that he needs to openly encourage mutiny. It simply means that if he wins over their hearts and minds -- their active rather than passive loyalty -- the brass' efforts to take him out will be shooting with blanks.