What does Trump’s bullying of Mexico have to do with supporting jihad and undermining Israel? Oddly enough, everything. By thus tugging at people’s identity-based emotions, Trump’s handlers divide the political field and weaken opposition to their dangerous policies. It’s psychological warfare. Trump is a con artist. And you’ve been conned.
In previous installments of this series, we’ve seen HIR’s ‘cartel’ model— which predicts that Trump’s policies in the Middle East will be, in substance, like Obama’s—rack some successes. The model makes four claims:
1) US politics are relatively simple. The Democratic and Republican parties are simulations of a unitary ‘Establishment,’ a ruling cartel centered in the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) and other powerful think tanks. Every single time, regardless of who ‘wins,’ this cartel determines US policy (Part 4).
2) Cartel policy, meant to fuel citizen demand for greater State powers (‘to protect us’), has been—since long before Barack Obama—to promote jihadi terrorism, while pretending to confront it (Part 2).
3) Consistent with that, the US cartel has undermined the security of the State of Israel, which lies on the front-line of the jihadi onslaught, while pretending to support it (Part 3).
4) Donald Trump is wholly owned by the cartel.
A good scientific model is predictive but also productive. It will account for stuff that, intuitively, seemed outside of its purview. Here, for example, is our fifth claim:
5) The US ruling cartel’s pro-jihadi and anti-Israeli thrust is what explains Trump’s bullying of Mexico.
I know what you’re thinking: I’ve misplaced my map (and lost my marbles). Mexico is far from Israel, and hardly a major player in Middle-Eastern politics.
Yes, but the map that counts here is the identity field. If you can shape it, you can render certain moves on the physical map possible or impossible. It is the essence of psychological warfare and requires a grasp of ‘political grammar.’
The anti-Mexico onslaught is calculated to make Trump look like a racist, which then closes the ears of ‘leftists’ to anything else he says, and to what their fellow citizens on the ‘right’—who cannot help but cheer the anti-jihadi speeches—may tell them. In this manner, the citizenry is divided, and the cartel gains maneuvering room in which to continue its policies.
We will put together this fifth claim step by step, for it is an interesting, sophisticated game. But let us first briefly get our bearings by reviewing how HIR’s first four claims are doing against those of a rival model.
HIR’s cartel model against the competition
The rival model sees US politics as relatively complex: a genuine ‘free market’ of (well… two) independent parties. In this model, Trump is a real challenger, and his anti-Establishment rants, his loud denunciations of Barack Obama’s pro-jihadi and anti-Israeli policies, and his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington were all sincere. This model predicts that Trump’s and Obama’s policies will be dramatically different.
To decide which model best matches reality we need diagnostic evidence, such that one model can explain it and the other cannot.
For example, take Trump’s choices for top foreign-policy positions. These, it turns out, are all ‘swamp creatures’: former Obama stalwarts and CFR Establishment types with a history of promoting jihad and undermining Israel (Part 5). This evidence agrees nicely with the ‘cartel’ and not at all with the ‘free market’ model. It’s diagnostic.
Now consider Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia. Though it was widely celebrated by his supporters for its harsh language against terrorism, this is not diagnostic evidence. For if Trump is sincere, this is anti-jihadism; and if he’s a fraud, it’s just a pretense—a ‘grammatically’ forced move. Either model can explain mere words; they cost nothing, so they’re worth nothing.
By contrast, Trump’s $100 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia, announced in the same trip, are worth… $100 billion.[1]
Context is everything, so let’s fill it in. Feast your eyes on over 2 million pilgrims who travel every year to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to circle the Ka’bah, a black cube at the literal center of Muslim devotion worldwide. As they worship, gorge your ears on their voices, harking to the amplified prayers of Saudi government clerics:
?May God set Himself upon the Christian oppressors and over the criminal Jews and over their tyrant brothers. May God give them misery and pain on their paths. May God dress them up in suffering and mourning garb and reprimand them with pain and sickness. May god give them pain and suffering in their lives and prepare for them a violent death. May god give punishment, martyrdom, and anguish to the Christian oppressors and the criminal Jews. ¡May God hear our supplication and give them what they deserve!”[2]
Let’s see, then…
Candidate Trump affected a counter-jihad pose and, consistent with that, promised to disappoint Saudi Arabia,[3] which, all over the world, “plays the lead role in financing contemporary Islamist movements” that terrorize the innocent.[4] So then President Trump makes Saudi Arabia his first official destination and pledges gun sales worth $100 billion. You follow?
Candidate Trump also “vowed to ‘knock the hell out of ISIS’ ” and accused that “ ‘…President Obama… is the founder of ISIS…’ ”[5] Indeed, among other policies, Obama, “whose arms sales to Saudi Arabia totaled $115 billion”[6], had the Saudis send some of those weapons to his favorite ‘Syrian rebels,’ who then promptly joined ISIS.[7] So then President Trump rushes to sell $100 billion in guns to the same Saudis. You follow?
If not, then perhaps we can have ourselves a little ‘Qatar crisis’ right after Trump comes home. To Trump’s applause, Saudi Arabia can call ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood ‘terrorists,’ accuse Qatar of supporting both, and break diplomatic relations with Qatar. What a great show. And that’ll make it ok for Saudi Arabia to get 100 billion in US weapons.
Never mind that it was together with Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood that the Saudis, at Obama’s behest, sent US weapons to ISIS.[7] Never mind that Qatar does not have its own foreign policy, for this tiny speck is the largest US military base in the Middle East. Never mind…
And let’s not forget Israel. At his next stop, Jerusalem, Trump peddled the Saudi ‘peace’ plan:
“[J]ust a couple of hours after he landed in Israel… [w]ith the gusto of a salesman pushing a limited-time offer, [Trump] cast the Saudi monarch in a leading role and invoked his name to push Mr. Netanyahu toward progress with the Palestinians.”[8]
These behaviors are diagnostic evidence. For whereas the ‘free market’ model, which accepts Trump’s presentation of self, cannot easily explain them, the ‘cartel’ model in fact predicted, before Trump took office, that his counter-jihad and pro-Israeli speeches would be followed, in policy, by just the opposite (Part 1).
So where does Mexico fit in?
These policies have a consequence. As jihadi explosions, shootings, stabbings, rapes, and murders-by-car-ramming become ever more frequent and bloody in the West, more Westerners are willing to accept that individual liberties must be reduced in exchange for the protection that a more powerful State promises. This feeling must be politically channeled, so the cartel fields a candidate marketed as counter-jihadi: Donald Trump.
But a danger lurks. If US citizens tip too strongly, too fast, and too collectively against jihadism, US pro-jihadi policies will become impossible. And then, as the jihadi threat quickly wanes, Western rights and liberties will have to be reinstated—and with them, citizen control of the system. Oops. To avoid this outcome, the cartel must ensure that leftists never join the counter-jihad movement. Solution: make Trump an anti-Mexican racist!
It works beautifully.
When Trump bullies Mexico, ‘left-liberals’ all over the West see a racist, and they hate Trump. In consequence, they hate anything he says. This is power—the power to direct minds. Watch: “Trump hates Mexicans. He is a racist. I hate him. What he says about Islam is just more racism.” See?
Of course, Trump can also be used to manipulate the ‘right.’ Watch: “Trump said the truth about Islam. He is a truth-teller. I love him. He must be right that US violence is made-in-Mexico.” See?
And then ‘left-liberals’ and ‘right-wingers’ each see a confirmation of their worst fears in the opposite camp, and they stay divided.
Which is too bad. If Western ‘right-wingers’ wave a patriotic flag to support a more powerful State because they think that State is fighting jihadist oppression; and if Western ‘left-wingers’ apologize for Islam because they think they are defending the downtrodden, the West—as we know it—will vanish. A more powerful State, or the growth of Islam in the West, or both simultaneously, will bring about the destruction of Western rights and liberties.
We need the ‘Left’ to confront rather than apologize for Islam, because Islam makes us all victims—beginning with Muslims, of course, whom we must help liberate. And we need the ‘Right’ to confront rather than defend the growth of the State because the State is supporting, not fighting, Islam. In other words, ‘Left’ or ‘Right,’ we must together defend the legacy of the European Enlightenment from its current major threat and preserve the modern democratic Republic, a place where we can all be free in our multifarious diversity.
To this end, we must understand the con, expose the con, and unite. For to remain confused and divided is to allow the con artists who rule us to continue with their pro-jihadi and anti-Israeli policies, which will destroy our rights and liberties.
The ‘anti-Mexico’ con works because you don’t understand it. But I shall explain it. I have briefly laid out its structure here, but much more remains to be explained and exposed. In what follows, I will carefully demonstrate how and why you’ve been conned. My demonstration has four more stages.
First (Part 7), I show that—aside from style—there is nothing new in Trump’s bullying of Mexico. In fact, in recent history, US policy towards Mexico was never so violent as during the Bush Jr.-Obama period. And now Obama II—better known as ‘Donald Trump’—carries it forward.
Second (Part 8), I show that Trump is a career con artist. In fact, this is not the first time that the US power elite have deceived us by having Trumpmake an issue of Mexicans.
Third (Part 9), I explain how Trump’s current ‘anti-Mexico’ con works to divide Westerners into separate, antagonistic identities that render us defenseless against the jihadi onslaught.
And finally (Part 10), I explain the entire suite of Trump’s foreign policies, from the vantage point of this unifying perspective, to show you where the system is really going. I have bad news for Israelis (and us all).
Before I do all this, a disclosure: I am a Mexican citizen, writing from Mexico City.
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