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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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The Strait of Hormuz is closed with no clear path to opening, Dubai International Airport is shut down, maintaining ~30 missiles a day is enough for mass economic disruption and disruption to daily life. The copium about Iran running out of missiles every day hasn't happened. We've gone from "We've won" to "We're winning" to "Please Help open the Strait" in 3 weeks.

Marcus Crassus fought the Persians (technically Parthians) at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC. His strategy was to wait for the Persians to run out of arrows before attacking with his infantry. But it turned out the Persians were being resupplied with camels, so the Romans attacked, and suffered one of their worst defeats in history. Crassus himself was killed during subsequent negotiations to end the fighting. Legend has it that the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat to mock his greed.

As for the rest, the Alt-right has always had a vastly overinflated perception of their own importance.

It certainly cannot be attributed to the Jewish Zionist wing that now owns MAGA like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, given that they opposed it in 2016. I think it's delusional to think Trump would have won without the "meme magic" that constantly went viral on the Internet and basically defined his image/aesthetic, but in any case it was a far greater part of the creation of that movement than the people that actively opposed it at the time but now claim they define it. Chutzpah.

Tehran announcing that the straights have been closed is a very different state from no ships transiting the straights. Looking at Marine Traffic, Lloyds List, and various other logistics industry trade sites what appears to be happening is the the Euros are spooked and staying in port, the Gulf States are running dark (IE turning of their transponders), and the Chinese are ignoring the announcement but given that most of their tonnage is bound for Iranian ports anyway that is to be expected.

And again. believing that Trump/MAGA was "memed into existence" by edge-lords posting on 4-Chan requires one to be entirely ignorant of the preceding 8 - 10 years of GOP internal politics.

As I said, what Trump did was accurately identify key fault lines that cut across large swaths of both the conservative and corporate sides of the Republican electorate as well as many former Democrats who'd been alienated by the national party's embrace of Id-Pol and then build a coalition around it. The Bernie-Bro to Trump-Stan pipeline flipped more votes than any on the Alt-Right could have ever dreamed of and that is a large part of why the Alt Right is on the outside. They are not the target constituency, they never were.

As I said, what Trump did was accurately identify key fault lines that cut across large swaths of both the conservative and corporate sides of the Republican electorate as well as many former Democrats who'd been alienated by the national party's embrace of Id-Pol and then build a coalition around it.

I swear I feel like I'm the only one with a 10-year memory. Identity Politics reached peak during Donald Trump. BLM and all of its fallout and cultural Great Awokening was during Trump's first term. In 2016 he ran on Immigration restrictionism, which resonated with dissident elements who then turned all of his leadership faults into funny internet memes that went viral incessantly during the 2016 campaign, to the point Reddit had to eventually ban his subreddit. Trump's 2016 campaign was not an anti-idpol coalition, it was fundamentally a nativist movement. The Zionist wing of the GOP picked up on that energy, which is why they called themselves "Never-Trumpers" and opposed the movement, at least until he proved his worth and now they say they define the movement and all the "nativists" who are skeptical of another war for Israel are not MAGA.

Now, the 2024 campaign was more of an anti-idpol coalition, but by this point more discerning observers knew that MAGA was being subsumed by the interests that have brought us exactly where we are today, and "anti-idpol" was a Trojan Horse to move the chess pieces to achieve this war with Iran and the purge of the actual nativists.

Again the reason the Alt Right is on the outside is that they were not the target constituency, they never were.

I think that you are engaging for the common affluent liberal fallacy of assuming that the you opponents have been somehow manipulated into voting against their own interests to salve your own ego rather than consider the possibility that they have their own reasons and interests that are different from yours.

out-played by people you view your inferiors, IE the normie populist right.

If you mean zionist elements in his close political orbit then sure. Normiecons didn't outplay shit, they dance to the same tune, but that's pretty much it.

I dunno, man. I am entirely sympathetic to the American normie populist right, in no way see them as inferior, and the reason I think Trump is being puppeteered, is that he jumped head-first into an idiotic war that he explicitly campaigned against, and which is exclusively in the interest of Israel and against the interest of the normie populist right.