The right side of history

Something interesting to follow are the –strong– internal disagreements dividing the MAGA movement regarding the Iran-Contra affair. “Another absurd war abroad that we’re waging in the name of Israel,” complains Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Republican congresswoman from Georgia and old-school MAGA member, who is currently estranged from Trumpist orthodoxy. It’s not that Taylor Greene is a pacifist activist: years ago, she became infamous for her videos with racist comments against Black and Hispanic people, and for a meme in which she appeared armed with an assault rifle, ready to shoot at photographs of Democratic leaders. She subscribed to anti-vaccine theories and the QAnon movement’s stories about the so-called Pizzagate And the existence of an international alliance of powerful people who kidnapped children to use them in orgies and satanic rituals that included cannibalism (all of this has been reinforced now with the declassification of part of Epstein's files). Well, Marjorie Taylor Greene is back in the news for her clash with a current rising star of Trumpism, a far-right activist who has a direct line to Trump and who congratulates herself on having killed "one of the most evil Islamic terrorists in the world," referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Taylor Greene calls Laura Loomer a "meuca," and Loomer retaliates by calling Taylor Greene a "traitor," etc.

In any case, the unease over the war in Iran among a large segment of the Republican ranks, many of whom were not so long ago Trump supporters, is public knowledge. So too are the low approval ratings the orange behemoth receives in popularity polls and the low approval ratings for his policies, as the midterm elections next November draw ever closer. The memories of the US's military, diplomatic, and patriotic failures in bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan are too recent and painful, causing even prominent American right-wingers like the journalist (or rather, the propagandist) Tucker Carlson to throw their hands up in despair at what they consider a mistake. There is a fear that the understanding between Trump and Netanyahu (an Israeli prime minister who, after all, acts under the constraints of a coalition government largely composed of religious fanatics) may end up leading the American president into a dead end where Trump's triumphalism is overwhelmed by the Republicans, where they have more to lose than to gain, and where only the most fervent Islamophobes, like Loomer, feel comfortable.

The disorientation of the Republicans contrasts sharply with the monolithic conviction of their provincial imitators, the Spanish right and a good part of the Catalan right, who enthusiastically support the Israeli-US war against Iran because they claim to be "on the right side of history." The right side of history: one of those verbal crutches that the presumptuous like to parrot. They're quite amusing.