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Notes -
Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced today he was resigning over the war in Iran.
What's most significant is that Kent is not a Marjorie Taylor-Green or a Thomas Massie. Kent served in the U.S Special Forces and in eleven combat tours, mostly Iraq, and then retired an became a paramilitary officer with the CIA. His wife was killed in Syria. Kent had a very public feud with the Nick Fuentes faction of America First which was started by Kent's public denunciation of Fuentes.
Kent was clearly amenable to an aspirational "middle ground" with respect to the tenuous America First/Israel Alliance, which is why he was targeted by the Groypers in the first place. Nobody can accuse him of hiding some deep-seeded Jew hatred because of his long and recent history of supporting Israel, this seems to be a genuine defection. This defection is highly significant and the first time a high-ranking official has described any of these conflicts in these terms.
There may be more shoes to drop/more resignations. My own criticism of Kent's resignation is that he tries to absolve Trump of blame, when Trump is neck-deep in all of this.
This resignation comes as the same day the Guardian reports that a UK security adviser present at US-Iran talks believed a deal was within reach immediately before the US/Israeli strikes on Iran.
Trump of course immediately goes to his classic method of "just insult anyone who disagrees with you on anything" https://x.com/TheCalvinCooli1/status/2033939188064702746
Either he knowingly put someone "weak on security" in charge of counterterrorism efforts, or he's a lying bullshitter who just makes shit up about you if you ever upset him.
Kent goes above and beyond trying to paint over it being the president's own choices and he still gets treated this way, cause of course.
Huh what interesting names to be Israeli assets, crazy coincidence I suppose. I wonder if Witkoff was wearing the pager he was apparently given by Mossad during these discussions with Trump
Isn't this what Trump and Trump supporters actually want you to think though – that Trump is a lying bullshitter who will dunk on you if you upset him, regardless of the truth/falsity/merits of the case? That way he can build a coalition that maintains loyalty and enables him to use his bully pulpit to ram things through in a way others could not, because they are afraid to oppose him. That is how his whole operation works. If he didn't lie and bullshit, it would be possible for his opponents to use reason and evidence to combat his insults, which would defang them significantly. They have to be regarded as insult theatre, not grounded in reality, to act as effective in/out-group markers.
I would have thought that MAGA supporters would at least tacitly accept this characterisation, though I confess they sometimes surprise me.
I disagree about characterizing it as lying, but yeah, the simple statement that his insults don't really mean much, and are more reflective of whether he perceived their target as loyal or disloyal than of their actual merits, is uncontroversial.
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