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Dear John Roberts, It Was Your Traitorous Ass Who Helped Light the Bed on Fire, You Dumbfuck
Dear John Roberts, I do not listen to traitors like you or your orange god. I do not listen to men who betray the republic and then demand reverence from the people they endanger. I do not listen to robed institutionalists who assist in the degradation of constitutional government and then emerge from their chambers to lecture the country about tone, manners, and public hostility. Your latest complaint was that personal hostility toward judges is “dangerous” and “it’s got to
john raymond
Mar 173 min read


The Military Show on Youtube Just Made One of the Biggest, Most Steamy Piles of Shit Video in Its Existence
I do not usually watch The Military Show on Youtube. The algorithm keeps shoving their predictably ass videos into my face, and I usually ignore them for the obvious reason: the channel has always radiated the kind of fake-serious, low-grade military infotainment that mistakes a confident tone for analysis. But this one, this one video on the Iran war , was so spectacularly shallow, so aggressively braindead, and so completely fucking unserious that it deserves to be singled
john raymond
Mar 174 min read


The Geometry of a Quagmire: How the Iran War Proves Itself a Miscalculation
In my earlier article, The Geometry of Miscalculation in the Iran War , I made a narrower and, I think, more disciplined claim than the usual instant hot takes. I did not argue that the opening move had to look obviously irrational at the moment it was made. I argued that strategic error often reveals itself only after a leader has created an environment that becomes progressively harder to control. The question was not whether President Trump’s initial escalation could produ
john raymond
Mar 175 min read


Yes, Trump Is Dangerous, But Only Because the Fucking Moron Serves a Foreign Master
Trump is plainly not a mastermind. He is a semi-literate brute with a predator’s instinct for fear, loyalty, humiliation, and domination, but with a visibly weak grasp of language, logic, and consequence. On March 14, 2026, he posted a Truth Social message declaring that the United States had “completely decimated” Iran while also demanding that other countries move to secure the Strait of Hormuz, sprinkling the post with random capitalization like “Countries,” “World,” “Harm
john raymond
Mar 164 min read


Why Moscow’s Mobile Internet Blackouts Are About Ukrainian Pressure First and Coup Fear Second
A great many people want the story to be simple. They want to hear that President Putin turned off mobile internet in Moscow because he fears a coup. That story is emotionally satisfying because it flatters the imagination. It suggests a regime already shaking so badly that it has begun choking its own capital out of sheer panic. The problem is that this is not the strongest reading of the evidence. The better reading is harder, more serious, and more useful. Coup fear is alw
john raymond
Mar 165 min read


All You GOP Shills Who Said Trump Would be the Peace President Needs to Apologize Before Shutting the Fuck Up
President Trump and his media auxiliaries sold the country a simple lie. They said he would be the man who ended wars, avoided new ones, and restored “peace through strength.” That was not some vague impression people hallucinated into existence. It was explicit. In his January 20, 2025 inaugural address, President Trump said America would be judged by “the wars that we end” and “the wars we never get into,” and declared that his “proudest legacy” would be that of “a peacemak
john raymond
Mar 163 min read


Why Trump Doesn’t Care That His Boss in the Kremlin Is Helping Iran Kill Americans Troops
If you still cannot understand why President Trump does not care that Russia is helping Iran kill American troops, then you are still making the same mistake that has broken so much analysis of him for years. You are assuming that his first loyalty is to the United States. It is not. That is the whole argument. Everything else follows from it. People keep approaching Trump as though he were a conventional American president who simply happens to be reckless, vain, or corrupt.
john raymond
Mar 165 min read


Why Didn’t the Trump Administration Sell the Iran War to the American Public?
Was the Trump administration simply incompetent? That is the question most analysts implicitly ask when they notice the strange sequencing of the Iran war. The United States moved forces into the Middle East. Tankers, naval assets, and supporting logistics were positioned to support strikes. Operational readiness clearly existed. Yet the administration made almost no effort to prepare the American public for a major war. If this conflict had been planned jointly with Israel
john raymond
Mar 114 min read


Understanding Netanyahu’s Place Within the Axis of Authoritarians
History is being flattened, and once that happens the causal structure disappears. Operation Spider’s Web on June 1, 2025 was not just another successful Ukrainian strike. It hit Russia’s strategic aviation deeply enough that even conservative public reporting described it as one of the most damaging Ukrainian operations of the war; Reuters reported satellite evidence of destroyed or damaged bombers, while U.S. assessments cited roughly 20 aircraft struck and around 10 destr
john raymond
Mar 113 min read


Meta Analysis: Recalculating the War Analyst Board for 2026
The analyst board has to be recalculated for 2026. For too long the commentary ecosystem surrounding the wars in Ukraine and Iran has been padded with analysts who either misunderstand the structure of the conflict or refuse to model the byzantine board on which the conflict is actually being played. If the purpose of analysis is prediction and explanation, then the ranking must change whenever models fail. The first correction is the removal of William Spaniel from the board
john raymond
Mar 114 min read


Dissolving Anders Puck Nielsen’s "Nuanced" Strawman Argument
Strategic analysis fails when it begins by asking the wrong question. In his latest video, Anders Puck Nielsen constructs a simplified version of the Trump–Putin debate and then proceeds to dismantle it. The problem is that the argument he defeats is not the argument that matters. What results is a technically competent critique of a strawman combined with a failure to examine the real strategic structure of the current global conflicts. The issue is not whether Donald Trump
john raymond
Mar 114 min read


Part 3: How the Iran War Weakens the United States and Strains Support for Ukraine
Wars do not merely consume men and machines. They consume attention, political will, and the finite industrial output of nations. When a state enters multiple conflicts simultaneously, the decisive question is rarely whether it can win each war individually. The question is whether the combined logistical and political burden of those wars begins to undermine the state’s broader strategic position. That is precisely the danger facing the United States if the Iran war expands
john raymond
Mar 104 min read


A Little Chess and a Simple Conspiracy Theory: Toward Understanding the Russian Telegram Shutoff
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
john raymond
Feb 145 min read


Though She Sidestepped the Question, AOC’s Munich Security Conference Performance Proves She Is a Strong Presidential Contender
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
john raymond
Feb 134 min read


I am No Vlad Vexler and That Is a Good Thing
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
john raymond
Feb 135 min read


Dear Young People, I Also Voted Wrong the First Time
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
john raymond
Feb 114 min read


Pillar Four Is Operationalization: Or How Ukraine Is Running Out of Winter
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
john raymond
Feb 112 min read


Kyle Kulinski Isn’t As Good at His Job As He Thinks He Is
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
john raymond
Feb 113 min read


My Minimax Read of Jeffries Is Not Good
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
john raymond
Jan 285 min read


Audience Hygiene Is Fine, But It Doesn’t Substitute for Minimax Analysis When Engaged in Warfare
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
john raymond
Jan 285 min read
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