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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Important to note how victory has a thousand parents, defeat is an orphan.

One of the sudden stomach cramp moments of realizing how bad things were was when Trump said it was Pete Hegseth's idea, that Pete spoke up first. That is atypical of Trumpian dialectics.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-publicly-tells-hegseth-he-was-the-first-to-push-for-iran-war-you-said-lets-do-it/ar-AA1ZgNwp

“I called a lot of our great people,” Trump said. “We have great people, and I said, ‘Let’s talk.' We got a problem in the Middle East. We have a country known as Iran that, for 47 years, has been just a purveyor of terror, and they’re close to a nuclear weapon. We can keep going and get that 50,000 up to 55 and 60. There's no end," Trump explained. "Or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem.”

“And Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. And you said, 'Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.' So, we are now having really good discussions," the President said.

Please post the full video beyond a stripmined headline repurposed for twitter because I promise it does not suggest what you're implying it does.

Yeah, that was a pretty bad sign. Also Elon not talking about it after day one. Elon is usually first to stick his head into a threshing machine with these things, I recall him bragging on day 1 about how Grok said the decapitation strike was a good move whereas Claude and GPT ummed and ahhed diplomatically. He changed the flag of Iran on twitter too to the monarchist flag. And given starlink and such, he was deeply involved with operations in Iran pre-war. But after day 1 he wasn't saying much of anything about the war.