More Kings

I'm going to No Kings. Of course I am. You don't live through all this without choosing a side, and the idea that I would ever be anywhere in this but with the anti-Trumps is so unthinkable that the very idea makes me wretch. Parts of this side don't thrill me, people who've read a while know what they are, but most people reading this know what needs to be done.

I have very little love for a left that can't be bothered with how they oppress Jews, views traditional Democrats just as oppressors with a human face, and treats every moderating criticism as the equivalent to violenc*. But the difference between them and conservatives is that conservatives have power! They control all three branches of the government even as they represent a clear minority of the population, and the more power they have, the more phantom threats they see while ignoring real threats all the more. Apparently a couple campus radicals are cause for a hundred times the alarm they sound over Russian interference in a Presidential election, or even than they sound about how the Chinese government uses our very technology to spy on us and all levels of our government (assuming they look on Silicon Valley's spying with approval...).

Churchill said 'If Hitler had invaded hell I should find myself making favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.' Well, I'm not thrilled about marching with a left who will no doubt coopt some of these demonstrations for Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, even while we currently live in the best hope for peace since Oslo. One day, traditional liberals like me may have to fight a vastly turbocharged version of the worst among them, but right now, they're our allies, even if I feel like I have to wash my hands in their company.

On the one hand, the silence of the Left over the Gaza peace deal is absolutely deafening. The devil must get his due if he is not to come for us, and the Trump administration did something heroic: they got the hostages home, and 2000 Palestinian prisoners are coming home too. Some of these prisoners are heinous terrorists who will try to kill Jews all over again, some were thrown in jail indiscriminately just for appearing at demonstrations or throwing a rock, and some who were senselessly thrown in jail are now radicalized into potential terrorists.

On the other hand, the idea that this deal will probably work is madness. We're supposed to believe that Hamas will unilaterally agree to leave, but Hamas didn't even wait a day before starting to execute any opposition: some in public. Reuters claims the number is 33, but I'm sure that number will climb precipitously. Meanwhile, Hamas accused Israel of killing another 30 since the treaty. This is peacetime?!

The hostages are home, and it says something that all the living hostages are now men. What happened to the women? I have a bad feeling I need to spell it out, so read the rest of this paragraph at your peril........................................... I think it's pretty clear that any forensic exam would show that sexual violence was done to them. They were killed so they wouldn't talk about it, and Hamas will inevitably claim that the bodies were irrecoverable.

On the other hand, what changed in the last month? Why now?

It wasn't about the Nobel Prize, or it wasn't 'just' about the Nobel Prize. Even an idiot like Trump knows very well that he'd have to maintain the peace as well as stop the war before he would ever be considered, but he could, as always, feed his not getting it as another grievance to his base. No, the reason is still more selfish.

What happened was that Israel bombed Qatar, a country that very shrewdly gifted Trump a giant plane in public and god knows what else in private; and Israel did so without even telling the US that they would. There's no question, Qatar is an Israeli opponent who helps fund everything from Hamas to Yemen's Houthis to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who broadcasts antisemitic propaganda every day on al-Jezeera, but client states don't go behind their protectors' back to bomb an opponent who tries so hard to stay in the Godfather's grace.

Yes, Trump caused peace in the Middle East, at least for a week, but he did it by doing what Biden and Obama never dared: bring Israel to heel. Force Israel to accept peace, pledge that America would never let Israel annex the West Bank. Behold, the most pro-Israel President...

The truth is, by the standards of historic fascism, Trump has still barely scratched the surface. I think everybody's a little nervous about tomorrow, but this is still so far from 20th century fascism. Fascism used to mean the wholesale ban of any political opposition with no political party allowed but the ruling party: all critics of the government are thrown into jail immediately, all suspected critics are too. It doesn't stoke vi*lence by subtle implication, it tells you outright what it wants to do, then it does it. Within the first six months of H*tler's rule, 30,000 political prisoners had been thrown in prison. Not Jews, just government critics. That would be the equivalent of Trump throwing roughly 200,000 of his critics in jail by July.

No, Trump is not H*tler, he's not even Franco or Mussolini, not yet at least. But he does bare a passing resemblance to Kaiser Wilhelm: a bombastic idiot who blunders his way into dominating a continent by dumb luck, only for the huge risks he takes to eventually ruin his country for generations and potentially take down a hundred million people in his wake.

Whomever Trump resembles, he's capable of so much worse than he's yet done, and even if it turns out he isn't (unlikely), he's so taken the lid off of society that someone with still much worse machinations can do still much worse with impunity, left as well as right. We're still in Year 1 of a very long four years, and potentially much, much longer.