This is an extremely strange story, but it just may suggest that there remains someone in the Trump administration who remains true to Trump’s campaign promises about reforming the U.S. response to the jihad threat. Or it may not. With the chaotic and rudderless Trump administration, it’s virtually impossible to tell.
“Administration Sources: Creepy Tweet Was a Coded Message to General McMaster About Leakers,” by David Steinberg, PJ Media, September 6, 2017:
A story fantastically strange, dancing between lowbrow and stupid, and it matters: this masterwork of a news item belongs in a time capsule, one day making the case to our descendants that we were, at least, blessed to live in interesting times.
Because this sort of thing happens in 2017, an alt-right crank who hasn’t won anyone’s trust beyond that of his loyal travelers seems to have become the white-whale obsession of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.
Also, a multi-national public relations campaign which occupied much of August — a campaign seemingly intended to repair General McMaster’s reputation with the President of the United States, to sully the reputation of Trump loyalists whom McMaster had removed from the National Security Council, and to drive out Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, all in one shot — may have been unintentionally destroyed by said alt-Right crank tweeting the words …
Mike Cernovich posted this tweet on August 11. To an objective observer, that’s inscrutable nonsense. And — also objectively — it’s creepy.
But when considered with its actual context, and pivotally, its timing, that rational observer should be driven to conclude that, ahem, the “McMaster what’s your spirit animal” tweet is a political thunderbolt with ramifications much beyond what Cernovich appears to have intended.
Here goes:
Sources within the Trump Administration claim that the“spirit animal” tweet isa reference to a small meeting that McMaster and select others within the National Security Council heldin the days prior to August 11.
At that meeting, attendees reportedly joked about each other’s “spirit animals.” Indeed, as of this writing, I can neither confirm nor deny that a prominent member of the NSC is imbued with the soul of a platypus.
Since August 11, Cernovich has offered other information that also points to him having sourcing within the NSC. However, the “spirit animal” tweet reportedly represented a more concerning breach. Yet even so, the breach itself is of less evident concern to McMaster and his supporters than is the fact of its August 11 publication.
Why?
Because if Cernovich still had a source leaking to him on that date or in the days immediately prior, then the tweet necessarily deconstructs much of the past month’s administration-orchestrated media defense of General McMaster’s personnel decisions.
———————–
In early August, General McMaster came under enormous pressure — spearheaded by the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick and the Zionist Organization of America’s Morton Klein — for having seemingly purged the NSC of all members who aligned with candidate Trump’s Mideast policy. “Radical Islamic terror” and the destruction of the Iran nuclear deal was out; the continuance of Obama-era policies behind the “Arab Spring” catastrophe had apparently returned.
McMaster disagrees and actively undermines Trump’s agenda on just about every salient issue on his agenda. He fires all of Trump’s loyalists and replaces them with Trump’s opponents, like Kris Bauman, an Israel hater and Hamas supporter who McMaster hired to work on the Israel-Palestinian desk.
He allows anti-Israel, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, pro-Iran Obama people like Robert Malley to walk around the NSC and tell people what to do and think. He has left Ben (reporters know nothing about foreign policy and I lied to sell them the Iran deal) Rhodes’ and Valerie Jarrett’s people in place.
And he not only is remaining at his desk. He is given the freedom to fire Trump’s most loyal foreign policy advisers from the National Security Council.
On August 9, Morton Klein released a statement on behalf of the ZOA which included this passage:
The duties of the National Security Council (NSC) include “ coordinat[ing] and direct[ing] the activities of the United States Government relating to combating transnational threats.” 50 U.S.C. § 3021(i). It is thus alarming that National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster purged from the NSC those officials who were carrying out President Trump’s policies of combating Iranian and radical Islamist transnational threats, and purged from the NSC those officials who support the U.S.-Israel alliance — an alliance that is vital to America’s ability to combat radical Islamist terrorism.
Instead, General McMaster has appointed officials who are holdovers from the Obama administration, who favor the Iran nuclear deal and are hostile to Israel — officials who are diametrically opposed to President Trump’s policies. Moreover, new revelations demonstrate that General McMaster’s ideology is antagonistic to the President’s policies on these vital issues.
Since then, McMaster and a large contingent of administration and media allies have chosen to defend his behavior primarily as the restoration of Executive Branch decorum and as the necessary removal of “alt-Right” thinkers. These defenses included implications that the purged members had been leaking to the disreputable Mike Cernovich.
With “spirit animal,” however, Cernovich managed the improbable feat of wiping out several weeks of PR crafted by some of the administration’s most powerful figures, because the fact of his tweet’s August 11 publication date establishes the following truth:
On the date of the “spirit animal” meeting, NO ONE with fealty to Trump’s aggressively pro-Israel, anti-Obama/Iran nuclear deal campaign platform — without which, he likely loses to Hillary — remained at the NSC.
Yet Cernovich’s source was still in the room.
So we now have a strong repudiation of the narrative component of the purge which — with the later resignation of Sebastian Gorka (who had long been unwelcome at the NSC) and his public resignation note confirming that such a purge had indeed been afoot — successfully removed every Trump Administration official aligned with Trump’s campaign promises regarding national security.
————
On August 11, I published a story at PJ Media identifying the National Security Council officials whom administration sources claim had been coordinating August’s public relations defense of McMaster. My concern at that time was the apparent dishonesty in how McMaster’s defenders have attacked both his critics and the members of NSC whom McMaster has fired or otherwise helped remove:
Deputy National Security Adviser Rick Waddell, Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Gulf States Joel Rayburn, and Yll Bajraktari, a former special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense during the Obama administration, have been coordinating an extensive public relations campaign in support of embattled National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, according to multiple sources.
Members of the national security community who spoke with PJ Media describe the talking points used during this effort to defend McMaster’s tenure as NSA as “absurd,” “dishonest,” and “comically inaccurate.” But sources primarily expressed anger regarding insinuations that NSC members fired by McMaster or otherwise no longer in their positions — such as K.T. McFarland, Rich Higgins, Adam Lovinger, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and Derek Harvey — are gone for reasons other than ideology.
Over the past week, several media accounts have painted them as “conspiratorial” members of the “alt-right,”possibly leaking information to the controversial Mike Cernovich, and possibly working in tandem with Russian social media accounts. Such claims, which have been picked up by several outlets, are reportedly doing lasting damage to reputations and careers.
Further, multiple sources believe McMaster and his allies within the administration are using such “career-ending” “swamp” tactics with the knowledge that the fired members and supportive colleagues — due to the nature of their careers within the national security realm — do not necessarily have the option of defending themselves in the public sphere.
Yes, Mike Cernovich does indeed have sourcing within the administration. And apparently he has occasionally released accurate information regarding the workings of the NSC. However, I’m hard-pressed to find anyone who was aware of this situation prior to reading of it in this August 4 piece in The Atlantic. And that should lead our objective observer towards identifying cynical motives behind Cernovich receiving unwarranted attention from McMaster.
In that article, the Atlantic’s Rosie Gray revealed that — among the myriad leaks to various outlets that are assumed to have originated from the NSC, including the Washington Post’s atrocious decision to publish transcripts of President Trump’s phone calls with two foreign statesmen — McMaster had seemingly prioritized plugging the leak to the popular-within-the-alt-Right-but-otherwise-irrelevant Cernovich. Sources could only speculate as to why McMaster has been so concerned with the one voice that could be most simply dispatched as a purveyor of false information. Indeed, Cernovich — recall “Pizzagate”? — has otherwise carried out that mission on his own.
But it’s clear that, as August came, Cernovich was a useful foil for defending McMaster against charges of purging the NSC of conservatives.
Suddenly, America was being told that McMaster had not been systematically removing those who questioned his embrace of the Obama-era policy of discounting the Islamic roots of terror and jihad. Instead, as we were told, McMaster was indeed tough on Iran and Mahmoud Abbas, and had actually been doing Trump’s bidding by removing “alt-Right” liabilities suspected of leaking to a man with the reputation of a conspiracist kook.
Throughout August, elements of this narrative were spread by influential outlets and think tanks, by Sunday morning talk shows, by Senator John McCain, by the U.S. ambassador to Israel, and even by a friendly in the Netanyahu administration.
Perhaps Senator McCain’s contribution most shamelessly embraced the smear tactic. McCain released a statement declaring that the outside pressure to have General McMaster removed from the NSC — which, as all of D.C. knew at the time, presumably including McCain, had been spearheaded by former IDF captain Caroline Glick and Morton Klein, child of Holocaust survivors and president of the Zionist Organization of America — instead arose “from the same purveyors of hatred and ignorance who precipitated the recent violence in Charlottesville.”
Yes — Senator McCain employed shameless expediency to turn “Glick and Klein” into … the Klan.
And until now, that disingenuous campaign had been remarkably successful.
“McMaster is purging the alt-Right leakers” soon became “McMaster can’t work with alt-Right leaker Steve Bannon and alt-Right leaker Sebastian Gorka.” Both are out. Truly, everyone who had been brought on as complementary to Trump’s Mideast campaign promises is now out, as Sebastian Gorka summarized in his public resignation letter.
But Cernovich’s leaker is still there….
Read the rest here.
John C. Barile says
We live in interesting times.
Gordon Miller says
Yes, McMaster scares me, mostly because of his influence on Trump, but also because he seems to be clueless about the genesis of jihad and the caliphate. He must be replaced before it’s too late.
james collins says
has anyone sent a link of this post to the White House?
John C. Barile says
We do indeed.
Tom says
SO the Alt-Left Pro-jihadi obama holdovers took over ! And dump trump has been brainwashed so well he even stopped using “Islamic radicals/terrorists” in his recent speeches !
John Forbes says
I BELIEVE MCMASTER IS WORKING AGAINST TRUMP ! THE FACT THAT BANNON & OTHERS HAVE BEEN REMOVED SUPPOSEDLY ON THE SAY SO OF MCMASTER IS A REAL WORRY !
THIS GUY IS POISON !!
John Hawk says
McMaster is as much a swamp dweller as the creature from the black lagoon. The problem is, Trump has no discernible moral compass, so it’s hard to predict where he will land from one moment to the next. Trump makes it up as he goes along. It’s like trying to anticipate the next move of a housefly.
Tom says
Not really , he is being conned and played by Alt-left Obama holdovers and Muslim brotherhood supporters.
saudi, Egypt , Bahrain , UAE are at war with qatar because of its Muslim brotherhood Links and funding ISIS .
AND get this Dumb TRUMP is offering to broker peace between them while he has Muslim brotherhood supporters within NSC and Tillerson is also following Mc Master’s line on it .
Key is for all patriots to share articles that expose the obama holdovers with Trump via twitter , email and advise him to get rid of them or lose your support.
If 1,000,000 ppl do it , he will wake up and take notice. No point blaming him and keeping quiet.
Donovan Nuera says
Trump seems enamored of all the medals and stars on McMaster and Kelly’s uniform…during the campaign he kept referring to Patton (and I think MacArthur) so often and seemed unable to elaborate why these generals were great and seemed to speak as though he just latched onto their names from his remembrance of reading about them in a high school history book at his military prep school….of he watched “Patton” on TBS one night. Or did he read about these men in a bullet-point talking points 1 page note in a limo on the way to a rally?The White House still seeems to be in disarray even with tough Marine Gen. Kelly as Chief of Staff.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
Gen. McMasters is a guaranteed disaster as Nat’l Security Advisor to Trump. Islam is the biggest threat to America today, and he doesn’t understand it, bending his mind over backwards to project Western values onto it. Long ago I gave up the idea that senior officers in the services were necessarily world wise players. One only look at Gen. Petraeus and his disastrous rules of engagement in Afghanistan, and the money he pissed down the hole to pull off his surge in Iran, which was putatively sucessful until the New Caliphate exposed the effort as bribe money taking by laughing tribal leaders who forgot their commitments after depositing all that U.S. taxpayer cash in the bank.
Jack Diamond says
Well, you should have asked who his spirit animal was before he was appointed. Apparently, it’s important.
The inmates are running the asylum, boys.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
The inmates are running the asylum, boys.
There is a new fangled improvement to the “science” of psychiatry called remote insanity diagnosis. It was invented by liberal Chris Matthews when he was able to diagnose then presidential candidate Michele Bachman as insane from thousands of miles away. More recently, the same new scientific technique found president Trump to be insane remotely.
gravenimage says
Yes–McMaster is a disaster–and he is just the worst; far from the only.
I worry that the swamp is draining Trump…
Karly says
ROBERT SPENCER : Is it you saying ”With the chaotic and rudderless Trump administration” ?
Are these your words?
gravenimage says
Yes, those are Robert Spencer’s words. Are you saying that he is wrong about this? I wish he were.
The only small saving grace is that it almost certainly would have been actually pro-Jihad under a Hillary administration.
Karly says
Thank you for the reply.
He’ wrong about the ‘chaotic and rudderless’. Everything Trump does has an end-goal and a clear strategy. Few people are allowed inside his inner circle.
He’s doing a magnificent job with regard to North Korea by playing China through slow painful economic strangulation.
With regard to Islamic issues, Trump made it very clear during his campaign what he thought about Islam. Remember the ‘Snake’?
Trump’s goal is to clear the Mid-East of terror groups without massive American involvement. To achieve this goal, he needs Islamic partners that will do the work for him, yes – even those who live by Sharia Law. Thus, it would be quite unproductive to bash Islam if he needs Islam to achieve his goal, don’t you think? The ”Fight fire with fire”.
As they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Trump is no fool. Everything in due time.
Joe says
I hope you’re right. Trump could be using the old Soviet strategy of supporting the resistance to help shine light on the resistance. Then a change of direction purges the now exposed resistance.
Terry Gain says
Karly
You sound like a young person with the mentality of those who put Obama in office. Muslims have been killing Muslims since Islam was invented by a psychopath and this will continue as long as Islam exists regardless of what we do. The danger western civilization faces is not from terrorists but from so-called moderate Muslims who are spreading Islam through Hijra. America’s survival as a free and democratic country will depend on keeping out this totalitarian ideology. McMaster doesn’t understand this and he is a therefore disaster as NSA.
Keep your enemies closer does not mean giving an enemy the power to set policy and dispose of your friends – friends who actually understand the threat posed by Islam. Not radical Islam, Islam.
Trump again revealed himself this week with his handling of the debt ceiling. He is neither a conservative nor a Republican. If he understood Islam he would never had hired McMaster or Tillerson.
gravenimage says
Karly, I would like to think that you are right–but somehow, jettisoning everyone who speaks the truth about Islam and being increasingly unwilling to do the same himself does *not* sound like a winning strategy to me.
seabird says
Trumps infatuation with appearances and the military by appointing 3 Generals to his administration (at least 1 of whom is surely a CIA/pentagon “plant”) endangers civilian Govt. while guaranteeing a smooth transition of power if/when he is ever removed from office.
McMaster is looking more and more like the roque Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now.
WestDivide says
The question is: Is Trump true to Trump’s campaign promises? Trump is a flake from the get-go, but I had some hope he’d get rid of most of the leftists from the previous admin. Instead, he seems to have chickened out and can’ figure out who to purge and who not to purge. His deal-making spiels appear to be just that, a spiel. He didn’t seem to have any political purpose other than his ego. Not that that’s bad in itself, but he’s not doing much to “make America great”. If an old guy like me can see the pitfalls, surely Trump should be able to. I don’t know….
West out
mortimer says
Disagree with WD: Pres. Trump is turning around an ocean liner. The good ship USA is a big ship to turn around.
Terry Gain says
Mortimer
You can’t turn around a ship of state unless you have the right crew.
mortimer says
The blockheadedness of those who believe in lying both to Muslims and to the entire Western world about the meaning, motive and methods of JIHAD-WARFARE AGAINST DISBELIEVERS is breathtakingly PREPOSTEROUS!
McMasters appears to be the main cheerleader of this method of KEEPING THE DARK SECRET within the MILITARY COMMUNITY where absolute REALISM ABOUT JIHAD IS REQUIRED.
If McMasters does not know that all Muslims are REQUIRED TO HATE THE DIRTY KUFAAR ‘for the sake of Allah’, then he is both a NAIVE POLLYANNA and SELF-DELUSIONAL. I don’t believe that is the case, so I believe the entire top establishment is LYING ABOUT THE JIHAD DOCTRINE.
Sam says
If they are lying about Jihad, I would still call them STUPID.
Terry Gain says
Lying about Islam only reinforces Jihad. The truth will set us free. Islam can’t bear to hear the truth about its doctrine and history. The longer we wait to tell the truth the harder it will be to defeat this evil ideology.
gravenimage says
Spot on, Terry.
mortimer says
Islam cannot be defeated without a covert program of stealth counterjihad which absolutely deprograms Muslims right out of Islam. The JIHAD DOCTRINE and ISLAM ARE ONE.
Guy Forester says
That article gave me a headache. It looks like the White House version of “Who’s on First?” McMaster and the BHO holdovers, Mueller, and probably more that we never even heard of need to get their walking papers. Sessions and Tillerson should be on the short list for a hike as well for not supporting the administration. If this Antifa mess scheduled for 11/04 is really serious, Trump has about 6 weeks to get a truly supportive security and military apparatus reorganized and pointed in the right direction.
Meanwhile, he needs to deal with hurricanes and the DPRK/Fat boy distractions. The GOP members of Congress are part of the swamp and are refusing to help the president get the USA headed in the right direction.
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
I ignore absolutely everything Cernovich puts out and anything derived from it.
More Ham Ed says
McBasterd.
Aton says
“spirit animal is a platypus”. Does anyone in that cabal like flying? That may identify them.
Aton
Aton says
The pro-jihad forces are not simply taking over the Whitehouse. Try posting the Koranic verses that underpin jihad in a western newspaper, and you will find yourself banned in an instant. There is a concerted effort out there, to deny the truth about the link between jihad and islam, to to the general public.
Aton
Edward.Fullerton says
I have n’t in all honesty read the whole of your essay.Soul of a platypus , gag ?. wjhat one could say is are communists behind it all ?. One has to wonder why the Mohammadans hold such pull in the west.
Edward.Fullerton says
What , mis-spelling on my part.
rbla says
I conjecture the following. Trump was told in no uncertain terms that unless he turned things over to the generals the House would contrive some reason to impeach him and there would be enough GOP swamp creatures in the Senate to convict. Trump realizes that the important thing in preserving the nation is ending mass third world immigration. So he makes an agreement with the generals. They can set foreign policy destroy his attempts at détente with Russia, have whatever little nation building wars they want and appease the mullahs in Iran. In return they will support his attempts at national survival by giving him leeway on immigration. This hypothesis is about to be tested. If in return for some leniency with DACA the generals get Congress to enact restrictionist legislation – end chain migration, impose punishing employer sanctions, interior enforcement and “build the wall” etc., then we know he had a deal. Otherwise the soft military coup is complete and we are simply doomed.
Gordon Miller says
But instead, why doesn’t Trump just fire all the generals loyal to McMaster and appoint others loyal to him?
Guy Forester says
Alternatively, I suspect that after he fired and hired some people, an envelope mysteriously appeared in his oval office desk one AM. No markings on it. He opened it, and in it was a list of recommended advisors, and a list of recommended removals. Also present, was a set of pictures of his family members take through some kind of magnifying device at a long range. Security cameras on the oval office were reviewed and nothing showed up there.
Similar to the pictures given to Loretta Lynch on the tarmac.
Lorensacho says
When Flynn was National Security Advisor, Trump at a dinner with Jared decided to undertake a mission in Yemen that was nixed by Obama because it was considered too risky. The result was a disaster resulting in U.S. deaths. McMaster has put a stop to these kinds of adventures. This increases American security. To create rational decision making, McMaster has had to fire unstable people from the White House. These people are now trying to turn the right against this great general. I am astonished that Robert Spencer seems to be going along for the ride.
gravenimage says
Loresacho, the idea that appeasing Islam creates a more stable nation is *very* questionable.