Long War

JUST YOUR AVERAGE TRUMPIST:

How Crazy Was The Las Vegas Cybertruck Bomber? (Tom Scocca, January 6, 2025, Defector)

The striking feature of Livelsberger’s writing was how ordinary it sounded. One of the two messages released by officials opened with a note-for-note cover of Trump’s central campaign message: “We are the United States of America, the best country people to ever exist! But right now we are terminally ill and headed toward collapse.” What followed was a litany of standard doomer and/or influencer populism, the sort of grievances that the Trump movement runs on and which Elon Musk retooled X to concentrate and amplify.

“The top one percent decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them,” Livelsberger wrote. “You are cattle to them.” And: “A lot of us are just sitting around waiting to die. No sunlight, no steps, no fresh air, no hope. Our children are addicted to screens by the age of two. We are filling our bodies with processed foods.” And: “Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.” He complained about homelessness, called DEI a “cancer,” and declared (while endorsing Donald Trump) “We are done with the blatant corruption.”

His other message was just as familiar, in a slightly different key—the apocalyptic operator key of Steve Bannon and the most militant participants in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol:

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.

Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.

Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.

Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

Was this the tone of a mentally ill person? Yes. Was it the tone of the controlling faction of the Republican Party? Also, unquestionably, yes.

iDENTITARIANISM IS TEXAN:

The New Orleans killer was an all-American loser Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s story is all-too familiar (Alexander Nazaryan, January 4, 2025, UnHerd)

He was Texan-born and -raised, an Army veteran who spoke with an East Texas drawl, forced to shack up at a trailer park after his career and love life went sideways. In short, he was as American as gas-station apple pie, loaded with carcinogens and carbohydrates, wrapped in a plastic sleeve that will be floating shortly in a waterway near you.

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

IT’S ALWAYS CUTE…:

The Great MAGA Immigration Meltdown (John Ganz, Dec 29, 2024, Unpopular Front)

While Elon Musk and his tech oligarch cohort have revealed themselves to be pro-immigration—at least,t for the type of skilled workers that they need for their businesses—the national populists of MAGA are up in arms about what they feel is a betrayal of the fundamental anti-immigration principle of the movement. These objections have been articulated in terms that range from putatively colorblind civic nationalism to raging racism and antisemitism, with the predictable specter of Jewish capitalists importing pliant ethnic hordes—a Great Replacement—being raised. It’s descended into name-calling with the pro-immigration business lords calling MAGA types “retards” and the MAGA types responding with other slurs that I will not repeat. For those of us who wish ill on all these characters, the battle has been amusing to watch. If only Bannon, Musk, Loomer, and Vivek could somehow all lose. It’s also pretty funny to see the racism machine that Musk built blow up in his face, although we all now have to live with the fallout.

As might be expected, Trump, himself an employer, has deferred to the power of money—the only force he respects—and come out in favor of the H-1B program.

This is not a debate about policy as such—in fact, many of the people doing the argument seem to have a very vague idea about how the program works—but, as the antagonists realize, about the ideological content of MAGA.

..when MAGA pretends it’s the illegality they object to

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The poison of white identitarianism (Inaya Folarin Iman, Dec. 22nd, 2024, spiked)

A mishmash of primarily online political subcultures have emerged over the past few years, vociferously defending white identity. It shares striking similarities with woke identitarianism. These advocates share so-called progressives’ racial essentialism, their obsession with identity and their conspiratorial mindset. Some have called this emerging movement the ‘woke right’, others the Very Online right. Either way, anyone who values liberal principles should be concerned.

These new rightists’ nihilistic resentment, indeed their racial identitarianism, is in danger of being passed off as a ‘legitimate grievance’ by the broader right – as an understandable response to successive governments’ failures on immigration; as of a piece with more general public concerns. At the very least, there is a hesitance among some conservatives to call out these toxic views. […]

But identitarian rightists are not expressing legitimate concerns about immigration, governance, the economy, fairness and social cohesion. They are criticising immigration on the dubious grounds that it is a means to dilute white British culture, through the sheer weight of non-white numbers. This is the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory – a crackpot fixation once found only in the darker corners of the internet that is now being increasingly mainstreamed. Indeed, one proponent of right identity politics delivered a public lecture earlier this year, presenting migration as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white Brits and warning that they are due to become ‘a minority in their own homeland’. […]

[T]o dismiss the emergent identitarian right as an insignificant minority would be to make the same mistake as many liberals and leftists once did. They dismissed wokeness as being limited to pesky, pink-haired university students, and subsequently proved unable to resist its mainstreaming.

The obvious difference between woke and MAGA is, obviously, that we actually subject black to systemic discrimination.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

The Grating Roar: a review of How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold: Tale of a Redemption, Philipp Felsch (Theodore Dalrymple, 8/02/24, The Lamp)

At the start of his essay on André Malraux, the great Belgian-Australian sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys tells a most amusing story. A stranger to a village attends Sunday Mass, the local priest being famous for his eloquence. After the service, all the congregation except the stranger have been moved to tears. Asked why he was not similarly moved, the stranger replies, “I am not of this parish.”

Leys said that he was not of Malraux’s parish either: he did not admire him. When it comes to Nietzsche, I am not of this parish.

I grant that Nietzsche was brilliantly clever and was possessed of certain important insights, psychological and sociological, sometimes expressed with wit and pithiness reminiscent of La Rochefoucauld. His main insight was that the loss of religious belief would entail philosophical, social, and psychological problems more severe than most people realized at the time, but as far as I am aware he provided no new philosophical arguments against the existence of God, nor was he the first person to question the metaphysics of morality in a world without transcendent meaning. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” was written when Nietzsche was a very young boy:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full . . .
the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Of course, Nietzsche proposed a solution to this existential impasse, though again, he was far from the first to do so; but I do not think that he can be absolved entirely from the accusation that his solution, if taken to mean what it appears to mean, could serve as a pretext for the worst imaginable conduct. Between what he sometimes wrote and what Himmler said in his infamous speech about the S.S.’s glorious work of mass extermination there is, as Wittgenstein might have put it, a family resemblance (though of course Nietzsche cannot be held responsible for all that was done by his most brutish of admirers). His exegetes in turn accuse those who take him literally of being unsophisticated and incapable of understanding his depths; but this reminds me of attempts to turn the seventy-two virgins into seventy-two raisins.

HE HAD HER AT KILLING MUSLIMS:

Tulsi Gabbard, Bashar Al-Assad and me: Trump’s DNI pick and I, both in Damascus in the winter of 2017 to meet with the dictator of Syria, came away with very different takes (Michael Isikoff, December 17, 2024, Asia Times)

“Whether, if the FBI says something, it’s not some — something it’s not evidence for anyone, especially for us … It’s just propaganda. It’s just fake news.”

And with that, Assad gave me my lead. The dictator of Syria was using a phrase —“fake news” — that had been coined on the 2016 campaign trail by the now-US president. It was a new and lethal American export, a gift to authoritarians around the world looking for a way to dismiss and ridicule inconvenient truths.

And Assad, no doubt emboldened by the PR boost he had just gotten from his new friend, the congresswoman from Hawaii, was happy to join the chorus.

IT’S LONG COVID:

In online drone panic, conspiracy thinking has gone mainstream (Tatum Hunter, 12/17/24, Washington Post)

[P]urported drone witnesses from Connecticut to Virginia — and as far west as Ohio — have taken to social media to share photos or videos of their sightings, which typically look like faraway orbs or blinking lights. Some have offered rank speculation: Did the government’s lax response to the drone reports indicate that authorities were somehow involved?

“This is the reason the government wants TikTok banned, so we can’t see what they’re doing,” said one TikTok comment with 20,000 likes on an unconfirmed news clip about dozens of drones emerging straight from the ocean.

Trump has fueled the frenzy, suggesting on Truth Social that the government is hiding information about the drones. “Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!” he posted Friday.

He repeated the claim during a Monday news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “The government knows what is happening,” he said. “For some reason, they don’t want to comment.”

DROOPALONG DEPUTIES:

Shootout in DOGE City: What can the new sheriffs in town actually do to cut government inefficiency? (Peter Van Buren, Dec 16, 2024, American Conservative)

One obstacle the duo cannot overcome is the math of the federal budget. Roughly 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending—things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Trump promised to protect those programs. Another 10 percent of the budget is spent on paying interest on the national debt, also untouchable. That leaves around 30 percent of the budget “discretionary,” though roughly half of that goes to defense spending, which Trump also vowed not to cut. That remaining 15 percent of the budget, non-defense discretionary spending, is already at its lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP.

It’s busy work for the problem kids.

NO ONE HATES JUST KOREAN GROCERS:

Capitalism’s Hidden Heroes: “Middleman minorities” reveal the free market’s strengths—along with their own. (Rinzen Widjaja, December 6, 2024, Modern Age)

Jews are not alone in this unenviable position. In an article titled “Is Antisemitism Generic?” the economist Thomas Sowell argues that such anti-Jewish attitudes reflect a broader pattern of persecution toward “middleman minorities.” Other groups that fall into this category include the Chinese overseas, Indians in Southeast Asia, and the Igbo people in Nigeria.

The rise of globalized trade and digital economies has only expanded the role of middleman minorities as they have moved beyond traditional industries like retail and exerted influence in global tech and e-commerce. After its forced expulsion from Malaysia, for example, Singapore transformed from a small island into Southeast Asia’s financial center and one of the world’s most developed countries in just thirty years. And in the United States, Silicon Valley’s South Asian diaspora has significantly contributed to advances in technology.

And yet the middleman minority, and his role in the economy, is as poorly understood as ever. In fact, this success comes in part from the suspicion with which they are often viewed. In his book Migrations and Cultures, Sowell argues that the “middleman minorities” were united by society’s reaction to them, as many individuals within these minorities may not hold middleman jobs but are nonetheless treated similarly by the majority population. While middleman minorities are not confined to a single race or culture, all have been persecuted for having something in common: what Sowell describes as the human capital of “experience and knowledge used in economic activity.”

So why are they seen as suspect if their contributions are so useful? Sowell notes that fewer people reach the upper echelons of middleman professions, which require greater education or sophistication, than the lower levels. Yet, what he calls “modest prosperity” among middleman minorities provokes more societal animosity than the wealth enjoyed by other groups, such as the nobility or entertainers. There is a common perception of middleman minorities as parasitic because the occupations they are associated with don’t produce goods directly, a view further intensified by their “racial or cultural differences” from the majority group.

During periods of heightened intergroup tensions, this can lead to mob violence. The Holocaust is an example of a culmination of centuries of resentment toward the Jewish people in Europe. In the May 1998 riots in Indonesia, anti-Chinese sentiment at the end of the New Order regime fueled mass lootings and fires targeting Chinese Indonesians, and during the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom, mobs killed 8,000 to 30,000 Igbos en masse.