Fresh off of last night’s suggestion that his previous threats of “fire and fury unlike any the world has ever seen” didn’t go far enough, President Trump unsurprisingly took to Twitter today to issue more threats to North Korea, giving the impression that a war is imminent.
Trump declared the US forces are “locked and loaded” for an attack on North Korea, insisting that “military solutions are now fully in place,” and reteweeting a Pacific Command tweet that declared US bombers in Guam ready to #FightTonight.
The “fight tonight” motto is a long-standing one with respect to a potential US attack on North Korea, dating back decades. Still, it’s not clear how familiar President Trump is with that fact, and the timing of his retweet makes it sound more aspirational, and ominous.
Trump went on to insist that if Kim “utters one threat” or “does anything with respect to Guam” he’s going to “regret it fast.” Since North Korea is liable to say something President Trump perceives as a threat at some point, this again raises concern of imminent war.
US officials appear to be trying to raise the perception of the threat posed by North Korea, with an eye toward providing some legal justification for a “self defense” attack. Despite this, North Korea’s ICBMs are broadly considered a hoax by experts, lacking guidance systems and reentry technology.
Justin saw this, right? Here’s his antiwar hero bullying a weak nation with schoolboy taunts backed by the threat of military violence, conventional or otherwise, for merely trying to assert its status as a sovereign state.
None of us, myself included, really know what is going on with Justin in the last few years. Those of us who have been acquainted with him for many years, remember him as one whose only biases were those in favor of liberty and peace, and in opposition to war and tyranny. He was never obviously blinded to any politician’s faults as egregious as those of Donald Trump.
Any ideas?
Well, so far as “biases” are concerned, I’d say his current set goes back AT LEAST 17 years — he gave a nominating speech for Pat Buchanan at the 2000 Reform Party convention. He does seem to have burrowed a lot further down the sewage tunnel that Rothbard created with his “paleo” deviation from libertarianism, but that’s just a matter of degree.
“goes back AT LEAST 17 years…”
I honestly have not had personal contact with Justin since at least 35 years ago. At that time, he would have never supported someone like Pat Buchanan for dogcatcher. He was a consistent anarcho-capitalist, in ideology, temperament, and rhetoric, and opposed the State in every conceivable manner. I do remember, that when he gave that speech for Buchanan, I was quite shocked, because I had remembered him as a radical libertarian, not a conservative of any kind. As I stated, I don’t know what happened to him. Your theory about his adoption of Rothbard’s paleo strategy doesn’t quite make sense to me, as he seems to have fully broken his attachment to Objectivism, harshly criticising its pro-war adherents in the modern day, If he can break with Ayn Rand, why not Murray Rothbard? He learned take the good and reject the bad in regard in regard to Objectivism, so why not do the same with Rothbardian beliefs? It just doesn’t make sense.