Possibly because history tends to repeat itself. Especially in case of US starting conflicts there. Could easily see the Operation Ajax being what he based the book on.

Look at its past.

I mean, the savior in the story is literally called the Mahdi, which is also the savior in Shia Islam.

The Russian leaders weren't a bunch of bloated pedophiles tho, were they?

Snorting crude oil

Peyote

Raw milk.

Listen, there may be a drug at the gas station called spice, but do NOT smoke it!

Will it help you forget or will it make you see every potential outcome?

It was not known to me but based just on the description of melange and how Paul saw reality after taking it, it should have been obvious

The degree to which the O&G industry has co-opted the Republican Party cannot be understated. This only really took root under Ford, when guys like Bush and Cheney were promoted into the upper echelons of the political leadership while in the midst of converting historically Dixiecrat Gulf Coast states to the Republican Party.

Democrats were late to the party, having more heavily aligned with the NY-based Finance Sector and CA-based global shipping magnets. It's been the outsized demand for energy in Silicon Valley that has really collapsed the Green-ish Democrats into O&G by way of Obama/Trump/Biden Era rapidly escalating demands for electricity. And even then, Dems are consistently in favor of generic economic growth while Republicans are hyper-fixated on O&G growth exclusively.

The Emperor pitted two historic rival houses against one another, with the expectation that they'd annihilate themselves and leave room for upstarts to take their place. The Bene Jesuits had seen this cycle play out before and knew it would preserve the Emperor's power at the expense of the advancement of the society as a whole. So, they backchanneled a breeding program between Atreides and Harkonen - on the Atreides side via Lady Jessica and Duke Leto, on the Harkonen side between Feyd-Rautha and Margot Fenring - to yield the prophesied optimal off-spring, the Kwisatz Hadarach.

But all of this ran afoul of a third agency, the Planetologists of Dune, who believed the planet's perpetual condition of spice harvest was undermining what could be a new kind of Eden for domestic development and liberation. Their efforts to irrigate Arakus at the expense of the global galactic trade (catalyzed by Lady Jessica's unlicensed male hier) was what ultimately undermined both the Emperor's political schemes and the Bene Jesuits' breeding program.

In the end, the primary antagonists of the Dune series are the environmentalists, fighting a guerrilla war against a Galactic Oil & Gas Industry.

Just like in real life!