Quotulatiousness

April 10, 2026

Trump’s intemperate, irresponsible, unhinged rants … worked?

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For all that Trump’s habitual form of social media post seem to frequently dance on the edge of incoherence — if not insanity — his track record is far better than his critics give him credit for. I thought his most recent blustering threats against the Iranian leadership would be counter-productive, but something approximating a ceasefire began just before his deadline. As Brendan O’Neill put it, this gives Iranian civilization a bit of a reprieve, but what about the West?

Imagine calling for the destruction of a civilisation. Imagine dreaming about violently scrubbing an ancient nation from the face of the Earth. Imagine flirting with the idea of obliterating a land with thousands of years of rich history. I am referring, of course, to the activist class and its annihilationist hatred for the Jewish State. For nearly three years, these people have beat the streets and swarmed the digital networks to agitate for the erasure of Israel, all the way “from the river to the sea“. President Trump’s juvenile bluster on Iran has nothing on their existential loathing for the Jewish homeland.

The frenzy of the past 48 hours, following Trump’s potty-mouthed and threatening social-media posts about Iran, has felt unhinged. The nukes are coming, influencers wailed. Trump must be “removed as president” in order to “prevent a catastrophe that our species will never recover from”, said the Guardian‘s Owen Jones. Within hours of this giddy apocalypticism, this huddled descent of the chattering classes into the pit of End Times prophesying, Trump had done what many of us expected he would: struck a kind of deal. The great detonation was not of a nuclear bomb but of the common sense of the cultural establishment. That’s the only thing that got vaporised yesterday.

Then there was the sheer cant. It was Trump’s ominous yelp that “A whole civilisation will die tonight” that got leftists and liberals frothing. It’s genocidal lunacy, they said. Let’s leave to one side that the target of his digital ire appeared to be the Islamic Republic, not Persia. “Forty-seven years of extortion, corruption and death will finally end”, he said. The more striking thing is the industrial-level gall of a cultural elite that is devoted to the dismantling of Israel, puffing itself up in fury over Trump’s hyperbole on Iran.

I agree that “A whole civilisation will die tonight” is a chilling thing to say. That’s why I’m so horrified by the frenzied anti-Zionism of our times. Our intellectual classes furiously deny Israel’s “right to exist”. Our activist classes openly call for Israel’s excision from the family of nations, by intifada (violence) if necessary. Our celebrity classes cheer the armies of anti-Semites (Hamas, Hezbollah) that were founded with the express intention of vaporising the Jewish nation. One minute the keffiyeh set is accusing the likes of Pete Hegseth of being in the grip of an anti-Iranian “bloodthirst”, the next it’s chanting for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers.

Future historians will marvel at the brass neck of an influencer class that took 24 hours off from calling for the destruction of Israel to bash Trump for posting about the destruction of Iran. I raise this not to be facetious but to draw attention to the moral disarray here on the home front that has been so spectacularly exposed by events in Iran. For it is undeniable now – we are surrounded by people who salivate over the violent disappearance of Israel but who fret over the withering of the Islamic Republic. They have taken sides – the side of the barbarous regime that dreams of “Death to America” over the side of the democratic state rebuilt by Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust. I’m delighted the Persian civilisation is safe – now what about the West’s?

3 Comments

  1. I believe those that equivocate Israeli actions of self defense to genocide should die six ways to Sunday and then six times on Sunday as well. This death should be slow and extreme, consisting of a feet first trip through the wood chipper with progress through it constrained via a noose, coupled by a light dousing of lighter fluid and striking matches. Yes, this is indeed overkill and exceedingly cruel – but nowhere near as absurd and cruel as having to endure their caustic, retarded and unnecessarily obnoxious presence. Just their mere lunatic existence is a nukeable offense. And get this; I could not care less about Israel and the inbred retards the poor fuckers are constantly having to battle for survival. Not my monkeys, not my circus. Now, imagine if I did give a good Goddamn…

    Comment by Mike Porter — April 10, 2026 @ 14:52

  2. I don’t have a God in that fight, but I’m amazed at how commenters — especially on Gab — eagerly inject antisemitic comments on posts that have little or nothing to do with Israel, Judaism, or Jewish individuals.

    Comment by Nicholas — April 10, 2026 @ 16:43

  3. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR about a week ago explained his interpretation of the current situation to Europeans:

    Hello, Europeans. The first thing you need to understand about the rant I’m about to utter is that I’m not MAGA, not a Trumpite, but a libertarian who has in the past nevertheless been strongly supportive of US military presence overseas. Because I want the wars that defend this country to be fought in somebody else’s country, as far away from me as possible with a nice big ocean in the way.

    Also relevant: I have a history of having lived in Europe and traveled there extensively. I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish, and have been passably fluent in Italian and French as well. I could probably still find my way around London and Rome and central Paris reasonably well. So if you’re tempted to tell yourselves that I’m some kind of parochial American hick, abandon that hope.

    All that was set-up. So that, when I tell you that almost the entirety of the US electorate, not just Trump supporters, is increasingly fed up with your shit, take me seriously.

    We’ve been cleaning up your messes and keeping the sea lanes open since 1917. And that was for you, not us – we, being very close to resource self-sufficient, don’t need that investment so much. We’ve spent enormous amounts of blood and treasure on keeping you safe. We risked nuclear hellfire on our own cities for nearly 50 years to keep Soviet tanks from rolling through the Fulda Gap.

    Even since the Cold War ended, we’ve subsidized your socialist-playpen welfare states and disastrous immigration policies by taking the need to maintain militaries more effective than a sack of wet farts off the table.

    Now we’ve come looking for help keeping a bunch of rabid Islamic fanatics from getting nuclear weapons that are a clear and present danger to all of you even more than they are to us, and what do we hear?

    “Waah! It’s another Republican president we don’t like, just like the last half dozen of them! So we’re going to sulk in a corner, except when we’re biting at your ankles with crap like airspace restrictions.”

    No. No, we’re not going to take this anymore. It’s not just conservatives who have had enough, it’s moderates and people who used to be strong supporters of liberal internationalism.

    Our citizen’s willingness to pay higher taxes to protect you was upward-bounded by your gratitude. Now that we know your gratitude has effectively gone to zero, so does our willingness.

    Don’t expect this to change if the Democrats take power here. They are much less liberal-internationalist than Republicans now. While they might make mouth noises that soothe you, their overriding concern is the gaping, insatiable maw of their income transfer programs. They’ll sacrifice subsidizing Europe’s playpen socialism to feed their domestic version in a heartbeat. And there is no longer any significant Democratic constituency to argue against that.

    In truth, three decades after the Cold War ended there is no American constituency at all for the massive subsidies you get. It frankly surprises me they lasted this long, that we were this patient with your cowardice and your bitchy whining.

    This moment has been a long time coming. It’s not Donald Trump sinking the transatlantic alliance, it is absolutely you.

    Comment by Nicholas — April 11, 2026 @ 12:08

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