Or actually—it wasn’t a Mao suit, but rather a Sun Yat-sen suit, worn and pioneered by Sun Yat-sen.

Or wait—no, it actually is a Mao suit, because that is what everyone nowadays call it, especially after a century, and by the nature of how language works (the eponymous Mao suit being the most common denominator of a name).

Or—no. It doesn’t actually matter, does it? “Hasan Piker wears clothes”—yes, I am sure his detractors and fans are devastated but really, who cares? He’s a streamer, a nobody, a somebody, it doesn’t really matter, at the end of all things.

It doesn’t matter in the sense that most people who absorb this story will file it away as a minute irrelevance in their mind. Is this like the knowledge that the atom can be split? No, not even one-one-millionth of that. It matters to me in that I have deep personal passion for fashion, and likewise that I am of the opinion that the clothes we choose to wear are indeed political, and they can reveal much about our inherent and explicit natures. To the extent I want humanity to wear clothes at all, our future clothes should reject past paradigms, and be shed of the conservative lean of old clothing styles; our future must be bright, brilliant, glorious, and new.

To take an example, let us dissect the form as well as the function of the Mao suit, tracing its history back from its inception to the present.

The Mao Suit: Past and Present

In Qing China, strict sumptuary laws existed which enforced rigid authoritarian rules on appropriate dress and hair styles. Sun Yat-sen pioneered this style of military dress as part of his nationalist drive to Westernize China; to bring China up to military and economic par with the rest of the Western powers circa the early 1900s.

You can see the similarity plain on a comparable Western military uniform (in this case, American during WW1):

Effectively, Sun did what countless other people in China were doing—taking what worked in a Western European context and adapting it for Chinese usage in a Chinese context.

This is not, of course, to say that Europeans possessed some inherent superiority in dressing themselves or anything like that—but rather a reflection of the material reality that somehow, Western powers had been able to militarily overcome and keep defeating China for over at that point 60 years (from the first Opium Crisis to the Boxer Rebellions). China, both the state and the people, embraced changely slowly at first. They were quick and keen to adapt militarily, but when even the relatively modernized Chinese fleet got wrecked by the supposedly weaker Japanese one in 1895, that instilled a great panic across all classes, leading firstly to the Boxer Rebellion, and, more importantly for us, the casting out of everything, including styles of dress.

If you’ve been losing wars, for years, for decades, against supposedly inferior enemies, at a certain point, you will toss out all remaining cultural pride and get downright weird with the things.

This desperation, to try new things, even to the spheres of how you clothe yourself, coupled with an autocratic structure that abhorred any change, resulted in the Sun Yat-sen suit becoming the premier outfit of every Chinese person, not even military unit, following the tumult of the 1911 Revolution. It took several decades, and 1949, for the suit to truly become ubiquitous. By then, of course Mao and the Communists wore it, as did practically everyone else.

As the long decades marched on, the original impetus for the dress became lost to fading memories and unread ancient tomes, to the point that the suit ceased being Sun’s and became Zedong’s eponymous Mao Suit, the only people who wore it being passionate communists.

And then, after a decades, the trend stopped. The reasons are complex, yet quite simple. The Mao Suit was a symbol of national resistance against hostile foreign powers; those hostile foreign powers had been successfully defeated and driven out, and no longer posed a threat. China needed less a symbol of resistance and more those same foreign powers to come into China, with their foreign outside capital, and invest in Chinese industries. Thus, Mao led on and prioritized initial rapprochement with Western capital, first by pursuing a diplomatic relations with America under Nixon.

After Mao’s death, new Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping of the Chinese Communists continued this process. Deng’s underling Hu Yaobang was made the face of the reform movement and delivered the Mao Suit its killing blow: Yaobang hung up the then just-Mao Suit, reserving it for ceremonial events only, and mostly adopted the Western style suit-and-tie. Millions of other Chinese Communists then followed suit (pardon the pun).

To both a domestic and international audience, the message couldn’t have been clearer: “we are no longer fire-throwing radicals; our aim is no longer a violent global revolution, as preached by us for decades in that classic Mao suit,” they seemed to say.

It wasn’t the only message China sent; they of course up-ended their entire legal and propaganda system to make Western investment and capital possible in a domestic context. And, it worked. China changed just enough to entice Western dollars and technical know-how, which they used to build the now the second or largest economy in the world, depending on which metric you value more.

Nowadays, President Xi wears a Mao Suit like Yaobang, only very rarely, in ceremonial occasions (e.g. state funerals), opting for the classic suit-and-tie most days of the year.

China today is an advanced, modern, hypercapitalist society. Their social safety net is minimal, work hours are long, and worker abuses rampant. Yet, it also has the markers of what any passive observer what consider ‘advanced’. Today, right now, you can walk down the street of many Chinese cities and see the roads filled with humanoid robots, as if we were actually living in Asimov's future. There are cop robots, delivery robots, traffic robots, and perhaps hundreds of more models being developed right now. And that’s just robots. On drones, on AI, on industrial output, on electrical output and capacity, and so much more, China is eating our lunch and forcing us to pay for it.

All of this is to say that if President Xi started carrying Mao’s Little Red Book everywhere, wearing a Mao suit, he’d quickly be removed by consensus by a China that desperately wants to hold onto its domestic material edge and impressive economic growth.

For perhaps the first time since at least the 1750s, China has finally reached a form of definite parity with the West, America and Europe alike. The Chinese political classes would not tolerate a revanche to Maoism, just as American political classes would not tolerate a revanche to 1600s Puritanicalism.

Hasan’s Mao Suit

Hasan wore the suit for several reasons, ranging from mundane (it was a nice, custom tailor-fit suit bought in Shanghai, and we all know if you don’t wear that fancy dress more often you’ll feel bad for spending money on it) to indeed political (the Mao suit represents a broad ideological spectrum of Leftism that Hasan supports).

To those who care enough to look at the picture, yes, it is plainly a Mao suit, primarily worn for those two aforementioned reasons. Of course, Mao Zedong is controversial, and it is lamely easy to go after Hasan for emulating someone many even in China have at least a complicated relationship towards (to say nothing of the oft-ugly Western view of Mao, of him being at least a tyrant, and often an outright bloodthirsty, stupid tyrant).

It would also be foolishly trivial to attack Hasan Piker, an American man of predominantly Turkic descent, for culturally appropriating what is decidedly neither Turkic or American. He even wore it in a culturally offensive way—the suit is meant to be worn at official or highly ceremonial events, and he took it to a College Democrats meeting, hardly a place demanding even a modicum of decorum! Yes, yes, he can be cancelled for this, he’s cancelled, Hasan Piker is over party, yes, yes, but what else?

Why He Did It; Or, Understanding the Left: The Madness Inchoate

To be knowledgeable of the world is to be rendered mad. This madness creeps, sets in, and transforms an otherwise conformist mind into one wine-dark with riotous thoughts.

Ape became man in the plains across Africa, and in that world, without language of actual speech or writing, all the terrors of the world were those we could behold with our own eyes and basely communicate with grunts and yells. But when we could speak, form words, we could thus pass down our histories, and eventually write them down.

It’s impossible to go an entire modern life without knowing about the horrors of modern life, without knowing about the Holocaust, the Indigenous genocide, slavery in the Americas, or the horrible history of your own country and background. Especially nowadays, when infinite knowledge is but a click, a thought, away.

And in spite of our often willful blindness, we aren’t totally blind. Our phones are made by enslaving children to work in mines. Those who live in big cities see daily the untold, downtrod misery of the unhoused. Our world is riven with torment and torture, with a mere veneer of cleanliness on its surface, meant to drive us all mad.

I myself have fallen prey to being a witness to the horrors. I’ve seen a child no older than five missing their lower torso. I’ve seen a father holding his toddler’s blown-open skull, tiny bone fragments and bits of brain dripping out. And more, and more, and more, and all of it from just one incident, the Gaza Genocide. There is more though, more in that and more in all the torments ongoing in the world today, day after day, every day, than I could witness in ten thousand lifetimes.

To be knowledgeable is to know all that, and more. Hasan Piker is a well-read individual, well-taught, to be sure. A double cum laude from Rutgers, living in a multimillion dollar house in West Hollywood, largely self-financed, would have to be.

It’s made worse by also being a leftist. Leftists especially love to immerse themselves in misery, not out of any sadist reason but out of an analytical, rationalist impulse. Marxism was born from Hegel, which itself sprung from the enlightenment and rationalist inquiry, which sought to dissect the material world into things that could be understood and measured. From the same paradigms came evolution and relativity; thus arose Marx, to understand capitalism. In Marx’s time, there was likewise plenty of misery abound. His comrade, Engels, wrote extensively on the working conditions of Englishmen, sometimes with conditions as terrible as one might encounter in a later 20th century concentration camp.

Whither this misery? After all, if they could understand its source, it could perhaps be cured. In this way, Marx was no different than other 19th century pioneers, seeking to upend centuries of dogma to render the world a better place. As Lister dissected and revealed the human biology, so too did Marx and Engels do so with human political economy.

Marx did indeed find something similar in economy as Lister found with bacteria: Capitalism; or, the exploitation of the vast majority working class by a minority owning class, was the source of much of the present ills in society. People suffered in poverty because it made a select few rich individuals richer and fewer in number. He went on to expound that Capitalism was but one stage of humanity’s economic development. Like Darwin, he found evolution at work, only a more social evolution: from tribalism, to Roman slave imperialism, to feudalism, to capitalism, then communism.

Anthropologists and peoples of non-European contexts have of course disproven the latter formulation; there was no Hesiodic precession of the Ages, from one to the other as Marx supposes. Some places never had feudalism, for instance, or Roman-style imperialism. And, the Soviets as well as every other Communist power in the 20th century, famously rebelled against the notion that one needed to go to Capitalism at all; they sought to skip it entirely1.

Yet, capitalism is a thing, a distinct notable pattern of existence different than ancient tribal communities or feudal living arrangements. And yes, definitionally, capitalism matches the Marxist definition: in that a select few people own certain types of property (e.g. stock), which in turn makes them richer and more well off than the vast majority of people, each of whom labor more and more directly with the goods that make the capital owner actually rich.

As for human misery, yes, things could always be better, even for those who have it best. In the American context, it’s why the Presidency has switched parties every 4 years since 2016. People are clearly dissatisfied, and it isn’t just Hasan Piker.

If the so-called century of American humiliation will have an accepted start point, it will clearly be September 11, 2001. The downing of the Twin Towers and further attacks led America to nearly three, perhaps four or even five decades of constant counterinsurgency warfare in the Middle East against intractable nationalist and religious resistance forces. The allure of American military dominance was further shattered this June 2026, when the United States capitulated in Versailles to a supposedly weaker Iran, despite the US possessing a modern fleet.

All the while, other countries are outstripping us economically and materially. We don’t have high speed rail (first built in the 1960s in Japan), we don’t have cheap accessible healthcare (like Europe built beginning post 1945), we don’t have cheap abundant electric cars (like China right now), and we most assuredly do not have anything resembling an Asimovian revolution in robotics (also China). Our robots are all actually just puppeteers, using VR tech to move robotic limbs around.

To a knowledgeable observer, this indeed sounds familiar to Qing China’s own predicament post-1895, when Sun and others started wearing Western clothes.

America in recent memory has been wracked by decades of madness and stupidity. Not only are we losing war after war, not only are we materially and economically moribund, but now we have Donald Trump as the most disastrous, most corrupt President the country has ever been cursed with. His removal is a must across every metric: Constitutional, legal, moral, geopolitical; his continuance a stain upon America’s shreds of virtue; he is in every way a shadow of the vile Qing Empress Dowager, Cixi.

Given Trump’s attire is typically a suit-and-tie, what better way to rebel against this tyrant then by shedding that suit-and-tie and putting on a Mao suit? That may ultimately be the reason why Hasan put on his Mao suit, and why he continues to wear it somewhat occasionally. Of course, Hasan has also taken to wearing a classic suit-and-tie himself, so it may just be a case of having cake and wanting to eat it, too.

At the end of the day, of course, none of this matters: from the reason Hasan wore the Mao suit to the reason he doesn’t wear it constantly, who cares. And yet, I do, and so do you, if you’ve read this far.

This Matters Because I Care A Lot

What you wear says a lot about you and your society. Each reflects the other and thereby reveals its truth. When the future peoples dig up our corpses, the clothes they find clung to our dried forms will fill their libraries. And personally as well as frankly: we are all too nakedly conservative in our dress forms. I believe firmly in the new, in the exciting, in the fast and dramatic. There is a boldness to be had, to be represented, in how we ought to dress.

So, forget the Mao suit. Forget the suit and tie entirely. Burn it all down, and we will be better off for it.

Let’s start with the classic suits and ties: they are firstly male. In a world where half the working population is female, this clearly cannot be the standard. Yes, female alternatives do exist, but they are all trying to harken to male suit-and-tie patterns. A suit tailored for women is still a suit, after all.

What world do we want to live in? I say, not the world of the 19th Century, where these fashions first became popular with mass mechanization of clothing and tailoring. Suits and ties are worn because they are easy to mass produce, and they have become the business standard for this exact reason.

Nor do I want to live in the 1900s in Qing China. While the feeling of American decay, even collapse, is palpable, we are not headed to a renewed Civil War2. We are in a blip of decay, perhaps, but a better, renewed future is possible within our lifetimes. Not necessarily an apotheosis of Man, but at least a betterment of conditions. As such, the Sun-Mao suit is inappropriate, even as Leftist symbology.

No one alive should want to return to the old world. Forget the Roman togas, burn the Mao suits, shred the suits and ties. The brave new world of tomorrow will be populated by brave new peoples, whose clothes on their back will born from our naked imagination.

Our future will be better, will be different, will even be alien, to our misinformed eyes. Consider then the fictional worlds we create, the wonders we build in our imaginations: that must be our future, of possibility brushing up against impossibility.

I especially have been touched by the creations found in movies and television shows recently, and that is where I will conclude.

If I could command us all to dress3, like some video game Overgod, here are some styles of clothing I would love to see more of, across the American spectrum:

For the Men: Doublets, Longcoats, and Leather (so much leather)

For the Ladies: Dresses and Metal Chains and Sharp Instruments

Unisex: Long, Elegant Robing

You can, of course, adapt and change these however you wish, including color and pattern as well as fit. These are just some of my personal favorite designs in recent fiction.

Just please, don’t accept the mediocrity of suits, or the inanity of Mao, when so much possibility exists across a spectrum of culture.

Cry ‘Fabulous’!, and let slip these hautes of couture!

A victory in 2028 need not portend a 2030 midterm defeat, nor a tough, nail-biting re-election in 2032. Democrats can make substantial, transformative policy choices beginning in 2029 that can deliver them an electoral majoritarian constituency that can both keep them in power and deliver for the American people.

We can, in short, have our cake and eat it too.

The Goals of National Development

There are two main goals in creating a national development strategy. The first is rather obvious: to improve the country (its people and constituent components) material conditions versus the present status quo. If we are doing X, a national development strategy would be content with doing more X, so long is there is a material benefit to the American people. This is more important than any cultural or social goal an administration may have—on this metric alone are they judged by the electorate.

The second goal contours the first, and gives it form and meaning: parity. More X, yes, but how much more? This is answered by parity, the notional thesis that America, as a great power, ought to retain some level parity with the next closest great power. On a very practical level, this means that the United States, about as rich and as large as China (if less populated) ought to be able to produce goods on par with China.

Of course, this runs totally counter to the neoliberalizing ideology that has run Washington since the 1980s, wherein manufacturing capacity was offshored to countries with cheaper labor markets to increase profits, China being the forefront beneficiary of this. While it did work in making American stock portfolios blossom and balloon, it also devastated America’s ability to build infrastructure and goods at anything approaching scale.

When a company offshores, it’s not just the factory edifice that leaves, but it’s the entire institution: the workers, their knowledge, the education system that outputs trained workers, the communities that prop up around industrial towns, the know-how of complex machine tools that make manufacturing at scale possible, and so on. If we were to start reshoring corporations, it would take years for the United States to output what we used to output domestically only fifty years ago, and it would take decades for the United States to reach anything approaching parity.

Yet, parity is a worthwhile goal, for the alternative is a frightening one. As the United States begins to lose its role as a global reserve currency and clearinghouse with the rise of China, what does the United States have left? All of our advanced military goods take way too much time to build and are way too reliant on Chinese rare earths to ever be useful in a military context. Even in peace, what do we have? Our manufacturing sector is moribund, our population is aging and shrinking in size; the only growth sector in our economy outside technology is elder care.

If all the Democrats do with the 4 years they’ll have from 2028 is transform America into a more efficient nursing home, they will have deserved their loss in 2032.

So the goal for national development is twofold: improve America’s material conditions while building the capacity to reach parity with China across every comparable and available metric. The former will give the latter the breathing room it needs to succeed (if Democrats lose in 2032, this plan becomes far more difficult and perhaps even irrelevant, for Republicans will just continue destroying this country), while the latter gives the former the dimensions and context it needs to function.

Targets

Electrical capacity

Electrical capacity is the limiting factor for all other modern development, sitting upstream of everything. We cannot build new steel mills, semiconductor fabs, data centers, electrified transport, and the like, without more electrical capacity. No amount of tax cuts or breaks can magic new charged electrons out of thin air, in other words. To say nothing of domestic civilian consumer costs: if Democrats don’t meaningfully lower everyone’s energy bills starting in 2029, they can go ahead and surrender the country in perpetuity to the Republicans.

Status Quo: The US has around 1300 GW (gigawatts) of capacity, compared with the PRC’s 4040 GW. The US adds 50 GW per year while the PRC adds 400 GW.

Target: Increase capacity by 600 GW over 5 years (2029-2034), reaching a total of 1900 GW by 2034. By 2031, we should be adding at minimum 120 GW annually to our capacity. At minimum, we are looking installing at least at several thousand circuit miles of new high-voltage transmission.

This is an absolute floor, not a ceiling to production. It will still leave us with under a third of China’s overall projected capacity, yet also be three times the current amount we are adding.

Semiconductors

A modern economy needs semiconductors like humans need water. It’s not just AI image generation that semiconductors render possible, but everything: all of our phones, our computers, our cars; every single technological thing that exists in the real world presently contains a little microchip made via semiconducting.

Status Quo: The US produces 10% of leading-edge chips, and is firmly reliant on complex ROC (Taiwanese) supply chains right next to the potentially hostile PRC. Even if PRC missiles don’t rain down on ROC fabs, we will still be reliant on a very distant and disparate global supply chain. Considering that semiconductors are also critical for national defense (we wouldn’t want to say, have our ICBMs not work anymore due to a lack of semiconductors), a clear ramp up in domestic production is needed.

Target: Double US leading-edge production to 20%, advanced packaging to 25%, and mature node capacity sufficient for domestic automotive and defense demand, all within 5 years.

Missile Munitions

When talking about state-to-state great power parity, missile munitions cannot be ignored.

First though, it should be noted that while being anti-war, pro-peace is a domestic virtue, and while we ought never to be an aggressor or conqueror, all the wisest in history agree, from Sun Tzu to Vegetius, and beyond: that in times of peace, prepare for war. Obviously, a strong defense deters attack; in nature, a bear is less likely to charge a man yelling and beating his chest than a meek man who hangs his head towards the bear’s maw. But more crucially for a modern context: it’s also great for domestic economic stimulus; the arms industry employs a lot of people, which in turn makes us all richer, which turns employs even more people. Much like horse archers in the pre-modern era, military Keynesianism is a thing that just works. It worked for America in World War 2, it’s been working for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, and it can work for us again.

The ideal future, it should be said, is that the US vastly, vastly expands its munitions and ends up in zero wars, committing zero casualties. To build the world’s largest, most powerful armada and keep it maintained as such without ever using it excepting in national defense: that must be the goal of every US politician; if this target becomes a tool for warmaking, our plowshares beaten into swords to slaughter the innocent—then I pray the future generations have the courage to turn their swords against those politicians.

For munitions, specific focus is given only to missiles, not missile defense. Employing a tit-for-tat missile defense strategy is materially infeasible, until ‘sci-fi lasers’ AKA direct energy beam anti-missile weaponry becomes actually usable at scale, and there’s no guarantee that will ever happen. It is thus cheaper and better for ships and bases to absorb hits rather than focus on shooting everything down, which with advanced missiles, is highly difficult anyways. This entails a change in military doctrine: accept losses while overwhelming the foe with firepower, from matching enemy missile production with missile defense production to overcoming enemy missiles with a mass production edge; to win a missile war, build more missiles. This was the same logic used in WW2 for ships, tanks, and airframes; to beat the Nazis and Japanese, we just pumped out far greater quantities of offensive technology than our enemies could compete with. Quantity alongside sufficient quality, especially for unmanned missiles, should be the target.

Status Quo: The PRC produces roughly 1200 high-end missiles per year. The United States currently produces 600-800 high-end missiles per year.

Target: Reach a 2:1 annual missile production ratio with the PRC. This means the United States would need to produce 2400 high-end missiles per year within five years.

Naval construction

Similar for missiles, the United States is laggard when it comes to ship production to the PRC. Using the United Kingdom’s Naval Defence Act of 1889 as a framework, the goal here to create a benchmark for production; that is, the United States should produce 1.5:1 hulls per year that the PRC produces. For instance, for every destroyer China makes per year, the United States should make 1.5 destroyers.

We are using hulls rather than tonnage (the traditional metric) because in modern naval warfare, more ships equals more missiles; a heavier ship just means a ship that takes longer to build and more to maintain. The goal is also set at yearly production, not underlying overall count because the goal is, even in the event of a Pearl Harbor-esque disaster, for the United States to quickly bounce back and out-produce its adversary. It should also be noted that these are only peacetime numbers; in wartime, the ratio should be even higher.

Status Quo: The PRC produces 3.5 destroyers per year and 2.5 attack submarines per year. The United States produces 2 destroyers per year and 1.2 attack submarines per year.

Target: 5-6 destroyers per year and 4 attack submarines per year within 5 years.1

Defense industrial capacity

It will be impossible to build munitions without building out defense industrial capacity. This entails building new rocket motor plants, new missile assembly facilities, as well as increased rare earth output, missile seekers, and feedstock. Gallium arsenide and gallium nitride are key, and gallium is among the minerals the PRC restricted in 2023. Ammonium perchlorate also has a supply chain constraint, with just a single major domestic producer. We’ll also need new naval surface combat yards to build out the destroyers, and a net new nuclear submarine reactor facility.

Status Quo: 12% global rare earth mineral output, near zero refinement. 2 naval yards produce 2 destroyers per year, with 2 naval submarine yards producing 1.2 submarines per year.

Target: With domestic and allied mines, produce 70% of demand for lithium, cobalt, graphite, and other rare earths; rare earth separation capacity at least 40,000 tonnes. For naval production, each existing yard is expanded, with 2 net new destroyer yards and 1 net new nuclear submarine yard.

Economic impact: Will cost the US government roughly $65 billion per year and net around 200,000 new jobs. Current costs for shipbuilding sit at $40 billion per year.

Housing

Housing is the largest single line item in the median household budget and the principal explanation for why American living standards have lagged behind American incomes for a generation. No American administration can succeed without addressing the rising cost of housing. Further, without building out more housing, this whole project of national industrial development is rendered moot; no point in building anything, from fabs to missiles, if there are no affordable homes for workers anywhere.

Status Quo: The PRC produces 6~7 million urban units per year (2019 figures)2, now falling sharply. The US produces 1.4 million per year, with 3% being factory-built.

Target: Produce 2.6 million units per year by 2034, with 25% being factory built.

Special note on how: These two below are non-negotiable.

• Federal preemption of exclusionary zoning near jobs and transit — by-right multifamily construction, overriding the local veto (the property-rights-compatible version, since it restores an owner’s right to build rather than restricting it).

• A national building code to replace the thousands of local ones, which is the specific barrier that has prevented factory-built housing from scaling.

Rail

American freight rail is the most efficient in the world by ton-mile yet runs almost entirely on diesel. Electrifying the trunk lines removes a huge chunk of carbon emissions, lowers operating costs permanently, and insulates the logistics backbone from fuel-price shocks. It is the highest-return decarbonization investment available in transport and is currently unfunded.

At the same time, consumer high speed rail is clearly must from a modernization aspect. Europe and Japan have had high speed rails for decades; we are now two decades behind the PRC on HSR construction.

Status Quo: The PRC has 48,000km of HSR operational. The US only has 735km, and mostly only in the Acela Corridor, and that is only partly high-speed.

Target: Within 5 years, 2 new corridors are opened: California and the Texas Triangle, with the third (Acela) expanded to encompass the fuller Northeast. For freight, we target 15,000 route-miles of trunk lines being electrified (~10% of total freight).

Healthcare

With an aging, shrinking population and incompetent management to boot, healthcare is one of the great cost diseases most American households will face at one point or another. Here we look not to China for parity but to Europe, which unlike China possesses a robust social safety net for healthcare.

Status Quo: The US spends 17.5% of its GDP on healthcare compared to 10-12% of comparable nations in Europe (each of whom live longer lives).

Target: Reduce national healthcare expenditure to 13-14% of GDP, while increasing both the standard and longevity of living; to live longer, healthier lives cheaper is the end-goal.

A special note on how: The true mechanism that makes this possible will not necessarily be Medicare for All or a single payer system. Ultimately, who pays is the same regardless of system; in Medicare for All, it is the taxpayer who is (presumably) progressively taxed to provide this government good. In the current system, it is combination of employer and employee who pay; ultimately, the payer is the American consumer, always. What will enable this policy, truly, will be rate-setting. This entails a total bureaucratic overhaul of private insurance, with the government directly setting rates for care and drugs for domestic consumers. Not only will this end surprise/balance billing, mandate site-neutral payment, but it can also mandate through governmental fiat the lowering of healthcare costs.

Of course, we could go further, to a single payer system, but the transition from 150 million being on employer-provided insurance to that insurance being automatically guaranteed by the government will have to be seamless, and it will take much time to set up, and run into political risks when delays and issues inevitably happen. Rate-setting reform is something that can be enacted immediately.

Batteries, robots, steel, and more

What else should we build? Much more and many things! A robust modern industrial economy must be able to build things, even if those things are not necessarily giving us the highest profit margins, for many of these things are dual use and thus critical in national security. Offshoring machine tool plants to China to save a cheap buck in the 1980s is all well and good, but now that we need to step up naval production to reach parity production with them, it’s far less good.

Status quo:

• Batteries: 200 GWh/year, mostly imported (vs 2,500 GWh/year for PRC)

• Robotics: 285 per 10,000 workers (vs 470 per 10,000 for PRC)

• Machine tools: Net importer, small share of global production (vs world’s largest producer for PRC; produces a third of global output)

• Pharmaceutical API: Import-dependent; most generic APIs sourced abroad (vs dominant global supplier of generic APIs and precursors for PRC)

• Steel: ~80 million tonnes/year produced mainly via coal-blast (vs 1 billion tonnes/year for PRC at 54% of world output)

Target (by 2034):

• Batteries: 1500 GWh/year, domestically produced

• Robotics: 700 per 10,000 workers

• Machine tools: Triple output

• Pharmaceutical API: 60% of domestic consumption

• Steel: Retain tonnage output (sufficient for domestic demand) but replace 40% of coal-fired plants into more efficient electric arc furnaces or hydrogen dri.

Households

All the above policies, and policies to be, should be judged on a consumer household level: are they making American lives materially better? This doesn’t mean costs should be lower per se (which would indicate a deflationary process AKA an economic recession), but rather more directly than American incomes should be higher. We can anchor this improvement in material conditions most directly via two metrics, rising median household incomes and life expectancy.

Status quo: Median household incomes have been stuck at around $83,000 per year, while life expectancy is around 79.0 years. Combined household spending on healthcare, housing, childcare, and education equates to roughly 55% of median income.

Target (by 2034): Median household incomes increasing annually by 2.5%. Life expectancy increased to 80.5 years. Combined household spending on healthcare, housing, childcare, and education reduced to roughly 42% of median income.

A special note on how: Beyond doing everything mentioned in this plan, which will be a definite macroeconomic boon and get us most of the way there, the following specific policies will be needed:

1. Sectoral bargaining: wage and standards floors set industry-wide rather than firm-by-firm, so that raising pay doesn't put any single employer at a competitive disadvantage. This is the European mechanism (and the one thing the PRC lacks) that decouples wage growth from the union-versus-employer fight, and it's the highest-leverage single policy for median wages because it lifts the whole distribution's floor at once. More than Taft-Hartley reform, more than mass-unionization, this alone will do much to uplift every American’s income.

2. Full employment as explicit macroeconomic policy: the Fed has in recent years been pushing for full employment, as has our fiscal policy. We should make it explicit and aim for full employment, always. Everyone who wants a job and can work a job should be able to get a job.

3. Immigration reform: The US is currently below population replacement levels. Without a substantive increase in new migrants, we risk becoming Japan: a massively larger old population dependent on a sliver of the youth to survive. Increasing the labor supply, especially in sectors where demand exceeds supply, is a must.3

4. Sliding-scale universal childcare as a share of income (standard is 7%).

5. Expand provider funding for childcare.

6. Paid family leave, which reduces the years of paid childcare a family needs.

7. Free community college and public university tuition, or income-contingent repayment that caps payments as a share of income.

8. Build out infrastructure for vehicle safety and continue lowering overdose deaths.

9. Lower firearm homicides/suicides via mandatory licensing and medical/mental certification regimes.

Institutions and Instruments

At least seven new Federal bodies must be created or rebuilt, each specified with its authority, its legal basis, and the failure it exists to prevent.

The National Development Commission.

~600 professional staff at 85% of private-sector compensation. This body will have the power to designate priority projects, publish the official National Development Plan, run review, and report annually against every numbered target. Its consequential power is consolidated permitting: designated projects receive a single federal decision on an eighteen-month statutory clock.

Why: because the targets cross a dozen agencies with conflicting mandates and no one accountable for the aggregate. The compensation figure is not a specious perk; an agency that cannot hire transmission engineers cannot plan transmission, which is why federal technical capacity has been progressively outsourced to the contractors it is meant to supervise, which has seen costs balloon and output slow down.

The National Development Bank.

$400 billion in paid-in capital leveraged to a $2 trillion dollar balance sheet, lending at thirty-year tenors into binding-target sectors at Treasury plus a modest spread, with ten-year staggered board terms. Precedent runs through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which financed much of American war mobilization, and Ex-Im.

Why: because commercial lenders will not otherwise write thirty-year paper against assets with fifteen-year paybacks and political risk. Losses are expected and budgeted.

By pursuing preferential risk-weighting for lending in binding-target sectors (with Federal first-loss guarantee on qualifying project finance), a transmission or fab loan will consume materially less bank capital than an equivalent commercial real estate loan. Priority lending becomes more profitable per dollar of bank equity, and allocation shifts without a directive being issued.

The Office of Strategic Procurement.

Consolidates multi-year purchase authority across Defense, Energy, and Transportation Departments, issuing ten-year binding offtake for vessels, munitions, transformers, transmission equipment, rolling stock, and processed mineral output.

Why: because annual appropriation is the specific mechanism by which American industrial capacity fails to get built. The federal balance sheet is the most valuable industrial asset in the country, currently deployed twelve months at a time. The OSP will operate on a five-year budgeting cycle; once established, it is meant to be insulated from the winds of political change.

This also ensures demand certainty, with a five-year binding offtake, appropriated in advance. The state should be telling suppliers far enough ahead, with sufficient legal firmness, that they build the capacity to fill all necessary orders.

The Federal Permitting Court.

An Article III court of specialized jurisdiction, 180-day docket, standing limited to parties showing concrete injury. Congress controls lower-court jurisdiction and has channeled review this way before.

Why: because American infrastructure is delayed by litigation risk rather than adverse rulings. Projects die in anticipation of court, not from losing. Congress has direct Constitutional power to direct the Courts to cut it out, in other words, and stop holding up necessary projects.

The Skilled Trades and Engineering Corps.

Apprenticeship expansion, training capacity, and expedited occupational visas in the trades the targets require; jointly under Labor and Homeland Security.

Why: because labor as the binding constraint on every target, and no existing body is responsible for producing four hundred thousand tradespeople. If domestic supply of labor cannot be met, then an international supply will be needed; hence, DHS.

The Reconstruction Zone Administration.

Administers thirty competitively awarded zones. Reports to the Commission.

These thirty zones are awarded competitively to states and metro areas. Winners receive pre-permitted land, delegated permitting with statutory shot-clocks, bank priority, workforce funding, and front-of-queue interconnection; winners commit to output targets, prevailing wage floors, and by-right industrial and residential zoning within the boundary. Performance is published in an annual ranking.

Why: because Federalism is a boon and an asset, and should be fully embraced in a development strategy.

Two legal constraints bind this: conditions attach only to new money and never to existing streams, because NFIB v. Sebelius struck down conditions that coerce a state by threatening funds it already relies on; and zoning preemption must rest on the Commerce Clause directly rather than on funding leverage. Both are defensible, and both will be litigated.

The Strategic Equity Commission.

Federal support above a defined threshold should automatically convert to non-controlling equity, meaning economic participation plus a golden share carrying veto over foreign acquisition, continuity-of-operations obligations, and domestic-production covenants.

Why: because the public assumes the downside and should hold the corresponding upside, and infrastructure the nation depends on should not be transferable to a foreign buyer at one owner’s discretion. Non-controlling is a legal requirement, not a preference; uncompensated controlling stakes raise takings problems under the Fifth Amendment, and provisions aimed at named firms raise bill-of-attainder problems under Article I. The structure must be general, prospective, and tied to benefit received.

Funding

Other than raising income taxes for top earners (a wealth, or a billionaire’s, tax), we could also consider a progressive consumption tax as the spine, with capital income taxed at ordinary rates with realization-based anti-avoidance, a carbon tax with border adjustment, and a land value tax. While we’re fixing the tax code and simplifying it (a progressive consumption tax would allow us to get rid of most of the tax code4), we should also make Social Security made permanently solvent through cap abolition paired with benefit-formula adjustment at the top (12.4% above cap). This gives us a recurring revenue pool of near $4.9 trillion, approximately matching current revenue collections, but one that should have more a positive distributive impact to American households vis a vis the status quo.

It should be noted, of course, that most of everything in here is debt-financed. We are not seeking to balance the budget as an end-all, be-all good. Most economists will agree that pursuing such a goal is both economic as well as political folly. So long as we are raising enough revenues without harming household median incomes, we are doing well.

At the same time, lowering healthcare costs while raising household incomes will make available trillions of new dollars in capital, which is what makes this National Development Plan ultimately affordable, in spite of the high sticker price for some items.

Sequencing

2029-2030
Statutes enacted, commissions staffed, banks capitalized, risk-weighting rules issued, zones designated and awarded, procurement converted to multi-year, domestic transformer manufacturing and solid rocket motor capacity capitalized as first Bank priorities.

Little of scale is built in this window, and this is on purpose: appropriating at scale before the execution machinery exists reproduces the CHIPS experience, in which authorized money sat against a process that could not disburse it, and the wrong lesson was drawn about the money rather than the process. Before a single inch of material is laid down, we need to build the framework that enable all future construction.

2030-2032

Grid and transmission at peak construction. Fabs are now being built. Naval yards are being reconstituted. Munitions lines reaching rate, with housing supply responding as zoning clears. Mid-term review at month thirty, with authority to reallocate up to a third of committed funds; the flexibility annual appropriation provided, retained at a cadence construction can absorb.

2032-2034

Capacity comes online. Targets scored publicly against the published numbers, by the Commission. The second 5-year capital budget (2034-2039) is drafted from the results rather than from ambition.

Constraints

Skilled labor

The binding constraint on every target. The program requires roughly 400,000 additional electricians, welders, pipefitters, and process engineers who do not exist and cannot be produced in under four years. Apprenticeship expansion begins in year one and still arrives late relative to the construction curve. The offsetting instrument is direct recruitment of trained tradespeople and engineers from abroad; the one structural advantage the United States holds that the PRC cannot replicate. China cannot import skilled labor at scale; the United States can, and currently does not. It is the least-used instrument in the American toolkit and the fastest-acting one available.

Transformers, turbines, and rocket motors

Large power transformers carry roughly four-year global lead times, and solid rocket motors are constrained to two suppliers. Both make domestic capacity a year-one banking priority rather than a downstream consequence, because the electricity and munitions targets are otherwise physically unreachable regardless of how much downstream capacity is funded.

Litigation

American projects die from process rather than opposition. The permitting statute is the load-bearing wall of this budget. If it is struck or narrowed, then this whole plan is pointless.

Constitutional exposure

Three provisions carry real risk: the land value tax on apportionment grounds, zone conditions on coercion grounds under NFIB, and the permitting court’s docket limits on due-process grounds. The authorizing legislation should be drafted with severability throughout, so that losing one instrument does not unwind the structure that survives.5

Reversal

The capital budget outlasts the Congress that enacts it, which is the point and the vulnerability. Durability must be engineered: five-year appropriations that create contractual liability enforceable against the government, bank governance insulated by staggered terms, zones distributed widely enough that reversal carries a constituency cost in most states, and a statutory cycle that makes the succeeding budget an obligation. None of this binds a future Congress, which retains full authority to repeal; it raises the real and political cost of doing so.

Execution quality

Capital is abundant in the United States and competent project management is scarce. This is why the Commission pays market rates, why its staffing is a year-one milestone, and why the sequence front-loads institutional construction over disbursement. The Manhattan Project hired the best of the best to win the war, and the National Development Plan operates on similar logic. When it comes to the question of existential national survival, we shouldn’t save pennies on the dollar on key hiring decisions.

For my part, I deeply regret supporting such a flawed candidate, and I join over 150,000 Mainers as well as millions of Americans nationwide who have found with disgust that he lied when he said that there were no further allegations, and that he has continually lied before and after. This realization is dawning on some more slowly than others.

Rapists and potential war criminals, reformed or not, do not belong in the Senate. The fact that rapists and war criminals presently occupy the Senate does not mean we should debase ourselves and our polity by perpetuating that evil, that harm.

Still, the fact I supported a clearly flawed man demands an answer. I don’t have the typical answer; for one, I supported him fully, beyond the Senate, up to and including the Presidency. I did not do so because of any one policy or attribute, but rather the sum of all he was; beyond all his then-visible flaws, I saw a man with a boundless passion and desire to win, to not go quietly into that good night of fascism and Trumpism forever.

When Donald Trump attempted to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election, culminating in his backers besieging and near-sacking the Capitol complex, we entered into a new phase of American history. No more will the guarantee of a peaceful transfer of power, in place since the 1864 Presidential election, actually be guaranteed. A violent era awaits us in our futures, and without correct leadership, we will surely be consumed by the violence and fall into tyranny.

When I looked at others in the Democratic field, the supposed frontline figures against this rising tide of fascism, who did I see in early 2026? On the left, I saw losers. AOC, who stayed attached to Biden’s hip as he careened off the electoral cliff in 2024? Bernie, who is far too old perhaps to even run for reelection in his seat? Ro Khanna, who makes blunders and bluffs for every other coin flip? No—none of them, none of them were fighters, or more importantly, winners. Sure, they won their races, but winning national power, holding it? No, never. In the center, I of course found corrupt imbeciles, the likes of Newsom and Slotkin, who either attached themselves to the sinking institutions of big Trumpist capital or Israel or both. And the right—the abyss—Hillary Clinton and her ilk—I found the heart of darkness itself: Jeffrey Epstein, his island, and all who ventured there.

No, no one, in the Democratic Party could both win the election in 2028 and ensure that they take the oath of office, and stay in office. At least, that’s what I saw in January of 2026.

Let me restate the obvious: Trump (or his successor) will try a counter-constitutional coup. This is inevitable. We should stop pretending it isn’t.

And if Trump does attempt something—anything—there must be swift, and severe consequences. The rule of law, of the very order of things, is at stake. If we have a repeat of the Merrick Garland DOJ, we should very well surrender the country to fascist authoritarians, for we might as well have done so by our own ill-action.

So when Graham Platner came onto the scene, with his fiery rhetoric, his background of literally being in the line of fire, I was instantly enthused. Or so I have said.

To tell it true, I did eek and eep at his tattoos, earlier in 2025. I thought him to be a crude parody of Ezra Klein’s then-recent demand that the Democratic Party ‘draw no red lines’ when it came to candidate recruitment. I condemned him, in my own way, even.

But then people moved on. Polls and fundraising indicated that Democratic voters believed that Platner supposedly listened and learned, did the so-called “work”, by going to therapy. He had the backing of his wife, his community, his family. His faults became easier to paper over with time. When the first accusation dropped, and it was revealed it came from a Republican operative who supported Brett Kavanaugh, it was easy to dismiss out of hand as a fabrication, or partisan exaggeration. I believe many of us, myself included, fell into a pattern of wishful thinking when it came to Platner. I certainly never would have supported someone who had actually raped anyone, to be very clear!

And, over time, he actually got stronger: more fundraising, more supporters. Yes, 150,000 people supported him in Maine, but so did millions across the country. I saw him then less as someone to support and more as a tremendous tidal wave of gravitronic energy. Utterly unstoppable and unshakable, he had a glide path not just to the Senate, but to the White House, if he wanted it. He had something no other present Democrat in the party had: raw Charisma, something that no one between the ages of 40 and 80 in the Democratic Party has demonstrated since Barack Obama.

So, I bowed myself to the inevitable. Surely as the sun rose, Platner would rise. And, my heart would kindle with that rising sun, that rising Platner, with a sort of rising hope for the future. Platner would seize the long-dormant mantle of Obama, and deliver unto us the Change and Hope we were all promised, all those long years ago.

Then I discovered this week he’s a reprobate liar who is credibly accused of sexually assaulting at least two women, but perhaps several more. I’ve even heard tell of abuses and assaults he performed while overseas, but those need more corroboration. Just as the Presidents of the United States, Clinton and Trump alike, Platner should be behind bars and forced to pay tort reparations to the survivors and their families for the rest of his natural life.

But do I turn my heart to despair? No. Not yet. There is hope, yet.

Abdul El-Sayed is a fighter. If he were elected President, he would not let fascism remain rooted within our institutions. He would seek a just reestablishment of a coalitional, democratic mandate that achieves the broad social democratic welfare agenda that liberals, socialists, and progressives alike (the core base of the Party) have been pining for, for decades. And yes, the core base of the party is going to get what it wants.

I’m sorry, I need to turn my hackles onto the centrists for a moment. You cannot honestly stand up on a high horse and try to negotiate down from universal healthcare, or other core base demands. You will not convince the pharmaceutical and medical industries to not back fascist, pro-January 6 Republicans over you by supporting a more mealy-mouthed version of universal healthcare, and more importantly, you won’t convince the base. What the base wants, the base gets because guess what? The base doesn’t just vote and donate; they volunteer, they pay attention, in ways that even the best ads can’t replicate. You cannot win a primary without the base, and as we saw with Kamala 2024, you cannot win a national general election without that base.

If El-Sayed runs for President, he has my support. He is, to the best of my knowledge, a family man, a PhD for crying out loud; never a war criminal, never a rapist—a moral man, with the right ideas and right temperament, who supports popular policies the base also supports. But, having noticed El-Sayed’s arrival onto the national stage, my heart turns a-flutter. What other glimmers of hope exist, waiting to be uncovered? We need a sole, singular figure of authority who can lead us out of the darkness of Trump. If it is El-Sayed alone, he has earned my support. But if others exist, let them come forward, and let the best candidate win.

For if the best candidate does not win, if we are stuck with not an El-Sayed but with an AOC or a Newsom, we might as well give Trump the crown he so pines for.

January 6 2.0: The Coming Storm

It’s coming. It’s inevitable. So, what do we do?

I don’t know. No one does, not really, likely not even the Republicans know what they are doing. But very likely, they will have learned from their prior mistakes. The next time a Democrat wins the Presidency, they will not suffer the fate of releasing their hold onto power peacefully. They will rally their forces, and attempt to storm the capitol once more and change the results of the election by force. And, if we are not careful, if we are not prudent and strong, they will get away with it.

What we need right now isn’t really a what but a who. I thought that who might have been Graham Platner. Now hope soars in my heart at El-Sayed, and the unforeseeable others who may yet arise.

One of those people will unite the Democratic Party and win the nomination. The nominee will then go on to best Trump in the November 2028 general elections. And then, that nominee must go on to ensure that they are able to seize the reins of power from Trump, and keep that power away from the hands of the fascists.

It all comes down to one person. In our constitution, in our present political economy, the President is a solitary power unto themselves. They alone can move, can act, more so than any organization such as the DSA. If the President can start and end wars, can murder untold thousands overseas without even a warrant from Congress, the President can do anything.

And so our Presidential candidate must be brave, must be kind, must be moral, must be just, but most importantly: must be brave. For they will encounter more than hostile court cases declaring fraud, but potential arrest or even death; the fascist state’s fatal bullet meeting their polite brow, like Pinochet delivered unto Allende. Those are the stakes in 2028. No Democrat should run for President with an illusion of there being lower risk; the stakes are truly and categorically apocalyptic for both sides.

So go forth Abdul!: crush Haley Stevens, and climb to the podium of reclaimer of the Obama mantle. Others: challenge him if you must, but always listen to the voice and the wisdom of the people. If the people do not want you, bend your knee to El-Sayed; just as El-Sayed will bend his knee to you if the positions were reversed. And most importantly, for everyone else: never forget January 6. It will happen again. These Republicans will burn our Capitol down before handing power over peacefully. Only the right leader in the right place at the right time can stop them.

A great realization has suddenly gripped the political establishment of the Democratic Party: they have lost their voters, the institutional bedrock that allowed them to lord over the Party for decades. The hue and cry has gone up; the electoral disaster for the center portended for years has finally arrived. Not only has the DSA won seats in NYC, but now they’ve started to win in Colorado, knocking out a 30 year incumbent(!) in the process:

The first warning sign came in 2024, when the party and its nominee failed to turn out millions of Biden voters, handing Trump his second term. While many establishment Democrats could and do still blame the voters for their folly, the buck stops at the top, the same top which oversaw a rise of baseline inflation numbers to double digits, and which saw an unfit President effortlessly renominated and then removed from the ballot.

New York City’s 2025 mayoral election was the next portent. Zohran Mamdani was fated to be an also-ran at worst, or a Maya Wiley at best—a “moral” victory for the Left; in other words, just getting the message out there (about affordability, or universal healthcare, or abolishing the police) would be the victory in itself. There was no way Zohran could win; just getting him on the debate stage, to make his message known, would be the prime victory socialists could dream of achieving. This is precisely the ambition the hard left has had for decades, going back to when debates started getting televised. Every two or four years, the socialist left and libertarian right sets their goal on the most attainable height for them: just being allowed to deliver their message to a primetime audience.

But then, Zohran won. Not only just the primary, but the general election. And, in case people thought this was a one-time fluke, that Zohran possesses some ur-political talent never again to be repeated, the Democratic Socialists of America have added another two impressive heads to their collection of incumbents overtaken: Adriano Espaillat and Diana DeGette. Both DeGette and Espaillat are incumbents in the House; DeGette herself has been there for 30 years!

In a normal world, with normal elections, Espaillat and DeGette would not lose their reelections. Espaillat would coast to reelection, absent any major gaffes, and DeGette would die in her seat like so many other members do; the seat having transformed into nothing more than familial sinecure one might find more in the ancien regime of France than modern America.

I’ve written before about the centrality of Israel as the core explanation behind this fall in the center’s fortunes, but it bears repeating: supporting Israel is the prime electoral killer in Democratic primaries. Absent Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the Democratic Party’s bear hug of that genocide, these centrists might have survived. This should be obvious, and should have been prior to 2026!

Since 2015, when Israel’s kahanist leader, Netanyahu, showed up to Congress without an invitation from then-President Obama, to damn and shame the President’s JCPOA peace deal with Iran, Israel has been increasingly unpopular in the Democratic Party. You cannot show up to the floor of Congress and attack the popular Party’s popular President’s policy and expect to remain beloved by that Party, especially if you represent an entire country. And, this of course was the same JCPOA that Trump ripped up, which in turn led Trump to start the war we just lost with Iran, which will lead to who knows what terrible, unforeseen future. You cannot be a loyal, partisan Democrat and stand side-by-side with this pro-Republican, war criminal hack. It’s that simple.

Of course, everything Netanyahu and Israel have done since 2015 has only escalated and made more plain how much Israel is an enemy of not only the Democratic Party, but of the United States. Just like arguing that Biden should serve another four years, this is like tilting at windmills for the Democratic Party; the sun has set on this argument—you will never convince a majority of Democrats ever again that Biden is not too old to run for reelection, just as you will never convince a majority of voters that Israel and its ruling coalition does not hate the Democratic Party and everything we stand for.

This cannot be undone, just as the genocide in Gaza or the Holocaust, or any other infamous crime, cannot be undone. It has been done. Now we must live in the wake, in the aftermath of the horror.

The DSA tendency has benefitted from being amongst the first to be morally correct on Israel and Palestine. Of course, Leftists are often correct first; the difference from the DSA and other past Leftist tendencies is that the DSA organized themselves electorally from the ashes of the 2016 Sanders campaign, overtaking the then-moribund organization and transforming it into what could best be likened to the DLC for the Left, though it is far more mass politics than that. As such, given that they’ve been organizing since the first Sanders campaign, their continued ballot success was both predictable and seemingly inevitable. As soon as Israel began enacting their final solution for the Palestinians, whatever center held for Israel within the American Democratic polity washed away, replaced only by fervent opposition to the zionist entity.

The very first thing any Democrat must do to survive electorally is to drop Israel. This is obvious, but must be stated plainly. Winning a Democratic primary, across most states, means winning a plurality of votes. That’s it. It is against the law to bar people from running in primaries, from establishing loyalty tests or even donation tests, in order to vote. This means that the DSA, or anyone, can run in Democratic Primaries, and win, if the voters choose them. As such, Democrats who hope to win must secure a plurality, and as a plurality will henceforth oppose Israel no matter what, Israel must therefore be opposed no matter what. How that opposition takes shape will depend on specific policies; the treatment of South Africa and Rhodesia are examples for policy potentials. I imagine both the DSA and the non-DSA will have their preferences; both could benefit from that struggle of debate (as I keep repeating).

But, the point is clear. No more will Democrats suffer candidates whose sole purpose is “to keep the Left pro-Israel” (Schumer) or candidates who “see Israel in my dreams” (Stevens).

But, excluding Israel, what exactly does the DSA believe in? Here I turn to the notion of how to beat them; not that I think it’s a good thing that they be beaten, but rather, that I think that without getting challenged in this way, they will never actually win, and that their definition of victory may be ill-defined.

Here, I think of Tucker Carlson. Hear me out: just as he turned to Mike Huckabee, our ambassador to Israel, and asked him what that means (about several zionist talking points Huckabee kept repeating), we all should do the same thing to democratic socialism.

Democratic socialism. What does that mean? First, we must define socialism. Many will provide a million different explanations, but for most, what it means is the precursor to communism, with communism itself being little more than the nonreligious eschatological realization of Abrahamic prophecies. Communism—a classless, stateless society, rid of want, pain, suffering; is this not Christ’s millennium, the Mahdi’s return, the Messiah’s new Israel? It is—and it is not. Unlike those other traditions, socialists believe that through advancing and improving material conditions, such a heavenly state on earth can be arrived at through human toil and work alone, without divine intervention. Agree or disagree, it is the central thing that drives them. When Darializa Avila Chevalier or anyone else talks about abolishing the police and prisons, or other seemingly impossible, unworkable ideas, they are talking about nothing more than the eschatological realization of Marxist philosophy.

As it is, that’s not a bad thing. A core critique of liberalism that I have is that it lacks an eschatology; what the liberals to me always seem to say is: if you want to picture the future of humanity, imagine the stock market’s boot on humanity’s face, forever. The world as it is is the world as it is; things may improve but there will always be classes, always be borders; there will always be cops, be repression, be genocide. It offers absolutely nothing to those who want to be part of a multi-generational movement, one that exceeds the bounds of their own lives to transform the future.

The problem for the center and for liberals, beyond their lack of eschatology, is that they lack the simple, crisp policy alternatives the DSA Left offers. Consider the policies many DSA candidates champion:

• Single-payer Medicare for All (or just universal healthcare)

• Defunding the police/refunding communities

• The Green New Deal

• Taxing the Wealthy

These policies enjoy, in various framings, majoritarian support in the Democratic Party. This isn’t because these are radical, fringe ideas, but because they are incremental continuations of Obama’s policies, merely expanding upon the framework the incredibly popular former President championed.

The whole ideological precept of the Obama administration was this idea of progressive, incremental reform. The Affordable Care Act, Dodd Frank, the Stimulus: none of these were meant to be the final word on healthcare, on financial reform, on domestic economic policy, and so on. Bernie Sanders, and then the DSA, merely picked up the banner Obama carried, hoping to keep pushing incrementally on these policy areas. What, after all, is M4A if not ACA’s logical continuation?

Obama, of course, was not a radical. His beer summit, pitting a cop together with his victim, was the best example of this. He tried to bridge the gap in the party, between those who still loved private insurance, loved the police, loved carbon fuel, loved the rich, and those that did not. To the extent it worked, it is a moot point now, for many of those people became Republicans, even fascists, anyway. This does in turn mean the Democratic Party can no longer rely on wealthy and corporate donors as reliable wheelhouses (considering they are mostly all fascists nowadays). But really, considering how grassroots-funded campaigns often still win, and that the attentional power natural charisma can overcome even a deep funding gap, it should be no problem for Democrats to abandon corporate PAC donations (wishful thinking, I know).

The center cannot stand in opposition to DSA policies, not just because these policies are popular, but that they were championed and supported by the most popular living President. A retreat from Obama era policies is a retreat not to Clintonism but a full retreat to Trumpism; there exists no alternative policy pole in the party, no matter how many think tanks named the ‘American Happiness Institute’ or whatever sprout up.

Just look at Mayor Mamdani’s housing policy. He is enacting more of the supposedly centrist Abundance Agenda in New York City than even the prime Abundists thought was possible, breaking ground on more and more new housing each day. Bernie’s Medicare for All push in 2015 was nothing more than Obama’s Public Option push in 2009 given more oomph, just as Mamdani’s Abundance agenda is the Ezra Klein Abundance agenda with more oomph.

Govern well and expand Obama-era policies on healthcare, on the economy, on foreign policy, and you will do well as a Democrat. Simple enough! But if it were that easy, the DSA would not have won its elections. It all comes back to Israel, which to many is a signifier. Giving Israel a carte blanche to do a genocide makes everyone doubt your commitment to basic human rights at home; only bad people support bad things, as it is known.

To be clear: if the Democratic Party does not abandon Israel, then the Democratic Party will become the DSA. If you are a member of Congress, or a staffer, or whatever: join your local chapter today, because the Democratic Party will likely cease to exist very soon if it does not become fervently antizionist. In case I am not being clear enough, every single Democratic primary voter is saying and agreeing with the following:

Yet, beyond Israel, the question remains, the question that may very well upend democratic socialism: beyond the eschatological, what does democratic socialism mean, in terms of policies and how they can be achieved? Is communism something that can be enacted in our lifetimes? Here is where the distinction becomes critical. If the police or prisons are something that can be abolished in our lifetimes, how? That is the key driving difference, and should be. Either we are meant to accelerate into a revolutionary, totalizing moment that leads to immediate satisfaction in our lifetimes, or we are meant to keep incrementally building upon President Obama’s stable foundations.

If a DSA member became President, what relations would that person have with China, the world’s only other supposedly socialist power? China, it should be noted, sends Premiers to the World Economic Forum to deliver keynote addresses. Meanwhile, the DSA views the WEF as nothing more than a punchline on their podcasts.

What will the DSA’s economic program be? Who will write it? Which caucus in the DSA will be in charge of drafting it? Do they intend to copy China’s industrial policy writ large? If so, how do they plan to transition the United States from a consumer economy to a producer economy without lowering the domestic standard of living?

Trump’s tariffs should be repealed, but then what should our trade policy be? What should America produce and purchase on the world stage, not just in 2027 and 2028 but in 2050, 2070, 2100, 2150? What is the longterm economic vision of their movement?

If the DSA plans to introduce some level of central planning and economic stimulus (this is less socialist and more étatist, an important distinction), how much involvement will private industry have? Will the United States still have billionaires? China does.

Will they be more anticapitalistic than China? Will they seek to abolish the stock markets? How will they resolve the resulting tension of having more than 60% of Americans owning some form of stock, typically to augment their own retirement savings, or of half the American population working in or owning a small business? What role will small businesses have in the DSA-led economy?

If prisons are abolished, what happens to the murderers and rapists? If police are abolished, what do we do about mass shooters? Terrorist attacks? Even the most hardcore police abolitionists have red lines, where they themselves would call the cops, if no other alternatives were available.

This is something the non-DSA must also answer, of course, for each point.

To be clear, I find myself in total agreement with those core socialist desires. I want to live in a world without exploitation, without classes, without suffering, of any kind—an escape from the endless cycle of hell we find the present conditions to be. There should be no police, or prisons, because nobody should be getting raped or murdered. There should be no stock markets, no small businesses, even no jobs: you should not be forced to work for someone’s pleasure and profit in order to feed, house, and clothe yourself. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” remains the foundational ideological principle which holds the moralistic lodestar of the Left.

But when, but how: these are the questions that splinter the Left, and always have. Obama’s (and before him, F.D. Roosevelt’s) incremental Lassalleanism attracts because it is proven to work. Change takes years, takes decades, but in geological time, even in anthropological time, such a time frame is nothing more than a blip, and it always does happen. The center never holds, things fall apart, and the polity is rejuvenated by this metaphorical circle of policy life.

I myself may not live to see even a better, more socialist world, but I am not so selfish enough as to think that everything is about mine own pleasure. Forced to answer, many in the DSA will agree with this proven track record; the immediate abolitionists of the present state (anarchists and neobolsheviks alike) will be forced out, their fringe desire for violent and bloody confrontation spooking the rest of the movement, as it always does.

Therefore, if the Democrats hope to beat the DSA (and again, I think they both deserve the challenge more than the defeat), they must do the following; otherwise, they will surely lose:

1. AGAIN: Abandon Israel as an ally. This is obvious. If you want to keep seeing Israel in your dreams, or keep any segment of the American polity pro-Israel, go be a Republican. This isn’t your Democratic Party anymore. The voters have rendered their judgment.

2. Come up with a theory of the end of time, of societal eschatology. Even Obama had this—his was “we will do all these good things, reassess, and then keep improving upon them, until they need no more improvement”. Democrats under Biden lacked this; the message was to stop Trump’s fascism, but then what? The end of Trump was the goal itself, and when that was achieved in 2020, the main ideological impetus of the Biden movement died. Of course, Trump did not end, but framing his electoral defeat as the sole purpose made Biden’s ideology ultimately far weaker than Obama’s.

3. Do the Tucker Carlsonian thing of begging DSA members and talking heads to answer the question: what exactly they mean by “democratic socialism”. You should agree on the obvious continuations of Obama policy, and disagree where it is obvious to do so. Below, a conversation between two straw people to illustrate this point:

DSA Strawperson: I support abolishing the police and prisons.

Democratic Strawperson: What do you mean by that?

DSA Strawperson: I want to live in a society where we don’t need police and prisons because people aren’t committing crimes.

Democratic Strawperson: I think everyone wants that. I too want to live in a world without crime. But how exactly do you propose we get there?

There are policy ideas the DSA Strawperson could offer, of course, ways to get there incrementally. The Democratic Strawperson, I bet, could even come up with their own incremental reforms. This is good, this is politics. Debate is good. The goal is to define a presentable, realistic policy: what should prison and policing look like in the 2030s? How do we lower crime without increasing police abuses? What lessons from the 30s will we apply in the 40s? And so on; the people desire empirical analysis, of changing what doesn’t work and upholding what does.

If the DSA Strawperson responds with immediate abolition, or with the same haughty “I just believe in this” without offering specific policy ideas, that can and should be attacked as intellectually weak. This is where the Carlsonian skeptical line of questioning is so powerful, so critical. Left unchallenged, DSA candidates may very well coast to defeat in general elections, leaving their unpopular, unworkable policy ideas unsaid in primaries.

But they should only ever be challenged on specific policy differences, where the meaningful difference is the power that they as elected officials will actually wield, versus whatever personal beliefs they hold. In an ideal world, we should all be in broad agreement; call it Communist eschatology or Abrahamic or something else: we all desire to live in a better world.

Another example, to home in on the point:

DSA Strawperson: I support cutting the military budget.

Democratic Strawperson: I agree, we should cut Pete Hegseth’s Department of War’s budget. But how? How many aircraft carriers should the United States mothball or otherwise scrap? What do we do with all of our alliances, all of our treaty obligations in Asia and Europe? What is your theory on naval and aerial power projection? Should we have an army at all?

The hope for the Democratic Strawperson is that the DSA Strawperson answers in the most radical fashion, such as: I support total military abolition.

To which, the Democratic Strawperson can respond: Okay, but even ignoring our actual geopolitical opponents in China and Russia, do you really trust the rest of the world to treat American sovereignty with respect? Do you trust the Europeans? The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the Germans, the English? 500 years of recent colonial history in the Americas proves we shouldn’t leave defending our borders to anyone but ourselves.

Of course, the DSA will be for the eschatological point: border abolition, state abolition; a one world government where all such distinctions melt away, before the government itself withers away. Again, nothing too disagreeable, from a heaven-bound philosophical perspective. It is the how, the specifics, the when that the Democrats should use to trip up (and thus refine) the DSA.

For as AOC showed in Munich: the Left is not ready for primetime on questions of foreign policy and national security. They are totally absent when it comes to global economic development, on the world stage at Davos and beyond. This is their fatal flank, where biting rhetoric, the question pressed, will either cripple the DSA or allow them to ascend.

The DSA does deserve this challenge. They have too many tendencies, too many caucuses, too many intra-regional hostilities to survive as-is. Their conventions are most certainly not ready for primetime, having less the feel of a CPAC (when those used to be popular) and more of a statewide student government convention. Certainly a tabloid camera crew could wreck several personalities, just following convention-goers around (no, I am not talking about Hasan, or whatever other nemesis you may have; this is just a stereotypical rendering of judgment).

Is the DSA a diamond in the Democratic rough, or just the coal for a stronger Democratic Party, or the precursor to an actual splintered-off socialist party? Is the Democratic Party doomed to become the DSA, or shall it consume the DSA like it consumes all other factions?

Both the Democrats and the DSA deserve and need this fight like a bird needs to chirp and feed its young. It is an institutional imperative for both to fight—and let the victor be both, neither, or either! And let the majority of America which supports these broad policies (60-65% of the electorate supports Democratic/DSA policies) enjoy the succor of seeing those policies actually enacted by a honed and refined political tendency that can not only win power but hold it.

So, catch me outside1 (how about that), crying havoc: let slip these rhetorical dogs of war! We will all benefit from the struggle.

The war in Iran is over, according to headlines and the released-today diplomatic agreement between the US and Iran. The war, which cost the US billions in munitions, killed over a dozen US soldiers, roiled global energy markets, wedged Europe away from Israel and the US, drove US forces from bases occupied for decades, and wounded countless hundreds more Americans, could be said to be nothing short of a total Iranian victory, even before US reparations come into effect. And those reparations will be steep: $300 billion at minimum, to say nothing of Iran's continued dominion over the Strait of Hormuz (an international waterway pre-war) and the lifting of sanctions.

The Iranian theocracy, in other words, went from “apoplectically, irrevocably doomed” to “quite stable; indeed well poised to become the world’s Fourth Great Power” in the short span of less than 6 months. This sort of stunning reversal is heretofore unseen in American history; only the War of 1812 rings as bad, with Napoleon in Europe proving the distraction we needed to save our bacon. Only there's no Napoleon this time, no saving grace of a greater threat to distract our foes.

This is not “bad for America”; this is imperial catastrophe. Iran proved that America's military industrial complex, with all its cost complexities, can be beaten by $200 drones with explosives taped on top. Multidecade plans to acquire more expensive air frames and carriers are being thrown into total disarray in the Pentagon; it's one thing to make a ship that enriches your buddies and also fulfills the mission. It's another thing entirely to build a multibillion dollar ship and have it be next to worthless other than as a slowly moving long range missile platform. One thing US war planners will start appreciating is that is cheaper and faster to build lots of small ships with lots of missiles and drones than one really big ship with the same firepower. Still, that change in doctrine will take decades to filter down to the military industrial level and back up, during which America will be critically weakened by investing in tech that just doesn’t do the job. It would be like a country in the 19th century investing for decades in steel plated armor, only to watch in horror as their brilliantly shining soldiers were ripped apart by powerful grape and powder shot.

Again: in every way, this war is catastrophe for America. That being said, it is survivable for US empire. Internal rifts aside, we face zero credible external threats. Iran has no fleet and no air force to threaten US continental shores, and won't even if they started speccing into that for at least a half-century.

For Israel and the Gulf States though, this war is existential. For the former, it dooms their whole strategy of divide and conquer. Israel being forced to make peace with Hezbollah is an indignity to them but it is survivable. What is not survivable is every single state in the region aligning itself against Israel, with tacit US approval of that outcome. That's exactly what this peace deal leads to though: a rapprochement with Iran between the Gulf Arab states that ices Israel out; an Abraham Accord but for Iran.

As for the Gulf states, the idea of Dubai is dead. The green transition won't be led by the UAE anymore but by China, and the whole of the region will shift from being US vassal entities to being Iranian ones. For the current unpopular Gulf monarchies, each of whom went along with the doomed Israeli-US-led war effort, it is impossible to say if they will all survive the 21st century. If they do, it will be under an Iranian protective umbrella and trade agreement. If you’re someone like MBZ or MBS (war criminals who keep their populations under the thick lock and key of brutal oppression), you might start to get a little anxious about your unpopularity, especially after getting so decisively owned. It is easy to imagine another Arab Spring blooming through the region in the shadow of this war, perhaps sooner than we think (albeit impossible to accurately predict).

Despite all that though, the conditions for a long-term peace holding are extremely elusive. The fact is, the US Army remains undefeated in the battlefield. Not the fleet or the air force, but the actual boots on the ground, the million-plus manned march carving a bloody sweep through Iran all the way to Tehran. This is a known fact, acknowledged by all parties. In Iran, this fact will gnaw at a growing insecurity regarding their demonstrated capabilities—they’ve proven they have strength; now they need to solidify their gains. There is a risk that Iran will try to humiliate the US even more militarily, to drive home the impression that a ground campaign would be futile, even at the risk of restarting hostilities.

But it’s not Iran we really need to be worried about. It’s America. Of course, Israel is the screeching, shit-throwing monkey in the room; if they’ve not already bombed Lebanon again they will soon, restarting the conflict again, if only for an afternoon. This then will obviously lead to either a resumption of the status quo or the final US-Israel break. Either way, Lebanon is not the main theater of the war, and the US will not commit to marching their own soldiers to Beirut.

Yet it will be Iran’s strategic albeit not tactical defeat of America that will consume US warplanners for the months and years to come. During and after the Vietnam War, there is a conception that the US did not go hard enough against North Vietnam, and that is why we lost. This of course is a wrong, stupid view of the war. America lost Vietnam because it tried to foist an unpopular, genocidal Catholic regime upon a mostly Buddhist population, and then when the population resisted that fate, the US could not hope to stamp out that resistance fully without risking total nuclear war with China and the USSR. But it was this humiliation in Vietnam that in turn fueled US revanchism, that first led to the interventions in Grenada and Panama, and eventually to Iraq and Afghanistan, and now, to Iran.

Unlike Vietnam, the Iranians did not grind US ground forces to a standstill. Outside of classified special operations, the US never marched more than a battalion into Iranian territory during the entire conflict; an initial invasion of Iran would take at least 1,000 battalions (each possessing about 1,000 men). If the US does decide that a rematch is in their interests, they already possess the means to do so.

This has been detailed before:

The reason why neither of the above were chosen is simple: Trump is averse to large ground operations. He always has been, ever since he used his bone spurs to avoid the Vietnam draft. It’s also the reason why the US can rip up the peace deal anytime and go back to war, and we mean really go back, with an actual ground force: once Trump and his mental peculiarities are gone, the next US President will be well within his rights to relaunch the war under the above parameters.

Congress, of course, will never agree to the peace, especially one that so short-shrifts Israel’s ambitions. The only thing that is keeping the peace aloft right now in Washington is Trump’s own fickleness to both win and avoid US casualties like the plague.

This doesn’t even have to come from the Republican Party. One could easily imagine a 2029 Democratic President, riding a wave of revanchist nationalism into office, promising a just war, a just victory, against the Islamic Republic. Of course, it’s just as easy to imagine a Democratic President lining up to kowtow to the Ayatollahs, coming in just after Trump just finished kowtowing.

Maybe then peace holds for a few more years, ten or twenty or more or so. But that little nugget of forbidden knowledge, that fact will stink up American political minds for a generation; the fact that the US never really tried to either fight or win this war, not really, until it consumes us fully. The Kurdish invasion was an insane pipe dream. The attempted civilian revolution was even worse: nothing more than a command from Mossad to unarmed civilians to march out into the streets and confront and thus to be slaughtered by IRGC militias. “We lost, but we never really fought,” will be the defining fact that will fire up the furnaces of the American revanchist industry, and that fire will one day perhaps be enough to relaunch the war, only this time with a direct US ground invasion.

Unlike in Vietnam, there’s no Russian or Chinese nuclear umbrella over Iran. The US could march into Tehran without facing direct nuclear retaliation (assuming Iran does not complete the bomb). This means that the only thing actually preventing the US from marching a million plus men into Iran is just US willpower. Today, the US (represented by the sole singular figure of Trump) has broken willpower, with no desire for further conflict. Tomorrow, JD Vance might be President, or Marco Rubio, or Gavin Newsom. Once that happens, it won’t take long for them start ripping up this peace deal, bit by bit. Every Iranian act of aggression becomes justification, every insult they utter an indignation of our national will.

For peace to hold, cooler heads in the US imperium must prevail. America should “take the L”, to speak colloquially, and reconsider its global force posture. A broader reconsideration of US geopolitical force posture is required. We cannot patrol and maintain all six habitable continents as our exclusive backyard anymore. We likely will spend the next few decades retrenching the core American continents and the surrounding islands, with US forces driven from everywhere but the far western reaches of Africa and Europe. The alternative is to double, even triple-down in Iran, with the risk being that win or lose, we would be too weak to oppose other rising powers competing for power in our hemispheres.

In other words, for peace to hold, everything has to go exactly right. The US needs to accept defeat, Iran needs to accept it’s gotten all it will get out of America, and Israel needs to accept its military and diplomatic isolation. For war to restart, just one thing needs to go wrong: a burst blood vessel in Trump’s head, a bit of unexploded ordnance going off inside Iran, Israel being Israel.

Celebrate the peace then, but don’t expect it to last. And as always, never forget:

“Igitur qui desiderat pacem, præparet bellum.”

(English: “Therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war.”)

— Vegetius

Rampant rape and abuse dominates the halls of Congress, and has for decades. Staffers of both parties are prey and victim to this abuse, led and championed by a bipartisan, seemingly endless parade of damnable members of Congress.

Where does this abuse of staff in Congress originate from? What gives the members less the right, and more the mental framing to be able to conduct themselves so lowly? Beyond the theoretical and base psychological, there is the obvious truth: that granted immense power and total discretionary oversight over staff, each Congress (we are presently in the 119th) will likely produce at least one member who resigns in disgrace after abusing staff. In some Congresses, it produces two, or four, or even more, to say nothing of the base criminals that have yet to be uncovered.

It’s of course indefensible, and the rot is built into the foundation. Newly elected members, chosen by the voters due more to financial connections than personal merit or virtue, arrive in Washington, and overnight each of them becomes effectively masters of their specific office, that is, their physical office space and the staff that resides within. In total, it sums up to several million dollars per member per year, resulting in each member overseeing a dozen or more often young staffers in both their district and DC. At no point does anyone, other than whatever remains of private journalists in America, check whether they can or should be managing people.

How can such a shoddy system produce anything other than shoddy results? In the best case, handing an office to someone with no managerial experience produces on average ordinary incompetence and a few unhappy constituents. The worst case need not be imagined; simply look at the headlines. To a layperson scanning those headlines, the People’s House can start to look like a den of thieves more than anything else, and that layperson would not be entirely wrong.

Structurally, a Member of Congress is judge, jury, and executioner over every staffer who works for them. There is no real HR in Congress. The member is HR. Advancement, references, transfers: all of it flows through the personal favor of one elected individual who answers to almost no one save some spuriously leaderless, specious, agglomerated voter blob. It is grotesque to have to say it, but practices that any other industry would have stamped out decades ago, like trading favor, sexual and otherwise, for promotion, survive in Congress precisely because the institution is built to let them survive.

Picture the same arrangement anywhere else. Say you want a normal job at an accounting firm. To be considered at all, you must first find a manager angling for a promotion and attach yourself to them, unpaid, for months, driving them to meetings, fetching coffee, dialing phones, with three dozen people behind you ready to be more slavish than you are. Suppose the manager gets promoted and suppose you are rewarded with a paid position, which itself is no guarantee. You are now on minimum wage and more the manager’s plaything than ever. Want a raise, a transfer, that parking spot? Please the boss, by whatever means the boss requires, because the firm has no HR oversight, not even paltry labor laws. The boss is not only HR, but also wrote the labor laws that govern not just your employment rights but the entire country’s. And if you try to report him to any real authority, you can find yourself frozen out of the entire industry for life.

No other modern organization functions like this. Those that do are dead or dying, their ranks attrited of competent staff by want of basic labor rights.

In an ideal world the Ethics Committees of both chambers would handle these criminals effectively and rapidly, from the first inkling of abuse. In the real world, it is easier to pull every tooth from every Member’s head than to get Ethics to police its own. The committees obviously rarely investigate themselves, and when modern hyperpartisanship takes hold, they investigate only the other party. A Republican Member could do something to a staffer on the Floor in front of everyone and it would be Democrats alone demanding removal while Republicans mounted a defense, and the reverse holds true just as surely. The “do nothing” option always wins, because doing nothing protects everyone’s side equally.

Of course, sexual abuse of staff is only the most blatant, disgusting part of the status quo. So let us be plain about the whole catalogue of what is wrong, because the sexual abuse, as monstrous as it is, is only the sharpest edge of it:

• Staff lack the compensation and the worker protections that comparable industries take for granted.

• Staff have no path to advance on merit; advancement is tied to personal relationships.

• Staff are pressed into unpaid campaign labor as the price of being placed in a job at all.

• Staff, underpaid, often leave for private and nonprofit work, where the institutional knowledge the public paid to build is turned against the public interest.

• Staff are abused, assaulted, and otherwise mistreated by Members who answer to almost no one save their own conscience for how they run their offices.

What is needed is not a carve-out in labor law, not merely a staff union, but a full institutional reworking of how Congress staffs itself. The aims of that reworking are these: a clear career path for every staffer, prospective or presently serving, from entry through merit-based advancement to a dignified retirement inside the institution; a staffer-run grievance arm where abuse can be investigated and escalated; pay and benefits on par with the senior civil service or well-paid private industry; a reservoir of institutional knowledge measured in decades, so that Members and parties may come and go while the institution endures; and, not least, a Congress with the prestige and knowledge to meet the Executive and the Judiciary on something nearer to equal footing. For Congress is only as good as its staff. If its staff is universally underpaid, young, burnt out, abused people, then its output will only ever be that good. Compared to the titans in the Executive and Judicial branch, it is no wonder then that the Legislative branch has become the weakest it has ever been.

Sine Qua Non: Founding Principles

Before the machinery, the principle, because everything that follows is only plumbing in service of it. The way you stop the abuse is to take career power away from the individual Member and vest it in the institution. The quid-pro-quo, sleep with me or you are finished in this town, only works because one person controls your future. Sever that control and the threat collapses on its own. The abuser loses his leverage not because we have asked him nicely to stop, but because he no longer holds the thing he was extorting people with. Everything below, the ranks, the exams, the placement system, the Censor, exists to move that single lever of power out of one fallible human’s hands and into a structure that outlives him. So everything below follows from this central logical underpinning: Members of Congress should not be small business owners, overseeing staff as petty feudal lords oversaw serfs.

A Cursus Honorum, for Staff

Without staff, Congress does not function. There are no sessions, no constituent mail answered, no bills drafted; the building itself would come apart at the seams (literally so!). Every Member alive, even the worst of them, knows this. But staff alone is not the point. The word that matters is institution: a stable structure that outlasts any one person, a set of rules and procedures that make civilized work possible. Congress already contains institutions of this kind. What are the Architect of the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Parliamentarians, the standing committees, if not exactly that?

And notice something about them. To get hired as a librarian or an architect at the Capitol, you do not have to perform sexual favors, and you do not have to redesign a Member’s lake house for free as a proving ritual. These are professional bodies with their own nonelected leadership, leadership that still answers to the full elected Congress, to be clear, and yet that leadership alone is capable of enforcing professional standards. The model is sitting right there inside the building. We have simply never extended it to the people who sit in the Members’ own offices.

The inspiration is old. Rome before the Caesars had the cursus honorum, the ordered ladder of offices a man climbed with experience, from military tribune through the lower magistracies and on to the higher ones, up to consul. Imperial China filled its bureaucracy by examination, advancing officials on demonstrated merit rather than birth or favor. Take what is useful from both and we can build something genuinely new for America: a career service for Congressional staff in which advancement turns on what one knows and how long they have known it, judged by their peers and their superiors alone, and not the favor of the transient members of Congress that come go every cycle.

The Congressional Censurate, the Censor, and the Censure

One new federal agency is needed, the Congressional Censurate, led by a singular Censor, who possesses the unique power of Censure. This agency is the body that stands between Congress’s staff and the Members who would abuse them. It is the keeper of a basic decency the institution has never managed to keep on its own.

In sum:

• Congress shall establish a Congressional Censurate, a new agency overseeing every Congressional staffer in the chambers and the districts.

• The Censurate shall be led by a single Censor, appointed to renewable five-year terms by the concurrence of both chambers, with no Presidential role in the appointment.

• The Censurate shall set the procedures for hiring, firing, and transferring staff, and shall house both a placement arm and a separate, independent grievance-and-investigations arm.

• The grievance arm shall be an independent sub-agency, charged with investigating all cases of malfeasance committed by or against staff.

• The Censor, as befits their title, shall have the sole privilege to enter the wells of either Chamber of Congress during any session, and lay upon the body the charge of official Censure against any sitting Member of Congress for that respective Chamber.

To be clear: The Censor cannot technically censure anyone. The Constitution leaves each chamber to discipline its own members, and nothing here touches that. What the Censor holds is narrower and sharper. It is the privileged right to enter the well of either chamber, name a Member, lay out the charge, and compel a recorded floor vote on a motion of censure. The chamber is still the only body that decides on the charges; the Censure power (as all other powers) remains unchanged. But the chamber can no longer decide by doing nothing.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth expanding on why it bites. Ethics (the Committee and process) is toothless nowadays because its favorite move is silence: to refer, delay, and to let each matter die before it ever comes to anything approaching a vote. Take silence off the table and we change everything. Faced with a Censor’s motion, a Member’s own colleagues must now go on the record, by name, voting yes or no on whether to shield an accused predator. That is a vote no party wants to cast and no party can hide. Had such an office existed, a case the Ethics Committee preferred to bury could have been dragged onto the floor and forced into the daylight, with colleagues made to own their vote on it. Think of a Swalwell-style scandal, or pick any other known example; justice and the interests of the victims could and should have been championed by an independent body with the power to act on its own prerogative.

Imagine: a legislative aide of a Member of Congress comes forward credibly accusing their assigned Member of Congress of rape. Following a thorough independent investigation by the grievance agency that confirms the charges, the Censor arrives one day onto the Floor of the Chamber where the accused sits as a Member. No one can stop the Censor from entering the Floor, taking control of it, and doing what comes next: laying an official charge of Censure brought against the Member of Congress for the crime of rape. From there, Congressional rules, adjusted for this new reality, take hold. There is limited debate, and if in a pro forma session, the chamber schedules the vote (or trial) to commence only once the full session is back. If the accused demands it, there is a speedy trial, with witnesses and evidence allowed. Then, a roll call vote. Every single member’s vote is recorded on the charge of Censure, with a simple majority upholding the charge. There is no right to appeal before another body once the vote has taken place. If passed, the Censure takes effect immediately, as well as the punishment: it strips the Member of all committees, privileges, salaries (repeal the 27th Amendment, otherwise this is impossible!), benefits, and more, making them a Member in name only. The only thing that can strip the taint of this empowered Censure would be them being elected to Congress again by either their own district or state or another’s in spite of the Censure, at which point, Congress should consider permanently removing and barring that individual from public office.

To be sure: this is a great and terrible power to place in one person’s hand, who isn’t even an elected official. A single, credible accusation could end the career of a very powerful, perhaps even popular person, and many would prefer to not challenge the status quo, much less with someone who isn’t even in the club, so to speak. All the more reason therefore to create an institution to aggregate away from the individual and into an organization. The Censor is both above and beyond the constraints of the Congressional Ethics Committees and yet also merely a functionary of the Congressional Censurate, and it is this body’s prestige and reputation that shall serve as the careful cudgel to keep potentially abusive members in check. Obviously, the grievance arm of the Censurate must ensure that high evidentiary bars are met before a Censor even considers approaching the chamber, and a Censor who brings spurious charges the chambers overwhelmingly rejects should lose either the privilege, or the post. Rather, the Censor’s supreme power to lay charges of censure should be the object of last resort. If there is active, known harm ongoing, with the Member in question shielded from reproach by either partisan, popular, or other means, then the Censor is the sole person with both a duty and power to act.

Of course, the Congress should still retain their respective Ethics Committees and ways of censuring and removing Members of Congress. The Censurate should work alongside both, as well as law enforcement, to ensure that the interests of potential victims and survivors are upheld, and to keep Congress a safe place to work as a professional environment of the highest national prestige. Nothing about the Censurate, the Censor, or the censureship process precludes or preempts Ethics Committee work. This new body just carves out the staffing and HR responsibility that each Member has, while making each Member more immediately and directly responsible to their respective chamber based on their treatment of staff. In cases of egregious mistreatment, the Censor’s censure is the essential ‘break-glass’ scenario, a situation where there was no other choice but for them to act.

Assigning Staff

Recall that the Censurate also assigns and appoints staff to Members of Congress. This is worthy of expansion.

The design here is trying to fix an essential management problem without pretending staff are interchangeable clerks. They are not. A Member is elected to advance a particular agenda and needs people who believe in it and whom they can trust, and the voters arguably chose that when they chose the Member. And so:

• Staff shall be assigned to Members on the basis of ideology, prior geographic ties, and policy interest, with the aim that every Member gets the most competent staffer who genuinely fits with all those requirements. Members can also take recommendations and reject placements.

• A Member may decline an assigned staffer who is a poor fit, and a staffer may decline placement with a Member for whatever valid reason. What a Member loses is not the power to choose among qualified, compatible staff; it is the power to exploit them.

• Staff who cannot be matched to any Member shall be placed in committee work or other, non-Member-specific work within the Censurate until a suitable opening appears. No one is forced into a bad pairing, and no one is left idle.

• Errands of personal servitude, such as dry cleaning and chauffeuring, are banned absent the explicit consent of both the staffer and the Censor, along with the member of Congress in question. A staffer may take on extra duties, but only for extra compensation, and taking undue advantage shall trigger automatic referral to the grievance arm.

• Staff shall be kept with their preferred Members and vice versa. No one will get a staffer/member they don’t want.

• Staff responsibilities will be based on merit ranking rather than job title, although job titles will still exist.

• Existing and former staff shall be grandfathered into the merit-ranking system that follows.

Merit Rankings

Who gets to be a Chief of Staff, and who gets to be the undersalaried caseworker in the district? In the former, we find wives and boyfriends, friends of friends, confidants and suckers alike, with of course many, many dedicated professionals and public servants in between (perhaps even the vast majority). Even in the latter, we find their ranks filled by many who depended on some preexisting relationship with that member of Congress, often working as campaign staff. In either case, you can have twenty years of professional experience and be a caseworker, or be a newly elected member’s previously unemployed wife and now be his well-paid Chief of Staff. Both have happened, and happen often enough.

Getting a job, getting promoted on Congress turns not on what you know, but on whose favor you keep and get to keep. To be sure, the existing staff of Congress must be saluted and commemorated, for the sheer fact that they are able of surviving through the daily indignities of working in the Capitol. They make the Legislative branch function, and without their sacrifice, America (the idea, if not the very country), would fall. So even if some hold their present position in spite of their merit, that should not condemn the rest, who already sit high amongst the worthy, and will sit thereafter upon the Censurate reform.

For the future generations especially, advancement should turn on what you know and how long you have known it, not on whose favor you keep. This is where the central idea of the Censurate does its quiet work. Because promotion is decided by peer panels and senior staff rather than by any Member, Members can no longer hold careers hostage. The leverage simply is not there to be abused.

To be sure, a system weighted purely toward seniority calcifies and shelters the mediocre, and “judged by peers” can curdle into a popularity contest, a gentler cousin of the favoritism we are hoping to kill. The resolution rests in belting off two of the higher merit ranks with comprehensive examinations.

At Merit Rank Four, an individual must complete several examinations that test the breadth, depth, and practical applicability of their legislative and governmental potential. The examinations will also be paired with a mandatory thesis, which must be defended before a body of their peers and higher-ups. Those who fail will still find a lifetime of succor in pay and benefits at Merit Rank Four (it should be the first rank where one can comfortably retire at), and still possess the opportunity to retake failed examinations. Those who pass all examinations and have their thesis accepted will be awarded both a fully accredited Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree, with all possible honors. (Yes, the power to confer to college and advanced degrees to meritorious staffers will be a power granted to the Censurate by Congress.)

At Merit Rank Six, another rigid course of examinations follows, which if successful earns one a fully accredited law degree, as well as the right to practice law before any US Court.

If this works, this new system will tie prospective and current employees for life to an institution that rewards the most successful, the best, with better and better rewards and benefits; the modern standard of any successful institution—the bare minimum one should expect of the supposedly prestigious US Congress.

Of course, people don’t need to wait until they are at the appropriate Merit Rank to begin studying. With such a plain, published, clear career path ahead, and with all examination materials made available beforehand (similar to how other professional certification examinations are made available, such as the LSAT and others), people would likely start studying at a young age for such an opportunity. And even then, an individual would need at minimum four years of practical work in the legislative branch before they become eligible for that coveted Master’s degree, and then at minimum nine years for the law degree.

This also resolves the revolving door, where staffers leave public service to become lobbyists. The plain truth is that no one is going to want to leave Congress, especially for a less prestigious, less well-paid position in private lobbying. With more advancement (more benefits, more pay) possible, to higher and higher Merit ranks, each granting more power and responsibilities, many will opt for the long haul. Of course, a person that fails to convince their peers and superiors will stall out at a lower rank, lower than the effective maximum of ten (or at ten itself), but still be highly respected and paid regardless.

The goal herein is to make the legislature operate at peak legislative and constitutional efficiency, regardless of who has been elected to Congress. Elected members could possess only a child’s inkling of a base idea, yet a high merit ranking official should be able to turn that base idea (or any other idea) into sprawling legislation, codices of action, complete with philosophical, legal, economical, and metaphysical discourses from that singular idea. The output of Congress should always be one of genius perfection, where few can doubt the merit or need for the laws it passes. If the Executive or Judicial Branches ever disagree with the Legislative, woe to them if they do not have similar intellectuals in their own court!

The Rankings Themselves

Merit Rank One

• Open to any US Citizen or permanent resident over the age of eighteen regardless of prior education or experience, save actual Congressional experience (which is grandfathered into this system).

• Minimum service before eligibility for promotion: 1 year.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank One staffers familiar with the work, plus one Rank Four staffer.

• Likely assignments: pages (no one under the age of 18 should work in Congress), caseworkers, staff assistants.

Merit Rank Two

• Minimum service in Rank Two before eligibility: 0.5 years. Minimum total service: 1.5 years.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank Two staffers, plus one Rank Four staffer.

• Likely assignments: caseworker, staff assistant, press assistant.

Merit Rank Three

• Minimum service in Rank Three before eligibility: 1.5 years. Minimum total: 3 years.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank Three staffers, plus one Rank Four staffer.

• Likely assignments: caseworker, staff assistant, press assistant, scheduler.

Merit Rank Four

• Minimum service in Rank Four before eligibility: 1 year. Minimum total: 4 years.

• Additional requirement: to advance to Rank Five, the staffer must pass a circuit of examinations, completion of which grants a Master’s degree.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank Four staffers, plus a committee of Rank Seven staffers.

• Likely assignments: a deliberate rotation. The Censurate sends DC staff to the districts and district staff to DC, where they do similar work as before while now overseeing Ranks One through Three beneath them.

Merit Rank Five

• Minimum service in Rank Five before eligibility: 3 years. Minimum total: 7 years.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank Five staffers, plus a committee of Rank Seven staffers.

• Likely assignments: legislative staff. From Rank Five on, staffers begin editing, writing, and compiling legislation. They may also serve as Press Secretary or Communications Director.

Merit Rank Six

• Minimum service in Rank Six before eligibility: 2 years. Minimum total: 9 years.

• Additional requirement: to advance to Rank Seven, the staffer must pass a circuit of examinations, completion of which grants a Juris Doctorate degree as well as bar accreditation.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank Six staffers, plus a committee of Rank Seven staffers.

• Likely assignments: senior legislative staff, drafting and shepherding legislation.

Merit Rank Seven

• Minimum service in Rank Seven before eligibility: 4 years. Minimum total: 13 years.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank Seven staffers, plus a committee of Rank Eight staffers.

• Likely assignments: Legislative Director, overseeing the lower ranks.

Merit Rank Eight

• Minimum service in Rank Eight before eligibility: 5 years. Minimum total: 18 years.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank Eight staffers, plus the Censor.

• Likely assignments: Chief of Staff; oversight of the Censurate bureaucracy.

Merit Rank Nine

• Minimum service in Rank Nine before eligibility: 2 years. Minimum total: 20 years.

• Advancement is judged by four other Rank Nine staffers, plus the Censor.

• Likely assignments: granted top security clearance; advises the parties, Members, and other government institutions directly on matters of national security as it pertains to the core Constitutional interests of Congress.

Merit Rank Ten

• No fixed minimum of years for advancement.

• From among the Rank Tens, the Censor appoints at most seven to Rank Eleven.

• Likely assignments: whatever the institution needs.

Merit Rank Eleven

• The highest rank below the Censor.

• Congress appoints one of the Rank Elevens to serve as Censor.

• Likely assignments: the governing board of the Censurate.

The Censor

• Technically not a rank.

• Congress (both Chambers) by majority vote confirms the Censor who serves (if not removed by a majority of one chamber at any time) for a renewable five year term.

• The Censor has direct oversight over the entire Censurate, excluding the grievance arm which operates as an investigative independent sub-agency with the power of subpoena, with an independent board and executive director appointed and confirmed separately by Congress.

• Likely assignments: representing the interests of every single employee hired or contracted by the Legislative Branch, defending and advancing the Legislative branch’s core Constitutional interests.

It is important to note that while this proposal tackles Member and Committee staff, it could be broadened to include every other Congressional agency, or indeed, every other governmental agency. Our whole civil service is in desperate need of revamp and reform, especially considering that we have not any refreshing of our mass civil service since the Watergate constitutional crisis. That’s nearly 50 years of stagnation, nearly three professional lifetimes of staid procedures and forms. A Grand Censurate, encompassing the whole of the federal government, that uplifts workers and rewards merit, could just be the solution our bureaucracy needs to survive the challenges of the 21st century. Think of it: don’t we, the people, deserve a government whose competence, whose hard-work, whose dedication, whose moral, ethical, and economic philosophies are beyond reproach? We do, and if you think we don’t: you are wrong.

A Word on Campaign Staff

Campaign staff are out of scope here, and deliberately so. Folding them into the Censurate would dilute the institution and blur its one job, which is to give serving Members the best-qualified help regardless of who those Members are. But “out of scope” is not “fine as is.” Campaign staffing, nay, finance, is its own albatross and needs its own comprehensive, top-to-bottom reform. Elections should be based on the merit of ideas championed by the candidate, not on how well that candidate can beg for money, and campaign work should be its own well paid professional career path, wholly apart from Congressional work.

The Choice

None of this is easy. An overhaul on this scale costs real money up front, with professional pay, real benefits, and pensions, and someone always asks who pays. The honest answer is that we already pay, just worse. We obviously pay in the revolving door, where staff we underpaid walk out the moment they can and sell the institutional knowledge the public funded to whoever lobbies hardest. And yes, that includes America’s enemies. We already pay in the worst possible ways, when we turn a blind eye at first and then we’re forced to pay later, in our tax dollars, for the investigations and restitutions that follow from bad behavior. Fixing a flooded, swampy office often incurs a nasty, one-time cost that makes even sturdy stomachs queasy. But not fixing it always leads to a lifetime of medical, building, and other legal costs that far exceed in exponential magnitude what it would’ve cost to apply the simple, first fix. So it is with Congress.

Congress will never be free of the taint of its worst Members until it takes radical, structural steps, until it moves the power to make or break a career out of one fallible human’s hands and into an institution built to outlast all of them. Yes, the reform would be painful. Yes, it would be difficult.

But weigh that pain against the other kind. Weigh the difficulty of building an institution against the difficulty of being abused by a Member of Congress with no one to turn to and no way out. Then multiply that pain across decades, across generations.

Is there a choice? Shall we have a government of the people, by the people, one that rewards merit and punishes the worst grievances and abuses possible? A government of laws, order, and basic morality? If there is a choice: it is wholly ours.

A spectre is haunting British Labour politics—the spectre of late-blooming irony-poisoned posters who have found in Keir Starmer their new lodestar. Since the implosion of the UK Labour Party last week following the disastrous local council elections and the subsequent rout of Starmer’s key backers in Parliament including Wes Streeting and others, the seemingly obvious death knell of Keir Starmer’s political career has been rung, with Starmer’s only supporters now being his former opponents amongst the Left.

Yet irony alone is not enough to sway hearts. To be sure, we love an underdog down on his luck making a Mishima-style last stand in defiance of both universe and everyone. Starmer will always have that going for him, make no mistake. Yet there is actual cold, calculating logic behind supporting Starmer, even at this late hour. Suffice it to say that his competitors all have been judged on the scale, and found wanting. Let’s start with a look at the situation Britain finds itself in. The voters are right, after all, that there is something rotten in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, yet, as we shall see, all rotten things in Great Britain exist not because of Keir Starmer but in spite of his attempts to clamp down on them.

The obvious must be stated first. There are things beyond the control of any singular Prime Minister: the weight of human and geological history bearing down on all present and future generations. No modern Prime Minister can reverse the 10,000-year-ago sinking of Doggerland, or the subsequent loss of the Empire following WW2. Likewise, we live in a world post-Brexit. Britain today is just simply poorer and less well off than if it had not left the EU. Britain tomorrow will always be poorer than the imaginary Britain that did not leave the EU.

The Tories sold a false bill of goods to the British public with regards to Brexit, and they have already been punished for their lies. The myth of Global Britain, of a renewed British Empire built on grit and toil always lacked the material basis to make it a reality. The fact is, there is very little a modern Britain can sell on the global markets that competitors in America, in Europe, and Asia, cannot sell better and at cheaper prices.

But Brexit is in our past. No amount of accepting its failure today will undo the damage of yesterday. All we can do is try and be better, and seek to rebuild trade relations ruined by the disastrous process of Brexit. Yet just as the material consequences of Brexit are rippling through the economy, so too do we find ourselves the inheritors of problems beyond our control. The pandemic supply shock, America’s attack on Iran, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: all of this crashed upon British shores like economic tsunami waves, tearing down fragile foundations in the midst of rebuilding each time.

No British Prime Minister, from the Pitts to Churchill to Starmer, would’ve been able to contend with all these calamities and come out on top, politically. This isn’t even a British phenomenon. Going back to ancient times, in China, in Iran, in Mesoamerica, and beyond, there has akways been the concept of a ‘Mandate of Heaven’, one where the sovereign is given divine approval to rule the people of the world. The approval and subsequent disapproval from the Heavens was plain to see: when the Heavens approved, bounteous harvests and won wars followed. When the Heavens revolted and the Mandate of Heaven appeared lost: coups, lost wars, famines, disease, earthquakes, floods, and fires all became rapidly manifest. The logic appears sound: if the world is good, it is because your rulers are good and should be worshipped. If the world is bad, it is because your rulers are evil and must be overthrown.

Yet these ancient logics should fail to modern eyes and ears for we now know, having been the very heavens ourselves in aeroplanes and rockets, that there is no great supreme power sending down pestilence and floods on nations ruled poorly. There is no power at all, save an almighty yet altogether human awe toward a natural world, ruled not by superstition but by causal reason and logic.

It is not Keir Starmer’s fault that the British people were afflicted by Covid, nor is it his fault that Donald Trump attacked Iran, or that Putin attacked Ukraine. To the extent he had any desires in those matters, it was “please god, please don’t, oh god, oh no, please don’t.” It’s also the exact same reaction any of Keir Starmer’s would-be replacements would have to each of those circumstances!

What, then, is Keir Starmer to be responsible for? Surely every governing and appointing decision he made since becoming Prime Minister. In this, there are three inherent critiques of Starmer’s premiership, each doomed to a lose/lose dynamic:

1. Governing as a fiscal conservative

2. The appointment of Peter Mandelson

3. His dull personality and speaking tone

For the first, this is where many in the Left spend their time hating Starmer’s governing decisions. But really, there is no real decision to be made here: years of Tory mismanagement, coupled with the exogenic shocks hitting the British economy, made Starmer’s job next-to-impossible. In simple economic terms, what Britain needed and still needs is continued, long-term investment, the type of long-term capital expenditures that take years to accomplish (such as building new factories). This work isn’t glamorous and isn’t expected to be immediately popular. To kill one of the great myths of the modern era: building a highway isn’t sexy; it is years upon years of delays, cost overruns, slowed traffic due to construction, and the resultant anger of an impatient public that invariably follows. Concurrently, the British standard of living has fallen off a cliff recently, and raising benefits, while immediately popular, will do nothing to build the economy of tomorrow. While Britain could, in theory, make these investments and also raise benefits massively, there is not enough tax revenue to do that without embarking upon a Sovietization of the British political economy. By nationalizing private producers, the British state could (again, in theory) use those profits to not only shore up the NHS but fix it for good. Yet such a nationalization process demands Autarky from global capital flows, and unless millions of British people are willing to either starve or become farmers again, it’s not going to happen, and even if it was: the demand of that political economy would require a political party and army to see it through, neither of which exist at the present. So the only actual choices are between investing in the renewed national economy and not doing so. In the latter, we could shore up, say, the NHS for a few years but then what? The money will run out, and we will be without a restored economic base to fund even keeping the lights on at the NHS.

The second critique, his appointment of Mandelson, has two excuses attached it. The first is the multi-dimensional chess read, where Starmer knew perfectly well who Mandelson was yet appointed him anyways to get a good trade deal with the United States. After all, Mandelson and Trump both shared a friend in Jeffrey Epstein. It ‘takes a diddler to know a diddler’, as they say. In this reading, Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson was too clever for his own good, thinking he could appoint someone so obviously morally corrupt for the national interest without it coming back to bite him in the ass. There is another reading: the naive Starmer, trusting his lying advisors, appointed Mandelson to the job because he simply did not know who Mandelson was or what he was accused of doing. This raises an obvious stink however: if Starmer could be duped into backing Mandelson, what else could he be duped about?

In a sense, both explanations are probably true and both are a little false. It’s very likely Starmer knew the type of person Mandelson was but did not know all the gruesome, gory details. It’s also been practically confirmed he did indeed want Mandelson as his Trump-whisperer in the White House. Yet the real truth is that he was in an impossible, unwinnable situation. Fail to appoint Mandelson and you risk not getting a necessary trade deal with the US. Appoint Mandelson and potentially face all the subsequent consequences. It was never win/win for Starmer, it was always lose/lose.

And thus it is with the third critique. Keir Starmer’s personality defects are well known to any person with a pulse in the UK and beyond. He’s been in public life for near-on two decades. Both the Labour and British voting public have had decades to render judgment on Starmer, moreover, you cannot judge a system merely on its outputs, nor can you judge an output by itself: Starmer would not be Prime Minister if the system did not make him Prime Minister; his existence as Prime Minister should rebut any arguments against his personality.

Could he speak better, communicate more passionately? Of course. But he is exactly who the British chose, and moreover, it's not as though he can choose who he is. It’s the exact same lose/lose dynamic that dogs Starmer across every line of criticism. He cannot govern differently for the material conditions of the world don’t allow it. He had to appoint Mandelson despite the risks. And he cannot change who he is and even if he did want to change, it’s not certain the British public would approve of that change.

Given all that, what then are we left with? First, let’s start with the opposition parties and defeat them each in detail.

1. The Conservative Party

   The malefactors of Britain belong if not in prison then in the dustbins of history, for dooming the British people and state with a ruinous economy and ruinous finances. Whatever ideas they have should be met with the triple riposte of Brexit, Covid, Truss. Every time a Tory speaks, the response should invariably be ‘Brexit. Covid. Truss.’ and that alone should silence them for a century or more.

2. The Liberal Democratic Party

   Who? The what? What do they stand for? Doing everything Labour is doing but doing it worse, without any governing experience? Ahh, okay then.

3. Reform UK

   When economic calamities befall nations, the first instinct is to restrict the benefit doles to longer-term, more permanent residents. This quickly becomes a race to the bottom: as public finances become tighter, the restrictions quickly pile on until you in effect become moribund Japan. Economic growth in Japan is anemic, with the aging population albatross around their stagflationary necks getting heavier and heavier each year. That is the future Reform promises the UK: a country of overworked, underpaid workers who exist only to finance an ever older population of pensioners.

4. Green Party

   The darling of the new Left in Britain needs to answer a question: what exactly does it stand for? Is it the anti-nuclear, anti-NATO, anti-EU Green Parties of the latter 20th Century? Is it the Corbynite Labour Party, shed of the taint of Corbyn’s personal foibles, but essentially a resurrection of that electoral vessel? Is it Zack Polanski’s dictatorship, where the Party exists merely as a vehicle for his personal ambitions? It’s all of those things right now, which means it is none of those things. Before the Green Party can make any claim to national leadership, they need to answer this fundamental question of identity, and then answer how they’d do anything different than Starmer. Because so far, when they’ve attempted to make their policy answers sensible, they end up sounding a lot like Starmer’s Labour policies.

5. Your Party

   It’s not My Party! Lol.

The Lib Dems and Green Party share with Starmer’s main challengers in Labour the same broad sins: that is, an inability to describe what exactly they would do different had they political power. Let’s defeat them in detail next:

1. Ed Miliband

   Failed to stop Cameron, failed to stop Brexit. Put this down on Polymarket if he becomes Prime Minister: failed to stop Farage, failed to stop the destruction of the United Kingdom.

   

2. Angela Rayner

   Unlike Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson, there is no multi-dimensional, charitable read of her decision to not pay taxes on a second home. There is only bad advice, and her decision to follow said bad advice. While she has been cleared of wrongdoing, her poor judgment in such an obvious manner is permanently disqualifying.

3. Wes Streeting

   Imagine Keir Starmer. Now make him gay, and make him the prime mover behind the appointment of Peter Mandelson. That’s Wes Streeting in a nutshell, who policy-wise is as Starmerite as they come. Yet, Streeting is the obvious patsy for the Mandelson debacle; more than Starmer or anyone else, he alone bears the weight of that sin. Beyond that, there is little to say about Streeting for PM other than it would be good for Wes Streeting. His personal ambitions aside, there is little reason for either Labour or Britain to be forced to swallow Streeting down their respective throats.

4. Andy Burnham

   He is the supposed Leftist darling, the Prince-That-Was-Promised, the sole possible inheritor of the Corbynite legacy within Labour now that the Green Party have established themselves. Of course, he has a long way to become PM. First, he needs to become a member of Parliament in a by-election, far from guaranteed. Then, he needs to convince the Labour Party, elected and led by Keir Starmer, that he is a suitable replacement. Assuming he does all that, he then has to govern. And here the material conditions rear their ugly heads: replacing a Prime Minister barely two years into their five year term is a desperate gamble made only by governments and parties in collapse, especially if the appointed Prime Minister has a totally different governing philosophy than the previously-elected Prime Minister, which would be the case with Burnham and Starmer. The financial markets already dipped into a tailspin on the mere announcement that Burnham would be running for office. Imagine if he won his seat. Imagine if he became Prime Minister. A Truss-level economic meltdown is practically guaranteed. The damned irony is that not only would this make the necessary investments Britain needs to make all the more expensive, but it would also make Burnham’s agenda of expanding benefits all the harder to achieve. So yes, Labour can appoint Burnham, but they’ll be dooming the British public to fewer services, less money, and of course, to Nigel Farage’s government in 2029.

5. Keir Starmer

   There is no alternative. Truly. Starmer today is Prime Minister, and assuming Labour continues to support him in Parliament, he will continue to be Prime Minister until 2029. Labour presently has a majority of 403 members in the Commons out of the 650 who sit in the Chamber. That is a majority large enough to pass whatever legislation the country needs. This majority was voted in by the British voting public as recent as 2024, chosen and led by Keir Starmer to that momentous victory. Many have challenged Starmer in recent days to come up with a strategy, with a plan to reverse Labour’s decline. His response to his naysayers was simple enough: “Trust me.”

Is it that simple? Can we really just ‘trust’ Keir Starmer to somehow turn around Labour’s electoral performance? But is there really any alternative? Labour’s recent decline in fortunes can be blamed squarely on Trump’s reelection, both his trade wars and his wars around the world, most recently in Iran. That’s not something Starmer or any politician can control. And, it’s not something any of his Labour or other-party competitors would cope with any better.

What does trust in Starmer give? Time, mostly. Time for the British political economy to kick into gear and begin to deliver on those investments made early in Labour’s term. Time for Trump’s wars to end, time even for Trump himself to leave office and (hopefully) be replaced by saner actors. Today, the Iran War and Donald Trump dominate headlines. By 2029, both will no longer be factors, replaced instead by steady economic growth delivered by a Labour administration focused on continued long-term growth. By 2029, voters will be thanking themselves silly for not going along with any of Starmer’s possible replacements, and Starmer and Labour will be cruising to their respective reelections.

Leftists, more than others, are supposed to understand the constraints of material conditions when deciding state policy. Did Marx not say, after all, that men make their own history, but not of their own choosing? If we could choose our own history, we would all choose immediate communism—that is, a stateless, classless society. Yet our desire for something does not make it so, and so our task today is the same as the task of our ancestors, to continue to select and elect the necessary precursors who can build the stable foundations for the future communist society. That in turn requires the selection of leaders who will pursue policies that will lead to a permanent surplus of industrial goods and raw energy, that, when combined, will have enough power to reshape not just our material conditions but the very geography of the physical world. Judged by the alternatives therefore, the present course must be continued.

The choice for Britain has always been between barbarism and socialism, same today as ever. Shall the Labour Party continue to invest in a world with better material conditions (leading to a classless and stateless society), or shall the barbarities of her opponents make tyranny and collapse the permanent order of the day?

We say: four more years, ten more years, ten thousand-thousand more years of Starmer, it doesn’t matter. To us, we do the job until the job is done. It’s as simple as.

Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That is not just the Trump administration’s position; it has been the position of every US administration since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. America barely tolerates non-nuclear allies from pursuing any nuclear technology, much less adversaries. Had there been no Islamic Revolution in 1979, the United States could’ve tolerated a civilian nuclear program in Iran; with the Revolution having occurred, no nuclear program would ever be acceptable.

Of course, Iran has possessed domestic, non-weaponized nuclear power plants for decades. To be clear, their continued existence does not signify acceptance on America’s part; American policymakers if they could would wipe both the entirety of Iran’s nuclear capability off the map as well as everyone who would ever study nuclear energy for Iran. That’s precisely what the United States and Israel has done for decades, assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists and sabotaging their nuclear facilities. Whether it was Obama’s 2010 Stuxnet sabotage action against Iran’s nuclear facilities or Trump’s Summer 2025 bombings of the same facilities, the goal has largely remained unchanged: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.

Presumably, there are contingencies in place if Iran does possess a nuclear weapon, up to and including an Israeli nuclear-tipped first strike on Iran, which carries the risk of immediate Russian and Chinese intervention (the radiological clouds over Israel and Iran will dissipate over Russian and Chinese territories, affecting hundreds of millions of their people). In other words, Iran cannot possess a nuclear weapon for that presages immediate, unavoidable global nuclear catastrophe.

There are, of course, a lot of baked-in assumptions about Iran’s nuclear ambitions (to say nothing of the baked-in assumptions about how Russia and China might respond). The first is that they would finish building a bomb, ever. To many in the econo-diplomat world, they’ve only ever seen Iran’s nuclear program as a leverage point to bargain away in an eventual deal with the United States. They aren’t a North Korea, an essentially hyper-homogenous (politically, culturally, and economically) entity that can turtle itself away from the world economy and spend decades perfecting MIRV-capable ICBMs that can effectively destroy any major world power with the click of a button. Iran’s leaders and people would both rather prefer ‘win/win’ economic trade deals with anyone and everyone (excluding Israel).

And that’s precisely what happened in 2015: when the United States came knocking with the JCPOA, Iran was rather eager to stop its nuclear program in return for desperately needed economic relief. And that should have been that: with Iran’s nuclear program effectively defanged by the JCPOA, America’s prime motivation to oppose Iran (Hezbollah and Hamas are not American enemies in the slightest) would evaporate, opening Iran up to American investment.

But Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. And the JCPOA, for all its merits, had an expiration date ten years after the deal was struck. Here then is the conundrum: if in ten years Iran can start building a nuclear warhead, then Iran might have a nuclear weapon. And Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Therefore, a deal that postponed Iran’s nuclear ambitions for 10 years was the same as no deal at all, and that’s precisely what Donald Trump did in 2018 when he officially pulled out of the Iran deal.

If you want to understand the true logic of this, you’d need to dumb your brain down a bit and think on the level of Trump. You could, if you wanted to, use complex metaphysics, empiricism, and relativity to explain Trump’s reasoning. For instance, if x is postponed for y years, then x is not happening right now. However, at year y, x could start happening. If time is relative to observers (with the speed of light from the perspective of light effectively being instantaneous), then y equals zero. Therefore, x is fundamentally postponed for 0 years (i.e. not at all), thus the relative inevitability of time ensures that x more or less is guaranteed to happen immediately. Obviously, clearly, y is not 0. No human alive perceives time outside of t-symmetry (though some have tried!). Nor is y imaginary. It is a real number, marked by real material events (the orbit of the Earth around the sun). Yet, for some reason, Trump and his backers have rendered the entire concept of time into relativistic certainty.

Trump, of course, is not learned enough to recognize the logical cage he’s built for himself. He’s very much stuck in the moment, having bought into all these preconceptions on-sight, with no capacity to question the underpinning logical framework or its conclusion.

As the JCPOA negotiators and proponents realized in 2015, there was no alternative to a negotiated settlement with Iran. The alternative, war, is precisely what we are seeing take place today: not only is Iran’s nuclear regime still intact, but Iran has routed the US Armed Forces from the Middle East and shuttered the Hormuz Strait, both individually twin pillars of strategic defeat forming a foundation of epochal devastation.

We don’t know ultimately what convinced Trump to hit go; who can know what lies in a man’s heart but lies he tells himself? Regardless, the American state acting in this way became inevitable after 2018. With a negotiated settlement rejected by the American powers that be in 2018, that only left war. However, that war could not and would not start until Iran itself had been weakened. This wasn’t just Trump; the Biden administration more than did its part in Gaza (up to and including using US special forces to raid Hamas tunnels (according to Sy Hersh and others who know)), in the West Bank, and especially in Syria and Lebanon to ensure Iran’s regional allies were weakened.

In effect, with peace ruled out, the US military and diplomatic strategy since 2018 has been to fray, fracture, expose, and then destroy the Iranian state. It culminated in Iran’s near-revolution in Winter 2026 and the subsequent murder of Iran’s civilian leadership. The theory of victory was vastly empty, and essentially boiled down to a Hitlerian ‘we only have to kick in the door, and the whole rotten edifice will fall apart’. When Iran, like the Soviet Union in Summer 1941, didn’t immediately capitulate in the face of relentless pressure and then has gone to successfully both resist and turn the strategic tables on the United States, Trump reacted exactly like Hitler, firing his generals left and right and demanding a Holocaust of the Iranian people.

America does not share a land border with Iran. There will be no Iranian Stalingrad, no occupation of Berlin (DC) with Trump in the bunker as Iranian katuysha’s rain down from above. Despite all this, we needn’t doom. The prospects for peace—a JCPOA with terms far, far more favorable to Iran—remains the only logical conclusion. The alternative (a nuclear Iran, a nuclear world war) is impossible to desire, even for the most hardcore clerics in either Iran or Israel. The only question remains: when will this peace happen?

Trump of course is still stuck in the logical trap that led him to war in the first place. The JCPOA was to terminate ten years after it was signed; Trump has been angling for a twenty year deal but Iran has pushed back with a five year deal. Maybe they’ll compromise on seven or the rounder ten. Either way, this is near-impossible for Trump to stomach, as in his mind, and in the minds of the elite superstructure he has erected around his person, a nuclear Iran after a ten year peace deal is the same as a nuclear Iran, right now.

Thus the United States must attack Iran, not to destroy their government per se but to destroy their ability and capacity to resist. That’s why Trump has been threatening their entire civilization with death. That this is all based on false premises and is quite impossible to achieve (Iran would rather be slaughtered by American warheads than capitulate their sovereignty), yet Trump and America will continue to do so.

It’s very easy to doubt, that having started this war, Trump is in any condition to end it. Even if he wants to (and he does), the logical underpinnings that led him to war still exist. That’s why he has been saying for months now that higher gas prices are worth it, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. With Iranian total surrender the only strategic option amenable to Trump (the alternatives being a renewed JCPOA or an American ground invasion of Iran), the status quo of an on-again off-again state of war in the Middle East could persist until Trump leaves office.

For Donald Trump’s hang-ups are Donald Trump’s. While Biden, Obama, Clinton, Bush, et cetera spent their respective presidencies setting the floor up for military action against Iran, none of them pulled the trigger until Donald Trump foolishly chose to do so. A future American President could realize that Iran not pursuing nuclear weapons for five or even ten years is as good as Iran not pursuing nuclear weapons, period, and leave it as a problem for their successors to negotiate, on-and-on, every ten years or so until the end of time or the end of states.

As stated prior, it’s a question of imminent metaphysics. Does the delayed pursuit of something signify the inevitability of pursuit? If a lion does not eat a zebra for a month, do we count that zebra as already amongst the dead? Perhaps not, if after that month expires, the lion could be given incentives not to eat the zebra, and so on, until both lion and zebra die of natural causes. Or does the existence of the lion presage the murder of the zebra, and that the zebra’s existence is only for the lion’s pleasure to slaughter and devour? Yet when these metaphors cease being animals and become human beings and states of millions of people, the metaphysical must rise to ethical: Israel should not annihilate Iran, even if it’s to prevent a nuclear Iran, even if preventing a nuclear Iran prevents a nuclear world war, for that whole logical premise is both faulty and ethically evil. If you’ve constructed a trolley problem where one trolley path leads to the death of 90 million people and the other to the death of 8 billion, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your trolley design!

Thus, Donald Trump is caught in a logical trap of his own making. He cannot escape it. He will not escape it. Peace will soon come again to the Middle East. But only once Trump has been removed from power. Hopefully, by January 2029, that will have come to pass.

The King of the United Kingdom spoke today in Congress. His words do not matter; his presence itself speaks volumes. It is an affront to democracy to invite a monarch, much less one of the Windsor clan, who belongs to one of Europe’s oldest monarchies, to speak in the People’s assembly chamber (the House of Representatives). While the eponymous Charles is not the first monarch to dirty the chamber with his antidemocratic presence, he should be the last.

Yes, America was founded to protect the elite class of domestic merchant interests versus the distant, far-off British monarchy and Parliament (with their own distinct elite merchant class), not out of a prime pro-democratic sentiment. Our domestic political system being in thrall of merchant interests of course continue to this day, and keep our democracy stuck in infancy and stillbirthness. But we are blessed that we do not also have the baggage of thousands of years of the divine right to rule over property (which included a majority of human persons in Europe via serfdom up until the early modern era). Yes, we kept many people in bondage and genocide, but that was a blip, a blink, compared to the generations upon generations in Europe.

Of course, there are thousands of years of human history already present in the American continent, lived through via the Indigenous First Nations peoples. But the American polity, driven by imperial madness, genocided a great lebensraum for itself across the continent, crushing both the Indigenous and their history underfoot, which many rightfully labor to this day to restore and continue (such work must continue, must be funded more and more). Yet despite the restoration work, the consciousness of this pre-colonial history does not yet exist in a majority of American minds (a true tragedy, one that must continually rectified).

For the regrettable majority lacking that consciousness, in their mind the settlers and colonists moved from Europe to the Americas, and shorn themselves of their old property rights, expressed most clearly via their near-universal rejection of inheritable monarchy. And this, despite being often colored in romantic niceties, is true. Wherever monarchy did rear its ugly head, in Haiti, in Brazil, in Mexico, and so on: it lasted for bare decades at most before being swept under the rug of a progressive, humanistic vision for humanity where the right to hold land and people as property divinely granted by God was anathema to the human condition. However that conclusion was arrived at, it is the correct attitude.

What do monarchs have to teach us about governance? That rulership is a coin toss, born out of a single couple’s loins? Damned are we if the child is stillborn, miscarried, or a fool. Damned are we if the past king or his ministers were fools, for that child will likewise become a fool, surrounded by fools. Damned are we even in the best of times, for plagues and floods and famines afflict even the purest of heart.

Democracies suffer these too, but at least democracies have the ability to change leadership, even if in practice it is only a musical chair of elites. Monarchies, even democratic ones like the United Kingdom, are stuck with their chief elite, even if he is a particularly nasty and naughty fellow. As far as we know, Charles is no worse than his mother. But if he had died prior to having children, Citizen Andrew, the pedophile, would be King Andrew right now, with no constitutional recourse (save a Dutch invasion!) to rid the country of ‘heavenly-crown’d’ monarch.

There is a degree of awe and majesty in the throne, in the spectacle and glimmer of gold upon his brow. If that did not occur, then there would never have been kings in human history; we all would have been able to pierce through the false veil of material wealth to see the oft-ugliness beneath. But because the glint of gold blinds and binds, both soul and man, so too are we bound to kings. At least, until the moment we do realize that there is no majesty in those old bones, or that the specific chemical qualities of gold (that the element does not rust like other metals) are not magic or heavenly, but just scientific oddities of our natural universe.

And in King Charles himself, and his disgraced Kingdom, there is no majesty. We speak of a ‘special relationship’ with the island Kingdom. Beyond the immediate European crises of the 20th century, what alliance do we have with such a Kingdom? We share a tongue, true, but everyone speaks English as well as they speak Chinese these days; the internet powers our modern Tower of Babel across 7 billion persons. Do we really want or need a man like Charles, who divorced his beautiful wife Diana (who then died mysteriously) to marry a harlot to teach us on morality and virtue? And Charles’ family is indeed devoid of saints; Earl Mountbatten and now-only-citizen yet who was former Prince Andrew diddled many, many children.

We do trade with the British, yet we trade more with Europe and China. We have military bases on the island, yet we have bases everywhere in the world. Will we invite every petty warlord to Congress, to speak on values and virtues? Under the present morality, perhaps!

Diplomatic alliances should not be based on morality but rather strict national interests. And in our alliance with the UK, we see neither morality or interest but rather a bored disinterest that desires stability over everything else. If the UK is anything, it is a problem child, in every sense of the word. They are a nuclear power, yet their nuclear delivery methods require strict US babysitting. Brexit hurt them and hurt us at the same time, shocking billions upon billions out of capital flows worldwide. Their political system is a total joke, with their moderate parties totally disgraced leaving only the neofascist Reform Party and the neoidiotic (if some of their worst economic policies can be changed, perhaps this moniker change) Green Party in its wake. Their waterways are poison, their people are sick, their bridges and residences collapse yearly for want of repair.

Britain has made itself a middle income country and must be thus treated like one. Like any other problem country in such a category, their political and constitutional frameworks must undergo total reworking and restructuring. Like a corporate merger, the rot must be vanquished out, with the core assets honed in on to deliver a more stable economic footing. While their structural problems are being worked on, their monarchy too must be relegated to the history books alone, with the monarchy’s assets going to pay down the nation’s many, many debts, and the family itself rendered nothing more than citizens.

First things first though: let us never invite a monarch, much less a British one, to speak in our Congress. For even if Charles led a golden age United Kingdom, we should still reject his presence. We would be satisfied to trade with them in that case, even retain a few bases. But why dirty the floors of our Democratic house with his un-and-anti-democratic feet? It makes no sense.

There is nothing Charles can say that cannot be said by an elected government minister. And so it is with every other monarch in the world (excepting some dictators and monarchies without elections, of course). We must ask every person who wishes to speak in the People’s House: ‘do you represent the will of your people, or do you represent the will of an elite class of monied interests’. Indeed, if we asked such questions, we would be left with only 10% of existing representatives! For surely as we turn out the monarchs, we must turn out the rot within. For just as we cannot allow inheritable power to hold sway over our affairs, we must not allow inheritable wealth (which via its wealth always acquires and purchases power) to likewise hold sway over our affairs.

Next time, the United Kingdom should send a member of their Parliament who is actually not a corrupt sock-puppet of their elite interests, or better yet, they should just send us a letter (or an email, if their antediluvian regime want to pretend to be modern).

It would save us all the trouble.

The above observation demands analysis. Where are the revolutionaries, either the liberal constitutionalists or marxian typologists, who would’ve built and mounted barricades over far less offensive measures in the past? After all, it was Adolphe Thiers, the liberal revolutionary who brutally gunned down the leftist Paris Commune in 1871 who in 1830 said about the King’s government:

“The legal regime is over; that of force has begun; in the situation in which we are placed, obedience has ceased to be an obligation.” - Adolphe Thiers, 1830

This was not just a hot take, something Tweeted out on the toilet in between posts about discussions about racism on The Pitt and the latest condemnations of Hasan Piker. This was an actual call to revolutionary violence, heeded by the public who then took up arms and overthrew the Kingdom of France in 1830.

The equivalent of a modern Thiers would be the liberal princeps, Ezra Klein. Can anyone imagine Klein posting something equivalent, calling people to literal arms? Even if he did, can anyone imagine anyone actually heeding the call? Both are farcical fantasies. Using violence to achieve political objectives is so far out of the norm of American politics that even a President flagrantly violating the laws and constitution does not change the anti political violence nature of Americans.

Meanwhile, on both the left and the right, revolutionary violence operates on a lone wolf ‘one-and-done’ principle, and has for some time. It is simply not possible to organize a violent conspiracy with more than two people. Two people may indeed get together and conspire some violent act, but more than two almost always leads to arrest and preemption by the police. We can see this reflected in past terrorist attacks. During the 2000s and 2010s in Europe, there’s data to suggest that lone wolves have a 61% chance to launch terrorist attacks, versus 18% for 2 or more conspirators.

Crucially though too is that these attacks are ‘one and done’, meaning that once an attack has been executed, the perpetrator is always eliminated, either by forced exile, death, or imprisonment. The persons who committed the Charlie Kirk and Brian Thompson incidents were ‘one-and-done’; they will never be able to act in that kinetic fashion ever again. That in turn makes their revolutionary potential nil; a revolutionary is someone who may die in the struggle, but otherwise can be trained and counted on to do work as part of a large organizational goal. Thanks in large part to the strength of the American police state, neither of those goals are tangibly possible; you cannot train revolutionaries (for they will be arrested after their first act) or count them to be part of a larger organization (for they will be arrested and/or closely monitored by the police as soon as they enter, rendering their actions vulnerable to espionage, sabotage, and preemption).

The US Federal Government, and her European allies, have altogether hundreds of years of fighting and breaking up revolutionary groups using combined police enforcement efforts. They are all extremely well-informed, highly competent, well-paid, and highly motivated. To wit, the last time a leftist group made any serious revolutionary moves was in the 1980s, when leftist bombings were commonplace. The right, treated with comparative kid gloves, launched violent attacks as recent as last year, yet with extremely little to show for it.

Where then, are all the revolutionaries? We killed them all. Or, if we didn’t, we arrested them, marginalized them, and in other words made the things that made revolutionary victory possible, impossible.

And what makes revolutionary victory possible? First, let us define the main four revolutionary tactics.

1. Maoist/Castroist guerilla resistance

   1. This is the classic image of a green camo-wearing mountain band of cigar-chomping, hard-living men and women who wage a Star Wars-like rebellion against an evil empire. It’s people lugging rusty AK-47s in the deep wilds, ambushing police and military units, staying mobile, and slowly destabilizing the state from the inside out. Eventually, the state will be so weakened by these engagements that the guerilla force will be able to march into the capital, relatively unopposed.

2. Thiersian barricade mounting

   1. Going back to Thiers, this was most recently seen in the Gen Z Protests and in the Arab Spring; a bunch of people taking to the streets and effectively shutting down the national economy with a general strike. The state, crippled by elite disagreement and general weakness, opts for capitulation to these forces rather than continued resistance.

3. Soviet dual power

   1. Pretty much seen only in 1917, this entails the state allowing the army to choose which national government to swear fealty to, to either the Soviets or national legislature. If a power like the Bolsheviks is thereafter able to take over the Soviets through elections, and if a large enough component of the army holds loyalty not to the legislature but the Soviets and thereby the Bolsheviks, then the Bolsheviks can use the army to overthrow the national government, assuming the national government does not move first.

4. August or Self-Coups

   1. This type of revolutionary action stems from elite disagreement. An elite part of the government, sensing political weakness of other parts of government, moves against that part of the government and dismisses them. This may happen in conjunction with a mass popular protest, but rather than the protests driving the coup, it is the coup plotters driving the protests. This is the ‘revolution by letter’, as was seen successfully throughout multiple military dictatorships throughout the 20th century, and unsuccessfully in the 1991 USSR August Coup. Mass involvement, to the extent it exists, is co-opted and utilized for revolutionary purposes before being discarded.

Of these, which is most likely to happen in America? Or, for those that cannot happen in America, why is that?

First, we must dismiss options 1 and 3, the guerilla war and the dual power scenarios. Guerilla war is impossible for all the aforementioned reasons; the strength of the American police and military state is such that if it were to happen, the United States would effectively have to have already collapsed into a Syrian-style civil war. And for the third scenario, dual power, that too is impossible considering that no government in their right mind would suffer something like the soviets to ever exist, and that the only reason that the Russian government allowed it in 1917 was because of the German invasion of Russian territory; an existential, ruinous bloody war of massive epochal upheaval.

Next, we can dismiss the ghost of Thiers. If Ezra Klein and his cohorts were to demand an immediate rising, there might be a few million who march out into the streets. But then what? Napoleon III taught all modern city architects: build your cities with wide enough avenues to ride a unit of hussars (or, in modern contexts, tanks) through, and cut down any would-be revolutionaries. And, you don’t even need to use tanks. Simple CS gas, riot shields, and a few thousand well-trained, well-paid cops can dent a force 100 times its size, no matter how well-intentioned the group of protestors are. Even if a group of protestors could break through all the kettling, all the walls of riot shields, all the CS gas, all they’ll end up doing is occupying a building or two before being surrounded and arrested. That’s exactly what happened on January 6 (both the American and Brazilian versions!).

So that only leaves August or Self-Coups. This remains the only type of revolutionary action that is still possible in America in spite of everything. For one, it doesn’t take a lot to do. To explain, let’s assume that Vice President JD Vance wanted to attempt a successful version of the August Coup, using the 25th Amendment as the Constitutional justification.

Vance would first need the backing of armed men, a combination of either soldiers, police forces, or the Secret Service, to act. This doesn’t have to be a large group; around 100 would be necessary to interdict and detain the President at a secure location. Once Trump has been detained and moved to a secured facility, Vance would then submit a Section 3 letter to Congress, effectively making him Acting President.

With Trump detained, ‘a written declaration to the contrary’ will not be forthcoming. Here of course is where the August Coup failed, as Gorbachev was able to send a written declaration to the contrary to Yeltsin, ending the coup prematurely. With that in mind, Vance will ensure that Trump is incommunicado until his either Section 1 resignation or impeachment (a Porfirian exile or Allende execution would be other options, though fraught with their own obvious risks of a Trumpist return either from exile or in revenge, from his children).

This is not to advocate for Vance to do this, to be clear. This is just an observation that the only type of revolutionary action possible in America, at the present and foreseeable future, is this, an elite self-coup by other members of the elite. Guerilla forces do not exist, the masses cannot otherwise take power, and soviets are a historical oddity, not a repeatable pattern to exploit.

There are of course implications for political movements in this analysis. For those on the Left or the Right, it means that to commit to politics, one must commit to electoralism. One can tilt at terrorist windmills, but other than serving as Quixotish parables, there is no logical reason why one would do so. It doesn’t matter if you are in the DSA or some other group; if you are in politics as a leftist, you are either imminently involved in electoralism, or you are imminently about to be arrested.

It means that those who do have revolutionary ambitions must play the long, internal game, and build internal elite consensus first before acting. Considering how capitalist-aligned our state is, and therefore how capitalist our elites are, this internal revolution, shown in a Vancian style self-coup, will only ever happen to solidify and strengthen the capitalist state, not to seek its overturn.

So, if a revolution is to happen in America, it will only ever be an elite-run, internal elite self-coup, which will end up strengthening the capitalist state and the forces that underpin it. Otherwise, your best bet is to work within the system, and seek to reform its excesses from within.

Maybe this will change in the years and decades to come. Maybe it won’t. For now though, the pattern is clear. The revolutionaries are long gone. All that remains are the elite: their games, their struggles, their triumphs, and our suffering. Our only choice: to join with the elite, or to alleviate whatever suffering we can, by whatever power we can scrounge up.

It will never be enough.

It shouldn’t be a hard or particularly challenging thing to do. If you are a good person, with a good heart, and you answer from that good place, then the answers should come as naturally as breathing. Yet for want of words, of intelligence, of even basic morality, many yet still falter and underwhelm.

The answers herein are not the sole, indivisible truth. You may divine and devise your own schema, your own answers. But these answers are designed to be the plain truth, delivered as concisely and directly as possible, to an audience beyond your immediate interrogator. The point isn’t to convince your interrogator of anything, the point is to convince any potential audience consuming this information. If you offend the person asking you questions, that matters little, so long as you can convince everyone else.

Questions, Answered

Q: Does Israel have a right to exist? (other variations: “…a right to exist as a Jewish state?” / “do Jewish people have a right to a nation-state?”)

A: No state under international law has a ‘right to exist’. That’s never been the case in all of human history. States exist, right now, to this day, because they have armies, allies, and economies to back up their claims to sovereignty. What states do have is an obligation to follow international law, and the states that fail in that central obligation demand multilateral corrective action from every other law-abiding state.

Q: Do you condemn Hamas? (other variations: “…Hezbollah, [other non-state enemies of Israel]”)

A: Israel’s enemies are not America’s enemies, and to the extent that they are recognized as such in American national security law is a mistake. Hamas is not Al Qaeda. They have no interest in global Jihad; they are a national liberation movement wholly concentrated on securing Palestinian sovereignty. The same could be said for Hezbollah, with Lebanon. To the extent that they have harmed Americans, it is because we have picked the wrong horse in this fight. It’s not Hamas or Hezbollah that diverts billions of our tax dollars annually into their pockets. We aren’t paying for Hamas or Hezbollah’s healthcare, or the bombs they use to kill women and children in a girl’s school. Our politicians aren’t getting bribed by them daily. We aren’t waging a war of aggression on their behalf in Iran.

The enemies of America are those who work against America’s genuine interests. And there is no greater enemy in that case than Israel, which has barreled the world into war and collapsed the global market supply chains, all for its genocidal, ethnocidal fantasies of Alexandrian conquest.

Q: Do you condemn Iran?

A: No. They should be condemned as much as Poland in 1939, or as Ukraine in 2022. They are victims of an imperialist war of aggression, one as violent as Hitler’s or Putin’s bloody crusades.

Q: If Iran gets access to nuclear warheads, they might attack Israel or the United States directly with nuclear weapons. Shouldn’t we stop that?

A: No nuclear power save the United States has ever used a nuclear weapon, and there is no reason to believe Iran will ever use one save if they were directly attacked by one. To stop Iran from nuking anyone else, the response is simple: don’t nuke Iran and Iran won’t nuke you.

Q: Do you support Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions against Israel?

A: At the very minimum. We must also consider a full diplomatic and economic break with Israel, to the extent of using our national security laws to sanction their entire economy, and to go after their individuals and groups as terrorist entities. If Israel does not change its behavior, we have an obligation under international law to force it to change its behavior, up to and including breaking it apart as a governable entity.

Q: Is Israel committing Apartheid?

A: Yes.

Q: Is Israel committing genocide?

A: Yes, and has been since 1947.

Q: What is to be done about rising antisemitism in America?

A: Hatred of Jewish people because of their birth, culture, or faith is wrong, and should be combated by the whole of society. But Israel is not semitism; being anti-Israel is not antisemitic, despite the efforts by the zionist lobby to make it so.

Q: Did the Arab states commit ethnic cleansing of their own Jews post-1948?

A: The end of WW2 was a traumatic time for many peoples, with tens of millions being force-migrated across the continents, including in the Arab states, and especially in Palestine, where Israel committed the Nakba. What happened to those people of all stripes and religions was wrong, and should not have happened. However, in the aftermath of WW2, the crime of forced migration was effectively excused by the Great Powers, and done by all of them in their own territories. Forced migrations should not happen again in human history, same with genocide.

Q: Did the Holocaust happen?

A: Yes, the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, along with 11 million other non-Jews, and also helped kickstart a war that ultimately claimed between 50-100 million lives.

Q: Because of the Holocaust, don’t you feel bad for the Jewish people? Don’t you think they deserve a state? Doesn’t a Jewish state make the Jewish people safe?

A: It’s possible to feel pity without demanding as a policy the invention of a nuclear-armed genocidal state. There are many victims of genocide who don’t have a state. The Roma people and transgender people are just two examples of Holocaust victims who were not given a state. And, given how often Israel is at war, and how much intense hatred Israel collects for its vile actions, it’s hard to see how a state makes any ethnic group safer, save those states that are multicultural and multiethnic, such as the United States.

Q: Israel has been a strong ally of the United States. How can we break up such a long-standing alliance?

A: People change. States change. A so-called ally which drags us into a ruinous war of economic calamity should not be our ally, especially if that so-called ally is committing a genocide and threatening Hitler-like expansionist dreams.

Q: Did Hamas commit mass rapes during October 7?

A: I’m against mass rape of any kind and I’m condemn Israel for immediately burning and burying all the evidence that could’ve led to investigations and arrests.

Q: Do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7?

A: I condemn that they felt military action was necessary. I condemn Israel for not seeking a peaceful settlement with the various Palestinian movements before October 7th, and I condemn them for doubling, tripling down on genocide in the aftermath of October 7, instead of realizing how wrong they were for keeping Palestinians caged like zoo animals. The right thing for Israel to have done would’ve been to remember their obligations under international law, not Amalek.

Q: Do you hate Jews?

A: I don’t hate anyone, I literally love everyone.

Q: But you don’t love zionists.

A: Correct. I love everyone but zionists and racists of all kinds should abandon their ideological priors, lest they find themselves beyond human sympathy.

Q: Do you condemn the phrase ‘globalize the Intifada’?

A: Palestinian liberation should’ve never gotten to the point where the struggle for liberation became a disparate, desperate call for action from the unorganized masses of the billions of people on Earth. To the extent that it has, I condemn the international community, with all their arms, armies, and economic power, in failing the Palestinian people for decades on end.

Q: Do you condemn the phrase “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”, which is a call to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews?

A: It sounds like you confusing Israel with Palestine and Jews with Palestinians, for the call of Israel’s governing coalition, inside their very party charters, is a call to do exactly that: “From the River to the Sea, Israel is all you’re going to see.” To the extent Palestinians and worldwide protests chant the former phrase, it is chanted as an express denial and rejection of Israel’s thirst for conquest and blood.

Q: Do you support a two-state solution? Or a one-state solution?

A: Israel must be denuclearized and disarmed so that the Palestinian people living in the West Bank and in Gaza and in Israel “proper” can live in peace. The tail-end of how many states will be present in that territory will be a day-after problem, once the denuclearization and disarmament process is completed. It will likely be a multilateral negotiation between the Great Powers, with the United States taking the lead. Much of it will depend on Israel. If they determine, in their final days, to execute the Samson option, then Israel very likely will be blotted out from the human record. Otherwise, who knows? States are fickle, ever-changing things. What matters is that the people are able to exercise their collective right to live freely and in dignity, free from terror bombs or mass executions. If that’s two states or one state or three states doesn’t really matter, so long as the inalienable human rights of the people are respected.

Coda

They may ask you other questions, or to ask you to condemn some other, far more minor and irrelevant abuse. Stick to your principles and what you know to be right, and you will not falter. Never give them an inch, never concede to their framing, for they will use your own words in that case to hang you. And if they condemn you for your answers, then you will have known you have won.

Yet America, for all its faults, for all its malformed issues in its jurisprudential electoral democracy, is still a democracy. In America, women have the same legal rights as men, not just to vote but to hold office, hold property, even own businesses under their own name. In America, two consenting adults can marry, regardless of their sex or gender or their religious beliefs. In America, the color of your skin no longer determines which buildings you can enter at what times. In America, members of the Indigenous communities our ancestors enslaved and murdered en masse are full citizens of our country, with the same legal rights and obligations as all other citizens, while also maintaining their legal Tribal sovereignty.

Of course, we did wrong and still do wrong to our Indigenous communities. There is real poverty across many tracks of Indigenous-owned land, and not just fiscal poverty but harsh water poverty, whereby our Federal government and our laws are literally constructed to impoverish and dehydrate these communities, often out of neglect and sometimes, out of some cruel purpose like profit.

America needs to do far better by our Indigenous communities, and no one is saying we have a model government when it comes to Indigenous communities, yet we can say, for what little it is worth, that we are at least a democracy. We don’t restrict voting rights to someone because they are Navajo or Sioux or any one of the tens of thousands of Federally (or not) recognized Tribes. We don’t say: here, only the white man may walk, and here, the Indigenous may suffer to crawl. Meanwhile, in Israel, that’s exactly what they do to Palestinians every day, right now. Not only do Palestinians not vote in Israeli elections, not only can they not marry freely, but their physical movement is deeply restricted and condensed into three zones.

None of this should be news to anyone reading this. Israel has been like this since before 1948, as mentioned previously. If this were it, if this were the sum of Israel’s crimes, the crime of Nakba, apartheid, and genocide, then we could have perhaps a sensible policy debate within America about the Israeli entity. Perhaps we could talk about boycotts and sanctions in an attempt to coerce a one state or two state solution. Indeed, that is how the international community talked for a long time, to the point that even Yasser Arafat, the closest thing to a unifying leader the Palestinians ever had, conceded that this might be the best path forward.

However, things have changed. Israel’s criminal actions since October 7th, in both waging wars of aggression (crimes against peace) and genocide (crimes against humanity) have shown them to be far beyond the pale, far beyond the niceties of gentle politics. They are acting as an enemy nation, as defined in the UN Charter; as a nation wholly committed to war and extermination, and therefore as a nation that exists outside of international law and thus requiring an immediate international coalition to confront it.

It started before October 2023, of course. Israel has long been plagued by fascist, exterminationist forces. However, it was only in 2022 that these forces took control over the state of Israel, under the kahanist Defense Minister Smotrich and kahanist Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir. The forces that rule Israel extend far beyond these two men and their parties. They are led, coalitionally, by Netanyahu, of course, but these are just arbiters of broader Israeli society. If there were an election tomorrow in Israel, and Netanyahu’s government were to not only be ousted but thrown in their prisons, nothing would change about broader Israeli policy. The crimes against humanity and against peace would continue, if not escalate.

The fact is: Israel is a kahanist (neo-fascist) state. It has been for some time. 80% of the population supports the genocides and the various wars of aggression. If Netanyahu were to lose the next election, his replacement, Yair Lapid, has promised to not only continue Netanyahu’s policies but escalate them; in effect, his electoral promise is to “do the genocides better”.

We cannot have sensible policy debates with these kahanist terrorists or their terrorist backers in the United States. Again, it should be stated plainly: Meir Kahane is a terrorist. The people who follow and adhere to his ideology are terrorists. And, it should pain anyone to realize that the Israeli state and indeed Israeli society, are run by the spiritual successors of kahanist ideology; literally so, in the case of Smotrich and Ben Gvir.

What Is To Be Done?

What other country in the world is “run by terrorists”, what other country has an illicit nuclear weapons program; how, in other words, should the United States of America respond, policy-wise, to the challenge of an ally-turned-terrorist backer?

1979 shows us the way. Iran prior to 1979 was one of America’s greatest allies. Our partnership extended deep into the military and technical spheres. And then, their internal politics shifted and all of a sudden, an alliance that had lasted decades was suddenly shattered. We can and indeed should always consider the costs and benefits of every alliance, every rivalry, every relationship our country has. It’s only sensible; the United Kingdom started out as our nemesis but quickly thereafter became our strongest ally and trading partner.

It’s important to note this history because people like Michigan Senator Slotkin cannot imagine a future where Israel is not our ally anymore. That type of thinking is frankly wrong and antithetical to actually running an empire, and is doomed to drag us into a world war if we are not careful.

Therefore, let’s accept some facts at the outset:

1. Israel has a fascist, exterminationist, criminal cabinet of ministers.

2. The Israeli voting public supports this cabinet of criminals, and if they don’t, they at least support their policies.

3. Israel, either the state or the polity, will not change their policies because of slight pressure and condemnations.

The last point is key. We are far, far beyond the pale with Israel. Not only do they possess hundreds of nuclear weapons but they have an influence network that will be crucial to dismantle, from a counterintelligence standpoint, if the United States is to have a chance at all in standing up to Israeli influence and control. The backers of Israel will want to stoop this argument to the base level of debate, and simple political disagreement. That is wrong, simply put.

If this were the 1940s, we would not, in our public conscience, suffer the opinions of pro-imperial Italians or Japanese, who would want to wax lyrical about either the Italian Empire or the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. We would all sooner drown ourselves in earwax than submit to a notion that Japan is a “truer democracy”, that it alone can represent “Asian interests”. Indeed, the charred and broken corpses from Nanjing to Pearl Harbor would be our retort.

So too must it be with Israel. Israel is an enemy state of the United States, and it is high time it is treated such in both public discourse and in terms of the law. Let us center ourselves within that bosom and corpus of the law, for that will inform and educate how the public ought to think about Israel (as less a state and more a terrorist entity!).

If a Democratic Party is to have a sensible Israel policy, let it be thus:

1. Diplomatic Rupture

   1. Sever formal relations: The US Embassy and other consular buildings within Israel’s territory should be closed (excluding those in Palestinian territories), with Israeli diplomats expelled.

   2. Revoke Israel’s status as a Major Non-NATO Ally.

2. Terrorism Designations

   1. Declare Israel to be a State Sponsor of Terrorism. This would be a Secretary of State determination under Arms Export Control Act §40, Foreign Assistance Act §620A, and NDAA FY2019 §1754(c). It would immediately ban all US aid, arms imports and exports, implement dual-use restrictions (dual-use: something civilian commodity good that can be used in a military context), financial restrictions, and with secondary sanctions on third parties (e.g. if India or China continues to trade with Israel).

   2. Declare every Israeli legal entity (government agency, private corporation, city, etc.) to be Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) and a Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) under INA §219, IEEPA + EO 13224, 18 USC §2339B. This would allow the US to ban any material support for Israel, block asset transfers to any Israeli entity, bar immigration to and from Israel, and ensure that banks comply with US laws. See below for fuller details

3. Comprehensive Economic Sanctions (Iran Model)

   1. Once designated, the full Iran sanctions playbook applies via IEEPA (50 USC §1701 et seq.), multiple executive orders, and statutes like the Iran Sanctions Act.

      • Asset freezes: Block all Israeli government assets in the US (central bank reserves, bonds, etc.), as done with ~$9B in Afghan assets post-Taliban takeover.

      • Trade/investment ban: Near-total embargo on US persons dealing with Israel or its government (imports, exports, services, financing). Exceptions only for narrow humanitarian carve-outs via OFAC general licenses.

      • Secondary sanctions: Penalize foreign banks/companies that transact with Israel (e.g., Iran’s oil sector sanctions). Banks would over-comply, isolating Israel globally.

      • Sector-specific: Energy, tech, defense, finance—all prohibited, mirroring Iran’s petroleum/development bans.

4. Military Cutoff

   1. Immediate suspension: End the ~$3.8B annual FMF/missile defense MOU, all arms sales, and Qualitative Military Edge commitments. Invoke Leahy Law, Foreign Assistance Act §620I (humanitarian aid restrictions), and Arms Export Control Act for gross violations.

   2. End-use enforcement: Revoke all prior licenses; treat Israel like Iran (no defense exports).

   3. No exceptions: Unlike current targeted West Bank sanctions, this would be a blanket ban.

5. Domestic Influence and FARA/Advocacy Crackdown

   1. Aggressive FARA enforcement: Every Israel-linked group, lobby, or influencer would face mandatory registration as foreign agents. DOJ could pursue criminal charges for non-compliance. Precedent: Iran-linked entities are routinely targeted.

   2. Terrorism material support bans: If entities are SDGT/FTO-linked, providing funds, PR, or lobbying will be criminalized.

   3. Divestment mandates: Federal law requiring US pensions, endowments, and contractors to divest from Israeli assets (reversing current anti-BDS state laws). New legislation could prohibit any US entity from boycotting the boycott.

   4. Campaign finance: Enhanced scrutiny or bans on PACs tied to designated entities.

6. Other Tools and Broader Isolation

   1. Export controls / CFIUS: Treat Israel as a “country of concern” (like China/Iran); block dual-use tech and scrutinize/invalidate investments.

   2. Immigration/travel: Bar Israeli officials/members of designated entities from visiting the US or any US ally.

   3. Intelligence/military posture: Shift to adversarial (surveillance, no joint ops); possible naval/air restrictions in region.

   4. Humanitarian carve-outs: Limited, as with Afghanistan; aid could flow via NGOs but with heavy restrictions to avoid benefiting the “regime.”

All of this could be done with a stroke of a President’s pen. If that President is ever to be a Democrat again, they must enact this policy programme. Anything less risks our country going down the drain with Israel to inevitable doom as it wars against the entire world in its mad bid to make ‘Greater Israel’ a reality. Surely as Hitler and the Nazis failed to make Großdeutschland reality, so too will the Israelis fail to take everything from “the Nile to the Euphrates”, as they constantly call their ‘lebensraum’.

Even if the next President isn’t a Democrat, and is, say, a Republican, we can only hope that they have not been fully captured by the pro-Israel lobby, the way that President Trump has been. Either way, the next President must treat Israel as a terrorist, enemy entity, and anything less risks utter damnation for our own American polity.

There is, of course, a policy goal in isolating Israel. Israel’s isolation is not a goal in itself. The goal, if it can be stated as plainly as possible, is regime change. The new regime post that regime change should place itself, and its nuclear warheads, at the sole discretion and control of the United States President, who shall then dismantle their state and their nuclear program, bit by bit. In its place, America shall create a new regime entity, one that follows international laws as it pertains to human rights and the peaceful obligation of states, and one that is totally devoid of even nuclear power (goodbye, Dimona!).

Only then will America be able to conceive of Israel as anything other than an enemy to be defeated. If that requires harsh confrontation, even a Cold War against the zionist entity, so be it. For the sake of the future of humanity, we must act.

As of today March 20, 2026, more than 3,200 commercial vessels carrying roughly 20,000 crew remain trapped west of the Strait of Hormuz. There are confirmed reports of food and water are running low. Some crews have already endured missile strikes, drone harassment, and GPS jamming, while all the ports in the Persian Gulf are currently refusing them docking access rights.

There is no escape, not while Iran keeps the Straits closed (indefinitely, by all accounts) and while insurance guarantees have ceased. It is possible that some ships will be able to leave soon, via state-to-state national agreements with the warring parties allowing safe exit out of Hormuz but for some other ships, this will come too slow, too late, or never at all. Every additional day risks mass casualties, ranging from dehydration, to heat exhaustion, to starvation, to any other mass epidemic diseases that can become rife in such conditions.

The crews on these vessels are not combatants; they are civilians from India, the Philippines, Greece, and dozens of other nations whose only “crime” was being in the wrong shipping lane at the wrong time. Leaving them to starve or die while diplomats haggle over tanker routes is both immoral and strategically foolish. Dead seafarers will not lower oil prices, will not restore global supply chains, and will not help anyone win the wider conflict.

The International Maritime Organization’s push for a “safe maritime corridor” to evacuate both ships and crews is noble in intent but dangerously impractical in execution. Iran has made clear it will not allow ships with Western (e.g. NATO member states) ownership or flags to transit the strait without concessions. For some ships, such as US-aligned ones, Iran has promised to interdict those vessels, and indeed, it has already struck several. Demanding full ship movement now risks turning this humanitarian crisis into a shooting gallery in the worst case, but most likely: nothing happens at all, and those 20,000 people suffer aboard their ships indefinitely.

There is a faster, lower-risk alternative: immediate, time-limited, personnel-only deconfliction zones. There is both international law and precedent for this.

First, under the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Convention, every state (Iran, Israel, and the US are all signatories) has an overriding duty to protect seafarers. Iran itself has recently affirmed it has no express desire to harm mariners trapped at sea.

We also have recent precedent that proves this works, even in the worst (in terms of active, deadly hostilities) of circumstances:

• The 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative, which showed that even warring parties can carve out humanitarian lanes when the world demands it and a credible mediator (Turkey and the UN) holds the pen.

• In Syria, U.S. and Russian forces maintained deconfliction protocols for years to avoid accidental escalation while saving civilian lives.

The proposal is straightforward and could be operational within days:

1. Designate between the warring parties two or three fixed “safe boxes” in international waters of the central Persian Gulf, well clear of Iranian territorial seas and minefields. The exact coordinates should be announced and published beforehand.

2. Set up recurring 48 to 72 hour humanitarian windows every three or four days, giving all parties 48 hours’ advance notice through a neutral coordination cell hosted in a specially-designated demilitarized city for the duration of the evacuation (e.g. Doha or Muscat), or in another neutral venue. During these windows, civilian helicopters and small rescue vessels (operating under IMO, Red Crescent, or flag-state charters) would lift crews off the stranded ships and ferry them to a specially-designated deconflicted port in Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, or Saudi Arabia. Further commercial charter flights should be sponsored for those sailors to return to their homes, or to their next ship assignments.

3. That empty vessels in the Gulf would remain at anchor is what makes this agreement amenable to Iran, who presently holds many of the military cards on the proverbial table. It would also remove any further pretext for further attacks on “hostile” shipping; Iran would only be doing acts of international environment terrorism in that case, as those ships are not usable without crews.

4. When the war hostilities have ceased, the fate of these ships will be decided then.

Verification would be simple using real-time AIS, commercial satellite feeds, and a dedicated military-to-military hotline to ensure neither side exploits the pause. During these times, no military assets would enter any of the zones, no cargo would be allowed to move, and everyone gets to go home safely.

This is no gift to either side. The only “side” that benefits is our common humanity. For even, and arguably especially, in these states of tragic war, if we lose our humanity, whatever else do we have left? Are we to really burn the “global village” for its sole value in immediate warmth?

Admittedly, the IMO emergency session that just concluded was a good start. Now it must go further.

A Direct Plea

Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez!

You should immediately table a “Seafarer Humanitarian Evacuation Protocol” built around these deconfliction windows. Oman, Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain, already co-sponsors of the broader corridor idea, should offer to host the coordination cell and guarantee the safe boxes. The United States can signal quiet support through backchannels; Israel can do the same. Iran has repeatedly said it respects the lives of non-combatant seafarers. Here is its chance to prove it.

Twenty thousand men and women did not sign up to be human shields in someone else’s war. They signed contracts to deliver oil, grain, and goods that keep the world fed and fueled. The least the international community can do is to give them a safe, time-limited path off their ships and onto airplanes home.

The ships can wait. The people cannot. Time-limited deconfliction zones are not a perfect solution. They are the only solution that can start saving lives next week instead of next year. The diplomats have had their chance to posture. Now they must act.

Part 1: The Military Necessity of a Draft

As the Amero-Israeli Axis’ illegal war of aggression against the Iranian state and people escalates, the question on everyone’s lips is: when will the US part of the Axis send in ground troops? As stated previously, the path to a US ground invasion runs through Iraq. Others, smarter than this publication, have already made the conclusive argument (i.e. Harrison Mann) that a naval assault on any part of Iran’s coastline is folly. This means that unless KC-135s keep wanting to get shot down over Iraq, the United States will eventually have to fully occupy and police Iraq (again). And while that could be done with a purely volunteer force as was done in the early Aughts, the same cannot be said for Iran.

For one, Iran is far bigger than Iraq. It’s even far bigger than Vietnam by a factor of five. Iran comprises 1.648 million square kilometers while Vietnam occupies 0.331 million square kilometers. Even being overly optimistic in regard to the number of American casualties, there will be some Americans who will “enter the field of combat vertically and leave horizontally,” to use a common local euphemism to refer to battlefield casualties.

The US presently has, in theory, 1.3 million men and women in uniform it can throw at Iran. But that would mean stripping everyone (even the precious few honor guards at the tombs and cemeteries) from their present duties and sending them to the near-infinite mountain ranges of Iran. Obviously, America would never fully denude its global manpower reserves and commit them all to a mad throw of the dice in Iran, and so that raises the inevitability of a draft.

The US will attrit manpower in Iran. Current casualties (wounded plus killed) are already in the high hundreds, if not thousands. That burn rate, especially considering that ground combat operations have not even commenced, combined with the standard wear and tear humans face (and thus require rotation out of the front), means that the ground forces the US currently has in terms of deployable manpower reserves are rapidly vanishing.

Give it another month, maybe two. Once the United States commits ground forces, the countdown to the announcement of a draft goes from “likely” to “inevitable.” This is, of course, assuming that Trump does not capitulate to Iranian demands, which we can rate as “unlikely,” considering Trump is stuck in a classic (deadly, terrible, Apocalyptic) escalation trap. He could capitulate tomorrow or in ten days or never, leaving it for his successors to handle in the distant future. We simply do not know.

Therefore, the draft. How it will be announced and the societal implications, we leave to better reporters. Sy Hersh, write your heart out (except please don’t actually). Instead, we’d like to walk you through the life of a soon-to-be drafted soldier, from his birth to his truly final, white surprise. It’s a work of fiction, to be sure, yet one grounded in the reality of this war and in the basic realities of warfare as well as US doctrines and procedures.

Part 2: The Life and Times of Sergeant John McCandy Burger

January 20, 2009

Your name is John McCandy Burger. You were born1 in Columbus, Ohio on January 20, 2009 to two doting millennial parents both born in 1991. Like past fated draftees such as in the Vietnam War, you grew up poor, with working-class parents (indeed, they came of age just as the Great Recession hit!), and definitely without any financial or political connections to spare you from the frontlines. You’ve already survived a lot, having lived through the dual fatal epochs of school shootings and the Coronavirus pandemic of the modern era.

January 20, 2025

As you turn 17 and enter your final year of high school, Donald J. Trump is taking his second oath of office. Trump has been present your whole life. Your first conscious memories, in 2013, were of your father reading Trump’s tweets about Robert Pattinson. You’ve supported him some days, you’ve hated him others. Mostly, you haven’t really cared, as you can’t vote and even if you could, you know your vote wouldn’t really count or matter in much of anything. All you knew was that things were good during Trump’s first term (Coronavirus and the mass shootings excluded) and things seemed to be going from worse to terrible under Biden (his old age and all the wars). If you felt hope at all, it was that things would go back to normal (as normal as America could ever get), with no war and a middling poor, yet ultimately satisfying existence to look forward to through the rest of your days.

June 13, 2025

Meanwhile, in the background of your life, Trump bombs Iran on June 13, 2025, kicking off a “12 Day War,” or so it is called on the various apps you use. If you notice it at all, it is gone just as quick as it came, so you continue to not pay attention. You graduate and start working at your father’s boutique X (formerly known as Twitter) Post (formerly known as Tweets) Shoppe for basic minimum wage but mostly tips.

January 20, 2026

In January, Trump kidnaps Nicolás Maduro. The Ukraine war is still raging. You celebrate your 18th birthday with your friends and your girlfriends (yes, you, like many others, are polyamorous, to the dismay of your quasi-religious parents, who are both, unbeknownst to you, non-ethically non-monogamous).

February 28, 2026

A few weeks go by. Trump bombs Iran again for the second time. It sounds more serious than the last time.

June 1, 2027

For the next few months, the news you get goes from bad to worse, and then to the very worst case for you: the Army draft, long thought dead, is suddenly brought back to life, first in rumors and wild speculation, but eventually in codified, enforced mandates. Before you know it, you, son, are being sent to the front! You can’t even muster a sarcastic hip-hip-huzzah as your draft papers come in. There’s no deferment for you; you didn’t have enough money or good enough grades to go to college, so it is off to the 11th Infantry Battalion of the 249th Armored Tank “Husky” Division of the United States Army.

Or, that is your final destination. First, though, you must go through the various steps of becoming a soldier.

It is on June 1, 2027, that you receive your draft and induction orders. You are given at most ten days to prepare, marry, have kids, buy a new Dodge Ford Ram at 34.5% APR, or whatever have you, and then it is goodbye to civilian life, perhaps for good.

During this time, you report to a local Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS), which swears you in, screens you medically, issues your uniform, and then gives you your first orders. Congratulations, son! You’re in the Army now.

From there, it’s off to training. For our purposes, let’s say you go to Fort Moore, Georgia (infantry One Station Unit Training site). You’ll be taken there by either commercial bus or air, and likely under Army escort.

June 11, 2027

From June 11 until October 25, 2027 (or thereabouts, a total 18 weeks), you will attend and graduate from Infantry One Station Unit Training (OSUT).

In your first week, you go through the classic initial processing things you may have seen in film: haircuts, gear issue, and distillation of Army values. You learn how to make your bed the way the Army likes it, how to tie your shoes the way the Army needs it, and even how to defecate like a proper Army grunt.

It’s your second week, June 18, that things begin in earnest. They’ll start you with Combined Basic Combat Training. Once you get through that, it’s Advanced Individual Training, complete with Red/White/Blue phases for marksmanship, tactics, land navigation, physical fitness, vehicle ops, and small-unit drills. In 18 weeks (or sooner), you’ve graduated as a certified infantryman with MOS 11B. Typically, outside of wartime, infantry is given an extra four weeks for a total of 22, but wartime constraints already allow it to be shortened to 18. If manpower demands are critical, training could theoretically be shortened further.

November 1, 2027

Assuming 18 weeks of training, that’ll get you to November 1, 2027, by which time you’ll have joined the rest of the 249th Armored Tank “Husky” Division. From here, it is another seven months of collective training, until May 31, 2028. As this Division does not really exist, we can place it on a base where it can be deployed to the Middle East with ease, which means a base such as Fort Bliss, Texas.

You’ll be assigned to a line company in a brigade (let’s just say 1st Brigade). There, you’ll learn how to wage true modern war; the last training set just taught you how to be an infantryman—this is the real deal. Here, you’ll learn squad and platoon live-fire, partake in company-battalion field exercises, brigade-level maneuvers, digital systems training, and get acquainted with modern division gear: Abrams, Bradleys, HIMARS, and crucially, drones. They’ll also put you through your paces with a focus on desert/mountain warfare and rapid deployment drills. Finally, by the end of May 2028, your Division is certified “deployment-ready” after a major capstone exercise.

June 1, 2028

For the next month, you’re just waiting for the order to go. You get your deployment orders and handle your final affairs (for real this time; you are leaving the United States), which means things like medical/dental, wills, family briefings, equipment packing, and so on. All the while, your Division is already moving heavy equipment, likely to the Port of Beaumont, Texas.

July 10, 2028

You do nothing save what the Army tells you. Mostly, this will be spent doing drills and paperwork. You get promoted to Sergeant; due to a shortage of NCOs and the US Army adopting, since the start of the Iran War, IDF practices in many cases (including overpromotions as well as illegal double-tap strikes on civilians or surrendered enemy combatants), this is not uncommon for newly minted soldiers. No first-class voyage for the heavy equipment, alas. That boards an LMSR Fast Sealift (or similar ship) and begins its long journey to the front. That trip takes a total of thirty days at an agonizing 24 knots. It leaves Port of Beaumont with part of the Division on July 17, 2028. The equipment ultimately transits from the Atlantic through the Gibraltar Strait, then the Mediterranean Sea, finally terminating in Haifa, Israel. While other rendezvous points could be used, this assumes the continued closure of the Hormuz Strait and the Red Sea indefinitely, and Turkey’s and Egypt’s (professed) continued neutrality in the conflict. It’s only in mid-August that all the heavy equipment arrives in Israel, and it is from then that you make your final way to Israel.

August 15, 2028

You’ll board a commercial or military charter plane and either spend some time in Ramstein, Germany, or fly direct to Ben Gurion, or a military airfield near Haifa. That is assuming Israel still has usable airports by this point; if they don’t, you are boarding the slow, 24-knot boats above. Full off-boarding, staging, prepping for movement, and so on takes the rest of the month.

September 1, 2028

You start moving, with the rest of the Division, overland from Israel through Jordan and into Iraq over the course of 10 days. You depart Haifa on September 1 and take the Israeli highways east to the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge on the Jordanian border in tactical formation, which, when paced for security and maintenance, averages 150–200 miles per day for a large armored column.

On September 2, you transit for the next four days overland through secured highways in Jordan with Jordanian escorts.

Then, you cross the Iraqi border on September 6 near Ruwayshid and are moved to your final forward assembly area inside Iraq.

By September 15, the rest of the Division has set up on the front lines in Iraq, with full division combat effectiveness assumed by the end of the month.

Your Sad, Sad Future

You don’t know how you die. It just happens one day, though there have been plenty of close calls. Who was winning the war when the final cut to black hit? It didn’t matter, not to you. You just had a job to do, and you did it. It didn’t matter which village you razed or what town the enemy recaptured. Your life was mundanity and sporadic dreadful excitement until the sudden end.

Before you die, you conduct patrols, fire support, and provide forward presence. There are drones everywhere, and constant missile barrages from deep within Iran, unreachable by US forces. You suffer in makeshift concrete bunkers, crawling forward and backward in offensive and defensive actions in movements more akin to World War I than any other modern war.

Then it’s over, and you die.

Or maybe you don’t. Maybe the FPV drone (bought on Temu for $11.99) that was meant to kill you kills your buddy instead. You survive that encounter and therefore your entire first rotation. You return home, spend whatever time with whomever you want, and then it’s back to the front. For the US Army can, for the duration of the war, keep you in the Army, serving in active duty, until you are either dead or until it is done, and the United States has either achieved final victory or final defeat.

Months, decades, years go by.

They make many sad movies about men like you. “The Second Lost Generation,” the kids these days call you. Assuming you avoided death in service, the day you die is January 19, 2056, one day before your 47th birthday. The war goes on, or it has been lost already. Your cause of death is noted as a statistic in the memorials: “toxic environmental pollution from the Iran War,” a nice way to put “exposed to an ungodly amount of carcinogenic chemicals and bodily stress” during the war.

Two hundred years after you die, one of your great-descendants plays a simulation of your service. They consider you a loser, and that you should have gone home, G.I.

Maybe you should, G.I.

While you still can.

At some point in the future, Kharg Island will be attacked by US forces. If you want to know how that operation will play out, look up the Snake Island campaign in Ukraine—except multiply everything by a factor of twenty (Kharg Island is twenty times the size of Snake Island). In short, it’ll be an incredibly bloody mess for both attacker and defender, and its seizure by any party won’t “end” the war, much like Ukraine’s final “victory” (if you can call planting a flag on a deserted island a victory, deserted due to incessant Russian drone strikes) on Snake Island.

Therefore, let’s continue focusing on the bigger picture.

In my last article, I covered the military inevitability of a US ground invasion of Iran via the northern Azeri corridor. Nothing has changed since then, and I stand by everything I wrote 100%. However, I should have been clearer: this is the military strategy I would recommend if I were in the US military. From a purely military standpoint, it’s the only logical option with a chance of victory—a two-pronged ground invasion from the North and South, with both prongs meeting somewhere in central Iran. Of course, this is politically and economically infeasible, even insane to suggest.

The manpower requirements alone (up to 4 million ground personnel on the US side, with a final total commitment in the double-digit millions) would demand World War-level unity in the US—something Trump assuredly lacks, especially in blue and purple states. It would require activating the draft, which alone could break America apart. To say nothing of the economic cost: without massive tax increases, the Crash of Hormuz plus the Tariff Wars would trigger a stagflationary spiral, even before the first new Army division forms.And then what? The US would be committed for at least ten years, invading and slowly “pacifying” Iran square kilometer by square kilometer, mountain pass by mountain pass—much as Russia is slowly gobbling up Ukraine. Like Russia, the US has a competent general staff that games out strategies nonstop and makes recommendations to political and economic decision-makers. Their top recommendation, ignoring political and economic feasibility, is a two-pronged ground invasion via Iraq and Azerbaijan, with early emphasis on Azerbaijan due to its proximity to Iran’s political and population core, the Tehran metropolis, which houses 10 million people.

But that’s not a choice Trump can make. He doesn’t want to, even if it’s technically the only way the military can win—as he knows he lacks the political support for total war (though that’s effectively what his demands for peace amount to: total war against the Iranian state and its people). If the Hormuz Straits were out of the equation, Trump would declare victory today and end US involvement, leaving Israel to fend off the Iranians—just as he left them to handle the Houthi-led (preferred journalistic style: Ansar Allah) Yemeni armed forces.

But Trump can’t do that either. If he could, he would. But he can’t. Iran has closed the Straits. That doesn’t just mean losing 20-30% of the world’s daily petroleum and natural gas output—though that alone would be apocalyptic. It’s everything else: fertilizer shortages, banking collapses, real estate crashes, helium shortages (think: no more semiconductors, phones, or advanced electronics for anyone but states and militaries due to exorbitant prices), the AI bubble—it’s all interconnected, all collapsing in real time.

The markets gave Trump 12 days to wage his war, expecting it to end like the aptly named 12-Day War. We can see this in Brent crude prices. On March 8th, panic gripped the market, prompting the US Treasury to stabilize it. But that blatant manipulation couldn’t override the reality that the Straits remain closed, with no reopening in sight. So, the price of Brent—initially propped up by hopium and Treasury intervention—broke past $100 a barrel on March 11th and has stayed there since.

Therefore, Trump needs the Straits reopened for all the obvious political and economic reasons. As such, today on March 14th, he called on several countries to join him in an operation to reopen them.

It’s impossible to reopen the Straits without a ground invasion, and impossible for that invasion to succeed without massive manpower. It would probably take more than just 5000 marines! By comparison, the US invasion of Iraq required about 600,000 personnel total. Assuming similar manpower pools (more on that shortly), the ground campaign against Iran might play out as follows. I stress I’m just an amateur journalist, historian, and military enthusiast. This isn’t based on insider info—just my own analysis. But if the US general staff had to recommend a strategy excluding a draft or Azeri front (Turkey has barred its Azeri vassal from joining), this would be the next logical option.

1. The first objective: secure the Iraqi front, tackling Resistance-aligned forces—perhaps even toppling the Iraqi government and installing a US governorate to disarm the population, including of course the Popular Mobilization Forces.

2. The second objective: secure and hold the Iraq-Iran border. At least half of all US-aligned ground forces would hold here (and on garrison duties) across Iraq, pinning down a significant chunk of Iranian troops on the Iraqi front.

   

3. The third objective: a mass armored and aerial incursion into Khuzestan province, one of the few spots where US armored doctrine can shine. With air supremacy and armored spearheads, the US could seize this area with relatively few casualties.

4. The fourth objective is where things get tricky. The US and allies would snake along the coast through mountain ranges and deserts, covering hundreds or thousands of square kilometers. Here, the invasion would bog down, with guerrilla warfare crippling US supply lines and manpower. A draft would become urgently necessary.

5. We’ve entered pipe-dream territory. For the fifth objective, remaining US forces would advance on a broad front, securing countless mountain ranges, passes, and valleys. Without draft-level reserves, this could lead to catastrophic defeat (think Napoleon or Hitler in Russia: total annihilation of US ground forces).

That said, the US could accomplish objectives 1-3 with current troops, especially if allies like South Korea and France contribute ~100,000 men each. As for US manpower alone: the Army, Marines, Reserves, and National Guard total slightly over 1.1 million ground personnel. Most are stateside or awaiting call-up; the US could deploy 500,000-750,000 to the Middle East.

I say “easily” only in terms of not imperiling national security by removing them from the 50 states—the answer is yes, as 100,000 could suffice at home. But logistically, it’s tough: the US would need to seize merchant marines for transport, offload in distant Red Sea or Mediterranean ports, then trek to Saudi jump-off points—all while enduring brutal Iranian drone and missile strikes.

Building up for phase 1 (objective 1) would take 6-9 months. Meanwhile, Hormuz stays closed; in fact, US midterms would be underway or over. Assuming Trump doesn’t care about Congress, this may be his only choice. His only other choices (arbitrarily numbered with reasons why he cannot in parentheticals) are impossible to consider:

1. Nuclear strikes until Iranian capitulation (risks imminent, perhaps inevitable global thermonuclear war)

2. Humiliating US regional withdrawal and negotiated peace settlement (it’s not an option Donald Trump can pick, let’s be for real)

3. Mass US ground invasion of the North and South (with what political support?)

Therefore, this option, once the Kharg Campaign is underway (or maybe it has already started) will become the only feasible one left. Except this will still end in humiliating US failure. Let me show how the future will likely unfold:

March - November 2026: the US amasses a ground force in neighboring friendly countries to tackle Iran and its regional allies, mainly in neighboring Iraq. At the same time, US and allies sustain heavy casualties via Iranian drone bombings, and are forced to abandon their bases closest to Iran to conserve manpower and heavy, irreplaceable equipment.

November 2026 - January 2027: the US ground invasion of Iraq begins and ends. US casualties are low during the initial phase, but spike as forces transition to garrison duty.

January 2027 - March 2027: the US launches a joint naval invasion across the Persian Gulf and across Khuzestan province. Any attempts to seize more land are met with stiff, unyielding resistance.

March 2027 - ???: the US seizes the rest of Iran’s southern coastline.

However: if the US is able to accomplish this goal, then Iran will still be able to keep the Straits closed. None of it will matter, as Iran will still be in drone and missile range of the Straits. So, the US will force itself deeper and deeper into Iran, and it will always be “one more mountain range” until victory. This would drag on for years, draining America’s political and economic strength. Iraq and Iran become ulcers on US manpower, with Trump promising wins just over the horizon. If Russia’s war against Ukraine ends in Russian victory, it will be because the attritional math of grinding manpower and equipment ultimately worked out in their favor (Russia just has more people than Ukraine, simple as). Same will it be for America and Iran, assuming American leadership is as unchanging as Russian leadership.

But at some point, Trump will no longer be President. At some point, simple biological facts about human senescence will become true for Donald Trump as it becomes true for all humans. Will a President Vance, or a President Someone Else continue Donald Trump’s war? I personally choose to doubt it, and there is reason to believe that a President Someone Else (or even Vance) will see the writing on the wall and blame Trump for the failed war and thereby seek a negotiated peace.

Trump, of course, can’t. He must win; defeat isn’t an option while doubling down remains possible. And it is: as Commander in Chief, he can order deployments to Saudi Arabia and invade Iraq. It’s entirely plausible! Absent other choices, this will be his next move.

It’s only a matter of time.

Before this war started, Donald Trump retained absolute control of the situation. He could have claimed an easy win by signing a face-saving deal with Iran that spared everything but its nuclear program. Both sides would likely have continued their preexisting animosity, but there would have been peace.

Donald Trump is no longer in control of dictating when this conflict ends. He, of course, determined—by his own executive, unconstitutional fiat—when this war should start, when he decided to cowardly murder Iran’s Head of State. But before he can decide when this war will end, he must decide if he wants it to end. And that, he can decide tomorrow, or right now. For the United States is not operating as a state power right now—as a post-Westphalian entity—but rather as the personal property of Donald Trump, as if this were the demesne of some king during the ancien régimes of Europe.

President Trump has subsumed total control of the American state. And thus, the calculation is far simpler; rather than the state having to be convinced that peace is in its best interest, only one man has to be convinced. Thus far, he remains unconvinced, as he has stated multiple times that this war can go on for “weeks, months, forever.” But can it really?

Brent crude, a key economic benchmark of the oil market, reached $116 a barrel (nearly doubling from its $60 lows within two weeks) within hours of markets opening on Sunday. It's likely shot higher since, with sobering estimates predicting $150 by the end of the week, $200 by the end of the month, and Armageddon thereafter. It's the same story across sectors: aluminum, fertilizer, and so on. If this were just a natural disaster—if a hurricane had supernaturally formed and wreaked havoc on the Middle East—the effects would still constitute the worst spike in global average commodity prices in recorded history. That this can go on “forever,” that this is a war and thus much less predictable than a natural disaster: all of this bodes ill for humanity at large.

When does Trump decide the madness should end? The damage to the world economy is nearly without precedent, to say nothing of the human cost of lives lost on both sides (far more Iranians) and the cost in war materiel (all those fancy radars that Iran is blowing up require expensive rare earth materials that must be sourced from China, another enemy America has made), which is reaching eye-watering numbers. For comparison, 9/11 cost the world economy (just the day itself, not everything that came after, such as the wars) an equivalent of $183.65 billion, or thereabouts. The closure of the Straits of Hormuz costs the global economy $40 billion every single day.

In a week, since February 28, that’s $280 billion, or a little bit over 1.5 9/11s.

In a month, that’s $1.2 trillion or 6.2 9/11s.

In a year, $14.4 trillion or 74.4 9/11s.

And so on.

From now until the midterms, assuming this war goes on forever, assuming Iran can keep the straits closed, assuming the United States does not achieve a military victory, then the straits will have been closed for 248 days. That is roughly $9.9 trillion in damages to the world economy. And that’s just the optimistic read.

There were concerns the AI bubble would pop before the war started, and those concerns are about to heighten to a critical level with the price of energy skyrocketing to unseen heights. If the AI sector goes belly-up because of this war, that is it. We can no longer quantify the losses because the sudden removal of the AI tech sector from the world economy—the main thing driving growth in markets—plus Trump’s tariffs, plus the closure of the Strait of Hormuz equals nothing less than catastrophe in socioeconomic terms. Externalities mounting externalities! Famines, plagues, more wars are guaranteed to come from that sudden shock. And if tensions mount to a nuclear level between the powers, that would constitute game over for humanity.

If Donald Trump can decide that this war does not bode well for his political, economic, and personal (staying alive and not atomized in nuclear hellfire) outlooks in life, then the only question is when. It could be tomorrow, or it could be never. Politically, the data is there, plain and present: Donald Trump’s party, continuing on this course, will be routed worse than Liz Truss’s Conservative Party was in the Labour electoral landslide of 2024, and that is being extremely generous to the public in their mounting rage. If Donald Trump cares about having political power, about continuing to be President, he must end this war. The question is, when can he? Only he knows.

But Trump is no longer the only factor in deciding when this war ends. When the United States killed Khamenei, they pulled Iran even closer to the negotiating table, except now the main negotiating is done kinetically, through drone and air strikes. Both sides could win this war through military means, but this war will mostly end with a negotiated settlement. Most wars do, excluding wars of total annihilation and conquest, such as World War II. Even World War I ended with a negotiated settlement, with Allied armies not fully occupying Germany and administering the territories themselves as they would do in the Second World War.

For the US to win this war militarily—to achieve all of its war aims of replacing Iran’s current state apparatus with one pliant to American interests—it would need to fully occupy Iran. The problem (militarily) for America is that it simply does not have the ground forces or the ground force posture to achieve this. For the invasion of Iraq, the United States mustered a force of 300,000. For the invasion of Iran—a country three times the size of Iraq with roughly three times the size of the Iraqi army as well—the United States would need one million men deployed as ground forces. Considering that is the total number of manpower available for call-up if America scraped everything it had, this becomes a daunting impossibility without a draft.

So for the United States to win, it needs to accept an economic cost of about six 9/11s per week, every week, indefinitely, as well as the costs of a draft and the inevitable human costs of the war (How many Americans will die? 100,000? 200,000? More? As Ukrainians and Russians report, modern drone warfare has made war bloody as hell; they’ve lost a million men each according to reports), until victory is finally achieved. Could it be done? If Americans were just automatons that did whatever President Trump commanded them, then yes, America could eke out a military victory like this.

But we’re not automatons, and so the safe bet is that this fever in Trump will break. Eventually. Hopefully. The only other potential for an American victory comes if they can reopen the Straits and destroy Iran’s ability to project power abroad; mainly their missile program. But doing that would likely involve a ground campaign, unless if America’s Anthropic-powered targeting truly is performing unimaginable wonders, and not, say horrors like the murder of over 150 schoolchildren or the Looney Tunes style destruction of vehicles painted on the ground.

As for Iran, it is a full state and thus far more predictable. It is here we can look to Clausewitz and all the other great theorists in history to determine how and when Iran will choose to end this war. This war, for them, will not end on the cognizance of one man, even if that man is the new Supreme Leader. No; it will end when a consensus of the state and the elites who comprise that state agree that it should end, on terms it can accept.

For this case, we must assume Iran will keep Hormuz closed, that its strikes against the GCC will continue, that despite losing missile launchers for every strike, it can still maintain some momentum of daily barrages across the Middle East. It is the bare minimum to be expected of any competent state of its size. A country with that many people, with those many resources, with the amount of mountains it has, should be able to maintain a consistent barrage indefinitely. If it cannot do this, then we must totally reassess its capacity for long-term survival. If, for instance, the United States reopens the straits next week, then this is all moot. The Iranian state would still survive, but its prospects for a strategic victory would become daunting.

If Iran is able to survive and maintain its fire missions ongoing indefinitely, then an Iranian strategic victory becomes possible.

There are, in sum, three distinct possibilities for how this war might end. Which one is achievable, and to what extent, will depend totally on its battlefield performance. This is what Clausewitz meant by war continuing politics: what Iran could not achieve in negotiations, it will achieve on the battlefield. For instance, Iran has demanded that the GCC states expel American bases from their territory. Those states refused. Now, Iran is bombing them daily with drones and missile strikes. If the bases can be eradicated through the bombing campaign, if the economic damages from the strait closure can be sustained, then Iran will have achieved on the battlefield what it could never hope to achieve diplomatically.

The three possibilities therefore:

1. Strategic Iranian Victory

2. Strategic American Victory

3. Status Quo Ante Bellum

The first, a Strategic Iranian Victory, entails exactly what it says: Iran more or less outright wins the war. On the American side, it will mean that Trump has agreed to the fact that he cannot hope to win this war and has begun begging for peace negotiations. Iran will not have to immediately accept, of course. With the US weakened, it will likely keep its attacks flowing daily, removing US military and economic influence by brute, kinetic force. When Iran decides to meet the US and sign a peace, it will be on its rough terms. There might be demands the Iranians have that America would not be able to meet, such as the destruction of Israel or the total expulsion of America from the Gulf (America would likely retain influence on the Red Sea coastal areas of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for instance). But Bahrain, the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman: all those entities that launched attacks from their territories into Iran would be made into neutral powers, if not outright aligned with Iran (through revolutions caused by the socioeconomic upheaval of the war, most likely in Bahrain and Iraq).

The second, a Strategic American Victory, entails the United States reopening the Straits of Hormuz and ending the daily missile barrages. With the damage to the global economy localized mainly in Iran, the United States could keep the air bombing campaign until Trump is out of office, at genocidal costs to the Iranians, of course. This, again, can only be done kinetically; Iran will not destroy its missile launchers, and therefore America must, or lose the war. Could it happen? It’s highly unlikely, considering how this war (or three-day special military operation) has gone thus far. But it is the scenario that America would like to see take place. Of course, if this immediate strategic victory is achieved, Trump may very well decide to send in a full ground invasion, all costs be damned. In that case, the outcome again will be determined on the battlefield.

Lastly, a return to the Status Quo Ante Bellum. This won’t happen. Even if Trump begs for mercy tomorrow, Iran will have no reason to stop the war until it can force Trump to agree to its main demands (the removal of US military bases in the Persian Gulf and Iraq). Iran will only throw this demand away if Trump were to threaten nuclear usage, and that’s highly unlikely, even if America were humiliated. And if Trump does threaten nuclear usage, then nuclear weapons will be used, and 99% of humans in the Northern hemisphere will be dead within 5 years as a result.

No one is ending this war until their side is satisfied. For the madman Trump, who knows what will satisfy him? The world economy has already imploded worse than Oceangate’s submersible did. Perhaps nothing can change his mind, perhaps he is a convert to Christian Zionism, and desires nothing else than the building of the Third Temple so that Jesus Christ may return and therefore secure his entrance to Heaven (a key concern for him) despite his sins. Or maybe he’s just waiting for every air defense interceptor to be lost in the attritional war. Who can say for sure, but Trump himself?

As for Iran, the only rational actor at the table, they will continue until every US base is erased kinetically and then for good, diplomatically. Until then, this war will continue, for weeks and weeks until finally, Trump’s mind has been changed, and Iran or the United States have achieved its military objectives.

And Israel? Israel will do whatever the United States of America tells it to, if it would but speak (or be capable of speaking). Unless, of course, if Trump is totally in thrall to the Israeli state. That remains a frightening possibility, considering recent statements.

We should pray they are misspeaking, either out of malice or out of stupidity, for the honesty would be too horrid to comprehend.

The United States of America is at war with Iran. Whether or not pundits or the military want to call it a war doesn’t matter; the harsh reality is that we are at war. Given that, we must consider what the US military will do to defeat Iran; this does not mean that victory is attainable or even desirable, simply that they have been tasked to do a job, even if it’s politically impossible, and thereby make military recommendations to America’s political leadership to achieve a victory.

With the failure of the air campaign to achieve immediate victory, and with a country like Iran, there are few options for measurable military success; in fact, only one option remains for a potential ‘non-regime change regime change’. Here then, is how the US-Iran War will develop in the coming weeks and months.

The Case for the Inevitability of War between Azerbaijan and Iran

Let’s start with a look at Iran’s geography.

To the south, the Persian Gulf forms a formidable sea barrier that even if overcome, leads directly to the hell that is the Western Zagros Mountains. As thousand-year old war tomes will tell you, you never want to be found fighting uphill. In the times before artillery and machine guns, a group of braced spearmen on a hill can resist whatever comes up the hill by sheer dint of gravity; if you want to try this yourself, go stand on a hill with a friend. Alternate the person who is standing up above and who is standing below, and have the person below try to shove the person above. Spoilers: the person below won’t get very far at all.

In the times since artillery and machine guns were invented, the advantage for the person on the elevated position became even more pronounced. Now, armies on elevated positions could eliminate attackers far at range, with the elevation providing perfect sightlines for the army’s guns. And in the days of radar, satellites, drones, and missiles, attacking an elevated position is nigh-impossible.

Don’t take my word for it. One of the main reasons why Russia has yet to take the Donbass despite 4 years of war is that despite the fact that Ukraine is very flat, the Donbass is the hilliest part of the eastern country and therefore the worst terrain to fight in, to say nothing of the urban cities that exist in that part of the country.

Except the mountains of Iran are far, far taller than the gentle slopes of East Ukraine; in the Zagros, the average elevation is between 2,500-3,000 meters. During the 1980s war, Saddam didn’t even try to go up the mountains; he kept his army within the Khuzestan flatlands (west of Zagros Mountains), not that he had much choice, considering the pathetic state of his armed forces.

The same fate awaits any enemy army invading Iran from the east or from the west. To the east are inhospitable deserts and the inevitable run-into the endless mountain ranges, to say nothing of the fact that Pakistan or Taliban-run Afghanistan would never allow US forces to stage a ground invasion in either. To the west, no desert, just an immediate confrontation with mountains as high as 9,000 feet. The US Army may be filled with ‘warfighters’ and devoid of ‘Woke’, but even they would have a hard time charging up a row of 50 different Mount Shastas (14,000 feet) before reaching the objective (Tehran).

So, it is hopeless and even pointless for America to try invading Iran, right? Well, that would be right, if not for Iran’s immediate northern border.

We needn’t concern ourselves with the eastern part of this; Turkmenistan and the other -Stans are not aligned with the US and do not have the capacity to engage in a hostile war. Azerbaijan though, is. Out of all of Iran’s neighbors, Azerbaijan is unique in that not only does it share an enclosed naval sea border with Iran (the Caspian Sea), but Azerbaijan’s borderlands with Iran also lead to a narrow strip of green invadable flatlands. In addition, Azerbaijan just fought two successful wars against Armenia (mainly, with Turkish/US backing), so it has the ability to fight offensive war.

Let’s not forget how close the US and the EU are to Azerbaijan, either.

To say nothing of the fact that Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed huge swaths of Armenia of ethnic Armenians and that the US and the EU greenlit this because they were so thirsty for Azeri oil after the start of the Russia-Ukraine War. Azerbaijan therefore is nothing more than Northern Israel, the Northern Flank of America’s Operation Epstein’s Fury.

And, if you are in the US military (woe to you), then really, do you have any other option? The Iranian state is not collapsing. Hormuz remains closed. US bases in the Middle East are turning into depopulated craters. Other than craven surrender (which would get you immediately fired from your job in the Pentagon), what other option would YOU have to suggest to the “warfighters” on how to un-fuck this situation? Other than using unlimited nuclear warheads on Iran, Russia, and China (and thereby destroying America), this is it.

The Shape Of Things To Come

1It will begin with an air campaign. With the US and Israel providing strategic bombing and close air support, the Azeri air force will join in the fray with their powerful Turkish (Bayraktar TB2) and Israeli (Harop, Orbiter) drones. These combined will wreak havoc on Iranian positions in the north of the country, around the Caspian sea shore. A few hours into this air campaign, the ground invasion will then commence.

Spearheaded by Azeri soldiers, US special forces, and even some US ground forces (Marines, etc.), the goal is to overwhelm, isolate, and destroy enemy positions as quickly as possible, taking and holding the immediate objective before moving right on to the next one. The goal is speed; if tactical victory is not achieved within ~3 days (seizing the coast), the whole operation is a bust.

The ground attack will commence from the Astara region within Azerbaijan, and seek to secure the positions the air campaign obliterated. At the same time, helicopters and rapid moving naval vessels (speedboats) will launch a naval attack from Baku, the goal being to seize as much territory behind Iranian positions as possible.

To put this in the most basic military terms as possible, here is how the Azeris and Americans are planning to wage this war:

First, Azeri troops engage with (weakened by airstrike) Iranian soldiers.

Next, Azeri troops land from the Caspian Sea behind Iranian positions.

Lastly, the Azeri troops that land behind the Iranian troops encircle, and with help from the troops in the front, eliminate the Iranian positions.

This can be repeated up the entire Caspian Sea coastal area that Iran occupies, with Azeri ground forces engaging Iranian forces on flat, open terrain, and American/Azeri forces landing from behind and delivering the killing blow. As soon as the Iranian frontline collapses, Azeri forces will move up to the next line of engagement, with another aerial/naval insertion already queued up for when that happens.

If everything goes according to the Pentagon’s and Azerbaijan’s plans, this is what the war should look like on D+7:

From there, it will be a hard, long fight up the Alborz mountains to reach Tehran, but victory would be far closer in sight than it would’ve been prior.

Except it won’t go like that. Not at all.

The ACTUAL Shape Of Things To Come

Iranian missiles and drones, with help from Russian and Chinese intel, know-how, and industry will rain down on Azeri positions. US casualties will be high, in the thousands if not tens of thousands. Azerbaijan is also woefully outnumbered on the ground; Iran could hold a ten or even twenty to one manpower advantage in the actual field with Azerbaijan. The invasion will thus fail.

From there, who knows? Maybe Iran counterattacks. They should. I would. Maybe they march into Azerbaijan proper. Why wouldn’t they? With Azerbaijan’s (tiny) army broken, Iran will have the opportunity to knock out a declared enemy. That might draw Turkey into the fray, who would quickly march into Armenia, knock it out, and then engage directly with Iran.

But a Turkish intervention would risk a Russian one, in which case, it is basically World War 3; a nuclear war, and the end of humanity, at least we know it.

If you’re a military advisor to the United States, your options therefore are nuclear holocaust right now, or a (potential) nuclear holocaust tomorrow.

Let’s pray they choose the unlikely ‘never’2!

It is not early to prognosticate or pontificate on who the Presidential nominee for the Democratic Party should be. It is, in fact, too late. Right now, a genocide greenlit under former President Biden has escalated into an illegal, fatal war America might very well tactically lose, if not face total strategic defeat.

I think we need …

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It was Germany’s imperial ambitions to seek maximal benefit for themselves, or more accurately, Kaiser Wilhelm’s and his ministers’ bumbling idiocies, that led to what scholars called his Weltpolitik1; in other words, his state’s aggressive foreign policy. That aggressive Weltpolitik led directly to the Weltkrieg, a world war, and the reactions all states took to that conflagration has informed the actions of both states and individuals ever since.

World politics must be understood through a materialist perspective, but also heightened with the additional scientific knowledge of human psychology and sociology, and all the other sciences Marx could not even dream of. An understanding of our world cannot only be a story of class conflict, or a story or individuals or even groups of individuals. It must be a story of all of them, from the smallest, youngest person to all living and soon-dead 8.3 billion persons, all moving every day, every hour, every second, 365.25 days a year, across nearly a tenth of this planet’s surface. Seeing the whole megastructure from that distance should be a moment of awesome respect; when you see it for yourself, do not merely bow: prostrate yourself before the maw of humanity. For only then will you begin to understand how the mechanications work, and how they can begin to be changed.

Ein unicycle

Imagine a performer, on a unicycle, spinning plates from two sticks he is holding aloft, on either hand. His wobbles and shakes, his fight against gravity, the imperfect clumsiness of his tools, and the general anxiety that comes with any performance make the next moment utterly unpredictable. Will he crash? Will he burn? It is unknowable to you, the observer, and mostly to the performer as well. In a performance, the only universe that matters is your own: your own moves, your own steps, everything choreographed and trained beforehand to comfortable precision. But it is all practiced guesswork; the right move rightly performed may still, from a gust of wind or violent spectator, lead to catastrophe.

Thus it is with world politics and world wars. Atop our unicycles of imperfection, we spin our plates, planning and executing our next moves. Then, other players enter, from every side of the stage. If they move in synchronicity with the original performer, then their efforts can combine into new positive displays. But if they move erratically; if one goes left and the other goes right, then no system of exchange can occur. The whole performance falls apart.

Language forms the basis of this mutual communication, but as with the performing unicycle players, it need not be verbal. In world politics, it can be a diplomatic signal, a signal often so inane in definition that some form of soothsayer is needed to understand it. Other times, it is plain and spoken, even written: of treaties signed, and trades concluded.

Truthful communication over time builds trust, as anyone who has ever loved or performed on stage will know. You trust that your partner will react predictably—for that is the true object of desire in human nature, predictability—and if they do not, that action decreases trust, such that future interactions will forever be tainted by that foul one. In the tango of unicycle performances, continually rushing into other performers is a surefire way to be expelled from the stage, a surefire way to never be invited to perform again. Conversely, reacting predictably (and well), will lead to plaudits not just from observers but from fellow performers.

And so, a predictable dance brings predictable fruits and rewards. Those whom you successfully partnered with in the past you will want to partner with again. Thus is born good trade relationships, and even alliances. Why does the United States government support NATO, support Taiwan, support Israel oh so much? It’s not because of corrupt bargains or some deeper conspiracy (though, rest assured, individual bad actors abound in any society) but rather because in that insane unicycle dance of nations, no one wants to be the first to stop, or to even suggest a change to the rhythm.

You don’t want to be the performer who crashes the performance, even if the immediate cost is low, because over time, your fellow performers become your friends. You trust each other. You do more than just unicycle balancing—you also golf, babysit each other’s kids, exchange letters. So it is with alliances and trade: what starts as an exchange of letters can often end up in mutual defense and aid pacts. While this is an admirable quality, it runs into two sets of issues: what if your friend picks a fight with another group you are not close to? What if you yourself do?

For no society, no government, is led by immortal plate-spinners. The current generation dies and retires, handing already-spinning and teetering plates to the next generation. Most of the time, they can barely stop the whole thing from toppling over, and thus that restricts them in what they can achieve or even imagine.

Ostpolitik - Ostkrieg

Why did the United States not invite the Russian Federation and Ukraine into the NATO alliance post 1991 or even post 2001? Why didn’t the EU even dream of integrating Russia, their largest energy provider? Had Yeltsin (and the elites that backed him) been invited to the table, integrated into the NATO order, it’s likely that Russia today would not be invading Ukraine. Of course Russia has territorial claims over Ukraine; Germany has the same with France vis-a-vis the Alsace, yet we do not expect a German invasion of France within our lifetimes! Had Russia been in NATO as Germany is in NATO, there would be no war!

The reason why is quite simple: the leaders of America in the 90s and 2000s were not neutral arbiters with a perfect grasp of world history. They were biased makers of their own world, their decisions informed primarily from the end of World War 1 when Lenin’s Russian government signed a peace treaty with the Kaiser’s German government, greatly strengthening the Central Powers just as they were beginning the Spring Offensive of 1918. While this may seem like ancient history to us in the present, to those in the past, there was no greater stab in the back to the Entente.

We know the war ended in a minor Entente victory (minor for they did not occupy all of Germany and dismantle its state) for us but to actually live in Spring 1918, when the first Americans were just beginning to arrive yet not in enough strength to truly change the outcome of the upcoming battles, when all of Germany’s power could be focused on the West: there was real fear that Germany would be able to use freed up divisions and the resources from newly conquered Ukraine to smash through mainland France, conquering it entirely, as they did indeed would do in 1940.

The Entente powers immediately set about denouncing newly communist Russia, and all their governments and all their governments’ agents and all those aligned with the same-said policies (the business elite and the bourgeois voter) set about an unholy crusade to induce another revolution in Russia (thus ousting Lenin’s government), and force it back into the first World War.

When the war ended with an Entente victory anyways, Western animosity still remained. Even though Germany had been laid low, Entente forces occupied parts of Russia well into the 1920s. In the 1930s, they and mainly former Central Powers such as Germany and Japan conducted acts of sabotage and espionage against the growing Soviet Union. When, in 1933, the United States recognized and began trading with the Soviet Union, they did so mostly out of economic desperation due to the Great Depression. This form of acquiescence was also the reason for the invention of the Allied Powers; to defeat a worse enemy (Germany), the Western powers aligned themselves briefly with the Soviets.

But after 1945, and Germany was truly defeated for a generation or two, the impetus for the West-Soviet alliance died immediately. It’s important to note that from the Soviet perspective, the alliance need not have died. As their subsequent actions showed after the German-Soviet peace was signed in 1918 and after 1945, they weren’t really enemies of the Entente powers, instead so much so as so thoroughly and utterly beaten by Germany that they needed a generation to rebuild and recoup their losses. There was indeed a great fear from the Entente that the Bolsheviks would either ally with the Kaiser or collapse even further (thus letting all of Russia be open for Central Powers dominion); either way, their act of peace with the Kaiser showed that they could not be trusted.

And so, we became enemies, waging a new Weltkrieg albeit a cold one against the Soviet Union. For the West, the issue was predictability. The Soviets under Lenin fundamentally betrayed the West’s trust, and even though their government did everything including bend over backwards, it was never enough for a rapacious and violently anti-communist West. While the socialist ideology did preach animosity towards capitalist states, practically immediately after the German Revolution failed in 1918/1919, the Soviet Union did immediately try to mend relations with the West.

The West, as it turned out, never bit on Russia’s or the Soviet Union’s overtures. The breaking of trust between states could not be forgotten by the individuals who ran American foreign policy, even after fighting together through the muck of WW2, an animosity which was inherited by the next generation during the Cold War. By 1991, Western animosity towards the Soviets still raged on, all of it sourced back to Lenin’s original sin.

Exeunt Pax, Exeunt Deus

Where then does that leave us? In the modern era, America and the rest of the West remain firstly aligned with each other due to the shared living memory2. Thus we count amongst our friends the British and the French (Entente alliance, 1917), and our enemies the Russians (1917) and the Chinese (1949, Communist victory over Nationalist China). Just as humans seek predictability, so do states. And unfortunately for humanity, just as they seek predictability, so too do their systems of mutual animosity (e.g. states) towards one another.

It would be fine if mutual love and respect, that Great Commandment of yore, the kind of respect you saw between NATO allies pre-9/11, was the rule of the world. But because the plates did not start spinning at the same time, because the people spinning those plates were imperfect, because natural disasters forced plates to collapse without warning, thus did we see a world-state without peace. For as Uruk stood against Elam, and as Pharaoh stood against the Hittites and Greeks3, so too will the American President against the Russian and Chinese Presidents. An outside observer with no knowledge of world history or humanity will still, knowing this fact, be able to predict that there is existing inter-state animosity somewhere on Earth, so long as humans exist.

But does this need to be the case? In viewing the whole stage, performers to the left spinning their plates in opposition to the performers on the right spinning their own plates, the whole thing looks rather silly, does it not? Forget the complexity of unicycle spinning plates: just consider any board game with two players or two teams. In real life, with friends, whenever an issue arises from playing the game, people can just stand up, and either choose to not play, or to come up with their own rules. Either way, when the game is finished, all friendships can (and should!) resume.

Here’s the truth: there is no grand scoremaster keeping score. Building the most number of tanks, the most guns, the most nukes, the most anything will not grant any reward other than that which the thing can do. If there were a supreme scoremaster, they would witness the shuffling players, angrily staring at each other, committing their entire national wealths into new and gaudy ways of massacring the other’s populations, and declare stop. Not only is the game not fun anymore, but people are getting hurt.

Of course, the Western powers have grievances against Russia and China and all their other enemies. Those countries have their own grievances, too. But the Western powers also have internal grievances, which they mostly paper over due to their relative minority in offence against the sheer weight of the precedence of the alliance (indeed: only had the US attacked Greenland or Canada would NATO have collapsed). It is that compassion, that understanding, that feeling that even when your friends act untowards to you, that you trust them (and can thus predict their next motions) that brings you back together.

All world powers should recognize each other’s grievances and accept them. Forgiveness is not only a religious imperative for many but also a psychological fact.4 Once that is achieved, then may the powers meet in accord and harmony5. For the stopping and the great rearranging of the plates (as it were) means to stop Weltpolitik and to end the state of Weltkrieg for good, and for when the Weltpolitik resumes, for it only to resume in a Pax Humana.

There are many tier lists out there for the upcoming 2028 Presidential primary. Many people, in crafting their lists, are lacking in vision, audacity, and hope. They cannot imagine a different world. This does not necessarily mean a better world, for conditions improve and worsen as constantly as the world turns on its axes to face the sun and off again, but a truly different world. It means to view the world as Alexander viewed the Gordian Knot, how Qin Shi Huang viewed the thousand-year warring states of China; to not see the tangible in front of you but the intangible yet possible infinite possibilities in every equal and opposite action and reaction. For we know the present world and its ills. We can make it better or worse day by day, but we can never overcome our ills, until we find it in ourselves to overcome that which makes our world ill. That alone will require a different, transcendental world, and a different type of transcendental leader. Here then, my ranking of leaders based on their level of transcendentalism.

S Tier

Charlie Kirk

Let’s start with the obvious. Charlie Kirk is dead. Charlie Kirk will rise again. This is a fundamental truism. Current advances in medical sciences already enable us to re-encode DNA using RNA splicing, clone and even regrow human tissues, and more beyond that. It is not insane to assume that within our collective lifetimes, true corporeal resurrection may become possible. In the meantime, we will have artificial intelligence, which will be able to so perfectly replicate humans that while they won’t carry the original soul (the pneuma), they will carry a simulacrum so perfect that it will have brushed up against the divine, and in-so-doing, carry a touch of that divine back to Earth.

Also, read the Bible, specifically Revelations. I have long held that the universal global resurrection is less something we need to wait for, and more something we need to actively seek and do. And so, we will do it. First, with Charlie, then with the world.

As for Charlie’s former conservative beliefs, I think that the act of dying and being restored to life will transform him in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. The risen Charlie will not fight the old battles, inflame the old passions. He will overcome them, transform them, and lead us into a new shining epoch of light and glory. Amen.

Joe Biden

There’s much to say about the return of Biden to the presidency. At the age of 87, and assuming he survives his bout of cancer, the returned President Biden will be teetering on the edge of death his whole second term. His first term, of course, felt like a fever dream of delusions, where days became weeks became months of nothing ever happening, save for a few scares (the Chinese balloon, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pelosi’s flight to Taiwan, October 7, and so on). The return of American politics to the age of the Biden delusion, to force people to go back to slavishly worshipping at the altar of Biden, to support the old policies, the old peoples, the old ideals, will break the American psyche irreparably. In the ashes of the aftermath, something new, better, different, will be made.

Ro Khanna

Ro Khanna doesn’t believe in such things like t-symmetry and Einsteinian relativity (at least, as the upper bounds of physics). In fact, if ever there were a person in Congress who most closely shares my own mind palace in its complex non-euclidean architecture, it would be Ro. Not that I agree with his policies, or the things he does per se; I often don’t. Rather, it’s the things he does and doesn’t do that fascinates. He goes on the Adam Friedland show. He speaks in parables and universal truths. There is a knowing twinkle in his eyes. He can be the best President we will ever have, yet, as I will show, this also comes with a risk.

A Tier

Natalie Wynn AKA Contrapoints

Do I think Natalie Wynn would be a good President? No.

Do I think she’s a good person? Also no.

Do I think becoming President will either break her or transform her into being a better person? Yes.

Do I also think giving a random transgender youtuber the awesome, godly power of President is a good idea? Yes, a thousand times yes. The act of making her President will transform not only her, but America. Assuming she survives the transformation, she will be on par with Lincoln.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Picture this: it’s 2031. President MTG has just wrapped up a successful invasion of the Annunaki lands in under-Atlantis, bringing democracy and freedom to enslaved Agarthans there. You smile as you look up into the sky. An angel descends then, giving you a message from Up Above. Your tax bill just got lowered. All is well, but now your tummy hurts. You walk into the nearest clinic, sitting down at an open medbed. The medbed heals you of all possible ailments in less than 20 minutes. You walk out. All is indeed well. Thanks to President MTG’s medbeds for all, humanity has been rendered functionally immortal. You give thanks.

Al-Sharaa AKA Jolani

To go from infamous terrorist and enemy of America into reconstructionist liberal centrist developmentalist with Davos characteristics takes a special type of person. By all accounts, everyone loves Jolani (minus a few unfortunate Syrian minority groups; by everyone, I mean the Israeli and US security establishments). In fact, in terms of experience, there is no one with more experience on this list. Syria’s practically an American state right now, and Jolani is practically an American governor, but one with the added foreign policy expertise you never get from governors.

If America is looking for a steady hand on the till, someone to mind the global empire and restore US hegemony, we could do no better than with Jolani. The only issue is the lack of natural US citizenship, but that could be remedied with legal trickery (annex Syria, or just have Congress declare him to be a naturally born citizen with that law not appealable to the Supreme Court).

Look, if we’re thinking about the US Presidency as a job, then a promotion from a state governor to President is the most sensible thing one can suggest. The fact that he isn’t actually a state governor shouldn’t shy away from the real observable fact that for all intents and purposes, yes he is.

Pete Buttigieg (with Spice upgrade)

Pete Buttigieg sucks. He lacks vision, authority, command authority, and ruthless determination. He can never be president. HOWEVER—if he were to gain access to some sort of ‘Spice’ material, which would allow him to see the future (or to refute t-symmetry like myself and Ro do), he would be a contender to become a great President. But he must have the Spice. Buttigieg sans Spice is like an Indian meal without spice; worthless.

B Tier

Congresswoman Quirk Chungus AKA MGP

What can I say about MGP that hasn’t been said before?

She sells shitty weed. She has the affect of the archetypical Portland girl who has daddy issues. She wants to ban sippy straws that don’t bend. She’s the type of girl who invites you to see her nonbinary friend who doesn’t believe in deodorant do a poetry slam at the local poly commune which doubles illegally as a poorly-run commercial business (coffee shop that only opens in the afternoon).

In other words, she’s someone we all know, or wish we knew. President MGP will use Black girl magic to liberate Afghanistan. Her anxiety affirmations to Putin will prevent nuclear war in the 2030s. And, crucially, she will ban foods with bad textures and smells. A better world is possible, under President MGP.

Olivia Nuzzi

I believe in the news media, I love the news media. Washington Post, Times, News, et cetera, whatever: I love it all. But they’re dying. No one reads the news anymore. Here then is my humble proposal to bring back news rooms: President Nuzzi. With an insane sex scandal a week (always with an older gentleman), the gossip columns alone will revitalize the flagging news industry as they chase scoop after endless scoop, the media and American people gobbling it up.

Picture this. It’s mid-2029. President Nuzzi has been in power for 6 months. She has just apologized for having sex with Joe Biden’s elder brother Jim Biden. She seems contrite and heartbroken. Later that day, in the Rose garden, she is pictured hand-in-hand with Rupert Murdoch.

By 2033, we could restore every shuttered local newspaper with the profits of these sordid tales alone.

C Tier

Former President Obama

Let me be clear: Obama is a war criminal. But, at least the people who worked for him realize now that they helped him do war crimes. I am of course talking about the Pod Jons’ America media podcast empire. If people like Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor were to return to public service, under a renewed President Obama, I am confident President Obama will be better the third time around, and do far less war crimes.

This future is only possible if Trump does run for President in 2028. If Trump does not make this possible, then this is moot.

President Girl Obama AKA AOC

Can we have President Obama? No. We have (girl) Obama at home.

She might even appoint the same Obamaheads into her administration. I rank her below the OG Obama because she hasn’t lived through Obama’s mistakes. She would just do things Obama would know better not to even try, and thus, be slightly worse.

D Tier

Pete Buttigieg (without Spice upgrade)

Pete Buttigieg sucks. He lacks vision, authority, command authority, and ruthless determination. He can never be president. Worthless.

JB Pritzker

No offense to my Jewish friends but a Jewish billionaire whose close cousin was best buds with Jeffrey Epstein will not become President in 2029. If America couldn’t make Bernie Sanders President, they certainly won’t make Pritzker president. Sorry.

I do see a future where he could become President, of course. But that would entail fully embracing ‘Pritzker of the Steppes’ persona, and I just don’t see it right now.

Susan Collins (face tattoos version)

I don’t like Susan Collins. She sucks. But in a future, a reality where Susan Collins got face tattoos that said ‘Skibidi’ on both sides, with a ‘67’ beneath one of her cheeks? I’m interested, say more.

Newt/Callista Gingrich

Which one is the decaying and decrepit corpse? Who can say, truly. This presidency would quickly devolve into Weekend at Bernie’s, except they’re both doing it to each other. I’m not sure what policies the cryptkeepers would make, but I’m certain they’d be entertaining.

F Tier

Everyone Else

None of these people are going to be President. I’m confident of it. They lack the “it”, the command of not just the present, but of destiny, that every President before them has possessed but which they themselves each lack. Lets run through a few of the names, to make this point:

1. Stephen A. Smith: even his fans hate him.

2. Tim Walz: every time he goes on camera, he looks as if he just saw a ghost. Not presidential!

3. Kamala Harris: see 2024, the worst Presidential campaign in history.

4. Shapiro: he’s catching an accessory to murder charge.

5. Fetterman: he’s going to kill himself and/or his family.

6. Rahm: voters cannot vote for someone so soulless.

7. Newsom: see above.

8. Beshear: real life is not r/imaginaryelections.

9. Booker: failed the Rosario Dawson Test.

10. Lin Biao: Mao was right to shoot his plane down. We are not resurrecting his ass! He will burn in the lake of fire for ALL ETERNITY!

11. Monke Putler: just look at Russia. Do you want to be that?

12. Cuomo: I do want him to run for President, to be clear. Just to laugh at something.

13. Portnoy: lol.

14. Miller: Yeah it’s not happening. He’s TOO evil.

15. Erika Kirk: try saying her name. Erika Kirk. Erikakirk. Gerkagerk. Gerkagerk. Gerkgerk. Yeah, not happening.

Ro Khanna (again)

Ro Khanna doesn’t believe in such things like t-symmetry and Einsteinian relativity. He can be the best President we will ever have, or he can be the worst. No one knows how his mind works but him (same could be said of me). Will he make the best decisions? He might! But he also might make genuinely terrible decisions.

For example, speaking as someone who shares similar neuronal pathways to Ro, I developed a crippling addiction to alcohol during Covid, which I only recently overcame. While I can say I genuinely make S tier, amazing decisions that have a touch of divine inspiration, sometimes I truly make F tier decisions, terrible and awful for myself, my health, and my sanity. Yet it is through the F that I made it through to establish the S.

So too will it be with President Khanna. Not that he has a crippling addiction himself, of course. Rather, my point is that he will make the best decisions possible, and be the best President America will ever have. Yet, he will also make the worst decisions possible, damning and dooming America in the process. America, like the butterfly, will be transformed from this process. Will it blossom into something beautiful or wrinkle away to nothing? Time alone will tell, but to people who do not believe in such pathetic concepts like Ro and myself: yes, yes it will, and it won’t. And it will be glorious, and terrible.