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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Trump is not a very smart guy and we know for a fact he is a twitter addict. The simplest answer is therefore the correct one , like Zelensky said , Trump has been captured by Russian propaganda. Probably as a result of who he talks to and what he watches. Watch how he pivots away from all former allies and befriends authoritarians like Putin and Xi. If any of you guys are European like me , better start running , digging and practicing how to dogde FPV's.

Trump has been captured by Russian propaganda.

If you actually believe this then you may as well give up the entire American project right now and prepare for Putin's coronation ceremony. If the Russian propaganda system is so incredibly powerful that it can bypass Trump's direct access to all intelligence gathered by the United States military and surveillance apparatus, his direct access to all the people in the US military with full knowledge of the situation on the ground and the security systems in place to protect the president... there's no hope left, the Russians could hit anyone lower down in the government with the same weapon. If the Russians have a mind-control weapon which can capture the President without the US military or IC doing anything about it then they have already won and you may as well just roll out the red carpet for them now.

Of course, the alternative hypothesis, that the alternative media and other voices have been correct about the US' pivotal role in starting the Ukraine conflict and Trump is simply recognising the facts on the ground because he doesn't actually want the war to continue, is a lot more believable to me.

there's no hope left, the Russians could hit anyone lower down in the government with the same weapon.

It's not that bad. If you're not a near senile boomer with notoriously little concern and knowledge about foreign affairs, your gullibility should be lower.

The problem with this approach is that if you actually believe it then there's no point having the CIA, FBI, NSA or Secret Service. What's the point in having an intelligence apparatus at all if the person who it is meant to be informing just believes what your supposed greatest adversary posts on social media? This argument would work if we were talking about an actual old boomer watching Fox News reruns on their iPad, but we're talking about the POTUS. If the safeguards around the president are so lax that Russia can do this then you end up in the same position - Russia has already won a total and complete victory.

Trump is a well known oddball, an oddball of the same age Biden was when he started his first term, I might add. Did you not elect him to crush the deep state, banish drag-queens from schools, deport every illegal immigrant or whatever and defy hostile parts of government?

Here's your based, unyielding chieftain. He has already figured everything he needs out, as he was meant to. Did you expect him to listen to something so silly as secret services? Down with that woke nonsense!

Did you not elect him to crush the deep state, banish drag-queens from schools, deport every illegal immigrant or whatever and defy hostile parts of government?

No, I'm not American. I'm not even a right-winger - but I am a populist, and I hoped Trump would got re-elected because he would smash and destroy the infrastructure of the American Empire. I'm not exactly shedding tears over the shutdown of USAID, an organisation which provided both generators and torture training to right wing regimes so that they could prevent the socialists from taking power and charging Americans slightly higher prices for fruit.

Did you expect him to listen to something so silly as secret services? Down with that woke nonsense!

I think the ironically named intelligence community in the US is full of shit and actively hostile to Trump, as they revealed in their text messages. But if your position is that the intelligence community can (and should) defy the will of the voters and implement the policies they prefer in the face of popular opposition, I think you're defending something far worse than Trump is even threatening to be.

Sigh. Fine, I'll repeat myself while filtering the irony out: while it's true that POTUS has better access to knowledge than anyone, it's still up to him what to do and believe. You'd think that wide access to the internet would kill and bury many falsehoods, but this isn't how it works. Trump campaigned specifically on his opposition to corrupt, hostile branches of the government. That he doesn't appear to take much advantage of his special access, or of a google search for that matter, shouldn't be surprising