trump

The Punchline That Stopped Being Funny

by damagecollateral

Or: How I Learned to Stop Laughing and See the Abyss

One can be evil and colorful at the same time

There’s a moment in every con when the mark realizes he’s been had. Mine came late—embarrassingly late. I’d been riding the Trump rollercoaster for years, white-knuckling it through loop-de-loops of outrage and absurdity, telling myself it was all part of some grand American farce. The joke was on the liberals, the establishment, the whole rotten system. Trump was the whoopee cushion at the funeral of American decorum, and I was too busy laughing to notice the corpse was real.

I’ll own it: I fell for it. Not the MAGA hat stuff—I never voted for the guy—but something maybe worse. I fell for the idea that Trump was amusing. That his chaos was a kind of performance art. That beneath the carnival barker shtick was just another corrupt politician, no better or worse than the rest, just louder and more honest about it.

I was wrong.

The scales didn’t fall all at once. They peeled away in layers, like old paint on a toxic building. First came the AI videos mocking Palestinians during what can only be described as a genocide he was actively facilitating. Dark, sure, but Trump had always trafficked in dark humor, right? Then the double-cross: promising to end the siege in exchange for a dual-citizen hostage, the kind of transactional cruelty that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush. I remember thinking, “Yeah, that’s nasty, but he’s still shaking things up, still saying things others won’t…”

The voice of the con artist’s best friend: the rationalization.

Then Jeffrey Epstein entered the picture—yes, that Epstein. In a private email that surfaced, the late pedophile and professional blackmailer wrote something that stopped me cold: “I have met some very bad people… none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body.”

Now, you might ask: why would I take moral guidance from Jeffrey Epstein? Fair question. But here’s the thing about monsters—they recognize their own. When a man who trafficked children for the world’s elite says someone else is worse than anyone he’s ever met, you have to at least consider the possibility that he’s not exaggerating.

That’s when I started going back through the highlight reel, except this time I wasn’t watching for the laugh lines. I was looking at where everything landed. And I had to do something I’d resisted for years: I had to open my heart to darkness. Not the metaphorical darkness of “politics I disagree with,” but the actual thing—the possibility that some people are so profoundly deformed at their core that most of us literally can’t see it. Our imaginations won’t let us. It’s too outside the normal range of human behavior.

The final nail came with Gaza. After brokering what he called a “ceasefire,” Trump executed an about-face so brazen it would have made Machiavelli nauseous. His administration strong-armed the UN Security Council into accepting a plan that essentially outsourced the genocide, giving the Israelis a breather while other nations coordinated with them to finish ethnically cleansing Gaza—or at least demilitarize it, which amounts to the same thing for a people resisting occupation after surviving what may be the holocaust of our time.

That’s when I finally saw him clearly. And I didn’t like what I saw. Not one bit.

I can already hear the chorus: “Really? Now you see it? What about ICE? The racism? The pardons for war criminals? The corruption? The election interference? The degradation of basic decency? The tariffs that destroyed farmers? The cuts to veterans’ benefits, SNAP, Medicare?”

The list is long, and it’s a valid indictment—of Trump, but also of me. Yes, I saw all of that. But not like I do now. Not with the clarity that comes from accepting what I’d been avoiding: that this isn’t just another corrupt politician. This is something else.

I think Trump knows it too. There was a moment recently when he said he doesn’t think he’ll make it to heaven. It was delivered with his usual glibness, but I heard something underneath it—a kind of acknowledgment. The presidency didn’t create his malice; it unleashed it. It gave him the power to reach his full dark potential, potential he’d had all along. The office served as both amplifier and indictment.

Here’s what I’ve learned, late though the lesson comes: Trump’s greatest trick isn’t the lies or the bluster or the norm-breaking. It’s the way he keeps you from believing he’s as bad as he actually is. The sheer scale of it, the constant motion, the circus atmosphere—it’s all camouflage. We keep looking for the punchline because we can’t accept that the joke is on us, and it isn’t funny.

So stop being distracted by the antics. Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. Stop telling yourself it’s all part of some complex strategy or that he’s “just playing politics.” That’s the con. You’re the mark. Believe he’s a deeply bad person and start seeing his actions in that light. Not because it’s politically convenient, but because it’s true.

The rollercoaster is still running. The question is whether you’re going to keep riding it, or finally get off and look at what it’s built on.

I got off. Late, yes. Too late, probably. But I got off.

The ground is steadier here, if lonelier. And from here, you can see the whole machine for what it is: not a ride at all, but a wreck in slow motion, with Trump’s grinning face painted on the front car as it hurtles toward something none of us should want to see.

The UN’s Gaza Gift-Wrap: A Genocide Gets a Makeover

by damagecollateral
Guess who’s baaack!

On Monday, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2803, a document so brazenly contemptuous of basic political reality that it deserves some kind of award for institutional chutzpah. The resolution concerns Gaza, or what’s left of it after two-plus years of systematic annihilation. But if you’re expecting anything resembling justice, self-determination, or even a coherent plan for Palestinian statehood, you’ve come to the wrong place.

The centerpiece of 2803 is demilitarization—Gaza must be stripped of weapons before anything else can happen. Not peace. Not statehood. Not even a timeline for Israeli withdrawal. Just disarmament, made a precondition for rebuilding and, more grotesquely, for allowing “essentials” to enter. Food, medicine, water—the stuff human beings need to survive—are now leverage points in a grand disarmament scheme. It’s disaster capitalism meets hostage negotiation, with the UN playing the role of complicit middleman.

What’s most striking about the resolution is what it doesn’t say. There’s no mention of Palestinian self-determination beyond vague, aspirational language. No specific steps. No deadlines. No pressure—none whatsoever—on Israel to ever leave Gaza. The word “Palestinian” might as well be a typo. The resolution treats Palestine and Palestinians as atmospheric details, background noise in a story about “regional stability” and “security arrangements.” It’s erasure by paperwork.

So what is this really about? Simple: outsourcing the genocide.

For over two years, Israel has been doing the dirty work alone—bombing hospitals, leveling neighborhoods, targeting aid workers, and killing tens of thousands of civilians. It’s exhausting, expensive, and bad for troop morale. Turns out that constant deployments in a grinding counter-insurgency operation aren’t great for an army composed largely of conscripts who’d rather be back in Tel Aviv drinking overpriced coffee. So here comes the UN, riding to the rescue with a plan that doesn’t end the occupation—it just rebrands it.

Under 2803, international forces will be deployed to “assist” in demilitarization and security. These aren’t peacekeepers in the traditional sense. They’re mercenaries, contractors, guns-for-hire operating under the UN’s humanitarian halo. Their job? Coordinate with the Israeli military—the same Israeli military that’s been committing genocide—and essentially do the policing Israel can no longer afford to do itself. It’s a temp agency for occupation.

And who’s lining up to staff this new venture? The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organization already implicated in the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians who were simply trying to get food. They’re recruiting now, presumably looking for professionals with experience in “crowd control” and “security operations,” which is NGO-speak for people who know how to shoot civilians without generating too much paperwork.

This is the new model: the genocide continues, but now it’s multilateral. It’s got UN branding. It’s got “humanitarian” in the name. And best of all, it gives Israel exactly what it wants—control without cost, occupation without the burden of occupation, and a international stamp of approval on the whole sick enterprise.

Resolution 2803 isn’t a peace plan. It’s a business plan. It doesn’t create conditions for Palestinian freedom; it codifies their subjugation. And it doesn’t hold Israel accountable—it makes the international community complicit.

The resolution is, in short, criminal. Not in the metaphorical sense, but in the actual, war-crimes-tribunal sense. It denies Palestinians the right to resist occupation, strips them of agency, and transforms their suffering into a logistical problem to be managed by well-paid contractors.

The UN Security Council just turned genocide into a public-private partnership. And they expect us to call it progress.

The Great Credulity Shift: How Israel Lost the Information War

by damagecollateral

A funny thing happened on the way to another mass grave

The Israelis just dumped another load of Palestinian bodies into Gaza—bodies bearing what I can hear Western media outlets delicately calling “signs of mistreatment,” which in non-euphemistic English means torture marks and bullet holes in the back of the head. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Why do Israelis publicize their crimes like this, you ask? To scare Palestinians and neighboring Arabs. As for the risk of upsetting Western audiences, well, Israelis think they simply won’t believe it.

That’s right. For decades, Israel has operated on a simple principle: commit atrocities so outlandish that Western audiences literally can’t process them. Evacuating entire cities like Yaffa and Haifa? Poisoning water supplies with typhus in Akko and Lyddia? It sounds like the fever dream of a conspiracy theorist, especially when it’s being reported by brown people with accents who pray five times a day. Surely it must be more complicated than simple ethnic cleansing, right? There must be context we’re missing. Both sides, you know.

This was the formula, and it was bulletproof. The sheer audacity of the crimes, combined with good old-fashioned Western racism and the assumption that Palestinians were inherently unreliable narrators, created a perfect shield. The reports were too crazy to believe, and the reporters were too foreign to trust. And our Zionist-controlled, government-subservient media is right there to discredit Palestinians at every turn.

But something broke.

The Gaza genocide—let’s be honest and call it what South Africa called it at The Hague—changed the equation. Seventeen months of high-definition horror, posted in real-time by Palestinians themselves, fundamentally altered the credibility calculation in the Western mind. People started believing Palestinians. Worse, from Israel’s perspective, they started going back through the archive, re-evaluating decades of Palestinian testimony with fresh eyes. The Nakba? Maybe that actually happened the way they said it did. Deir Yassin? Jenin? The prisoner abuse? All of it suddenly crackling with an electric charge of plausibility it never had before.

Even better: the credibility transfer went both ways. The same audiences who stopped reflexively doubting Palestinians started reflexively doubting Israelis. Why exactly should we assume Mustafa Barghouti is biased but take Mark Levin at face value? Why are Palestinian casualty figures “claims” while Israeli statements are just… reported? Why does the Muslim guy in the keffiyeh need three sources while the IDF spokesman with the better PowerPoint gets printed verbatim?

The Israelis don’t seem to understand this shift has happened. They’re still playing by the old rules, broadcasting their brutality to intimidate Arabs while assuming Westerners won’t believe the reports anyway. They’re advertising their crimes on the assumption that the audience will remain incredulous.

This is why you see the increasingly frantic attempts to keep this old paradigm alive. “Pallywood!” they shriek, trying to paint Palestinians as Hollywood-level fabulists. The starvation reports are exaggerated! The genocide numbers are inflated! It’s all fake! The desperation is obvious: they’re trying to claw back the credibility gap, to restore the comfortable old arrangement where Israelis were presumed truthful and Palestinians presumed lying.

It’s not going to work, and here’s why: Palestinians got good at this. Decades of having every single claim scrutinized, picked apart, and dismissed made them into obsessive documentarians. They know they’ll be doubted, so they film everything, source everything, archive everything. The result is that their reporting has become ironclad in ways that make the IDF’s increasingly preposterous explanations—she was shot by Hamas, the hospital bombed itself, the aid workers were terrorists, the journalists were combatants—sound like the propaganda they are.

Meanwhile, independent media outlets have proliferated, places willing to apply the same skepticism to both sides. These outlets aren’t bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson’s heirs or dependent on access to Israeli officials, which means they can ask uncomfortable questions. And audiences, particularly younger ones, trust them more than the legacy outlets with their suspiciously shiny production values and their weird reluctance to use the word “killing” when Israelis are doing it.

The “antisemitism” card isn’t working anymore either. People have figured out it’s a mute button, a way to end conversations rather than have them. The spell is broken.

It must be a strange relief for Palestinians, finally being believed after howling into the void for a century. But the mainstream media? They’re going to keep playing the old hits, keep soft-pedaling Israeli crimes and interrogating Palestinian testimony, because they’re locked into the worldview of their donors and their access-based business model. They’re too compromised to adapt, which means they’ll be left behind, still insisting we can’t really know what happened while everyone else watches the videos.

The great credulity shift is complete. The Israelis are still acting like it’s 1982. The world has moved on.

“`

Dear Americans: Let Gaza Do Its Job and Unite You, For God’s Sake

by damagecollateral

Someone sent me a Nick Fuentes clip. Not the algorithm – my algorithm knows not to recommend him.

Fuentes was riffing on Trump’s plan to empty Gaza and turn it into a luxury real estate project, complete with all the usual apocalyptic development porn that makes Jared Kushner salivate.

I can’t stand Fuentes. His anti-Semitism is repulsive and just plain dishonest. His scapegoating of “blacks” marks him, in my view, as just another tool of the same Deep State machinery he claims to oppose. The overworked persona, the rehearsed radio voice, the calculated provocations. I see as much of a fraud in him as I see in Kamala Harris. He doesn’t sound human. He sounds like a project. Project Nick.

But something strange happens in the clip.

After Project Nick lays out the whole Trump scheme for Gaza – the murder, the dispossession, the techno-beach-port-whatever land grab – he stops. His head sinks. He looks up and to the left, like he’s searching for words somewhere in the air above him. Then, in a completely different voice – softer, more genuine, as if talking to his own self – he says:

“What, what even is this? Like, we live in Hell.”

I replayed those two sentences over and over. Not because they’re particularly eloquent, but because of everything surrounding them. The build-up. The tone shift. The fact that they’re coming from someone whose entire brand is being hard, rude, and deliberately un-humanitarian.

It was a crack in the armor.

And what cracked it? Gaza. What else could punch through all those fake layers of Project Nick, grab hold of his buried humanity, and drag it to the surface for us to behold? It’s like watching someone have a moment with their therapist.

He continues, still in that lower register: “What can you even say about this plan? You know these are human beings, like, these are human beings with lives. Like you and I. They were born there; we were born here. We were born here and so we get to go to school and ride the school bus and have Christmas parties and go to Disney World. They were born there so they know nothing other than hunger and thirst and death and explosions and airstrikes and being shot in the face and disabled.”

I’m thinking: Who is this person?

“And this administration is making it into a, basically a joke. We’re gonna turn it into a gameshow? Now the beleaguered people that are officially being starved to death and genocided – 107 people dead in the past 24 hours from hunger – we’re gonna give them digital tokens on the blockchain in exchange for their territory? And then we’re gonna kick’em out and send them to Somalia? What the fuck is this? This is evil.”

He had to reassure his audience later that he wasn’t going woke. But here’s the point: everyone has a human side, and Gaza is trying – with the actual, irreplaceable lives of its people – to remind us of that.

Marjorie Taylor Greene recently said things about healthcare and immigration that most Democrats in Congress don’t have the guts to say. Candace Owens started using phrases like “This isn’t a Right or Left issue” and “I don’t care if you’re Liberal or Conservative” and – this floored me – “We need to all come together.”

We sure do.

Credit to the Left: they got there first on Palestine. Most progressives were willing to overlook the fact that Palestinian society doesn’t exactly align with progressive values on LGBT rights, for example. They didn’t let that stop them from being fully sympathetic to people going through the holocaust of our time. Conservatives have been slower (aren’t they always?) to let basic humanity override their talking points, but they’re mostly there now.

But most Americans are still dug into their separate blue and red trenches. The mirage of division maintained by corporate media and the Deep State is too convincing for too many. Too many conservatives think uniting with liberals is impossible, even on basic human issues like genocide, healthcare, and free speech. We see rallies for one side or the other, seldom together. Right and Left will literally say the same thing, but from separate stages. It’s like the whole nation is made of divorced couples who both want what’s best for the kids but refuse to admit the other one does too.

Conservatives can’t seem to grasp that being anti-woke doesn’t mean being a heartless jerk about everything. Just because woke people oppose genocide doesn’t make genocide okay, especially when you know they’re right. What better symptom of our division than being afraid to stand against freaking genocide because the other side does? Want to make a conservative pro-human sacrifice? Tell them the woke crowd is against it.

On the Left, so many non-left causes have been glommed onto leftism by the liberal managerial class that the core of real leftism – working class struggle – has become secondary to issues like abortion, feminism, and LGBT rights.

And the dehumanization between us is staggering. Ponder this: why would anyone be surprised that Tucker Carlson opposes genocide? Is he not a human being? Does he not have children? Why do I keep hearing people on the left say, “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Candace Owens. I need to take a shower.” Calm down, Mehdi Hassan. Candace speaking out against wanton murder is actually the normal thing. What should shock us is when Lindsey Graham cheers for mass murder, not when Theo Von speaks out against it – unless we’ve dehumanized each other so completely that basic decency registers as a plot twist.

The tragedy is there’s so much to unite around: the sanctity of human life, free speech, government surveillance, corporate greed, congressional corruption, foreign lobby interference, the military-industrial complex, our abysmal healthcare system, rising inequality, money going abroad instead of helping Americans at home, endless wars, billionaires running the country, and – oh yeah – not wanting our tax dollars to blow people into pieces.

When will Gaza be allowed to do its job and bring us together? Palestinians have paid the ultimate price to wake us up, to show us our common humanity. When do we let that sacrifice mean something? When do the cries of grieving mothers drown out the manufactured shrieks of division from our decadent elites? When do images of actual death take priority over the fake fault lines that Fox and MSNBC spend billions widening? Palestinians are building bridges between us with their own bloodied body parts. Can’t we, if only as a token of appreciation, perhaps see what it’s like to join hands?

We have Palestinians trying to unite us on the one hand, and oligarchs and elites trying to divide us on the other. Will we stop choosing the latter and embrace the former?

If Dems Will Ever Earn My Vote, The First Step Is To STFU

by damagecollateral
Winning…

There’s a particular genre of political masochism I’ve been watching lately that deserves its own category in the DSM. Call it Electoral Tourette’s Syndrome, or maybe just advanced Brand Damage Fetishism. Whatever the clinical term, the Democratic Party has it. Bad.

Look, I get it. The party establishment’s position on Gaza has been, to put it mildly, positively atrocious. Senator Cory Booker—who someone brilliantly nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur” and the universe it still laughing about that—is hardly alone. The whole apparatus has been galactically, catastrophically wrong on this issue, in ways that make their base want to claw their eyes out.

But here’s the thing that really gets me: it’s not just that they’re wrong. It’s that they can’t stop yapping to world how wrong they are, at precisely the moments when shutting up would be the politically savvy move. It’s like watching someone methodically shoot themselves in each foot, then reload and go for the kneecaps.

Take Hillary Clinton. Back in May 2024—when Biden was still the candidate and the party desperately needed to contain the Gaza backlash—Hillary decided to go on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and deliver a lecture to student protesters.

“They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or, frankly, about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country,” she told Joe Scarborough. She claimed that under her husband’s administration, “an offer was made to the Palestinians for a state on 96% of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians with 4% of Israel to be given to reach 100% of the amount of territory that was hoped for.”

“If Yasser Arafat had accepted it, there would have been a Palestinian state now for about 24 years,” she insisted, calling it “one of the great tragedies of history.”

Never mind that this narrative has been thoroughly debunked by actual negotiators who were in the room—including Robert Malley from Clinton’s own administration. As Professor Osamah F. Khalil of Syracuse University noted, “For Clinton to say this is really disingenuous.” He pointed out that Arafat had warned Bill Clinton before Camp David “that the two sides were not ready.” To lay blame squarely on the Palestinians was unfair, he added. “Diplomacy is not a one-time mattress sale.”

The real question is: why say this now? Campus protests were erupting across the country. The party’s position on Gaza was already hemorrhaging votes. You’ve got students getting brutalized by police for protesting a genocide your party is funding.

What was the strategic thinking? “You know what will help? If I remind everyone that our party’s foreign policy blob has the same tired talking points they’ve had since Camp David!” Brilliant. Chef’s kiss. Really winning hearts and minds.

The response was swift. Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, which has a substantial Arab and Muslim population, said the city’s “young people” were not taking kindly to being lectured.

But wait—it gets better.

Fast forward to late October. Kamala’s now the candidate, desperately trying to hold Michigan—a swing state with the largest Arab-American population in the country. She’s already hemorrhaging support because of Gaza. The campaign knows this. Everyone knows this.

So Bill Clinton emerges from whatever Epstein-memorial crypt he’s been hiding in, and Good Lord. The man goes full Zionist-ideologue mode, so extreme that he doesn’t just torpedo Kamala—he retroactively destroys his own legacy. Suddenly everyone’s remembering that the Oslo Accords were overseen by this guy, this ghoul who apparently thinks Palestinians deserve whatever happens to them. The “peace process” is revealed as the sham it always was, because of course it was—look who was running it!

“The hardest issue here in Michigan is the Middle East,” Clinton, 78, shakily told the crowd at a “Souls to the Polls” event. “I understand why young Palestinians and Arab Americans here in Michigan think too many people have died. I get that.”

But of course, there’s always a “but.”

“Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself,” Clinton blurted.

Clinton wasn’t done. He decided to deploy the ultimate historical argument: “I got news for [Hamas]—[Israelis] were there first, before their faith existed,” The Times of Israel he said, referring to Islam. You know, just casually erasing the entire existence of Palestinians as a people who’ve lived on that land for thousands of years.

The reaction was swift and brutal. Palestinian American comedian Amer Zahr said it is “baffling” how out of touch the Harris campaign is. “It’s hard to imagine anything more insulting than what Bill Clinton said about us. He invoked the oldest Zionist tropes in some bizarre effort to convince us to vote for Kamala Harris.”

Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn—the US’s first Arab-majority city—told Al Jazeera: “When you see the remarks of former President Bill Clinton, talking about how Israel is forced to kill civilians … it gets extremely frustrating.” As one analysis put it, Clinton “appeared to suggest that they’re wrong to be outraged by the catastrophic death toll from Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Social media erupted, with journalist Sana Saeed calling it “one of the most horrific genocidal diatribes a U.S. leader has gone on in decades.”

Xavier Abu Eid, a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, wrote: “Clinton is concluding what he started in Camp David, July 2000, where he adopted Israeli positions and blamed Palestinians for not accepting them. Don’t know what he had in mind, but this isn’t going to help the Harris campaign add a single vote from Arab Americans.”

And again: why? This was one week before the election. In Michigan. Speaking to Arab Americans. People were desperately searching for reasons to believe Democrats weren’t as monstrous on Gaza as they appeared. He could have lied! Many would have believed him! But nope—he had to make it crystal clear that when it comes to Palestine, Democrats are just Republicans with pronouns.

The pattern was everywhere. Pro-Palestine voices banned from the DNC. A Muslim delegate literally kicked out of a campaign event—not for protesting, just for.. existing while Muslim, I guess? And then—and then—Kamala skips Dearborn, Michigan entirely. The largest Arab-American city in the country. In a swing state. During a razor-thin election.

The message couldn’t be clearer: “We dare you not to vote for us. We’re actively testing how little self-respect you have.” So when pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a Harris rally in Detroit by simply stating they “won’t vote for genocide,” she shut them up with her catchphrase, “I’m speaking”. Even with polling data showing “growing support for Trump among Arab American voters in Michigan, with many citing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s stance on Middle Eastern conflicts as a primary factor”, the Democrats saw it coming and just… kept going.

So Trump wins, and—wouldn’t you guess? The post-election discourse from the Democratic establishment wasn’t much better. We’re talking photo-ops with Netanyahu, several visits to Israel by Congressmen, the hilariously names “50 States, One Israel” event where 250 states legislators went to Israel, many of whom were Democrats. Not only that, but to ensure not being outdone by future political flubs, freaking Pete Buttigieg decides to repeat atrocity propaganda about October 7th “babies in ovens”—lies that were debunked over and over for two whole years, even by Israeli media itself. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they’re trying to be funny.

I’ve covered a lot of political self-destruction over the years. I’ve seen parties implode, candidates crater, movements eat themselves alive. But this? This suicide-by-megaphone routine the Democrats are running on Gaza? I’ve never seen anything quite like this shutting up handicap.

Someone please explain what I’m missing. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like a party that would rather lose elections than stop telling pro-Palestine voters to go fondle themselves.

And they wonder why people won’t vote for them.

The Gaza Pause That Isn’t

by damagecollateral

They’re calling it a breakthrough. A triumph of diplomacy. The latest example of American leadership bringing peace to the Middle East, or some such hogwash.

Let’s cut through the victory-lap fog: this ceasefire isn’t about ending anything. It’s about managing the optics of a 77-year-old project that’s been running on autopilot since the Nakba. The deal everyone’s celebrating is really just a calibration—turning down the volume on ethnic cleansing from a scream to a whisper, dialing back to the pre-October 7th simmer that didn’t make quite so many people uncomfortable at brunch.

What’s actually changed on the ground? Let me count the ways: nothing, nothing, and nothing.

Gaza remains an open-air prison. The West Bank is still a patchwork of checkpoints and settlements where armed zealots terrorize families with impunity. Palestinians live under a surveillance state that makes the Stasi look like mall security. And Israeli officials keep saying, out loud, with cameras rolling, that there will never be a Palestinian state—a detail that somehow never makes it into the “path to peace” coverage.

Oh, and Gaza? It’s rubble. Flattened. Block after block of what used to be homes, hospitals, schools—gone.

But sure, let’s pop the champagne.

The kicker? Israel’s already violating the agreement. Five Palestinians dead today. Aid trucks stopped at the border. The usual script. While Gazans understandably grab any respite they can get from the nightmare, the rest of us have zero reason to pretend this represents progress.

Don’t believe the hype. This isn’t Washington riding in on a white horse to save Palestinians from Israeli bombs. This is the U.S. and Europe throwing themselves in front of a runaway train – one they built, fueled, and waved goodbye to as it left the station.

The real story? Israel was about to become ungovernable for its Western sponsors.

In recent weeks, the global backlash hit critical mass. Hundreds of thousands were flooding European streets every weekend, not in scattered protests but in coordinated eruptions of rage. In Italy, the government was staring down the barrel of an actual political crisis. These weren’t your standard-issue marches-that-change-nothing. People were done.

Meanwhile, aid flotillas kept multiplying in the Mediterranean, each one a floating middle finger to the official narrative, magnetic poles for thousands of people who’d had enough of doom-scrolling genocide from their living rooms. The couch-to-action pipeline was real, and it was accelerating.

The imperial brain trust looked at the board and realized Israel had painted itself into a corner so tight that the whole regional chessboard was about to flip. That’s what this “peace deal” is actually about – damage control for the alliance, not mercy for the dead.

The American foreign policy establishment is engaged in a grotesque, self-fellating victory lap, pumping out grandiose “peace” announcements like a pharmaceutical company distributing free samples of Xanax. This isn’t celebration—it’s sedation. It’s a calculated dose of institutional Valium, mainlined directly into the cerebral cortex of an global public that was getting dangerously close to giving a damn.

The game here is transparent if you squint even a little: they need us to exhale, high-five each other about “getting the win,” and then zombie-walk back to our regularly scheduled programming. The pressure worked—actual, real pressure from normal human beings who briefly remembered they’re supposed to have opinions about whether we incinerate strangers on the other side of the planet. So naturally, the Blob is betting we’ll do what we always do: declare victory and go home, precisely at the moment when not going home actually matters.

It’s the oldest trick in the Washington playbook. Give the plebes just enough of a “win” to shut them up, then resume operations while they’re still drunk on their own sense of accomplishment.

Don’t take the bait.