I know it’s Grayzone which has been cringe recently but this is Parenti’s son and it’s a very good read so.
Very interesting article. Especially from Christian Parenti. Quite a thought-provoking retrospective on the bull in the China shop that the Trump presidency was.
I do want to note my favorite bit from the article is
Trump treated powerful allies as poorly as he treated subcontractors during his real estate days. Recall the G-7 summit of 2018: Trump arrived late, left early, and refused to sign a joint communiqué reaffirming the G-7’s commitment to a “rules based international order.” When then-German Prime Minister Angela Merkel pressured him to sign, Trump took two Starburst candies from his pocket, tossed them across the conference table and sneered, “Here, Angela, don’t say I never give you anything.”
Trump took two Starburst candies from his pocket, tossed them across the conference table and sneered, “Here, Angela, don’t say I never give you anything.
:michael-laugh:
Two things:
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He just had Starbursts ready to go in his pocket
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I bet you the ones he gave weren’t even any of the good flavors. They were 2 lemon ones for sure, while he kept the reds and oranges for himself
The FBI and the CIA have illegally intervened in domestic politics, historically by targeting left-wing social movements. We know they infiltrated Trump’s 2016 campaign, then worked to paint him as a Russian puppet throughout his presidency. Are we to believe that the intelligence agencies would not and could not have intervened to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump? Or that they would not have attempted to entrap, then hound and severely punish the MAGA that that rioted for several hours at the US Capitol on January 6th 2021? Such a proposition strikes me as ridiculous. Yet, many of my left-wing friends refuse to explore the mounting evidence suggesting that such agencies moved against Trump and his base because they cannot see why the intelligence agencies might have pressing reasons to do so.
But look abroad. Trump threatened the entire system of US global hegemony. He threatened it for different reasons and in different ways than might grassroots, socialist, anti-imperialists, but he threatened US empire nonetheless.
He is positing here that Jan 6th was anti-Trump entrapment concocted by the fbi/cia. And given all the weird things we were talking about at the time, I think it’s an interesting suggestion. Much of the rest of the article is a mountain of evidence to support the hypothesis that the feds would have a motive to do such a thing.
Egging on maga to do an intentionally bad colour revolution failure as a means of defeating a political threat? CIA doing the revolution psyops they do abroad but intentionally badly within their own country? I can see it.
You could probably say the same about the 2020 George Floyd events. I actually think about that a lot, why was Floyd the straw that broke the camel’s back? Police have and continue to murder black people with virtual impunity. What was so significant about Floyd’s murder? The conditions caused by COVID lockdowns created a unique situation for sure, but we saw stuff in 2020 that the US hadn’t seen since the late 60s, when, apologies to George Floyd, multiple important black leaders were assassinated. I think it’s definitely possible that the protests were escalated by the security state in an effort to damage Trump. Trump, being the absolute moron that he is, played right into their hands by escalating right back, but the spooks probably anticipated that. It is depressing to think about how powerful the US security state is. I suppose if there is one silver lining it’s that something so globe spanning and insidious has to be a very complex system, and complex systems can be easier to disrupt.
In Portland if there was escalation, it was by the PPB, they were coordinating with SPD to fuck people up from day 1. You don’t need the feds for that shit. Cops are dumb enough to do it on their own.
DHS was in Portland egging them on. There are tweets from Chad Wolf in Portland saying how they were going to restore law and order by any means necessary. I know you all hate the PPB, and I’m sure it is well-deserved, but DHS was in Portland ready to murder people and, from what I remember, it was Wheeler and the PPB pushing back against armed DHS agents coming in. I’m sure part of that was a pissing contest between agencies, but it was DHS that was really trying to escalate against the protestors.
Covid was thr first time in a long while people could feel the material changes to their lives. It’s hard to remember but it felt like anything was possible. We could just all agree to do things differently and do them. It was intoxicating. That is part of why they had to restore normalcy as soon as possible. So we didn’t realize it is all just made up.
The 2020 BLM movement was almost certainly infested with feds at the national level. All the actual leaders of the OG BLM movement were assassinated after the 2014 Ferguson protests. When the Minneapolis protests started, it wasn’t the local orgs that had actually organized the initial police protests that were chosen for TV and interviewed, it was members of a national organization that had nothing to do with those protests. The same thing went for the online discourse, the #BLM stuff felt extremely astroturfed at first until it caught on with the mainstream. Hard to tell with online stuff though, as it is usually incredibly reductive.
That is very interesting, honestly it makes you wonder, to what extent the national security state has to keep a lid on everything all at once, my only guess they arent nearly as competent as we would think, it really seems like the situation is just managed chaos in terms of the George flyod situation. Their are really hard questions to askon, how much longer this thing can work as it is right now trying to contain manage ukraine, but also over throw southamerican goverments, while managing a future upcoming, Taiwan China situation, I belive we are gonna see the limits of the national security state honestly. No king rules forever and no security state can forever repress its internal contradictions forever in a declining hegemonic position.
It’s win/win for thr cia. If the based Maga Chad’s actually did anything on 1/6 it could only have ment more policing. Either due to new fascism or to protect order. The worse the cops do and the more chaos they cause the more their budgets increase. They have no incentive to be anything other than monsters
What’s really weird about it is that I could believe it was something organic they could have latched onto, or was even whole-cloth made up by them, but in the end all the MAGA people are incoherent that there’s almost nothing you could do to make them change their views because it’s alternately an evil government plot/based patriots fighting the gov’t when it suits them.
Trump, like a toddler wielding a hammer
:chefs-kiss:
I’ve heard parenti’s daughter in law really continued the Parenti legacy moreso than his son, and this article does reinforce that (full disclosure I didn’t read the article).
It doesn’t matter if a ruling class person has lumpen elements that make them funny, there is no version of “the US” that’s good or at all preferable to the complete dissolution of the US, and weird thought-exercises are never going to change that
I don’t understand the desire to build bridges with white supremacists, its completely unnecessary and in fact counterproductive
I don’t understand the desire to build bridges with white supremacists, its completely unnecessary and in fact counterproductive
I think it’s fair enough to say that Trump was a threat to the security state. One, as matter of discourse he actually ran on scaling back war commitments, even if he was actually lying. Second, he let the mask fall off as he demanded tributes from allies and reduced the US presence in syria into the ‘oil protection units’. And lastly, because he’s a dumbass:
Unimpressed, Trump called his generals “dopes and babies” and “losers” who “don’t know how to win anymore.” As his anger rose, he demanded to know why the United States was not receiving free oil as tribute for the US military presence in the Middle East. “We spent $7 trillion; they’re ripping us off,” Trump bellowed. “Where is the fucking oil?”
There are points in the article that can almost be ready like Trump is a principled isolationist handicapped by media and the blob. But that’s if you’re a Trump worshipper already (which, this being the grayzone, yeah). All in all I think there is some truth in saying that Trump is too green a politician to properly convey the Republican desire to ally Russia, decommit form the Mid-east and attack China. Which means that he’ s always stepping on a blobber’s toes without proposing anything to focus them.
I’ve heard parenti’s daughter in law really continued the Parenti legacy moreso than his son, and this article does reinforce that
Didn’t she write an anti-vax article for the Grayzone?
Trump is not against war, he literally tried to start two with Iran and Syria
This isn’t hard
There’s some truth to the article though. Trump’s moves did hurt the American empire, even as he tried to double down on some imperial aspects. His brash “fuck you, pay me” ideas of diplomacy have the appearance of being pro-empire, but undermine the subtle systems that actually keep the world under American hegemony. Definitely not “anti-war” though.
