Discoverable

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

Tucker, Candace, Joe Kent: “Iran isn’t trying to build nuclear weapons. The Ayatollah said nukes are immoral!” Deputy Speaker of the Iranian Parliament: “We tried to develop nuclear weapons, but couldn't keep it secret.”

Donald Trump on Iran: 1980 → 2026. Trump’s position hasn’t changed. Anyone claiming he was ‘tricked’ into this war simply hasn’t been paying attention.

@marklevinshow @grandmaj2 They’re effectively controlled by coalitions that are controlled by Muslims. What did you think would happen??

You’re right

Dave never debates. He recites a few anecdotal lines that can’t be proved or disproved which his audience chooses to believe….not actual knowledge or any truth derived from objective evidence - just pure inferences built on assumptions built on inferences That’s means of course that the audience learns nothing because debates are based on claims and evidence presented with logical structured conclusions…..not slop stories on top of slop stories that some followers feel good believing

We don't debate Dave. We laugh at Dave.

Earlier today, I explained that what we see from Tucker Carlson, et al., is ultimately Critical America Theory, which many people found clarifying. To add some depth, I want to explain that at the heart of every critical theory is a lunatic totalist conspiracy mentality. We can start where we started earlier, with Max Horkheimer's characterization of his Critical Theory. He invented Critical Theory in 1937, adapting it from the Marxist tradition of ruthless critique. He described it this way (paraphrasing): "We [neo-Marxists] developed the Critical Theory when we realized that it is not possible to describe the good or the ideal society on the terms of the existing society, but we can criticize those elements of the existing society that we wish to change." This characterization is very important because it reveals the ultimate character of all critical theories: looking for "problematics" in society that don't live up to some imagined ideal society that likely cannot even exist but can still be used as a reference point against which to complain about reality, often senselessly. Briefly, how? How can you use something that isn't real as a reference point? By believing things like "we don't know what an ideal America would look like, but it wouldn't have racism." Then you send people out looking for anything they can consider racist and get them to "problematize" it because the ideal society wouldn't have that happening. That's how. The thing is, Horkheimer's characterization also reveals the true structure of all critical theories: they're conspiracy theories. The belief in the Critical Theory is that the whole of society in every regard is so captured by the ruling classes and powerful interests that you don't even have the tools you'd need to describe an alternative. That is, powerful interests control everything, and they do so in a way where people don't realize it. In fact, they don't even have the conceptual tools to imagine an alternative. And the ruling classes benefit from that situation, so they like it that way, and they keep it that way, sometimes on purpose. The two sides of this mentality are "critical consciousness" for the people who are "Woke" to the Critical Theory and "false consciousness" for the people who aren't. The conspiracy the powerful interests in society run is alleged to be so complete that people literally misunderstand their reality. Give that a second to sink in. That's the totalist part of the lunatic conspiracy theory. The belief that Critical Theory is based on is that the powerful are so in control of society that: (1) nobody at all has the conceptual tools to imagine or articulate an alternative vision; (2) nobody BUT THEM even know this is happening. That's really important because what it means is that everyone is a dupe except the Critical Theorists. That means nobody is actually capable of understanding, much less managing, their own lives and circumstances except the Critical Theorists. Depending on the critical theory in question, different powerful interests allegedly control society (again, to such a degree that nobody except the critical theorists themselves even know it, and such that nobody can articulate an alternative). (Critical) radical feminists, for example, believe that society is totally structured by a male-dominated force called "patriarchy" that benefits men. It is enforced, they say, by another force they call "misogyny," which means hating women. Critical Race Theorists believe society is totally structured by a white-dominated force called "white supremacy" that benefits white people. It is enforced, they say, by another force they call "systemic racism," which they alone can detect (in literally everything). (Critical) Queer Theorists believe society is totally controlled and structured around people who deem themselves "normal" to the exclusion of everyone "queer." This is enforced by a wide variety of structural forces called "normativities," such as "heteronormativity," the completely made-up "cisnormativity," and "thinnormativity," which ultimately hold that there are norms and that's at least sometimes good. Critical America Theory, which I discussed earlier, has two main modes, which we could call "Left" and "Right." The "Left" mode believes that America is controlled by a conglomerate of powered interests including capitalists, nationalists (whom they call "Fascists"), and all of the "privileged" groups in the whole Intersectional pantheon of victimized identities (called "minoritized groups"). The "Right" mode believes that American is controlled by a conglomerate of powered interests including the Leftists and their Intersectional victimhood paradigm and its beneficiaries, globalists (the "managerial elite"), Jews, and, well, capitalists. Both of these modes hold out that the powerful interests completely control the social, economic, and political lives of Americans, and that Americans simply don't know it because it's not possible to talk about it because, allegedly, the powerful interests will shut you down or ruin/"cancel" you if you do. Even though they all do all the time pretty much exclusively while screaming that they can't. These two models are more or less completely diametrically opposed on all issues except Jews and capitalism. The "Left" mode is pro-Intersectional while the "Right" mode is reverse-Intersectional (same model, but privilege is good now). The "Left" mode is pro-globalist while the "Right" mode is nativist-nationalist. Both modes believe capitalism enables the whole problem and that Jews are participants in the problem (though in different ways). "Left" Critical America Theory believes capitalism restrains people in the name of making money (puts money over people) and that Jews are part of the oppressor category that allegedly harms poor Intersectional victims, including the imaginary people known as "Palestinians." Most of this blame is displaced onto Israel, not Jews directly, which is blamed for "genocide" and such, narratives that can be traced at least in part to Soviet propaganda efforts and Islamist agendas. "Right" Critical America Theory believes capitalism is too licentious in the name of making money (puts money over people) and that Jews form a shadowy cabal of powerful and all-controlling hidden interests (that advance their own "Jewish" (national) interests over those of their "host" nations). Most of this blame is displaced onto Israel, not Jews directly, which is blamed for "genocide" and such, narratives that can be traced at least in part to Soviet propaganda efforts and Islamist agendas (with plenty of Nazism mixed in). The point is that these are totalizing conspiracy theories, so in addition to everything that obviously implies, it also means that they cannot be refuted. Any attempt to refute them is merely to reassert the theory of capture and to defend the system of power that prevents people from knowing the "truth" (believing the critical theory). For instance, refuting a feminist is just another way of asserting patriarchal control and attacking women. Refuting a Critical Race Theorist is having White Fragility which is a kind of covert racism they uncovered in you. Refuting a Queer Theorist is forcing norms upon them that cause them harm and make them s-word-icidal. Refuting a "Left" Critical America Theorist is having sold out to capitalist interests or defending one's own privileged status in the system (or "supporting genocide"). Refuting a "Right" Critical America Theorist is believing making money is more important than people, being a shill, or having been bought off, captured, or blackmailed by Jews, Israel, the Jewish lobby, or the allegedly powerful interests that are controlled by these (or "supporting genocide"). I'm sure you're familiar with all this crap, but you might not have known that it's a direct consequence of the structure of the Critical Theory itself. Once Horkheimer laid out that the raison d'etre for the Critical Theory in the first place is that the "very terms of the existing society" are captured by powerful interests and ruling classes, that means that all refutation of the Critical Theory itself is just further proof that the Critical Theory is right that the whole system of sense-making permitted by the ruling classes is captured. Guys, this is idiocy. It isn't just idiocy, though; it's also evil idiocy. Very evil idiocy. Destructive idiocy. It's also easily replicable by people who are just playing in the incentive structure of the cynical logic of the Critical Theory mindset, so while some of the participants pushing us in this direction know exactly what they're doing, most either don't or, at the very least, don't have to. What should you do? Learn to recognize it. Mark it. And avoid it. And help others to do the same.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Masshole is a fraud.

@catturd2 @blueunicornJan They’re all popular among the dumbest demographic. They influence retards to be more retarded..

Yep - doomer grifter musical chairs. All saying the exact same things.

Tucker Carlson believes Pearl Harbor was a false flag orchestrated by Roosevelt to drag America into WWII. His evidence is a Senate inquiry that actually concluded the exact opposite - that there was zero evidence of foreknowledge of the attack. He also conveniently leaves out that Hitler declared war on America following it.

These people are doing Critical America Theory. The only difference from the typical Left, which does the same thing, is their socially conservative angle to it.

Leftest think they are Devine creatures, and thus have the Devine right to impose their view. Notice they don’t write a book or produce anything…..they steal and plagiarize by displacing their view for another’s (in this case an author). Nothing original, nothing productive, nothing of value that requires work or investment of any kind. Just theft of the stuff others produced.

One election away from her being your “First Lady”. Gavin Newsome wife’s philosophy on parenting. 👇🏽

Javier Milei: “I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.” “But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred, resentment, and unequal treatment under the law. They are very violent, and since they have no way or arguments to answer, they go for physical violence.”

While one party is likely judgement proof, and assuming your inference regarding who or what organization is orchestrating the intended reputational damage, a quick look through the past communications of the parties pursuant to an order compelling discovery might help you find someone who is not judgement proof.

No, it is not. This is a rank defamation, and I'd take Milo for everything he has over it if he had anything. Every lawyer I've consulted about it has said Milo is "judgment proof" (too broke to sue) and too nasty to make it worthwhile. Thank you, Libertarian Party (official), for letting me tell this story. Up until now, I have refused to tell this story because it doesn't deserve my attention, at least not beyond a C&D. With this kind of slander from this kind of actor, your best option actually is to ignore it, not to draw attention to it and spread it around. Milo literally self-published a demented book alleging I molested my daughter. This obviously didn't happen. No one ever claimed it happened. Milo simply made it up, maliciously. It easily qualifies as defamation per se. Though I don't know for certain, Milo probably did this on someone's orders because I was damaging the Woke Right attempt to derail the Trump Administration and the Republican Party, which we can now see is plainly some kind of evil conspiracy against the United States. This is NOT me, no. It's a defamatory testament to how badly the Woke Right wants to destroy its enemies. They're genuinely evil and have no place in any respectable movement, especially in America, doubly especially for conservatives. You do have assets, though, Libertarian Party. I suggest you delete the post and issue a formal application. You posted this with obvious malice and disregard for the facts.

What you see almost endlessly from Tucker Carlson, "Comic" Dave Smith, Theo Von, etc., and the rest of the blackpillers amounts to a Critical America Theory. I'm not making this up. I'm explaining. Critical Theory was developed by neo-Marxist Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School in 1937. In an interview in 1969, Horkheimer explained what the Critical Theory is. He said (closely paraphrasing): "I developed the Critical Theory because we [Western neo-Marxists] realized we cannot articulate the good or ideal society on the terms of the existing society. What we can do is criticize those aspects of the existing society that we wish to change." In other words, a Critical Theory believes everything is so captured and corrupted by power and those who benefit from systems of power that it isn't even possible to talk about a better situation in clear terms. All that's available is criticism of why the system/society isn't better than it is. This activity has come to be known as identifying or "making visible" the various "problematics" in the existing system. A Critical Theory OF SOMETHING would focus this general mode of engagement into a particular domain. For example, a Critical Theory of Race in America would believe that racism is so endemic to a society and embedded within its systems to the benefit of whites that we cannot articulate a true "antiracist" vision on the terms available to us. All we could do is identify where "racism" manifests and criticize it for being there. We call that program "Critical Race Theory" because it is a Critical Theory of Race. What it does in practice is (1) identifies "hidden racism" in everything (criticizing those elements of the existing (racial) system they wish to change), called "identifying problematics"; (2) induces more people to think this way; nothing else. What a Critical America Theory would look like is not being able to articulate what a good or ideal America would look like on the terms of the existing America but criticizing those elements of America as it exists that we wish to change. That is, it would look for everything America isn't doing perfectly according to some ideal standard that doesn't exist, probably cannot exist, and cannot even be articulated and "make those problematics visible" in the hopes of changing the system. Leftists, including the whole of Critical Race Theory, do this endlessly. From Derrick Bell's (founder of CRT) 1970 book, Race, Racism, and American Law, forward, it is a relentless racial Critical America Theory. That's why it exported poorly and often hilariously to other countries that don't have the same law or racial history. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980) is another example, a very naked example, of a work of Critical America Theory. Specifically, this book goes through every chapter of American history, from pre-founding (Christopher Columbus) to the present (1980 at the time) and catalogues how America cheated "the people," mainly workers, indigenous, racial minorities, and women (the intersectional coalition). What I'm telling you is that the blackpillers of Podcastistan and X, etc., very notably including Tucker Carlson, are doing a socially conservative variation on Critical America Theory. Whether Carlson or "Auron MacIntyre" (nhrn) from The Blaze, the undertone of every message is plainly "you don't hate your (real) country enough" as compared against an imaginary ideal that doesn't, can't, and won't ever exist. The Blackpill Comics all do the same thing, relentlessly identifying "problematics" and alleged hidden systems of control that delegitimize the country as it actually is against a standard that isn't even real. The thing is, Critical America Theory is a Critical Theory of America. That is, it is a Critical Theory. That is, when you participate in this slop, you are taking on a critical consciousness about America. Having a critical consciousness is being WOKE, by definition (of Woke). This slop is Woke. When this Critical America Theory slop takes on a socially Leftist slant, we call it Woke Left (or just Woke). When this Critical America Theory slop takes on a socially conservative or Rightist slant, we call it Woke Right (which is just Woke too). They are both Woke. They are both toxic. They are both false enlightenment into a kind of terrible darkness, entitlement, malice, despair, hatred, and failure. Reject Critical America Theory. Love your country. It's great, and it's worth it.

This was reportedly a focused strike on hardened infrastructure in Isfahan, a nuclear facility, using bunker-buster bombs. Let’s review the geopolitics: Peaceful nuclear aspirations don’t need to be built under bunkers. Strike now or deal with an Islamist version of North Korea later. And yes, they were actively rebuilding the facilities after the first strike, Operation Midnight Hammer. These simple facts continue to get lost in the debate over this incredibly bold foreign policy action. The action against Iran is long term thinking. The easy political thing to do would be to agree to a crappy deal and move on. That would be short term thinking.

@catturd2 Has this clown ever been elected to anything? What makes him presume that he is the voice of anybody other than a sliver of the loud retard right podcasters. He has no political qualification whatsoever.

I voted for Trump. Not you. Don’t you have another doomer grifter podcast to go on today to whine, leaker.

Isn’t the enriched uranium coupled with pretty impressive missile design and build concern you? Thus regime is amassing proxy armies in a region that will demand symmetrical nuclear development and instability that likely results in global economic blackmail and extortion no one could do anything about shoujd they advance their programs. Why is that not a big deal. For example, they activate terror cells here in the name of whatever jihad cause they invent, and are then immune from any consequences………is preventing such a predictable outcome not a cause worth considering at least?

Does the pro Iran war crowd have an argument other than, "YOU'RE AS CRAZY AS TUCKER!"? This is getting to be the persuasion-by-threat I wrote about this week re: voter fraud, masking, climate change, etc etc. You might intimidate people out of saying what they believe, but you don't change any minds.

Are you kidding Dan. Dave doesn’t care about actual history. He only cares to find facts that fit his theory. To listen to an alternative set of facts, he might actually have to craft a theory to fit all the facts……but the theory would then conflict with his click bait pitch, and the nature of war and diplomacy might seem complicated. Much easier to say war is bad and America is wrong and whatever we do we shouldn’t have done and whatever we didn’t do we should have done. Don’t waste your breath

Dave, let me educate you like I always do: The seeds of Syria’s chaos were sown in the 1970s, when Hafez al-Assad, a member of the Alawite minority, took power in a Sunni-majority country. In the eyes of Sunni Muslims, it was intolerable to be ruled by someone they did not consider truly Muslim. To secure his position, Assad sought legitimacy from a Shia cleric who issued a fatwa declaring Alawites as Muslims to defuse the theological tension. But that wasn’t enough. Sunni Muslim groups rejected it and responded with violence. Between 1970 and 1978, their opposition escalated, culminating in the massacre of 80 Alawite cadets at the Aleppo artillery school. Assad responded by consolidating power around fellow Alawites, excluding Sunnis from the security apparatus, and preparing for inevitable revolt. That revolt came in 1982, when Assad crushed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama, slaughtering an estimated 25,000 Sunnis and silencing dissent for a generation. Fast-forward to 2011. The Syrian "uprising" wasn’t just a protest against dictatorship, it was a jihadist resurrection, funded and armed by Islamic countries looking to reshape Syria into an Islamic stronghold. From 2011 to 2025, millions of Syrians were governed by jihadist factions: al-Qaeda affiliates, ISIS remnants, and new militant groups under different names but with the same goal, an Islamic state. The U.S. and Israel did not try to take al-Assad down for years; if that had been their goal, they could have done it in the first year. On the contrary, they wanted him to remain in power because they realized the alternative would be Sunni Islamic terrorism. After October 7, there were attempts to welcome al-Assad back into the international community. However, there was one condition: cut Iranian supply lines to Hezbollah through Syria. Because Iran had effectively controlled Syria during the war years, al-Assad was unable to do so, so removing him became the only option. The legitimacy given to the ISIS leader was the result of $2.4 trillion in Qatari and Saudi investment promised to the U.S. economy, along with a request for Trump to approve Ahmad al-Sharaa as president of Syria. Trump was assured by MBS and Qatar that they would control al-Sharaa, and they did. However, the real problem is the hundreds of thousands of ISIS fighters who became the Syrian army. So even if al-Sharaa were a Mossad agent, he would not be able to control them. Blaming Israel for Islamic jihad is ridiculous and reflects ignorance of what has actually happened.

@ComicDaveSmith Dave “some guy says” is not evidence for your claims when that “source” has a motive, opportunity and record of lying. As always, you’re regurgitating propaganda from sources as though it’s verified fact. In order to confirm your story. You’re a clown.

This post does not debunk a single thing that I said. Not one.