By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

There is no use arguing that Donald Trump hasn’t existentially altered the conversation on war in this country and sweet Kali knows that I’ve tried. I’ve been crying bullshit in all caps on that swinging bologna salesman’s phony isolationist, Pat Buchanan-with-dick-jokes act since he crashed the GOP primaries on his golden escalator in 2016. The man is a pathological liar with a long and well documented career of saying quite literally everything and anything to make a buck and keep his cojones out of the fire. Just try taking a jog through the ruins of Atlantic City without a fully automatic Uzi if you don’t fucking believe me.

Orange-Man-Bad’s America First strip tease was just his latest sales pitch but after eight years of George W. Bush and another eight of his mentholated doppelganger, Barack Obama, a lot of disgruntled conservatives and independents were just pissed off enough to buy it, hook, line and sinker. This included one of my heroes, paleolibertarian muckraker and co-founder of antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, who literally went to his grave believing that Donald J. Trump would be the man who brought American conservatism back to its populist non-interventionist roots. Watching that brilliant son of a bitch go down with that ship is one of the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed but he was only half-wrong.

Donald Trump may have turned out to be every bit as ghastly and cravenly opportunistic as I smugly predicted he would be, increasing civilian drone strike casualties by 330% and overseeing a Saudi holocaust in Yemen which claimed the lives of over 300,000 starving peasants, but that walking jack-o-lantern did succeed in lighting a fire under right-wing isolationism that has significantly altered the DNA of America’s bipartisan combat addiction. Trump may be full of shit but the wave of rural disgust with America’s runaway war machine that he inadvertently gave license to is not and the recent wave of conservative dissent against Joe Biden’s reckless proxy war in Ukraine proves it.

Pew Research has found that 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that America is sending entirely too much murder machinery to that hopeless death march to a third world war and that number seems to be growing daily. The opportunistic money changers in both the GOP and the right-wing media sphere have recognized this trend and some of them are cashing in.

Before running afoul of his corporate overlords, Tucker Carleson built a veritable tabloid empire trashing transgender freaks like me while simultaneously cussing out the wars that I’ve been raging against since he was busy deep throating Deepak Chopra on CNN. This included trashing Trump himself when he bombed Syria and apparently even talking him out of a full-scale air war against Iran. It was a crazy Malcolm McLaren-esque gamble that would eventually blow up in Tucker’s face and send him to the wilderness of whatever the fuck twitter self-identifies as this week but if the almost exclusively conservative opposition to a nuclear holocaust in the Wild Steppes proves anything it’s that he and Trump were following the money even when the system wanted to pretend that it didn’t exist.

This is the real reason why Wall Street sewar mutants like Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney despise the MAGA phenomenon and it’s actually the same damn reason why Wall Street sewar mutants like Hillary Clinton and Ted Turner despise the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. Because even a fraud can be a threat to the status quo when they empower the peasants to revolt against it. Now we have to contend with the bizarre spectacle of confirmed rapists and Zionist fuckboys like Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis chumming the waters of the partisan zeitgeist with brazenly antiwar legislation and campaign promises. I can just hear that old bastard Justin Raimondo now, hissing in my ear “I told you so!” before bumming another cigarette off Ayn Rand in the fires of hell.

But spectacle is not always reality, and you don’t have to scratch the GOP’s newfound isolationist rhetoric very hard to smell an illusion. While half the GOP may be running for reelection on cutting arms shipments to Ukraine, the entire party remains frighteningly united on redirecting them much closer to home with an open shooting war at the border. This terrifying bait-and-switch was made revoltingly graphic by the new lord of isolationism himself, Tucker Carlson, during an interview he did for the Blaze with 2024 GOP Primary darling, Senator Tim Scott.

After rightly trashing Biden’s recent decision to mobilize 3,000 reserve troops for possible deployment to Europe, Tucker exposed the real color of his peace flag, and it was anything but white. “Why not build a human wall with say, the reservists who were called up to go defend Ukraine- why wouldn’t they be defending our border?” To which Scott responded like a good gimp with a drooling, ball gagged “Yup.” before Tucker continued his messianic call to literally bring the war home to the Rio Grande. “If you’ve got millions of military age men coming into your country and hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying, why is that not the job of the military to stop?” After swallowing this salty load whole, Scott responded with another grinning, snaggle-toothed nod of approval, and I dearly wish that he was the only one.

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