the trump administration is trying to undo the narrative of islamic fascism as america's natural enemy that my generation grew up with and which defines the global outlook of most people under 50, in contrast to the cold war narrative that defines the lives of baby boomers. during the cold war, the bad guy was russia. in the post cold war period, russia is no longer a bad guy; the bad guy is now islam. while i don't really like the cold war narrative, because i'm a leftist, i'm largely in agreement with the war on terrorism narrative...because i'm a leftist. whether the communists were bad guys is a subtle issue, and the correct answer is something like "they weren't really worse than the capitalists, and, when you look at it carefully, they were probably less bad, overall". it's hard to get angry about communism or think they're going to ruin us all with their radical egalitarianism and want to fight them. but the islamists have no reedemable qualities and such a subtle discourse is not applicable. these are much badder bad guys, and it's much easier to hate a religious person than it is to hate a communist. if the communists won, it probably wouldn't be so bad; if the muslims won, it would be backwardsness and hell on earth, in a viciously barbaric legal system that rejects any concept of dissent.

to the trump administration, that appears to be exactly the problem. they don't like this narrative at all. they want more religion, not less religion. it seems to bother them that we're vilifying islamic fascists (or were) and are sending money to communist kurdish groups (or were) to fight off the fascists. this contradicts their basic principles and alienates the groups in the region that they want to align with, like the far right governments in turkey and saudi arabia...and, increasingly, in iran. this administration wants america's allies to be fascist extremists that want to enforce their dark age rules on everybody and america's enemies to be utopian socialists trying to defend themselves. the war on terrorism does not fit the narrative they want, but a war on transgendered people does.

as mentioned, this is mostly irrelevant to me. it's not going to make any difference to me on a day-to-day basis.

but if this embrace of islamic fascism by the highest levels of american government begins to filter downwards, we're all going to suffer dramatically, as they systematically take away all of our rights to make us pliable and obedient.