Lost in the excitement of Trump’s proposed cabinet appointment is the lack of neocons in the list of foreign policy names. There are plenty of pro-Israel people, no doubt suggested by the Israel Lobby. It is rather clear that Trump made a deal with The Lobby in exchange for their support in the general election. All his proposed foreign policy people are Iran hawks, except for Gabbard. Otherwise, it is looking like an Israel first foreign policy shop under Trump.

It is important to note that the neocons are not part of The Lobby. They may have a lot of things in common, but they are different gangs with different agendas. The neocons are not Zionists. In fact, they come out of the anti-Zionist intellectual sphere with roots in international communism. The neocons are happy to work with the Zionists and the Israel Lobby when it suits their interests and vice-versa. As we saw under Biden, they are also happy to work against the Zionists as well.

To some degree, Trump’s victory is due to the Biden administration making the strategic blunder of prioritizing Ukraine over Israel after October 7, 2023. Israel looked at that Hamas attack as the opportunity to settle issues dating back to the Six-Day War, when Israel controlled much of the land that the Zionist consider part of Greater Israel but was given up in order to make peace. Netanyahu also imagined a regional war, drawing in the United States to topple the Iranian regime.

Instead, the Biden admin worked to prevent a full-blown regional war, often choking off support to Israel, at least in the view of The Lobby. It turned out that the “arsenal of democracy” did not have enough arms for both Israel and Ukraine, so the neocons running the Biden administration chose to favor Ukraine. Further, The Lobby thought the Biden administration failed to handle the anti-Israel protests that broke out at elite college campuses after Israel launched war on Gaza.

The result was The Lobby backed Trump over Harris and Trump committed to prioritizing Israel over all else in his foreign policy. This is one reason the neocons are escalating in Ukraine and will continue to do so. They think it could tie down the Trump administration in Ukraine and prevent them from delivering on Iran. Again, there is no love lost between the neocons and The Lobby. Contrary to what some believe, these are not two faces of the same collective hive-mind.

This does not change the fact that the neocons are headed for the political wilderness come January. While legacy conservatism would welcome them back, the future of what we call the right is anti-neocon and increasingly anti-interventionalist. The neocons have slithered back to their home on the side we call the left, but they will run into the same problem they now find with the so-called right. The groups in that coalition have little interest in the neocon agenda.

Despite Trump’s commitment to the project, it is not all good news for Israel, or the vast support network called The Israel Lobby. The main problem is the political instability within Israel that could blow up before Trump takes office. Protests against Netanyahu are a regular feature in Israel. Netanyahu is slowly losing the judicial fight surrounding his many corruption probes. Then you have the hardliners in his coalition, who are gaining power as he struggles to maintain his position.

Making matters worse is the fact that it may no longer be possible to bully Iran with the threat of military strikes. The tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran revealed serious flaws in Iranian security, but it also revealed newfound military prowess by Iran. On the one hand, Iran’s missile and drone program is far more advanced than what had been assumed until this exchange. On the other hand, her air defense capabilities are also much better, largely due to Russian assistance.

Then you have the withering of support for Israel in America. The Lobby has roots going back to the middle of the last century, where it capitalized on certain events in the Second World War to build a vast network of support for Israel. Much of this rested on the sense that the Jews deserved special consideration due to what happened to them in the war. Demographic change and the actuarial tables are slowly eroding this base of support, both politically and morally.

Taken together, the ground is shifting underneath the feet of The Lobby, as the state of Israel succumbs to its own demographic revolution and the conditions in the Middle East change to reflect the reality of the multipolar world. The Lobby might not fear the sight of an American carrier on fire in the Persian Gulf, but the Trump people certainly do, and they will have to adjust to this possibility. As with many other things, Trump may be a transitional figure regarding American Zionism.

Put another way, the Zionists may be about to follow the neocons into the political wilderness, despite having their guys in the White House. American Zionism, like neoconservatism, is a creature of the last century. It evolved for conditions that are slowly fading into the history books. Like so much of American politics, it has failed to adapt to the new reality. Just as the Biden administration was the last gasp of neoconservatism, Trump may be the last gasp for American Zionism.

That does not mean the end of Israel or The Lobby. Unlike neoconservatism, Zionism and Israel have a future. There is no interest in the “destruction of Israel’ within the Arab world or among its new friends in the multipolar order. Israel can maintain itself, even without the unlimited support of America. Zionism and The Lobby simply must adapt to the reality of the multipolar world and the changing role of the American empire as it slowly returns to being a normal country.

While Trump could turn out to be the last Zionist in the old school sense of it, he could also become the first Zionist in the new sense of it. On the other hand, if he fumbles the problem of Iran, he could simply be the last American Zionist. The images of an American carrier on fire in the Persian Gulf would signal then end of public support for Israel and The Lobby. Either way, Donald Trump is most likely the last of the old school Zionist presidents and the last gasp of this version of The Lobby.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Note: Behind the green door I have several posts about my trip to Nashville, a post about the culture of fraud and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Word leaking out of the Biden White House is that the people actually running foreign policy got the old man to sign off on the limited use of ATACMS missiles inside the borders of pre-2014 Russia. The Ukraine press immediately began to lie about this, as that is what they always do, claiming that this now means they can launch unlimited strikes into Russia using American weapons. The Ukraine lobby makes the Israel lobby look candid and transparent by comparison.

For this unfamiliar, ATACMS stands for Army Tactical Missile System. This is a supersonic tactical ballistic missile that can be fired from mobile launchers and has a range of about 200-miles. This is a precision guided weapon, which means it relies on the American military global positioning system to reach a precise target. It can carry a variety of warheads, including nuclear, chemical or biological. Those last two officially do not exist, but they do exist, and Russia knows it.

That is why the United States has not “allowed” Ukraine to use these weapons against targets inside of Russia. Ukraine is not actually operating these weapons systems because they lack the cognitive and technical ability. Ukraine operators can do the minimal to operate the system, but the targeting and guidance is done by the American military hidden away in bunkers in Ukraine. It is a thing everyone knows is true but pretends is not true to avoid nuclear war.

Despite the lie machine saying otherwise, the latest escalation is limited to the Kursk region, where Ukraine launched an ill-fated attack inside Russia. Their forces are now bottled up there, getting hammered into bits. This limited use of ATACMS there may be in preparation for a retreat or just another crackpot scheme to continue a project that has no chance for success. It also created a problem for the Trump administration, which will inherit the Ukraine mess in two months.

That may be the real motivation. The Kagan cult is sure that Trump will make a deal with his bosses in Moscow to abandon those freedom loving Ukrainians to the Kagan’s ancient enemy to the east. They have two months to throw sand in the gears in what they imagine will be the Trump Ukraine strategy. This is one reason Trump has refused to say anything about his plan for Ukraine to this point. He seems to have figured out that the people responsible for this war are insane.

Of course, the point of permitting Ukraine to use these weapons is to bait the Russians into responding. This is a standard neocon tactic. They provoke a target into responding and then claim it is an unprovoked “act of aggression” against them. Coincidentally, this is the standard operating procedure for Israel. They did everything possible to provoke an attack from Iran, so they could then claim to be the innocent victim and then call in the United States to wage war on Iran.

That is the real concern between now and January. If the neocons running Biden foreign policy continue to poke the bear, the Russians can always take the restraints off Iran, which would like to send another volley of missiles to Israel. The Russians have no illusions about the Ukraine war. They talk about it as a NATO proxy war against them and have repeatedly warned about NATO escalation. They have made clear that their responses will not be limited to Ukraine.

This is where the geopolitical game of chess comes into play. The Kagan cult may also be looking to set a trap for Trump. By escalating in Ukraine, they may think Russia will escalate in the Middle East, perhaps leaving it on the brink of war. Trump’s plan to stack his foreign policy team with Iran hawks is read as a plan to be especially tough on the Iranians this time around. The schemers running foreign policy at the moment would love to see Team Trump step on that rake.

Note that the one of the things the foreign policy establishment does is make it impossible for presidents to negotiate. Every issue around the world is cast in extreme moral terms and every rival is Hitler. This means any deal is akin to Neville Chamberlain ceding the Sudetenland. To even suggest making a deal to resolve a dispute is to acquiesce to evil. Team Trump looks primed to fall into this sort of trap when they take over Iran policy, but we shall see.

It is not hard to imagine a scenario in which the Trump administration is dealing with spiraling of attacks between Israel and Iran. Then the warmongers in the GOP will be demanding war with Iran. The press will be full of reports of how the Russians are supplying Iran with weapons. That means any effort to make a deal with Russia over Ukraine gets the Chamberlain treatment. For the neocons, this at least buys time to keep Project Ukraine going.

Of course, the Israel lobby is fine with this. They want war with Iran as they think the American military will easily defeat them, which will lead to a collapse of the Iran government, paving the way for Greater Israel. It is a good example of how the neocons draft on the Israel lobby to keep their various schemes going. If they can pin down the Trump admin in the Middle East with another proxy war with Russia, then according to their logic, there can be no deal over Ukraine.

There are, of course, many other schemes bubbling up in the fever swaps of the neocons and the Israel lobby. They have two months to poison as many wells as possible, in anticipation of a Trump administration that would prefer to wind down the foreign conflicts. It is why no one should be optimistic about foreign policy under the next Trump administration. He will inherit a foreign policy establishment that is hopelessly corrupt.

Even if his team is sober-minded and realistic about he various hot spots they will inherit, they will be inheriting problems that have been caused by successive administration who have burnt up a lot of political capital. That means they walk into a world full of traps. Some have been set on purpose, while others are just the result of mismanagement over the last thirty years. Simply making to through the next four years without a war will be an accomplishment.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m13s Trump’s personnel picks
• 20m09s Fertility and feminism
• 26m59s Righteous dismissals
• 30m59s RIP Timothy West
• 33m14s Churchill’s return
• 36m17s A very Japanese project
• 38m42s Signoff with Gracie
• 00m00s Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your precipitously genial host John Derbyshire with some observations on the week’s news.

Today’s podcast will depart somewhat from the usual format. My custom has been to offer five or six longish segments and then a miscellany of shorter items. The way it came out this week was as one lo-o-o-o-ng segment followed by five much shorter ones. Unable to make that fit into the customary format, I shall present each as a segment of its own, with no closing miscellany.

So first, the long one. Continue reading →

A recurring dynamic within the ongoing technological revolution is the process in which the forces of centralization sweep up the various nodes within a particular area into a dominant organization or industry. Centralization follows the initial success of some new technology or use of a technology. Once a set of dominant players control a market, the forces of decentralization kick in and pick away at it. It is like the expanding and contracting of the universe.

In the early days of computing, you had big machines maintained by an army of engineers at special facilities. As more computers were created, the next step was to network them into the first distributed network. What followed was the age of the mainframe and midframe, which centralized all the users of an organization into one main computer, which they accessed via terminals. The original internet was a consolidation of these machines.

The PC started to nibble away at this structure. Instead of the user storing all his data on the central machine, he kept it on his local machine. He shared his data with others by copying it onto a disk and then walking it over to that user using what was eventually called sneaker-net. Soon, the local area network allowed the office to share resources and disconnect from the mainframe. The internet then allowed those offices to share data with one another in a distributed network.

Of course, the forces of centralization roared back as servers came to dominate the office network and then the organizational network. As quick as everyone had a personal computer, they were soon forced to make it fully accessible to the impersonal network and then make it little more than a terminal attached to the organization’s network of servers. This soon led to the return of the mainframe era, which was pleasantly renamed cloud computing.

This consolidation – disaggregation cycle is a pretty good model for the history of human civilization, so it makes sense that it plays out in technology. In the disaggregated world, there are those who see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in bringing the disparate parts under one roof. At some point in the consolidation process, there are those who begin to see a benefit, personally, morally or philosophically in breaking the blob into pieces or creating alternative pieces to the blob.

A good model for this is the internet community. The first “social media” was the BBS created in the early days of computing. The Bulletin Board System was modeled after the old-fashioned bulletin board. The main difference was that when someone posted something, others could post replies and then others could reply to those replies for as long as the topic required replies. Sites like 4chan are pretty much just the old BBS with a cheap graphical interface.

The problem with the BBS was that it did not take long before the topics grew too diverse to organize, and the users started to hate one another. Soon groups of users started to spin up new boards for their specific topic or to get away from a rival fraction they used to war with on the old board. The central board broke into a million bespoke boards organized around the tribal instincts of their users. It is not hard to see how humans spread around the globe once you understand this.

What we now call social media has been defined by the consolidation – disaggregation cycle that is the nature of humanity. Just as the centralized BBS splintered into many small communities, subsequent technology followed the same pattern. Big email groups eventually broke into small email groups. Usenet, a technology that aimed to solve the limitations of the BBS, went from a set of large channels into an impossible to track number of small channels.

The message board, which made it easier for the tens of millions of new internet users to be herded into communities online quickly followed the same pattern. The big forum for sports soon broke into forums for specific sports and then forums for specific teams and then rival tribes within the team fanbase. The main driver was always the inability of any group of people larger than the Dunbar number to interact with one another inside an internet community without conflict.

We are now seeing another round of this with microblogging. After the election, the doxers, deviants and lunatics that came to dominate Twitter in the pre-Musk age have jumped ship to something called Bluesky. They have all sorts of reasons ranging from technological to conspiratorial, but the main reason is they cannot face the reality of their moral turpitude, so they are seeking shelter among the like-minded, in a similar way described in the study, When Prophecy Fails.

In one of life’s amusing ironies, they can thank Andrew Torba for the opportunity to create their own fever swamp. The tireless efforts by Torba to keep Gab going, despite the relentless attacks by the crazies, was the first step in the disaggregation phase of the modern social media platform. Gab became a fun refuge for those excluded from Twitter, something like Alfred’s fort at Athelney, from which he waged his heroic resistance to the great heathen army.

Gab surviving and thriving in its inimical way was a proof of concept that opened the door to the coming disaggregation. Mastodon and now Bluesky are hoping to attract niche communities that seek an alternative to Musk’s Twitter. The people into “right wing” conspiracy theories first tried mastodon, but found it too challenging, so they have landed on Bluesky, which is easier for them to navigate. They can now share their conspiracy theories in a “safe” environment.

Twitter will remain the dominant player, owing to the fact it is owned by Musk, and he is besties with the new president. Advertisers are returning to the platform, so it will probably start to turn a profit or at least break even. The ascendent economic interests want one central platform, so they will support it, but those forces of disaggregation will keep gnawing away at it. Nature, at least human nature, does not like centralization, at least not the reality of it, so disaggregation always prevails.

That is the engine of history. Whether it is family dynasties, empires, authoritarian regimes or the unipolar world order, the desire to centralize and control always crashes into the rocks of disaggregation. The tribal nature of man, evolved over millions of years, has not been completely beaten out of after ten thousand years of civilization, so conflict and separation are baked in the cake of human organization. Separation, peaceful or violent, is always the end of the story.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.