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Nov. 30, 2025 - Lionel Nation
18:52
Nightmares: Radical Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood
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My friend, more and more are we going to be re-addressing, re-familiarizing ourselves with the notion of radical Islam, Islamist al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, all of these names which we really haven't been talking about or thinking about for quite a while.
And therefore, it is incumbent upon us, and you in particular, as a sentient member of our society, to understand who these people are.
You know, in the past, politicians promised all kinds of stuff.
You know, better worlds and various idealistic promises.
And left-wing or right-wing, they sold big futures, new societies, new men, new freedom, new perspectives, new authorities.
And their authority came from, in essence, the dreams that they purported.
And then those dreams failed.
And then wars failed, and social experiments failed, and economies cracked, and people stopped believing.
And ideology, which is so important, ideology became a bad joke.
In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed right now to find out what exactly is our ideology now.
So anyway, so politicians kind of reinvented themselves.
And they no longer promised heaven.
They now promised protection.
Protection from chaos, protection from viruses, protection from climate doom.
And above all, protection from one huge amorphous enemy called terrorism.
That was the story.
That was the dark network.
That's what we used to worry about.
That's what we used to think about.
Sleeper cells and these people in caves and with funny names and funny hats and funny ideologies and they hate our freedom.
Really weren't sure who they were, but they're the perfect amorphous boogeyman.
And everywhere and nowhere they were.
Too secret for you to understand or to grasp.
So you must hand them power for your own safety.
You have to give it to the people who protected you.
Here, take care of me.
I don't know who these people are, but you do, so keep us safe.
We basically relinquished and abnegated our authority.
And here is the uncomfortable argument.
Much of that threat is real and is lethal.
And it still is.
It hasn't gone anywhere.
But the picture in our heads was kind of inflated.
It was shaped and it was scripted.
It was a nightmare.
And nightmares built by people who needed a new source of authority in an age when utopias and idealistic promises weren't selling.
Remember, something's got to motivate you to turn control over, whether it's the Hegelian dialectic, however you want to look at it.
But nothing is better than fear than nightmares.
Please, I refer you to a BBC documentary called The Power of Nightmares 2004.
Absolutely rudimentary.
It was brilliant when BBC was BBC.
And what it highlighted, and what you have to be familiarize yourself with, is that two groups sit and sat at the root of this modern kind of a dichotomy, this dialectic, radical Islamists and American neoconservatives.
And as far as neoconservative neocons, neocons are just like fascists in that we use them, and we use the term a lot, but we really don't know what it means.
You see, they hated each other more than anything.
They would eventually kill each other, but they were born from the same moment and the same movement.
You know, the death of the old liberal dream.
That's what it is.
Let me tell you something.
Neoconservatism is not what you think.
These are lapsed Trotskyites, fallen liberals, disenfranchised lefties.
And it's important for us to remind ourselves of what it really means.
On one side, there was an Egyptian school, a school inspector named Saeed Kutub, Q-U-T-B Qutub, it means leader, but anyway, Saeed, he had a little Hitler mustache, Prussian.
It's called a toothbrush mustache.
And in 1949, he came to a small town in Colorado to study education.
And what he sees freaked him out.
Lawn worship.
People talked about lawns, you know, lawnmowers and greens and horticulture and topiaries.
This consumer chatter and movie gossip.
A church dance with dim lights and big band music.
Young men and women pressed together.
Oh, he couldn't take this.
To ordinary Americans, it was innocent fun, but to him, to Saeed Kupt, oh, oh, oh, oh, it was moral decay, dressed as freedom.
And this was the antecedent of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And he decided then that the West was wrapped in barbarism, in kind of shrink-wrapped or in neon, whatever the particular image you want.
And people think that they're liberated, but they're ruined and ruled by appetite, he said.
And then he returned to Egypt, and he was convinced that only a purified Islam could keep this disease out, out from their society, but also around the world.
He saw us.
He saw this as depraved.
That never went away.
And he joins the Muslim Brotherhood.
He supports a revolution.
Then he is imprisoned and tortured by the new regime, by Nasser and others.
Remember one thing.
This is a rule of thumb when it comes to Islamist folks.
If they wear a suit in a time, you can deal with them.
I know that sounds crazy, but Nasser was this pan-Arab, this new kind of a melding of a modern Arab world.
But Saeed Kupt, oh, he was there.
I remember who his followers were.
The folks who were responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat.
And anyway, I don't want to confuse this, but those folks are still there, okay?
And in that prison where he was, we was tortured and whatever, his ideas hardened into steel.
And the West is, he thought, was not just decadent, it was a force of spiritual annihilation.
I mean, its culture, our culture was a virus.
And its local allies are no longer true Muslims.
You know, they can be removed.
So this was a guy who was so hardcore, so virulent in his anti-West, but also anybody who was not 100% hardcore Muslim.
He was, I mean, I'm using the word hardcore far too much, but you got the point.
Now on the other side, in Chicago, you had Leo Strauss, a political philosopher watching the same post-war liberal order wobble completely.
He saw the same thing.
And he believes that liberal freedom, taken to its extreme, dissolves everything.
Interesting, they're very parallel.
Strauss thought that traditions, shared meanings, moral anchors, people wandering through life as satisfied little consumers.
Oh, no, no, no.
No higher purpose, no common truth, only private pleasure.
They were very similar, but different approaches.
That is the Abyssidarian lattice work, if you will, the expatiation foci, for lack of a better word, of the neocons.
They haven't gone away.
Remember when Dick Cheney died, he was a real neocon.
Peanak, remember those guys?
They haven't gone away.
So Leo Strauss tells his students that societies do not hold together on facts alone.
They need binding myths, noble lies, if you will.
Stories of good and evil.
Everyone can understand.
Religion can do that.
So can the myth of a unique nation chosen to confront evil.
In America, that myth becomes the story of a special destiny.
The television Western with the clear hero and the clear villain, the guy with a white hat, the gunslinger in the white hat, the simple conflict that makes sense to every viewer at home.
That was the message of the initial intonations, if you will, of neoconservatism.
Now, out of this, Saeed Khutub, again, Q-U-T-B, that's a tough one.
Out of his prison cell came the idea of a revolutionary vanguard, a small elite that sees through the illusion of freedom that will drag the masses down, and he's going to drag them back into truth.
And out of Leo Strauss' classroom comes a different elite, students who will one day guide America through crisis by reviving epic narratives of good against evil.
This is Manichaean.
Both camps believe the same thing.
Remember, this is fascinating.
Ordinary people are lost.
They need to be led.
They need strong stories, strong leaders, more than messy truth.
They want absolutes.
As the liberal project falters in the 1960s and 1970s, these ideas escaped the kind of college seminar classrooms and the prison yard.
And Saeed Kup is executed.
He is made a martyr.
His writings spread through the Islamic world.
Young militants pick up his call for a purified politics of faith and a war against corrupt regimes.
One of the boys leading this movement and reading him is Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Remember the red-headed dude?
Remember the fellow who was the doctor who was UBL, Osama bin Laden's buddy, who will later stand beside UBL in the, you know, supposedly, if you believe it, the caves and the like.
Now, Leo Strauss's students leave academia, they drift into Washington, and they become the core of what we now call the neoconservative movement.
The Scoop Jackson Democrats, they look at riots, crime, and cultural fragmentation and decide that liberal reforms have rotted the center.
A lot of these guys were ex-commies in the 50s and before.
I mean, remember, the only problem, give you an idea, the reason why, the only problem they had with Vietnam was that we didn't finish the job.
Not that we went to war, but we didn't finish it.
So they believe, this is the neocons, that America must once again see itself as a moral warrior, a country and a people defined not by welfare programs or weird managerial tinkering, but by a mission to confront evil and to emerge triumphant.
And they find their perfect foil in the Soviet Union.
It was perfect.
It was real, dangerous.
Reagan loved it.
Post-Cold War, it also was the ideal stage for a simple fable.
So they built Team B, so to speak.
They accuse the CIA of being naive and blind and weak.
They insist there are secret weapons, secret doctrines, secret plans, often with little or no evidence.
But if a weapon can't be found, they say it must be so advanced and that it's invisible.
Absence becomes truth.
Doubt becomes fuel.
I mean, this is wild.
Slowly, again, this manichaean good versus evil picture hardens.
And the Soviets are not just a rival power.
They're the central engine of a worldwide terror network.
Every hijacking, every bomb, every urban guerrilla, everyone is tied to invisible strings to Moscow.
Remember also, this is Bigneb Brzezinski.
Now, remember, this is very, very tough because many people like Pat Buchanan believe that neocons are basically pro-Israeli, pro-Zionist groups as well.
And people who rail against the neocons are called anti-Semites.
Again, believe me, don't think this is not subject to murky confusion because it is.
But the truth gets even messier.
And a cosmic struggle, again, between good and evil, Islamists and the neocons.
And here's the twist.
The Islamists do something very similar in their own world.
They take a complex landscape of nationalism, corruption, poverty, and power struggles, and they reduce it to a single epic confrontation.
True believers against the vast system of jahiliyah, the barbaric ignorance that Qutub saw everywhere.
Every compromise and every compromise politician becomes a traitor.
Every secular ruler becomes some apostate.
Every bloody act can be justified if it awakens the masses from the dream of this horrible westernized freedom.
Out of this mirror and this dance emerges the world you and I were handed after 2001.
A world in which politicians, unable to sell bright futures, revert to nightmare management.
They can't give you a worldview about what to look forward to, but they can tell you what to fear.
And they tell us there is a hidden global network, secret sleepers in every city, motivations too irrational for us to grasp, plots too shadowy for us to see.
But trust us, we'll take care of you.
Only they, with their agencies and their groups, they'll do it.
And we're going to have to bend the rules a little bit.
We're going to have to bend the rules.
We're going to, you know, we're going to have our surveillance, our group, our kind of secret police, our way of doing things.
The unitary executive retooled it.
I mean, it was wild.
And you really don't know this until you look back.
See, some of the threat is real.
Some of it is fictional and layered on fact.
And that's the point.
Fear doesn't need perfect accuracy.
It just needs emotional clarity.
Do I feel this?
If you feel some pain, if I hit your thumb with a hammer, does it really matter to you for you to understand the pain circuitry, for you to understand the pain?
No.
Just scared the shit out of people.
All of this restores authority and kind of a disillusioned age.
And it gives frightened populations something ancient and simple, a monster to fear, a savior to trust.
And it leaves us with a question.
How much, how much of our modern nightmare today is genuine threat?
And how much is scripted by people who learned long ago that when the dream of the future in essence dies, the promise of protection and care becomes the last currency of power.
This is what Trump really needs to act upon now.
This is critical.
We are in this now.
We are seeing this.
I see it so clearly.
Mr. President, however you mobilize the masses, we, America, has become very, very complacent, left and right.
We've got these goofy Zoran momdanis.
It is incumbent upon whoever is running the show to learn from the past, to seize upon this moment, and to perhaps, perhaps, reintroduce the now once dread intellectual and philosophical substructures and structures of neoconservatism.
We should maybe read, look at this again.
Look, my bottom line, I don't care how we do it as long as we win.
So thank you for this.
Thank you for this.
Like this video.
Subscribe to the channel.
And I'm going to put some great questions for you up in the sections after this.
Some really good stuff to read.
The power of nightmares.
I'm going to put a link to this.
You've got to see this.
It's fantastic.
I'll never forget when I saw this years ago.
I was like, ooh, I understand now.
And you're going to understand too.
We have a lot of work to get to, my friends.
And President Trump needs all the help we can give him.
So anyway, I thank you so much.
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