We were four minutes in to the Dem debate in Des Moines last night (1/14), somewhere on the outskirts of Mideast foreign policy, when the boredom began to take hold. ‘They couldn’t find some of Iowa’s world-renowned meth to spice this stage up at bit’, I muttered, as I cracked open another beer and wondered who in his or her right mind would subject themselves to watching this.

The Democrat frontrunners remain, in order, a doddering septuagenarian who can’t reliably remember what state he’s in, a hectoring schoolmarm, a 78-year-old Communist who has never accomplished anything in 30 years in Congress, and a weird, hairy child from South Bend whose eyebrow waxing gets more meticulous with each passing debate.

That, of course, is Mayor Pete who, when asked about damage caused to local farms and factories due to seasonal flooding in Iowa, pivoted to discussing ‘fire tornados’ in Australia. He blamed both on climate change.

How imbecilic are those Republicans trying to make a name for themselves by opposing the unconstitutional Schiff/Pelosi articles of impeachment?

Susan Collins, Rob Portman, probably the self-serving Mitt Romney, are each trying to be the biggest monkey wrenches in an already ridiculous endeavor to remove President Trump from office.  [With a 53-seat majority, it will take 3 of them to torpedo Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) Motion to Dismiss.]

Each of them should just admit they are Democrats at heart and switch parties. How else to explain their betrayal of their own party?

If they do not realize by now that the impeachment over a boring phone conversation with the president of Ukraine is as big a hoax as the Russia-collusion story from the outset, they are too dim to have any political power in the Republican Party.

Who is Q? What is Q? And, perhaps most importantly, why is Q?  Q and the ever-growing worldwide movement it’s inspired have been the objects of fascination, mockery and hatred, but of surprisingly little serious analysis.

In recent weeks, the tempo of Trump’s spotlighting of Q has accelerated, with the President retweeting Q followers twenty times in one day. Trump has featured Q fans in his ads and deployed one of Q’s signature phrases (“These people are sick”) at his rallies. The President’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has also retweeted Q followers.

If you’re unfamiliar with Q or only know it through the media’s attacks, I’d like to provide a brief introduction to this extraordinary phenomenon. I’ve followed Q since the first drop, and I’ve grown increasingly impressed by the accuracy, breadth and depth of Q’s messages.

I’ve compiled a list of Q’s most famous catch phrases and tried to put them into context.  Here they are.

I am a man born in the former British-Indian capital who currently resides, researches, and works in the United Kingdom, and am agnostic about the royals. That is to say, I don’t care who lives and who quits. But that is beyond the point.

The constitutional and parliamentary monarchy is an institution in United Kingdom’s DNA, a balance of power historically developed since the Magna Carta to the industrial revolution, and it gives back a lot more to the state than it takes.

The reason for Harry and Meghan’s departure is pure liberal-individualist narcissism. And both are equally responsible for that. Duty, stoicism, propriety, and patriotism are supposed to be the four cornerstones of nobility.

Unfortunately, Harry has too much of Princess Diana in him, from compulsively breaking orthodoxy and tradition, to extreme and fatalistic narcissism. As Emma Freire recently wrote, with him it is all noblesse, with zero oblige.

Remember “politics stops at the water’s edge”?

In the Trump era, that patriotic phrase isn’t only dead, it’s decomposed.

And ironically so, since the latest manifestation of this decomposition is over the termination of Qassem Soleimani, the terror mastermind who was, on analysis, even more dangerous to the United States and the world than Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, monumentally evil as they were.

Neither bin Laden nor al-Baghdadi ever had remotely the power at their disposals—even when the latter controlled his caliphate—that Soleimani did as the military leader of by far the greatest state sponsor of terrorism. They weren’t even close to the man who was head of Iran’s Quds force and the second most powerful person in that country of 80-plus million, with all its attendant weaponry and technology and ties to China and Russia.

"Perhaps nothing so accurately characterizes dysfunctional families as denial. The denial forces members to keep believing the myths and vital lies in spite of the facts, or to keep expecting that the same behaviors will have different outcomes." 

—John Bradshaw

As everyone knows, there are thousands of books, memoirs, and fiction, about dysfunctional families.  To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are generally the same, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way.

But to peruse the plethora of such books, it might be truer that unhappy families are unhappy in much the same ways, their differences a matter of degrees.  Young children know only what they know, how their own family functions.  Memoirs like Educated and The Glass Castle, for example, are shocking to those fortunate enough to have had loving, peaceful, and essentially normal childhoods if there is such a thing.

While dysfunctional homes can produce and have produced successful children who, as gradually exposed to the homes of other families and the outside world, saved themselves by sheer will and talent.  But most children of dysfunctional families are forever damaged, condemned to a life of misery and distorted reality.  They remain resistant to the facts of life that govern the world around them.  They are perpetually angry and unhappy.

[Note by JW:  TTP is pleased to follow the advice of Joe Katzman and Skye in requesting Yasuhiko Kimura’s Forum post as a TTP article.  As Joe comments: “This is, by far, the best and most consequential thing you [Yasuhiko] have ever posted here. TTPers need to read this over a couple of times, and consider how absolutely pervasive its implications are. It destroys the standard conservative notion of politics, and replaces it with a truthful construct that is of actual use in navigating modern politics.]

Looking at the human nature and the political games the humans play, we can observe the following:

Human beings are status-seeking beings. Ergo, most humans seek to achieve as high a social status as possible.

In order to achieve and maintain the highest social status possible for themselves, most humans would willingly sacrifice personal comfort, happiness, enjoyment—that is, they would willingly endure suffering.

Correlatively, human beings are power-seeking beings. Power is centripetal. Power tends to become concentric and concentrated. Ergo, power holders seek to concentrate power unto themselves.

Power holders seek to attract and then keep subordinates not on the basis of competency but on the basis of (blind) loyalty in order to maintain and concentrate power.  They do this by promulgating nonsense rather than reason.  Here is why.

[Note by JW:  This is an astounding essay strongly recommended by TTPers Joe Katzman and Yasuhiko Kimura.  It is definitely worth your reflecting deeply upon it.]

It’s 100 years now since the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Leninism. It’s been 100 years already, but you realize how present the whole thing remains when you look at the press these days.

I’m not very interested in Lenin, the man; but I’m very interested in Leninism. Lenin is very dead (if not yet buried, I wonder what Putin is waiting for); but Leninism is quite alive. And the Western press has just realized that China, the second power in the world, in place to become the first in a few years, is a Leninist state.

The West is scared because Leninism is effective. Yes, sure, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; but lasting 74 years is no mean feat. And at any rate, the very establishment of the Soviet Union was a superhuman feat. It was something amazing, and amazed was the whole intelligentsia of the Western world for many decades.

Marxism completely captured the intellectual classes of the whole world for over a century. In China it’s still the official orthodoxy, taught in schools. In the West it’s still with us, if in the morphed form of Cultural Marxism.  Which is why now we have gay marriage and black transexuals running for office.

The rhetoric about the so-called “War on Terror” has led us down the wrong path for 20 years. Terrorism is a tactic. We are not at war with terror.

Similarly, our fight is not against radical or extreme Islam. When it comes to the Middle East, particularly Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, it is imperative that we understand the true nature of the threat.

We are fighting Islamic Fascism—the political idea in which state actors or nonstate actors are using Islam to rule people through the use of violence. This is not about Islam itself, but rather about belligerents hijacking the religion for their own political purposes.

The ongoing war in Afghanistan has shown that we can’t win with just guns and money; we have to win the war of ideas. To permanently defeat the Islamic Fascists, we must first delegitimize their ideology.

The only way to do this is by ensuring the success of two areas being governed in the exact opposite manner, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the proposed Nineveh Plains Province.

It is popular on the NeverTrump Right and everyone on the Left to claim that President Trump has “failed” as we head into an election year. But his supposed failures are instructive.  Like Fake News, they are Fake Failures.

Take the wall.  After three years of mockery insisting Trump has not built his wall, he nonetheless has attempted almost every imaginable method to do it. And now the invective over the last few months has begun to alter.

If Trump between 2017 and 2019 was mocked as an obsessive Ahab pathetically and in vain chasing his Great White Wall, he now is being redefined as a dangerous xenophobe, whose American version of the Maginot Line may soon become dangerously reified.

The same ambiguity is true of many of Trump’s other “failures.”

2024? What? Don’t we have the 2020 presidential election to deal with first? Has the fat lady already sung?

Yes, maybe she has.

Just look at the booming economy with lowest-ever unemployment, the utter failure of the Mueller Russia investigation (with severe punishments for the investigators themselves possibly ahead), the embarrassing, ludicrously partisan impeachment – plus Trump’s extraordinarily well-organized, high-tech 2020 campaign under the management of Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner that even the devoutly liberal Axios couldn’t help but admire.

So, on to 2024.