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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?

I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.

I get it.

Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.

If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.

So we are stuck.

But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever. Many probably don't expect it to happen, they are just trying to set up Trump looking bad. An example of this is probably the war powers resolutions.

But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.

I think that's kind of treasonous? Maybe not the executing kind, but definitely the "holy shit what are you doing kind."

Like the war. Hate the war. It's happened. Criticizing how we got here is understandable, but I think we need to be careful.

Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.

The people who manipulated Trump into starting the war are the “traitors” in my book, though this isn’t the legal definition. Lindsey Graham shouldn’t be coached by Mossad on how to neurolinguistically program Trump’s 80yo mind into joining a war. That’s the most insane thing I have ever read. It is baffling that this happened. And I don’t trust “confirmed bachelor” Lindsey Graham in Tel Aviv in the Epstein era at all:

To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country's intelligence community. "They'll tell me things our own government won't tell me," he said. He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said.

A law should be passed to deport people who do this to Mogadishu along with their nearest kin, extending even to second cousins, along with banning any of their interns of assistants from working in government. Imagine the best salesmen in the world working for years to figure out how to sell you something, and they are able to use a friend of yours to do so. They have an infinite budget and have collated tens of thousands of hours of your speeches and conversations to determine priming words and anchoring words according to your facial expressions and vocal tenor. Oh, and you’re 80 years old and easily impressionable. This is the capability of Mossad, plus infinitely more.

we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel

I would sooner support America formally declaring war on Israel than believe this, or support someone who believes this. This is not the assessment of the American intelligence community. This is an Israeli talking point.

along with their nearest kin, extending even to second cousins

United States Constitution, Article III, section 3, paragraph 2:

no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood

They had experience with governments punishing the relatives of traitors and wanted no part of it.

If you told the founders that we were entering a needless war of foreign intervention 6000 miles away in Persia, they would consider their constitution a failure, and may be partial to my helpful revision.

"From the Halls of Montezu-uma,

to the shores of Tripoli,

but not twenty-five percent fa-arther,

cause that'd just be crazy!"

Seems like it ruins the original's meter and spirit.

Maybe focus on "needless"; don't throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Also if the place was still called "Persia", we likely wouldn't be having this issue.