Four Things to Keep an Eye On
Israeli antiquities, more spyware blacklisted, space Jesuits, and "freedom conservatives"
Prolegomenon
This is going to sound crazy, but this very strange political moment needs some narrative coherence that nobody else seems to be capable of, so I’m going to lay it out for you in terms that will be familiar.
At a strategic level, the China-Israel problem reaches into a whole lot of different institutions, including our own government, and it has its more obvious origins in the Bush era. The two foreign governments with substantial pull in the United States who wished to keep the U.S. bogged down in the Middle East were China and Israel—Chinese money, Israeli spying. You see it everywhere, and it’s very powerful and dangerous.
The Microsoft-Activision merger is important to all this. Microsoft is an Israeli-compromised company. They want to create a software architecture to control American children from birth to adulthood—some Israelis are working with the Chinese to enslave our children, that isn’t putting it too strongly. They cannot be allowed to. Lina Khan needs to be supported to the absolute hilt. She’s one of our Millennial heroes.
The biggest Activision franchises are Guitar Hero, which teaches children not to learn to play actual instruments, and Call of Duty, which is all about constant deployments and misadventures in godforsaken sandpits, and there’s all this Saudi money in Activision too. Both of these games tell you a lot about how they want you to think of yourself. The Chinese are cracking down on video games, but they’re pushing them here. You see how this works? I’m not opposed to video games, but they are very powerful, in the way that they structure how especially young people think. The way to think about it is Microsoft-Activision is a sand people construction.
In a similar way in movies, Marvel is Chinese, the DC universe is Anglo—Aquaman, Batman, are very Anglo superheroes. I don’t even know what to make of Marvel anymore, it’s a huge mess.
The basic question on a conceptual level is, are Americans sea people or land people? The answer is we are sea people. We inherited the British Empire. You can sort of think of the AUKUS alliance as the New Atlantis rising up out of the ocean. As the Bible says, “We have not here any lasting city, but we seek one that is to come.”
The conservative movement just doesn’t get this, because they have ideological commitments in opposition to antitrust. There are also other corruption issues, though. I look at a couple like Lulu Cheng Meservey at Activision and Joshua Meservey at the Hudson Institute, and I see a problem. Joshua used to do Africa policy at Heritage, and there are all these resource conflicts there where the Chinese and Israelis are lined up against America. What’s going on there?
For my readers out in LA, there’s some Saudi money coming in to break the SAG-AFTRA strike. Stand up to the sand people.
There have always been serious reservations about the Iraq misadventure within NATO and the U.S. Navy, which you can see in Wes Clark Sr. and Jim Webb. Some conservatives like Jim Webb because he’s Scotch-Irish, culturally conservative with populist sympathies, and all that’s fine, but the real story there is that’s the Navy saying this is the wrong direction. He’s a former Secretary of the Navy. This is one reason the Israelis have tried, might and main, to compromise the Navy SEALs.
The Israeli Antiquities at Mar-a-Lago
This is a very interesting story:
Israel has discovered that a set of ancient pottery lamps that it lent to the White House for a temporary exhibit in 2019, and which it has been trying to recover, ended up in Mar-a-Lago, the Florida residence of former US president Donald Trump, according to a report Tuesday.
According to Haaretz, the items, which are part of the ‘National Treasures’ collection of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), were shipped to the US for a Hanukkah candle-lighting event at the White House during Trump’s presidency, with the approval of the IAA director at the time, and were to be returned after a few weeks. Saul Fox, a major Jewish American donor to the Israel Antiquities Authority, was invited to the event.
The lamps did arrive in the US but were eventually not displayed in the White House, after US government officials raised concerns that they may have originated in the West Bank, and their display would have been in contravention of international antiquities law.
Biden Administration Blacklists More Israeli Spyware Companies
It’s just inconceivable that Republicans would ever do this, which is part of the problem:
The Biden administration on Tuesday added the foreign commercial spyware companies Intellexa and Cytrox to a federal “entity list” that prohibits American companies from engaging in certain trade activities with them, after determining that the two firms pose a threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.
The decision is part of an ongoing effort to address the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware, according to senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to brief reporters on the matter. The move is the most significant since President Biden issued an executive order in March that sets limits on U.S. agencies’ use of spyware and bars the technology’s use when there’s a risk it could be exploited by foreign governments to target Americans or violate human rights.
That action serves as a “strong signal” to entities that use commercial spyware, as well as the surveillance industry as a whole, a senior administration official said.
Meanwhile, Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis are at the CUFI conference crawling to Papa Bibi for crumbs from their master’s table. It’s un-republican, and there are national security issues here, that at this point Republicans can’t be trusted to take seriously. It sort of astonishes me that there are no right-of-center reporters who will even ask them about this stuff. Something’s really broken here. Rupert Murdoch’s empire is, of course, Chinese-Israeli as well.
Bronze Age Pervert in Politico
I was going to make a joke that Gal Luft should enjoy himself at the Bronze Age Pervert pirate colony. Anyway, Politico had a symposium on manhood written by women, a surefire way to get no men to pay attention. My read on Rosie Gray’s article is the Israelis have proposed Nietzschean Zionism as the answer to what’s going on, even Beijing Ben Shapiro is saying nice things about it. BAP-ism has the advantage of creating a lot of cranks that other pro-Israel reporters like Rosie can cancel in their other reporting. It’s pretty interesting how her book never came out.
Let me be very clear, we will not tolerate the Israelis encouraging young men to embrace slogans like “total nigger death.” First of all, it’s an awful thing to say. Second of all, they’re going to ruin their lives. Third, we cannot let the Israelis use our young people as fodder for the ADL. Absolutely not. We spend all this money on studying radicalization but not a single person has published a paper that notices how much of the radicalizing the Israelis are doing! This whole racket needs to be shut down.
Rosie doesn’t talk about any of that though. She’s a bad actor. There are all these parts of the article that are transparent lies. The book was a “word-of-mouth phenomenon.” He’s a “folkloric trickster,” come on, maybe a desert trickster. He’s an Israeli operative tied into all these neocon institutions. They’re just lying, this isn’t complicated.
There’s a permission structure on the right, whereby people only think things once the Israelis have given them permission to do so. Oh, the Israelis are OK with nationalism now, I guess we can be nationalists. Oh, an Israeli operative likes mass genocide and space fascism, I guess we can be space fascist genocidaires. I think it would be better if people thought for themselves.
The Space Jesuits are Here
A Vatican dicastery is getting involved in the ethics in AI conversation.
The “Freedom Conservative” Manifesto
I don’t really have anything to say about this because it doesn’t say anything. Just a joke: perhaps a “liberty conservative” is, simply, a conservative who remembers the USS Liberty. Viva libertatem.