Trump wants to turn Gaza into a casino resort. Ita Buttrose thinks only an ‘activist’ could object

We have crossed both the Rubicon and the Rhine these last few weeks, and the next liberal who screeches “this is not who we are!” when talking about America needs to leave the room and go read some fucking books.  

Just three overwhelming weeks later and it should only be the scared, stupid and pathologically optimistic clinging onto any belief in American benevolence under the Nerd Reich. 

In just three weeks of America being its authentic self, we have already witnessed: 

• Two Nazi salutes from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a Nazi-salutin’, Nazi-supportin’, Nazi guy. 

• A plan for a 30,000 capacity concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Nazis love concentration camps. 

• The fairly fucking Orwellian erasure of 27 phrases from US government materials, terms such as: diversity, bias, inclusion, privilege, prejudice, racism, transgender, allyship, intersectionality and pronouns. You get the idea.

• The destruction of USAID, one of the few American government international institutions not solely dedicated to murdering Latin American peasants and overthrowing left-leaning democracies. 

• Elon Musk’s DOGE department taking over US Government finances and setting about ‘looking for efficiencies using AI’. Strangely, no one is concerned about the billions of dollars of public money spent exploding SpaceX rockets. 

• Every US government employee was offered a redundancy package to quit promptly. Roughly 75,000, out of 2 million total, have taken up the offer. 

• The Associated Press was barred from a media event because it didn’t refer to the newly christened ‘Gulf of America’. Can you feel my eyes rolling deep into the back of my head through these words? Ongoing positions inside the White House have been handed to Brietbart and One America Network, truly deranged Nazi-baiting outlets. 

• And Kanye West, following an anti-semitic ALL-CAPS tweet storm, took out a Superbowl ad directing a gargantuan audience to his personal website, which, for the occasion, was selling only one item: a sweatshirt adorned with a swastika, bearing the SKU “HH-01”, a commonplace acronym for “Heil Hitler”. His music has always sucked, too.

TL;DR, it’s getting a little fashy ‘round these parts. 

There’s more. Way more. Too much more. Aside from an unfortunate afternoon when I was roped into attending the Melbourne Cup, I have personally never witnessed social regression move at such a dizzying pace. This is paradoxically both the goal of the Trump administration and how it will set about achieving it. 

Like last term, this overwhelm is by design. Sure, some of this frantic fascism is a natural result of hyper-wealthy narcissists microdosing horse tranquilizer and being handed the keys to the world. But it’s also very much the Steve Bannon doctrine of ‘flooding the zone with shit’ to discombobulate effective opposition and overload the roughly 40-odd journalists still trying. The temptation to tune out is mighty fucking there. 

All of this incomplete list is horrific – and all of it has been topped by the unembarrassed plan for the US to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

15-months of America-funded genocide, the true scale of which we still don’t know, all for Trump to turn it into a seaside casino resort complex. There will be no place more cursed than MAGAZA, a wretched hive of scum and villainy no doubt perpetually filled to the brim with the biggest cunts in the entire world.

‘We will have Gaza. No reason to buy. There is nothing to buy. It’s Gaza. It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it. We’re going to cherish it,’ said Trump, describing his annexation. Seated next to him: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli PM, a depraved racist wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and (an extremely obvious livestreamed) genocide. There is no ‘rules based international order’. Maybe there never was. People that use the phrase are lying to you. 

I don’t know how Trump aims to move more than 2 million Palestinians from their destroyed homes short of sending in the US military, but the step after is clear. Both Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner (who was appointed in the first Trump term to ‘solve the Middle East’) have all the dodgy high-end real estate connections any Mafia boss would cream himself over. 

We have truly reached peak banality of evil: a Trump Hotel by the Mediterranean Sea built on Gaza’s corpses. 

And even though the depraved morality of this moment should be bleedingly obvious to every sane, compassionate monkey, in the West this truth is obscured, mythologised into nothingness, twisted until up is down and offence is defence and all of a sudden: ‘iT’s CoMpLiCaTeD’.

At home, in the US imperial vassal state of Australia, we saw, in the case of Antoinette Lattouf vs the ABC, exactly how ethnic cleansing and genocide can be institutionally normalised and supported by mainstream media. Your consent is manufactured.

This week, in Sydney, Ita Buttrose, former chair of the ABC, in court implied that supporting Israel is neutral and natural and journalism but having sympathy for Palestine makes you an ‘activist’ that needs to be fired – maybe even catch Covid to save face. That’s where we’re at. 

In Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, he explains media self-censorship. Essentially, a journalist that espouses the establishment line consistently might sincerely believe his own bootlicking tosh – like Greg Sheridan – but the crucial part is that if he believed otherwise, he wouldn’t be employed there to begin with. He is there, in a position of privilege and prominence, because his thoughts fit. It is self-selecting, and through so many examples now, Peter Lalor and Lattouf being the highest profile, that message is being reinforced loudly.

As the villain from the Devil Wears Prada gave her evidence, we learned that Buttrose sent six emails about Lattouf in 19 minutes. We can glean from this that she is embarrassingly enthusiastic to appease angry Zionists (she has not replied to any of my emails about new seasons of that weird slime gameshow from way back when). 

Like absolutely everybody else in the upper echelons of mainstream media, the way is being paved for depravity and barbarity by these editorial lines. We are being sold a disfigured reality in which to exist. And as long as we can remain distracted from our gut feelings and cognitive dissonance, as long as we can unsee the painted-on horizon and fake plastic trees, these illusions can be comforting, almost convincing, even. Opt in, dissociate, head down, and quietly hope Trump and Netanyahu and their ilk throw someone else through the wood chipper before they get to you and yours. 

This is a dark historical moment that will get worse before it gets better. It will get better, but fuck me if I can tell you when that will be.