Pretty sure you’re correct. Seems like it’s just a miscommunication around the word ‘deep’, with one person meaning deeply hidden and the other meaning deeply ingrained.

Pretty much everyone I know (bar for those few still religiously devoted to doing their best impression of a boot polish sommelier) seems to be on the same page about how nearly everything Trump does is a distraction from the files, and that’s been the consensus for months now, even before the Iran War.

That said, I run in very different circles than those who make up the loyal core of MAGA, and I’ve learned to never doubt my countrymen’s ability to achieve new and rarified heights of stupidity and cognitive dissonance. I also never felt like most people even tolerated the idea of Donald Trump, and that led to an extremely unpleasant surprise in the wake of the 2024 election, so my social circle probably isn’t a particularly representative cross-section.

Oh trust me, he’s in the teens, I can promise you that.

Yes, because nobody has ever believed themselves to be superior for reasons other than religion such as ethnicity; that would be absurd. It’s not like the Jews suffered a holocaust for exactly that reason or something.

(To be absolutely clear: this isn’t a defense of Israel; they are, beyond any possible doubt, perpetrating a genocide, and I don’t want it to seem like I’m excusing this in any way because there is no defense. I just want to note that this is a flaw in humanity that we see pop up in a variety of forms, with religion being one possible angle.)

To call this a flaw in religion is to equivocate Israel to Judaism, and that’s exactly what Israel wants you to do. Don’t help them muddy the waters.

The real risk they should be worried about is the resource commitment required to run a nuclear program in the first place (to say nothing of their ballistic missiles which have consumed incredible resources over time only for them to have underperformed in the Twelve Day War).

Their domestic situation remains incredibly fragile, and every bit of money committed to a war machine is money that can’t be committed to domestic priorities like keeping the people from wanting to forcefully interface you with a piece of lighting infrastructure Mussolini-style.

Ukraine deploying drones from trucks in Operation Spiderweb was arguably also a drone carrier, just a terrestrial one.