Pour one out for Fethullah Gulen, dead at 83

He was as close as you'll ever get to a Bond villain. He set up a charity to pay for kids' education up through college. After a couple decades of that, he had thousands of educated followers with deep personality loyalty to him. He used them to make up the "Ergenekon" conspiracy theory, claiming that the military was plotting all kinds of evil things. Using forged evidence and ties to the media he got the public to believe in this bullshit and he got thousands of military officers arrested or fired. The military had always been the dominant force in Turkey but he managed to cut their balls off within a few years.

He had been closely allied with Erdogan during this. But once he was done the military he started the same kind of campaign to undermine him. Erdogan wasn't a tard and fought back, eventually forcing him to flee to the United States. For some reason the tards in our government decided to let him have asylum here, because I guess this is the kind of conflict we want to get caught up in. From his base in rural Pennsylvania he plotted the failed coup attempt. Since then Erdogan has used him like Goldstein in 1984. We always have to be on guard for Gulenists. They could be anywhere! This is partly true because his followers had infiltrated every institution they could, but Erdogan's supporters have used it as an excuse to fire anyone they want to, up to maybe 100,000 people now. We know most of them must be innocent because there's no way Gulen had that many people in his organization.

Maybe with him out of the picture tensions between Turkey and the US will cool a little bit. I'm not hoping for much since Erdogan just doesn't like us, but at least he doesn't have a legitimate grievance against us anymore.