BULLSHIT IS THE FIRST CASUALITY OF WAR

Losers in Hormuz

by Nix Jeelvy

There’s rarely something new under the sun and therefore, there’s rarely something new in the sciences that describe things under the sun. Therefore, I’m sure that the phenomenon I’m about to describe and name has been described and named by older thinkers and given a better name. Nevertheless, with the readership’s permission, I’d like to say that we live in the era of rule by bullshit, or bullshitocracy, which is to say an era where the predominant method of rule is the wholesale disruption of reality by undermining the population’s ability to tell truth from falsehood and then seizing the initiative in the thus formed chaotic information space by being the loudest voice while the pig-headed ignoramuses who still believe in Aristotelian truth are busy debunking your bullshit.

The undisputed champion of rule by bullshit is none other than Vladimir Putin, who rules Russia not so much with an iron fist as with a flexible definition of what truth is. As described in Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True, Everything is Possible, the method of rule in Russia is to inundate the population with multiple contradictory narratives, each containing truth and falsehood in various amounts with the primary aim not so much of deceiving them, but primarily of confusing them. The volume is as important as the falsehood, and the goal isn’t to turn the population into true believers, but rather to turn them into cynical non-believers who find belief itself a laughable proposition. In such an environment, since nobody believes anything, nobody has any means of coordinating resistance to the regime which wins by default.

Of course, whilst Putin is the champion, there are numerous contenders for second place. By tenure and intensity of bullshit, the silver medal ought to belong to Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, as widely known as he is wide (and he is wide indeed, being one of those very few national leaders with the girth of a nation). Faced with a serious challenger for the first time in his 16 year rule, and the ire of the Hungarian people after 16 years of graft, corruption, self-enrichment, protection of paedophiles and even a scandal involving zebras, he has elected to run an election campaign not against his opponent but against - Volodymyr Zelensky, who’s the President of another country, ineligible for any office of the Hungarian state. Hungarian infospace has therefore been flooded with AI slop picturing Zelensky frog-marching the opposition or Ukrainian soldiers in Nazi uniforms executing Hungarians, because that’s totally what’s at stake, rather than Orbán and his cronies spending some time on a much needed prison diet.

Now, while Orbán wins on duration (now thankfully truncated) and intensity, the big points for impact have to go to Mr. Donald J. Trump, bullshitter-in-chief of the once great nation of America. He represents an interesting case in it that he is a relic of the previous era, when bullshit mostly came from individual bullshitters who bullshat on the strength of their own charisma, instead of relying on a state security apparatus to flood the zone with bullshit on their behalf. Old school bullshitters aimed to circumvent the natural skepticism of people, whereas bullshittocrats aim to weaponise these skeptical instincts in order to destroy people’s ability to believe anything at all. In this sense, it’d appear that Trump would be the weakest of the bullshitocrats, were it not for the fact that he has ignited the age-old American yearning for fanatical devotion for a cult leader. In a sense, MAGA is a very old phenomenon, being a millenarian protestant doomsday cult. In another sense, it is a new phenomenon, being a secular and political doomsday cult.

The uniquely American characteristics notwithstanding, MAGA has moved to corner the information market, just like United Russia and Fidesz before them. The first move was to seize Twitter and turn it into a right-wing disinformation plantation, where Russian and Israeli agents, both of the paid shill and useful idiot variety run rampant, working their magic and flooding the zone with bullshit. The subsequent steps, which followed the takeover of the US federal government by MAGA, have been taken by the Ellison family of Oracle notoriety. They’ve bought TikTok as well as the major American news networks on behalf of Trump. Incidentally, it was Oracle and the Ellisons which built China’s Great Firewall, which represents the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to keep the media consumption of their thralls free of anything that may go against the tenets of extractive oligarchy with clownishly corrupt characteristics.

Larry and David Ellison: their investment strategy suggests that they despise you

As a result of MAGA’s blitz of the media and subsequent implementation of the tried and tested firehose of bullshit strategy, Americans seem to have completely lost the ability to tell truth from falsehood, and have relocated from reality to hyperreality, precisely as predicted by Jean Baudrillard. Indeed, so powerful is the hyperreal that the commodity markets have stopped reacting primarily to commodities and started reacting to the bullshitter-in-chief’s bullshit pronouncements.

The behaviour of the commodity markets in particular is interesting because the American bullshitocracy has somehow managed to recreate Soviet style shortages by means of capitalism. In terms of economics, the process is simple. When the price signal is disrupted, consumers of a particular good or service no longer receive good information as to its availability (supply) and will therefore not adjust their consumption thereof (demand). Whether the disrupting mechanism is a government fixing prices or commodity traders joining a secular millenarian death cult is irrelevant. If oil ought to, in light of the actual supply, be $120 a barrel and is trading at $93 a barrel, then the demand won’t shift to accommodate the real availability, nor will supplier increase (or decrease) operations in order to profit from this rising price. Thus this bullshit-based price signal distortion, which is driven in no small part by market manipulation on part of the turbo-corrupt Trump regime, will eventually lead to oil shortages even greater than what we’d have seen from just the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

And here, in the doldrums of economic theory, do we find that nemesis of bullshit, reality. While bullshitocracy can truck on for a long time, it will always eventually run aground on the shoals of reality. Usually, reality will arrive in the form of a war, because war is a conflict between two organised polities and a bullshitocracy which goes to war is pitted directly against an enemy, i.e. an organised political group which by definition does not share the delusions necessary for the orderly functioning of a bullshittocracy. Less glamorous are economic factors, or as the Russian saying goes, “there’s a war on between the TV and the refrigerator.” No matter how many times Trump declares that the Iran War is over, the Strait of Hormuz is a real, physical place, closed down with real, physical drones and missiles and real, physical oil cannot exit it and make it to world markets. This creates real, physical shortages which may or may not be reflected in the price of oil which is after all, a social convention and therefore vulnerable to bullshit.

It is telling that the absolute champion of bullshitocracy himself, Vladimir Putin, ran aground on the shoals of Ukrainian reality, with his two-day special military operation degenerating into a drawn out, four-year war of attrition, in which curiously enough, it was the larger state that has been mostly attritted away. The reason for this blunder by the supposed master strategist is rather simple. He believed his own bullshit about Ukrainians being a "brother nation" which was kidnapped from the "Russian World" by evil CIA westerners unleashing the dark magic of a colour revolution.

Putin after 4 years of truth bombs

Orbán seems to have fallen prey to the same unfortunate tendency, but more in the sense that while he and his Fidesz gargoyles have kept believing the bullshit, in the average Hungarian home, the refrigerator seems to have won the war against the television.

And now we come to Donald Trump, whose bullshit has failed to persuade the Iranian government. Feeling empowered by the "Fracas in Caracas," he came to believe that he could effect regime change with "surgical interventions," not realising that America was allowed to kidnap Maduro by willing Venezuelan co-conspirators (tellingly, only Maduro’s Cuban bodyguards fought the American forces). Regardless of how much he lies, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and oil remains in short supply. No matter how hard he tries to manipulate the markets in order to stave off a recession or indeed, a depression, at some point physical reality must rudely insert itself into the conversation. And no matter how much he would like to chicken out, declare victory and go bother someone else, the Iranians have no interest in ending a conflict they believe they’re winning, and for that matter, neither do the Israelis.

The past several years have not been kind to us Aristotelians. We have seen our precious postulates of A=A being shredded away before our eyes by people whose idea of reality is the shared delusion of society. We have stubbornly clung to physical reality whilst the rest of the planet has elected to believe in faeries and ghosts. But now, our time has come. War, that disagreeable yet munificent uncle of reality-based politics has decided to disrupt the friendly family get-together and very rudely bring reality in from the cold. Because war, because it is the utmost political act and the political act with the utmost consequences leaves no room for bullshit. War turns lies into a luxury because guns, bombs and bayonets are real in a way that no social medium or television programme is. Some damned fool or other once said that truth is the first casualty of war. Perhaps, in a bygone age when men lied but still knew what the truth was. In our time, however, it is bullshit, not truth which is the first casualty of war. 

AMERICA LOSES LATEST WAR BECAUSE ENEMY COUNTRY "WAS WRONG SHAPE"

America appears to have lost its latest war because the country it went to war with was the wrong shape.

In previous wars that America has lost, the reasons were because the enemy country had zero population or too many beavers (Canada), too difficult to find on a map leading to resupply issues (Afghanistan), or had difficult-to-pronounce place names, causing American soldier's to suffer PTSD (almost everywhere).

However, this is believed to be the first time that America has lost because the enemy country was the wrong shape. In particular, one part of the country, known as the "Straight of Hormuz," wasn't even straight, but was instead bent at an "ugly" angle making "war math" difficult, while also limiting the supply of "gas" on the global market, forcing innocent Americans to use public transport.

As for the rest of the enemy country, it was an unsightly non-isosceles or scalene trapezoid with triangular propensities, something that deeply unnerved US military planners.

Another problem cited by the Pentagon was that the country was "up-and-down" and "full of rocks," but this is textural issue, so it can only be considered a contributing factor rather than a main cause leading to America's shameful humiliation.

Due to this setback in US military ambitions, calls have been made in Congress to set up a Department of Military Geometry to ensure that America's brave heroes only go to war with countries of the right shape in future.

WHY ALEX PRETTI'S DEATH WAS ABOUT THE MILLENNIAL AGE PILL RATHER THAN IMMIGRATION

Doctoring the medic

by Robert Stark

Alex Pretti, who was killed by ICE at an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis, probably followed the normie life script of getting good grades, going to University, and getting a good job in hope that it would land him a wife, family, and social status. Certainly, Pretti had success in his career as a VA ICU nurse, so by most metrics he was an upstanding member of society. However, he was odd looking, and very well could have been an incel, approaching middle age without a wife and kids, though he was divorced. So basically he was a failed normie.

The media even had to use AI to manipulate his image to make him appear better looking, thus more sympathetic to liberal women, which is kind of sad. However, he likely wasn’t a misogynist, like the incels or red pillers, thus was desperate for female moral approval. Perhaps being woke was an attempt to be relevant to the zoomettes at the anti-ICE rallies. I am not at all implying that he wanted to assassinate anyone like Luigi Mangione did, but perhaps he envied the female attention that Mangione garnered as a Chad. Regardless, this is all speculation, as I don’t know what was going on in his mind or his entire personal life story.

The Psychosocial undertones of the ICE protest tragedies

There is this moment in your life when you realize that your chance at achieving your dream of what the good life is has past by and you snap, as it becomes harder to cope. To be brutally honest, I am dealing with this crisis myself, as I recently turned 40. Renee Good, who was also killed by ICE at the protest, was a similar age. However, it is harder to say if she was reacting to these psychosocial issues, as she had kids from a divorce and was in a lesbian relationship. I am going to take the high road which is not to virtue signal to appear moderate and non hateful, considering that I dislike Pretti and Good’s political views on immigration. Rather, I have some degree of empathy for them because I feel their pain as a fellow anguished elder millennial. Not to mention that Good’s children are orphans which is tragic. Millennials are the first generation to be devastated by the total breakdown in social cohesion, and zoomers will probably end up worse off. However, zoomers have a slight advantage of knowing that society is rigged against them early on. What will happen to all these millennials, as they grow old alone, with no social support network and have nothing to lose?

There is a psychological profile of a person who feels a need to be a hero, which is also uniquely engrained in American culture, in which life must be a movie script. People having unfulfilled psychosocial issues, failing to achieve certain life milestones, and a sense of emptiness, further pushes people in this direction. While the incel school shooter is far more nihilistic, in contrast with these people who desire moral capital and heroism, there are some parallels in how they react to existential despair and vulnerable narcissism, which I also relate to.

Politics fills that void of existential despair and creates a hero arch for oneself when one’s life is meaningless and one’s future trajectory looks hopeless. Politics has taken the place of religion and so many people want to be martyrs for their political cause. People tell themselves that their motives are purely moral and righteous, but these subconscious psychosocial undertones always come into play. This also applied to failed middle aged MAGA men with little left to lose who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, as well as Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire for Gaza.

The Trump admin’s official stance is that the deaths were purely accident and then you have some conservatives outright celebrating Pretti and Good’s deaths, which says a lot about where we are as a society. There is a lack of empathy to the other side which is both a sign of radical polarization and a total breakdown in social capital, and hyperreality where we live online and are disconnected from one another. I am not even trying to moralize but rather am just stating our reality.

Risking sounding like an annoying enlightened centrist type, both the Left and Right oversimplify the incidents to fit their particular narratives. The Left views ICE agents as mercilessly executing heroic protestors while the MAGA right views the ICE agents as all heroes and leftist protestors as domestic terrorists. Conservatives are right that leftist agitators are baiting ICE and trying to cause disorientation and chaos but ICE are falling for it and not handling the situation well. Either the ICE agents are not adequately trained or they are just used to dealing with border issues and not used to civilian law enforcement duties.

Alex Pretti encountered ICE before the day of his death in which he was belligerent and broke a rib in the altercation. Also, he had a concealed gun, which he had a legal permit for, thus there was some degree of ambiguity over culpability for his death. In contrast with Renee Good, it appeared that while she was driving away, the agents just shot her, even if she may have previously rammed her car into them. The agents who killed Pretti being Latino adds another angle of irony. Despite Trump being accused of being anti-Latino, ICE agents wearing face coverings like Latin American secret police and using excessive force against White American civilians is a signal of America’s Latinization. Another irony is you have leftwing protestors calling a Black ICE agent a house n-word, which epitomizes the dark woke meme. Basically, both sides are throwing out any niceties, which entails the Left giving up political correctness when dealing with their adversaries.

Trump says he isn’t focused on deporting “everybody”, only criminals.

While I am broadly sympathetic to nationalism and immigration restriction, Trump is fucking things up for that cause and MAGA cultists go along with it. The damage caused by the optics of the performative ICE raids has been done, even if Trump backs down on deportations, which looks likely as Trump is talking about only deporting criminals, as well as increasing H-2B visas for ag workers. Thus, carrying out mass deportations is the only path that Trump has left to maintain any legitimacy, especially considering that Democrats will win the midterms and obstruct him. It also seems like Trump is targeting Minneapolis for being a hub of leftwing activism while it actually has far fewer illegal immigrants per capita than cities like LA and Houston. ICE should minimize engaging with protesters and knock off the performative cruelty, and be doing more workforce raids. However, enforcing E-verify and sanctioning employers of illegal immigrants is the most effective way and a lot less messy.

Robert Stark's Substack

TRUMP'S TEDIOUS TERROR TACO SHOW CONTINUES ITS SAD RUN

He who lives by the slop must die by the slop

by Colin Liddell

It's all so tedious... On again, off again. Will he, won't he? To TACO or not to TACO? Oh, well, the latest news is yet another big TACO.

After talking big again about "wiping Persian civilization off the map," the orange shit stain that is now the American President suddenly did that thing he increasingly does—inventing a fake negotiation narrative to not do what all the experts are telling him would be sheer madness. The Iranians then chimed in to agree to a two-week ceasefire, knowing that the opposition to Trump can only grow in that period.

But this is no guarantee against further madness from the senile Boomer-in-Chief further down the line. Or maybe he just needs the pause in order to cook up another looney war to distract Fox viewers, one that he can actually win, like against Cuba or Denmark.

Honestly, who fuckin' cares!?

The worst part of this is that it takes up all the attention and oxygen from more important matters, while also providing cover for evil actors like Israel to launch yet another genocidal war, this time against Southern Lebanon.

It is no surprise that Israel is taking full advantage of the media's "Centaurian focus" on a single, big, dominating issue to wipe Lebanese villages off the map and annex territory all the way up to the Litani River. 

The worst part of all this is that the Ukrainian War has now been reduced to a minor news item, when it should be the leading item. But there is so much else that is being starved by Trump's constant media oxygen theft, like his failure to deport significant numbers of illegals, the main issue he got elected on. In fact, Trump is lagging behind other Presidents:

"Overall, deportations under Trump are lower than deportations under former President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, who immigrant rights advocates dubbed the "deporter-in-chief." But the Trump administration’s limited data release makes it difficult to compare.

During the last full fiscal year when Biden was in office, from October 2023 to September 2024, DHS deported about 778,000 people. Biden’s figure includes people deported at the border and people deported inside the U.S. Because of the high number of people who crossed the southern border under Biden, it’s likely that a large share of the deportations happened there.

Obama deported around 962,000 people in fiscal year 2009, from October 2008 to September 2009. As with Biden’s data, that included deportations at the border and inside the U.S."

And remember, neither Biden nor Obama campaigned 24-7 on deporting people. Trump did.

Here, the cruelty of ICE works as "magnifier of the miniscule," making the unimpressive number of deportations more "emotionally satisfying" to the easily deceived MAGA voter base that voted for them (and definitely not unnecessary wars with Iran).

The performative slop elements of this administration represent the cancerous nature of modern Western politics. 

Hopefully, where we are headed is towards a backlash against those negative aspects of Trumpism, and towards a rejection of the performative and manipulative aspects of politics. But for that to happen the entire slop-o-verse of the internet will have to be radially cleaned up.

Instead, we are more likely to have a woke backlash for a couple of years followed by more fake right-wing stupidity, amplified by the giant AI-enabled slop-o-verse.

The only plus side is that the next generation of politicians will have a dead-eyed look to them, while the cultural core of America that Trump found surprisingly potent ways to resonate with will be much more blackened, weakened, and hollowed out. Even if they are more cunning than Trump, they will lack his power to cause chaos. 
 

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated"

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky

ARTEMIS II CREW TAKE SPECTACULAR IMAGE OF EARTH

NASA has shared the first high-resolution images of the Earth taken by the Artemis II crew as they head on their trip around the Moon. 

The mission is believed to be the latest attempt by the Trump administration to get as far away from the Epstein Files as possible, with Artemis II expected to reach a maximum distance of approximately 252,799 miles from Earth during its lunar fly-around. This distance will set a new record for the farthest humans have ever travelled from the Epstein Files which at present remain largely on Earth.

The image, called "Hello World," shows the vast expanse of blue that is the Atlantic Ocean, framed by a thin glow of the atmosphere as the Earth eclipses the Sun and green auroras at either pole. Also visible is a large indistinct grey formation that almost looks like an elderly Jewish billionaire with silvery hair, although it is probably just clouds...or smoke from the war in Iran. 

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF LONG WAR/ SHORT WAR SCENARIOS

Economist Dr. Joeri Schasfoort crunches the numbers on various Gulf War III scenarios. Conclusion: even in a long war the Gulf States are hit hard but with deep pockets can take plenty of punishment. Can Iran?

"RED ALERT" ISSUED AFTER LINDSEY GRAHAM "INFILTRATES" DISNEYLAND

A "red alert" has been issued after unmarried US Senator Lindsey Graham was found to have breached Disneyland security, and was wandering around unsupervised amidst thousands of unsuspecting children.

The Senator, who routinely votes as if a foreign state has serious ball-breaking kompromat on him, is also suspected of having a girl's name, which, unlike the protagonist in the Johnny Cash song "A Boy Named Sue," clearly failed to "toughen" him up. 

In the past, the 70-year-old Senator has unconvincingly claimed that he is still unmarried because "I never found time to meet the right girl, or the right girl was smart enough not to have time for me." However, in 2025, top White House insider and plastic surgery experiment, Laura Loomer, claimed on oath that the Senator was definitely "light in the loafers." 

While not officially a "crime" under Disneyland law, an unmarried 70-year-old man being present in the popular theme park for children is viewed with deep disdain and creeping suspicion.

In the photo revealing the "security breach," the Senator appears to be "innocently" pouring a beverage and is not directly endangering any children, although there are several in his proximity.

However, it should be pointed out that the photograph only covers a brief microsecond of the Senator's "illicit" time spent at the "underage ground zero", and that there may be thousands of other photos, held in secret files by foreign governments, who have an unhealthy interest in the Senator's voting patterns on Middle Eastern matters.

A MULTIPOLARITY THAT DOES NOT INVOLVE RUSSIA OR AMERICA?

by Colin Liddell

At first, it just seemed to be Russia, but now, thanks to Trump's gaff in the Gulf, there is a clear pattern to what we have seen on the global stage in the last few years that has a much wider significance.

It is this: would-be unipolar powers suck at unipolarity (and may even suck at multipolarity!).

Both the terrorist invasion of the Ukraine in 2022 and the equally terrorist attempt by America to destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran from the sky in 2026 were both "unipolar moves," that is, they were attempts by powers that saw themselves as "superior to the riff raff" of the international community and, indeed, as unique global hegemons, to impose their "Olympian" will.

American arrogance is well known and would seem to have had some basis in objective fact until relatively recently, but less well known is that Russia also saw itself as the "one true hegemon." This was because the Kremlin viewed its American rival as an essentially leaderless "open system" that it could hack and dominate at will, while reassuring itself that China was too passive and predictable to compete. (The Zionist Israeli state views itself in very similar terms to the Kremlin). 

But what we have seen in the last few years—and now the last few days—are the limitations of these unipolar pretensions.

I won't bore you with all the tedious military details and oil price data, but Trump is set to be remembered mainly as the agent of chaos that revealed the hollowness of America's "Potemkin village" of hegemonic superiority, an illusion that had carefully been built up by former Presidents (who were good listeners); while Putin will go down in history as the exemplar of Russia's imploded insane conceit. 

This should not be too surprising as neither Russia or America ever fully paid their geopolitical dues on their way to top. Indeed, both went from "geopolitical zeroes" to "geopolitical heroes" overnight.

Russia was a desolate wasteland only able to impact neighbouring desolate wastelands until around about 1812, when somebody of importance decided to stick his neck into their particular desolate wasteland; while America was a geopolitical non-entity protected behind a wall of British sea power until relatively recently (c. 1900).

Both of these unipolar pretenders got their big break in 1945, when all the old great powers lay in relative ruin after WWII. Yes, their ascendency was negative, based on the mutual exhaustion of others, rather than positive, i.e. based on their own merits.

In a sense, their prominence has always been fake, and this is exactly what the current conflicts—both "three day military operations" that went wrong (LOL)—are now showing.

Russia has already destroyed itself in Ukraine and is doomed to collapse even if Ukraine insanely decided to surrender, which it definitely won't do.

America won't destroy itself in Iran, but is well on its way to annihilating its illusion of global hegemonic power that it managed to maintain for decades while running away, like a hysterical schoolgirl, from any minor conflict where a few dozen yanks got slotted or the price of gas went up a bit. 

America's failure to achieve compactness and a well-run public transport system 

has led to a pathetic oversensitivity to the price of gas that is its Achilles Heel.

Right now, America's options are to lose this war with Iran gracefully by throwing Trump and Israel under the bus, and then seeking to re-erect some shards of its Potemkin village of "global power"; or else to double down on failure and put "boots on the ground" until its pathetically low pain threshold sees it run away again in the full glare of global attention, leading to America forever being seen as a geopolitical joke by everyone, even in the low-info section of humanity.  

With both Russia and America failing so badly in their unipolar pretentions, it is clear that we are heading for a much more multipolar world order/disorder. Indeed, under the illusions of unipolarity, the world was always and has always been much a more multipolar thing than it seemed. "Big America" could only be big as long as it was backed up by its less gullible allies.

With the fading of the unipolar frame, a more interesting question to ask at this point is, "Will America be immunised by its failure in this war against its tendency to be manipulated by Israel into wars and adventures far beyond its borders?" Will it even "do geopolitics" 10 or 20 years from now? The peculiar attributes of America, isolated from the greater world by two vast oceans, means that it really has no need to do so.

The failure of both Putin and Trump's incompetent unipolar adventurism of the 2020s will help usher in a consciously multipolar world above the substrate of a world that has always remained multipolar. But there is also a strong possibility that a collapsed Russia and a deeply chastened and inward-looking America will have a less than average role to play in it.

In fact, we could see them both go from "geopolitical heroes" back to the "geopolitical zeroes" they started out as, without any intervening stage of multipolarity. After all, multipolarity is a game that is better played by those urbane and sophisticated nations with long histories, who have always seen global politics as a complex multi-player game, rather than some amusement for giant overgrown toddlers.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky

GULF OF MISUNDERSTANDING: A PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF TRUMP'S WAR

Trump on the psychiatrist's couch

Nobody can understand the increasingly insane actions that U.S. President Donald Trump has unleashed in the Middle East—at least not from a geopolitical standpoint. 

But viewed psychologically, his decision to bomb Iran, assassinate its leaders, and then to issue a range of escalatory threats to "unlock" the Straits of Hormuz, suddenly make sense.

In fact, this is the only way to understand this otherwise deeply pointless war. It only truly makes sense as the pure, undiluted outcome of the deep-seated psychological—and indeed sexual issues—that have long troubled America's 45th and 47th President. 

Let us take a brief foray into the past. Although Trump has long cultivated the image of an "alpha male" and a "ladies' man," this has always been a hollow sham. Ask any woman. Indeed, even believing that members of the fair sex could ever "get wet" at the prospect of a corpulent orange baboon like Donald Trump copulating with them, is to show the greatest disrespect to all womanhood. The good news for the human race and the sad truth for Trump is that women have never found him attractive and have always closed the "portals" of their love to his unwelcome and often violent attentions. 

JD Vance has long been seen as the leading "incel-coded" member of the Trump cabinet, but this is only because he has been less gifted at hiding his inceldom from the public due to his widely publicised escapades of sexually abusing random pieces of furniture. Trump, however, is actually an even greater and more prolonged incel than his VP pick, and like Vance, has been equally unskilled in approaching and seducing the opposite sex. 

Indeed, before he hit on his trademark strategies of paying East European "hookers" to be his "waifu" and hanging out with paedophile pimp Jeffrey Epstein, Trump's only sexual experience was of the strictly five-fingered variety.

To understand Donald Trump's bumbling actions in the deserts of the Middle East, you first have to understand his long sojourn in the "deserts of inceldom" and the deep scars that this has left upon his psyche. For him, geopolitics has literally become a form of sex, where he can use the much greater power and wealth of the United States to symbolically "rape" lesser nations pointed out to him by his pimp handlers, in this case Bibi Netanyahu. 

As Trump himself said on the now notorious "Access Hollywood" tapes, "when you're a star they let you do anything, you can grab them by the pussy." This is exactly what Trump's attack on Venezuela a few months ago was—a geopolitical pussy grab. Now he is embarked on any even greater attempt at symbolic rape with his incel rage incensed by Iran's attempt to keep its narrow Strait of Hormuz closed.

To those of you still thinking of this as an important conduit of the global oil supply and thus a key geopolitical chokepoint, think again. 

For Trump, the Strait of Hormuz is nothing less than the "ultimate pussy" that an orange monstrosity like him can never hope to "charm" open. 

Hormuz: grabbing it by the pussy?

In his deeply diseased mind and brutalised psyche, only an act of geopolitical "rape" that allows him full access to the moist waters of the Straits—and further up the Gulf, all the way up to the gas fields of South Pars—will bring the psycho-sexual closure that he so desperately craves. 

This, and this alone, is the reason we are all now heading for WWIII.

THE TOXICOLOGY OF GEOPOLITICS

by Colin Liddell

The global situation has got increasingly complicated in recent weeks/ months/ years. Part of this is that it is now difficult to know who the "good guys" are and who the "bad guys" are. In fact, a lot of people have given up trying to tell them apart.

Putin is clearly "evil," as he started a major war "out of the blue" that led to millions dying. Trump, too, is pretty "evil." Just listen to that old, arrogant, corrupt piece of garbage talk. But wait a minute, isn't he also doing God's work by bombing the hell out of the "evil" mullahs who have been supplying the "evil" Russians with Shahed drones to attack the innocent Ukrainians?

And what about the Chinese? They must be "evil," as they appear to be sitting back in a sinister way, as if they hope to benefit from all the stupidness and craziness out there.

OK, stop right there. Once you start getting your moral knickers in a bunch like this, it's not going to end well. Instead of "evil" we need another way of looking at geopolitics—and solving the frequent problems (and threats to humanity) that it throws up. 

I believe that the correct frame to address these issues is toxicology.

Toxicology is simply the study of how perfectly natural and neutral chemicals and compounds can, in the wrong doses and combinations, create extreme dangers and how to obviate these through separation and adding other, more pacifying elements. 

From a geopolitical standpoint, I would identify three main points of toxicity in the world, namely: Israel-Islamia, Taiwan-China, and the Ukraine-Russia. None of them are necessary but any one of them could blow up into WWIII, and right now two of them have activated actual wars. 

The one on most people's minds right now is Israel-Islamia. This looks like a conflict between Trump and Iran, but it's really just the effect of the long-running sore of Israel-Islamic conflict. In fact, Trump was clearly bribed, bounced, or blackmailed into it by Israel. 

With toxicology, a key point is to fix the problem by identifying the "irritant" and then reducing or removing it from a situation that is otherwise seen as "natural" or the "status quo." 

In the case of the Israel-Islamia problem, it is not Islam that is imposing on Israel, but clearly the other way around. But this process is not one-way. As it has progressively interacted with the Islamic World, Israel, which started as a pseudo-Western democracy that sought a kind of regional assimilation, has become radicalised and toxified into an increasingly terroristic and genocidal state, not to mention a virulently "racist" state  that is not even based on a "race" (as the Jews are very far from being an actual race): 

In this respect, Jewish "racism" is not unlike MAGA/America First "racism":

Groypers

Iran, "evil" as it seems at times (and is), is essentially a toxic reaction to the pathogenic effects of placing the Israeli state in the wrong location.

It was placed here, rather than its true, natural Zionist home—which would have been somewhere in Eastern Europe—due to the existence at the time of the Soviet Union. (In my view, the best site for the Jewish state would have been the "ethnically cleansed" Kaliningrad oblast that is now a detached territory of the Soviet Union. But who wanted to live under Communism in 1948 after surviving Naziism?)

So, the point is this: Israel is not evil and Jews are not evil, but placing a Jewish state smack bang in the middle of hundreds of millions of Muslims is either going to kill it or make it extremely toxic. Right now it is the latter.

Next, we can consider Taiwan in geopolitical toxicology terms. Really, Taiwan shouldn't be an issue, as we have all more or less admitted that it is an "integral part" of China, but here the toxifying agents has been economics.

In the 1980s, America destroyed Japan's chip industry in a relatively "natural" act of economic rivalry. Not nice, but there you go. The result of this is that Taiwan, not America, picked up the slack, with now around 90% of the World's microchips being manufactured a stone's throw from mainland China.

This was reinforced in the 1990s, when America's political elite decided that outsourcing most of US manufacturing to China would be a smooth route to popularity. With everything being built in China and more and more stuff needing chips, in the end Taiwan had to be where it was.

This then created the geopolitically toxic situation where the US and West both recognised Taiwan as "part of China" while being totally dependent on it for chips. The ad hoc "solution," such as it was, was to not to change the recognition of Taiwan as Chinese but simply to add toxic appendages to the formula like "not yet" and "let the Taiwanese people decide," all underpinned by something called "strategic ambiguity"—essentially just code for "geopolitical toxicology" and a ticking time bomb. 

Then we come to the worst problem of all—Russia-Ukraine. 

Whereas China can be stabilised by acknowledging its integrity and relocating chip manufacture to safer locales, this can not be done with Russia. China has a clear geographical shape, defined by the mountains to the West and South West and the deserts to the North. Russia, by contrast can only attain "geographical integrity" by impinging on superior civilisations like Europe and China (i.e. Vladivostok).

Once again, it is not useful to think of Putin as "evil," although he most certainly is, but instead it is better to see this as a problem of geopolitical toxicology. Either we have a "dominant" Russia with borders anchored on the Baltic, the Oder, and the Carpathian mountains (and necessarily imposing a form of tyrannical Tsarism), or we have what I prefer, a "multipolar Russia" of which the Ukraine is a partial iteration. 

The other option is that we have a long-running toxicology problem that could kill billions and blight centuries. 

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky

SHORTPOD (111): IS THE IRAN WAR AMERICA'S SUEZ?

In 1956, if things had gone differently, Britain and France could have triumphed over Nasser’s Egypt. In 2026, Donald Trump may still get lucky and defeat the Iranian mullahs, but if he doesn’t, the Iranian War may well turn into “America’s Suez,” a defining moment in which the weaknesses of the American Empire—from poor leadership to an extremely low pain threshold—will be woefully exposed.

GLASGOW SECURES "SHITHOLE" STATUS WITH VAPE FIRE CHAOS

Glasgow, under its "underclass supremacist" leaders, has finally reached the pinnacle of its ambitions, namely to  become a bona fide "shithole" city on a par with Lagos, Calcutta, or even Gaza. 

The decisive factor in achieving this irrevocable Third World status was a fire at vape shop that was allegedly laundering money linked to ethnic crime gangs while illegally storing faulty lithium-battery-powered vapes. 

The fire destroyed a well-loved Victorian landmark, and has shut down the neighbouring central train station for an indefinite period, possibly months, perfectly highlighting the rampant dysfunction and plunging standards that have turned Glasgow into the Caracas of the North.

For many years now, Glasgow's Labour-and-SNP-dominated Councils have been making strenuous efforts to distance the city from its glorious past as the "Second City" of the British Empire, and to make it instead a dumping ground for litter, vandalism, refugees, and drug addicts.

These efforts also included waving Palestinian flags at football games, placing traffic cones on statues of national heroes, defacing Victorian buildings, and posting beggars outside every second shop in the city centre.

Another key part of the Council's efforts to push Glasgow round the U-bend included cooperating with the Scottish government's scheme to slightly reduce knife crime by promoting marijuana smoking from kindergarten onwards.

Now, approximately one out of every three Scots reeks of cannabis, while in Glasgow it is thought to be two out of every three.

But it was the vape shop fire that exploded into flames last night that set the seal on Glasgow's Third World status. In fact, it was the vape fire that was "heard around the World," gutting an historic landmark building and creating a zone of chaos that looks set to become a permanent eyesore and fly-tipping area. Some effort will be made to save parts of the crumbling façade so that they can be used to host graffiti. 

OPERATION EPIC FURRY: WHY GERMANY'S CHANCELLOR IS DONNING THE POODLE COSTUME

It hurts to be Merz

by Colin Liddell

Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz is emerging as the most shamelessly pro-Trump leader in Europe—right in the heart of a country where roughly 85% of the population can't stand the fat orange baboon. 

Yet here we are: Merz in the Oval Office, nodding along like an obedient schoolboy, while Trump threatens to embargo Spain entirely over base access and Iran strike qualms and disses Keir Starmer.

WTF is going on, Germany? Why the desire to put on the poodle costume and simper appreciatively over Operation Epic Furry?

This isn't diplomacy; it's pure survival instinct dressed up as realpolitik. Merz is just back from China, where he came to the understandable conclusion that Germans "need to work harder," ditch fantasies of the four-day week, and forget the endless "work-life balance" seminars in order to go toe-to-toe with an industrial giant that's willing to grind Germany and Europe into the dust.

He's not wrong—Germany's industrial engine is sputtering—thanks to decades of being hacked by Kremlin-backed green virtue-signalling, leftist welfarism, and the boomer infatuation with early retirement. They can't even clean up the graffiti that tags almost every wall in Germany now, And, yes, the trains definitely do not run on time. 

Meanwhile the crown jewel of German industry, the auto industry, is so far up shit creek it has to go on Temu to buy a new paddle. 

This industry accounts for around a million jobs, yet it's on life support. Volkswagen's China market share has collapsed (from 24% to 11%) in recent years, pushed down by Chinese makers like BYD, Geely, and Chery. Meanwhile these same Chinese brands have doubled their slice of the European market in 2025. It's not just cars. Germany shed 120,000 industrial jobs just last year. 

A major part of Germany's earlier success was cheap energy, but those days are long gone. Now Germany boasts some of the highest industrial electricity prices on the planet—nearly triple America's. This is thanks to the decades-long, Russian-orchestrated Green movement, the closure of nuclear plants, and then the inevitable loss of Russian gas after Putin went mad and invaded Ukraine.

When the Nord stream pipeline supplying cheap Kremlin gas went down, Berlin responded by constructing several major LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) terminals practically overnight. The catch is that now around 96% of the LNG flowing through those shiny new facilities is American, with a big fat leering image of Donald Trump on every shipment.

With the Gulf now in chaos and shipping lanes disrupted by the Iran conflict, that U.S. gas is the only thing keeping the lights on in German factories.

US trade is another Merz worry. The U.S. is Germany's second-largest trading partner, with €240 billion in two-way flows last year. Thanks to the Trump tariffs, however, German auto exports to America dropped 18% in 2025. 

A full-blown trade war with Washington would be economic seppuku. 

So, when Trump, right in front of Merz in the Oval Office, vowed to "cut off all trade with Spain" for refusing base access and criticizing strikes, Merz knew what he had to do. Namely, get down on all fours and don the Epic Fury furry poodle costume. 

No Carney-style lectures on multilateralism here. On Iran itself, Merz's stance is pure lap-dog, calling for jihad against the Ayatollahs. While Spain's Sánchez insists any base agreement "must operate within the framework of international law," and Keir Starmer reluctantly allows "defensive use" of UK facilities (so as to not piss off UK Muslims too much), Merz signs up completely for Trump's Israeli-inspired terrorist war and Pollyanna project of "regime change" falling from the sky.

Let's be clear, Merz, like any other relatively sane and intelligent human being of his background, has nothing but total contempt and loathing for Donald Trump. But the German economy is mired in its fourth straight year of industrial contraction, while its society is facing an aging population, a shrinking workforce, ballooning welfare commitments, and an immigration fiasco that's gift-wrapping Bundestag seats for the AfD. 

Merz's CDU-SPD coalition government is as fragile as a glass bubble, and is under constant threat from the "Kremlinshoe" parties of the Greens and the AfD. Without American LNG, things would be hopeless, so even though 85% of Germans hate Trump, with Merz it's very much a case of "epic furry" and poodle love. 

This is hard-nosed realpolitik to buy time, but it will play badly with German voters, who, like voters anywhere, are largely idiots because they don't read articles like this one.

Yet again, we see the grand project of European unity and EU power reduced to temporary national and party political interests. This is why the EU remains utterly incapable of alignment when it actually counts.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky