Let me be explicit: this is conjecture. It is a possible  explanation for an otherwise confusing piece of timing, not a claim of insider knowledge, not a leaked memo, not a “sources say” scoop. I am offering it because the surface-level story — Russia degrading a tool its own troops say they rely on — looks irrational on its face. When an action appears irrational, the correct move is not to dismiss it as madness, but to ask what the actor is optimizing for. The observable fa

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did what serious aspirants to executive power must do before they ever announce: she demonstrated decision-grade foreign policy cognition in a room that measures credibility, not charisma. At the Munich Security Conference on February 13, 2026, she sidestepped the predictable parlor-game question about when she will run for president and instead used each answer to build an integrated argument: democracies lose when they cannot deliver materially for

I am no Vlad Vexler  and that is a good thing. If you have been watching the noise machine emit its daily fog—its false equivalences, its manufactured optimism, its ritual insistence that reality is negotiable—then you already know why. The war we are in is not only a war of artillery and drones and pipelines and budgets. It is a war over sovereignty, and sovereignty begins in the mind: the right of a people to decide what is real, what is true, and what must be done. Vexler

I know the feeling many of you are trying to name. The embarrassed silence. The defensive reflex. The creeping realization that you were not merely “disappointed,” but wrong —and that your wrongness had consequences for yourself as well as for other people. If you voted for President Trump or you gave him the benefit of the doubt and now feel that doubt curdling into anger, I am not here to sneer at you. I am here to tell you something simpler and harder: I did it too. I vote

Winter is not a feeling. It is a multiplier—one Ukraine could still use to compound Russian failure in the energy system, especially where distance and cold turn every repair into an expedition. That currently open window, however, is sadly closing. Whatever advantage General Winter  offers is time-bound, and Ukraine has not yet demonstrated the kind of sustained, deep, heavy strike throughput that converts “winter hurts” into “winter breaks things.” The constraint is not per

When Kyle Kulinski says that what we are learning about Jeffrey Epstein’s operation is “worse than anyone could have imagined,” he is not describing reality. He is describing his own failure to reason from structure. In a coercive trafficking-and-blackmail enterprise, threats of murder are not where it stops. Threats of murder are the marker that murder is clearly in play. This is not hindsight. It is base-rate logic. A network like Epstein’s does not survive because it is c

PRIMARY THESIS My minimax read of Hakeem Jeffries is not good because his most visible “opposition” moves map cleanly onto the regime’s pressure-management needs, not onto the public’s need for binding constraints. In an asymmetric environment, you do not grade leaders on how loudly they denounce abuse or how many scalps they demand. You grade them on whether they reduce the regime’s freedom of action. When the output is repeatedly symbolic, easily absorbed, and narratively c

Audience hygiene matters. In a polluted information environment, people need tools to think clearly: how to distinguish speculation from evidence, how to resist doomscrolling distortions, how to keep moral judgment intact when the feed is engineered to exhaust and confuse. There is a real civic function in helping the public recover its balance. But audience hygiene is not strategy. It is not defense. It is not minimax analysis. When you are engaged in war—especially the mode

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not “being difficult” when he tells Western leaders that Russia is not looking for peace; he is stating the only rational conclusion available under minimax reasoning. Russia’s current posture—maximal territorial demands paired with continued strategic strikes and diplomatic theater—signals an adversary optimizing for coercion and advantage, not reconciliation. In a minimax frame, Western policy must start from the worst plausible in

The problem is no longer that moderate and corporate Democrats are saying the wrong things. The problem is that their entire operating system is calibrated for a world that is no longer here. They speak as if the public’s central need is reassurance, unity, and incremental progress, when the public’s lived reality is coercion, fear, and the steady normalization of state violence.  In that gap — between what people are enduring and what these politicians are performing — legit

The standard story about Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is that he miscalculated Ukrainian resistance. That is true, but it is not the whole truth, and it is not the most dangerous truth. The deeper failure was not simply an intelligence error about how long Kyiv would hold. It was a structural misread of what the invasion would do  to the West—particularly to Western militaries. Putin did not just pick a fight with Ukraine. He tripped a switch. He activated a latent

Barack Obama’s short Medium statement, “A Wake-Up Call for Every American,” is morally lucid about the symptom—federal agents “acting with impunity,” public narratives “directly contradicted by video evidence,” and an administration that appears “eager to escalate.” He is also correct that peaceful protest and civic pressure are the only legitimate source of corrective force when state power is misused. But Obama’s proposed remedy—“reconsider their approach” and “work constr

There is a style of political communication that mistakes emotional management for strategy. It responds to brutality by offering uplift: the suggestion that “the ground is shifting,” that “glimmers” are appearing, that hope is rising because the audience has been “making your voice heard.” I reject that style outright. Not because people are wrong to want relief, and not because organizing cannot produce results, but because this framing, laundered through hope, becomes a so

The most persistent tactical delusion in democratic politics is the reflex to treat any fracture on the right as a coalition opportunity on the left: if someone breaks with President Trump, they must be moving toward reality; if they criticize the regime, they must now share our basic premises.   That assumption is not merely naïve—it is strategically dangerous. The decisive question is not whether a figure has turned against a particular leader in a particular moment, but wh

The phrase “let them eat cake” endures because it captures a specific kind of regime failure: not cruelty, not propaganda, not even contempt, but detachment—an elite class so insulated by its own fictions that it offers symbolic nonsense in response to material reality. In that case, the public does not merely conclude that the rulers are lying. The public concludes that the rulers no longer know they are lying, because reality has stopped intruding into the regime’s mind. Th

Democrats did not engineer President Trump’s current weakness. They have, in the main, been absent—reactive, fragmented, and too often content to let the news cycle substitute for strategy. If there is now an inflection in the second Trump regime, it is not a testament to Democratic brilliance. It is a testament to President Trump’s own structural failures finally becoming impossible for the world system to ignore. Davos was the moment those failures became legible on the wor

Joe Rogan’s stupidity is not “he does not know a lot.” It is worse than that. It is the kind of stupidity that cannot tell the difference between a fact and a good story. It is the kind that hears a confident man say something dumb and goes, “Yeah, maybe.” Then he hands that dumb thing to millions of people and calls it “just a conversation.” Rogan does not check. He does not test. He does not demand proof. He nods. He marvels. He gets excited. He lets the guest drive. That i

Adam Kinzinger’s recurring mistake is not that he fails to notice what President Trump is doing. It is that he keeps insisting on a personality-based explanation— narcissism —for behavior that is more simply and more accurately explained as power accumulation and regime defense. In the clip at issue , Kinzinger treats Trump’s attacks on Jack Smith as the byproduct of an ego wound: Trump cannot bear being remembered as a loser, therefore he obsesses, therefore he lashes out. T

A tipping point is not a mood. It is a change in behavior—specifically, the moment when a threat stops being treated as rhetoric and begins to be treated as an operational variable that must be countered, priced in, and designed around. If that is the standard, then it is no longer fanciful to argue that we may be watching a tipping point form in real time. Year One of Trump 2.0 looked like lashing out because coercion was the method. Year Two is beginning to look like backla

Contrary to Pyotr Kurzin’s framing , Europe’s historical position on defense spending and collective security is not one of chronic shirking or “freeriding” that has unduly burdened the United States. The longstanding U.S. policy toward NATO and European security has been one of partnership in which European nations balanced defense commitments with democratic priorities, social welfare imperatives, and economic stability—not one of irresponsible dependence. My central argume