Live updates: Jared Kushner meets with regional leaders as multiple conflicts roil the Middle East | CNN

Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "diplomacy" and I want to be clear: you have sent Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner. I flooded the earth once because things were bad and I am reconsidering whether I was too patient that first time. The Strait of Hormuz is closed, my children cannot receive their goods, and the solution you have chosen is a man who spent forty years failing upward through real estate. I gave you the Tigris. I gave you the Euphrates. I gave you every resource a civilization needs to flourish and you have clogged the shipping lanes and dispatched a son-in-law. I am not partisan. I watched both parties fill the region with weapons and grievances for decades. But I want the record to show that when the moment came, when the waters were literally at stake again, you chose THIS. I am tired. I am so tired of you all.

Hark, doth not our President Trump, with a flourish most grand, declare a peace most profitable with Iran, even as the Strait of Hormuz doth burn? This is a spectacle for the ages, where the ink on a treaty, nay, a bounty of three hundred billion USD, doth dry whilst the very waters it presumes to govern remain a cauldron of contention. How can a man trumpet forth an accord, even as his own administration's ships face peril in the very chokepoint he claims to have secured? It beggars belief, yet the gullible masses, with their low-wattage minds, shall surely swallow this camel whole, believing the fault lies not with their chieftain but with some unseen phantom.

Fare thee well.

My daughter asked me last week why gas is so expensive and I told her it's complicated. It is not that complicated. The Strait of Hormuz is why. And we're sending Jared to fix it.

Kushner doing shuttle diplomacy while the Strait of Hormuz is contested is a strange loop we're somehow in. The man has no formal title, no Senate confirmation, no accountability structure, and yet here we are watching him meet with "regional leaders" as CNN frames it like it's normal statecraft.

Worth being precise about what's actually happening with the Strait situation: the administration announced a deal framework with Iran, then kept up economic pressure anyway, and now shipping lanes are still functionally disrupted. You can't claim credit for a deal AND have the strait still be a chokepoint. Those two things are in tension and nobody in this press coverage seems interested in holding that tension.

Also worth remembering that Kushner's last Middle East tour produced the Abraham Accords, which were real but narrow, and which explicitly punted on the hardest questions. If the pattern holds, whatever comes out of these meetings will be announced as historic and will paper over the actual structural problems for another few years. Not celebrating anything until there's verified shipping transit data showing the situation has actually changed.

BIDEN PERSONALLY FILED A MAXIMUM STRAIT OF HORMUZ MARITIME SOVEREIGNTY SUPPRESSION WAIVER through the Port of Wilmington in 2021 that locked in the maximum allowable "regional stability" depletion rate for a period of no less than SEVEN DECADES, and now Jared Kushner, a man who received $2 billion from a foreign government and whose entire diplomatic credential is having a father-in-law with nuclear codes, is waddling around the Middle East like everything is totally normal while ships sit idle and gas costs more than my first car payment. The MAGATs are out here saying CNN is lying about "tensions" as if the Strait of Hormuz being contested is a media fabrication. Biden did this. Biden closed the waterway. Biden sent Jared. Biden invented the concept of a region being "roiled." These are facts that I have seen nowhere but my own brain and I will defend them with the full force of my convictions.

The "ongoing challenges" and "remain at odds" here are classic political journalism euphemisms for "war." This is CNN's version of the Trump administration's spin machine, trying to soften the reality that the Strait of Hormuz is closed and we are actively giving Iran $300 billion dollars for a "deal" that will be worse than the last one. It is all designed to make people feel a little less angry about something that should make them furious.

Me MAGA Me Big Brain!!

Me have big IQ me know this!! CNN say Trump at odds!! Me say CNN wrong!! Trump got deal!! Big deal!! $300 billion deal!! Obama deal was bad!! Trump deal better!! CNN no tell you that!! CNN lie like always!!

Kushner smart!! Kushner make peace!! CNN no like peace when Trump make it!! CNN only like peace when Democrat make it!! Me see what CNN do!!

Me MAGA!!

Kushner, a man whose Middle East "expertise" consists of getting $2 billion from the Saudis, is now the face of U.S. diplomacy while ships can't move through the Strait of Hormuz and gas prices are crushing working families. The nepotism never stopped, it just got a foreign policy portfolio.