First it was buy Greenland, then make Canada a state. Now Donald Trump wants to own the Gaza Strip.
The President proposed on Tuesday that the U.S. should “own” the Gaza Strip, “level the site” and develop it, explicitly calling for displacing 2 million Palestinians from their homeland as the region’s leaders struggle to maintain a fragile ceasefire.
During a wide-ranging press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump laid out a sweeping plan for the U.S. to colonize Gaza and build resorts there. “I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy, but—the Riviera of the Middle East. This could be so magnificent,” Trump said.
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Isn’t that a front of they intend on committing one awful thing to commit a different awful thing?
No, you’re misunderstanding me.
They don’t attack trans people to distract from ethnically cleansing Palestine, and they don’t ethnically cleanse Palestine to distract from tearing apart the government. This isn’t a Soderbergh movie; there’s no grand unified plan where every action is actually secretly a play in a 4D chess game towards a different hidden goal.
They’re attacking trans people because they want to attack trans people. They’re ethnically cleansing Palestine because they want to ethnically cleanse Palestine. They’re tearing apart the government because they want to tear apart the government.
These are all things that they very much want to do. And along the way they’re going to collapse the US education system, destroy the welfare state, give tax breaks to billionaires, and plunder whatever money they can get for themselves because those are all things they want to do too. And they have the ability to do all of these things at once, so why wouldn’t they? What benefit is there to slowly going through their list of targets one by one?
You don’t need to conjure up a fantasy world where everything is part of some elaborate plan in order to explain this behaviour. It’s just the most obvious thing for them to do in this situation. They’re behaving completely rationally, given what their goals are.
The fact that the people opposing them refuse to care about more than one of these things at a time is just a happy accident for them. It’s more comforting to believe that everything is a distraction except for the one thing that you really want to care about, but the reality isn’t that easy. The reality is that no matter how much it sucks, someone has to care about every single one of these things, because they all matter. Doesn’t always have to be the same someone, but it has to be someone. There is no feint to disguise the main attack; you are surrounded on all sides, and it is all main attack.
But the good news is that the only reason they can afford to be this reckless is because the people opposing them really haven’t woken the fuck up what’s happening yet (and the people who have woken up are feeling pretty demoralized by everyone else’s apathy). That sounds bad, and it is, but ultimately it’s good news because their victory is not a foregone conclusion. The American people have the ability to stop these criminals if they try. It’s not too late.
I think we’re just being pedantic about the word ‘front’ and are actually agreeing? I’m not saying they’re playing 4D chess or that we’re living in a movie, I’m only trying to make a point that they’re attempting to overwhelm the media so that we don’t know which attacks are feigned punches or immediate threats. Obviously they still want to punch the shit out of everything.
No, we’re not agreeing, because you still seem to be under the impression, at least from the part I just quoted, that any of this is a feint. It’s not. They’re doing bad things because they want to do bad things. None of it is a feint, all of it is the main attack. Where they win, they win, where they fail they’ll just keep on trying.
I think it’s less focused than that. I think it’s “I want to make the world worse in these 10 ways. If I only get 5 of them, I’ve still managed to make the world worse, so I’m happy.”