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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 problem is that America is a democratic republic. A section of Trump's vote was won on no more war/America first, or at least a leader that represented their interests in no war.
Now it appears as if the vast unaccountable artifice that wants war is actually more capable of setting foreign policy than the leader. This signals that the leader is useless at representing the people's interests.
If they want popular support for the war, the war needs to be successfully sold to the public, with reasons given for why the war is in America's best interest. If this is not done, the public will come up with their own explanations.
They didn't supply a good, or even bad reason. They didn't give a reason at all. I'm sure someone could come up with great explanations for why this was necessary, and a nuclear armed Iran doesn't seem great. But the incoherent noises from the government when asked to explain their situation do not inspire confidence.
There is a conspiracy theory that this is all a test, like a ratchet, to see how much people are willing to accept from their leaders. The hypernormalization of involvement in conflict, without a perceivable reason. There is another conspiracy theory that this is being done to distract from the frustration around the Epstein files, or the slightly related one that Mossad has significant kompromat on key American politicians related to Epstein and is using it as a lever to get them to assist with their war effort. There is another conspiracy theory that the evangelical wing of American politics has struck a deal with the Zionists to usher in the fucking apocalypse.
After Covid, I can no longer discount even the wildest of conspiracy theories as entirely without merit.
Why do you describe it like Trump was simply absent when all this was decided? Trump didn't simply fail to stop them, he is on board with it.
The people who wanted no war voted for a guy who constantly flip-flops, and this was a completely foreseeable outcome of that.
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It might not be an intentional test, but there is definitely a test going on for just how much the so called "conservatives" have sold their soul into a cult of personality. I always assumed in 1984 when they said "we've always been at war with Eurasia", the government would have at least taken down all the "we are not at war with Eurasia" propaganda first.
But the point about loyalty tests is the absurdity. The more you're willing to show blatant disregard for basic reason in favor of bootlicking, the more trustworthy you seem.
The evangelical right has been very open about this for decades. It's not a conspiracy theory when they literally say it is their motivation.
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