GftNC
So much is happening in the world, and with (as Tina Brown called him) a berserk brontosaurus in the White House, the topics of possible interest seem endless. The Florida election after which Mar-a-Lago and Trump are now represented by a Democrat? The insider betting on the timing of US military (and PR) actions? The incomprehensible (/s) fact that the state most benefitting from the current situation is Putin’s Russia?
Open Thread, as I mentioned
wjca wrote:
“But I’m impressed that an Army Secretary that Trump appointed was willing to stand up for his troops.
I suppose we should be grateful that Kegseth didn’t just force them into retirement.”
I realize, because you a nice guy, wj, that you are engaging in some mild sarcasm here. “Impressed” and “grateful” you are and we should be too. I get it. Tongue in cheek to keep the tone around here at some level of soporific civility, like Anne Frank whistling a sentimental tune only during the hours of the day when the traffic noise adjacent to the Annex might serve to distract the nearby murderous jack-booted MAGA Christian conservatives of her day from noticing her brief moment of joy.
No. The genocidal monster in the Oval Office some time ago issued a writ declaring English the national(ist) language, so here’s an example of it:
Pegseth is a racist, misogynist, immigrant abusing, gay stabbing, election-stealing, liberal beating, Muslim murdering, soon-to-be Jew Burning Christian, because that’s where all fascist rightwing vermin throughout history end up.
By the way, Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, Franco, Kim Jong-il, the ill-coiffed bitter dumb eff in the White House, the entire Republican Party, Jagoffseth’s favorite Christian pastor, and Xi Jinping, Ronald Reagan, and Victor Orban are all filthy conservatives in my moderate, but understated book of hierarchies.
I assume these four folks, decorated patriots, careers now ruined because of the presence of vaginas on two of them, and a surfeit of melanin in the skin of the other two, are adept at and have been rigorously trained on the operation of all types of deadly force weaponry, perhaps even of mass destruction.
Pigseth, that cosplaying tattooed testoterone-enhanced drunk freak, prayed to his murderous merciless Christian (his word, not mine) God for overwhelming violence against the perverted conservative movement’s enemies .. everywhere, not merely in places around the world he’s never set foot in, and here.
Odd that he would make enemies of four trained killers who retain access to the Army’s full armory.
I expect they are praying for overwhelming violence too.
Putin. Too
Maybe Iran should create an A-bomb, nobody is attacking countries who have one.
As for the crazy mullahs ‘argument’: looking at the past 25 years of foreign policy, that doesn’t really hold any water, especially when compared to US/UK/Israel.
Re the generals… Promotions to one-star rank and initial postings must be submitted by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Same applies for promotions to more stars. The standard procedure is a board of general officers drafts a list. Said list goes to the secretary of the service branch and the Joint Chiefs, then on to the Secretary of Defense, then to the President, then to the Senate. Precedent is that the Secretary of Defense will either approve or disapprove the entire list rather than striking individual names. We all know that precedent is a weak straw to depend on these days.
Trump, consciously or not, is breaking the US military leadership of any independence.
Part 1 of Carole Cadwalladr’s latest substack. There is permission to share. I have had to remove most of the links so it doesn’t go into moderation – let’s hope the two parts aren’t too long to go through.
The broligarchy’s war on journalismThe capture of US media by Trump allies is accelerating and the UK is the next in line. Plus: the mystery money behind my old newspaper.
Carole Cadwalladr
Mar 27, 2026
A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.
This week, the BBC announced the appointment of a new director general. An ex-Google middle manager called Matt Brittin who will lead the publicly-owned corporation at a time when its entire existence is under threat. The next years are crucial: Nigel Farage, whose far-right Reform party is surging in the polls, hasn’t disguised his Trumpian desire to smash it to pieces.
I’ve written about Brittin in the Nerve this week because I believe it’s a disastrous appointment for the BBC and therefore us all. It’s a choice rooted in our ongoing naivity about Silicon Valley technology firms including Google that’s is still seen as a dynamic start-up not a rapacious AI company that’s actively trying to destroy journalism.
Google’s AI summaries now appear at the top of every search, they scrape journalists’ work while simultaneously tanking traffic to their websites. Since they were introduced, some websites have seen up to 80% fall. And Brittin is your standard issue AI hype man.
Last year, he was appointed to the Guardian’s board to help the organisation navigate decisions about AI and the organisation promptly entered into “strategic partnership” with one of the worst companies on the planet, OpenAI.
This is tech capture. It’s a playbook we’ve seen play out time and time again. And, as an ardent believer in the importance of independent media and the survival of both the Guardian and BBC, I think it’s a terrible, terrible error of judgment. Silicon Valley creates dependencies in media companies that gives them leverage to avoid negative coverage and crucially regulation including through a range of techniques that include blackmail and extortion.
In the US, the Washington Post has been hollowed out by one tech broligarch (Jeff Bezos) and CBS and TikTok have been captured by another (the Ellisons). CNN is the next in line. Larry Ellison’s son David is set to take control of Paramount which owns CNN and HBO among a welter of other media brands. CBS, which it already controls. already become a hollowed-out husk of a once vital US network. Oliver Darcy of Status also reported this week that viewers are turning off in droves. This is a media crisis wrapped inside a political crisis.
The UK’s media was pre-captured. Our print media is overwhelmingly oligarch owned. But the process is accelerating here also. The German company Axel Springer is buying the Telegraph in a £575m deal. It’s owned by another Trump ally, Mathias Döpfner who’s also close to Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir. Thiel is actually in business with Döpfner’s son, Moritz, investing $50m into a fund he founded.
And this Sunday, my old newspaper, the Observer – which was an integral part of the Guardian until a year ago – published a story on Palantir that made my heart sink.
At the Nerve, we’ve investigated Palantir’s chokehold on the UK government, we’ve found Ministry of Defence whistleblowers who claim it’s a threat to national security, and revealed the UK pension funds who are fuelling its growth. I’ve written here about its role in what I believe is the US’s descent into technofascism. And of course, in this newsletter, Peter Thiel, one of the most dangerous men on the planet, is a regular character.
This is what alerted me to the Observer piece. Two glowing endorsements from…Palantir’s UK CEO, Louis Mosley.
Mosley is the grandson of Oswald Mosley who founded the British Union of Fascists, aka “Blackshirts”. The examples he cites were case studies that the Observer’s political editor had exclusively obtained. Mosley also granted her an exclusive interview. For comparison, Palantir did not respond to any of the press inquiries we sent it before our first investigation. The Observer piece is behind a paywall – as all its journalism now is – but there’s a text version here.
What’s noteworthy here is that Palantir is being covered by my old newspaper by the political editor as a political story. UK political reporting is largely a time-honoured game of favour trading that sees journalists use politicians to give up their gossip and politicians use journalists to channel their spin.
Certainly this is the game (and journalists) that Palantir’s press man in the UK knows: he previously worked at Number 10 Downing Street. I may be wrong and we can never know but I don’t believe the Observer of a year ago would have run this piece. Not because of me or my strongly held views on the threat Peter Thiel poses to democracy (his words, not mine: Thiel says democracy is “incompatible” with freedom) but because of normal editorial processes.
News organisations make mistakes. The Observer famously did when it backed the Iraq War. But channelling Palantir spin into a double-page spread without robustly interrogating the provenance of the story or the motivations behind it? A simple fact check would have revealed Mosley’s claims weren’t even true. The case study Palantir provided made the bold claim that Palantir had prevented all domestic murders in Bedfordshire last year.
“Usually 5 or 6 domestic murders a year,” Mosley tweeted quoting the article. “Last 12 months? Zero. By using Palantir, Bedfordshire Police identified 1,000+ women whose partners had a history of domestic abuse – and warned them they could be in danger.”
Er, no, as the journalist Iain Overton points out. He found at least two Bedfordshire women murdered in their homes last year. I also asked a solicitor who specialises in domestic abuse what she made of the piece [I have had to remove this link. Anyone interested should check out Cadwalladr’s Substack.]
The UK police have a persistent track record in failing to act on domestic abuse and threats of violence against women. And what Bedfordshire Police have done, with the assistance of the Observer, is to techwash these failures via Palantir’s press office.
All of which begs the question: why?
A mystery investorIt’s nearly a year since the Guardian “transferred” the Observer to a group of private investors along with £5m. It did so after a bitter dispute with its journalists, 93% of whom voted to go on strike. I’ve written here about Tortoise Media, the company that acquired it, and here about the issues with the deal including the friendship between James Harding, Tortoise’s founder and the Guardian’s CEO, Anna Bateson, who cooked this deal up. And here, about the day we left the Guardian.
In a meeting, on the day the deal was done, we asked Anna Bateson for the names of Tortoise’s new incoming investors. She told us she would send a list after the meeting. That offer was rescinded. The Guardian said Tortoise Media had to supply the names. Tortoise Media declined to do so.
The new known investors include a major political donor to the Labour Party and the controversial thinktank, Labour Together, Gary Lubner, and the owner of Prospect magazine, Clive Cowdery.
But just before Christmas, Tortoise Media, now the owners of the Observer, published a new financial filing with the UK registry, Companies House, which finally listed the names of all shareholders. Most of them were already in the public domain, which made the secrecy all the more baffling. But one caught my eye: “The North Hatley Trust.”
Part 2:
The North Hatley Trust had been a seed investor in the company and in the latest round had bought a further 434,234 shares. That made it one of the Observer’s biggest investors. When I’d seen the name in the seed round I assumed that North Hatley Trust was…a trust, ie some sort of non-profit or family foundation. But when I looked more closely, I found it was just the name of an opaque financial vehicle. An opaque financial vehicle that is now one of the biggest shareholders in the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper.
The only information is a “Legal Entity Identifier” or LEI listing that reveals the barest of details and that’s it. The “Parent” information – ultimate beneficial owner – is not provided.
These sorts of financial vehicles can be set up for all sorts of perfectly legitimate reasons. But they’re also useful if you want to mask the true owners of a company or source of funds. They provide total anonymity.
They’re also commonly used by investment firms for cross-border transactions or to administer sub-funds. (North Hatley is a small town in Canada, to save you the Google.) And there’s just a few other tiny bits of information including that it was registered on Jan 20 last year
And that its registered legal address and listed HQ is: Suite 5700, 415 Mission Street, San Francisco.
415 Mission Street is a pretty famous address in San Francisco. It’s home to the city’s landmark Salesforce Tower, a huge office building. But North Hatley Trust’s address is much more specific than that. It’s based in Suite 5700.
And that’s where it gets interesting. Because it turns out that 415 Mission Street, Suite 5700 is the headquarters of Hellman & Friedman, a US private equity firm.
And I was already familiar with Hellman & Friedman because of this guy, another investor in Tortoise Media, Patrick Healy.
Healy is the CEO of Hellman & Friedman.
He sits on its investment committee, leads its European division and is core to its media acquisition team. He also led Hellman & Friedman’s investment into, wait for it, Axel Springer, the Germany company now buying the Telegraph. (H&F has since exited from the firm.)
When James Harding came to present his vision for the Observer in the Guardian’s office, he took questions and I put up my hand. Was Patrick Healy a fit and proper person to be an owner of our newspaper, I asked? And I explained my reasons why.
Two years ago, Hellman & Friedman was revealed to have taken an undisclosed amount of investment from the Saudi public investment fund, Sanabil.
And just so there’s no doubt about who and what the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is, it’s a $776bn fund personally led by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. That’s Mr “Bonesaw” to you, the man who the CIA concluded ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
The Guardian along with other media outlets rightly condemned the murder of Kashoggi in the strongest possible terms. It has published multiple blistering leaders on it, (leaders express the official voice of the newspaper). In 2018: “The Guardian view on the death of a critic: Riyadh must pay a price”. It published another in 2019 and again in 2023, and perhaps most appositely, of all, yet again in 2023: The Guardian view on Saudi Arabia’s rehabilitation: following the money.
Harding assured us that Healy had invested in Tortoise Media in a personal capacity. Subsequently, a group of press freedom organisations raised the same points about his Saudi connections with the chair of the Scott Trust, Ole Jacob Sunde, who gave the same assurances.
Last December, I included Healy in a piece I wrote about Tortoise Media’s funding and included his response in the article:
In fact, Healy did go on to participate in the latest round. As did the North Hatley Trust which is legally registered as being co-located in the office of his firm, Hellman & Friedman. I do not know if Healy has any relationship to or stake in the North Hatley Trust. Similiarly, I don’t know whether Sanabil, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has any interest or money in the vehicle.
It does not publicly disclose its investments. The only public information, as Bloomberg reports, is that the Saudi Public Investment Fund commits around $2 billion a year into “venture, growth and small buyout assets worldwide” via portfolio companies of which Hellman & Friedman is one.
Neither Patrick Healy nor Hellman & Friedman responded to my queries on the matter. Nor did Tortoise Media/The Observer. This included a yes/no question of whether it has taken Saudi money. Ole Jacob Sunde, the chair of the Scott Trust (which owns the Guardian and is a co-investor in Tortoise Media) did not respond either. Only the Guardian press office answered my emails. A spokesperson said it did not wish to comment on this matter.
What it means when someone won’t answer your press inquiriesThirty years ago, when I trained as a news journalist, the importance of the “right to reply” was drilled into me. It’s an important defence in the event that a company goes legal but more than that it’s a matter of fairness. Even just a few years ago, it was unusual for a press office to simply ignore journalists’ inquiries. But now the rules on everything are broken and it’s increasingly standard practice. Why bother responding to a news outlet when most people think it’s “fake news” anyway?
But for a news organisation, it’s another rupture of another norm.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation as to why the Observer is refusing to disclose the real identity of an opaque investor who happens to share an address with a private equity firm that’s taken a ton of cash from Mr Bonesaw, that’s why we send right to reply letters: to get the facts.
It’s not just a box-ticking exercise, it’s a crucial step to make sure you haven’t jumped to conclusions. It’s bad faith for anyone to not respond but something is profoundly broken when it’s a liberal news organisation that champions transparency and accountability. It’s the same reason why I believe the Guardian’s secrecy over its deal with OpenAI is so profoundly wrong. You can’t enter a financial arrangement with a subject you report on without disclosing the terms. Yet that’s exactly what it’s done.
Perhaps, you think, the Guardian’s leadership is ignoring my questions because they perceive me as a troublemaker. Well, doh! Of course they do and of course I am. That’s what investigative journalism is. They know that because they publish brilliant, important investigative journalism by my former colleagues.
I lost my job because I investigated this deal and my own news organisation, despite the same leadership’s public statements that no jobs would be lost. It wasn’t just me. The editor, Lucy Rock, lost her job too and last week, the Observer announced it was seeking further voluntary redundancies across the company with staff told they may be facing compulsory redundancies next
The UK government changes the lawThree weeks after the transfer of the Observer to Tortoise Media took place, the UK government changed the law to allow foreign state ownership of UK news titles. They also backdated the legislation to a year previously.
At least four news organisations lobbied the minister in question to get this law changed according to a report in the Guardian. The details remain secret.
I genuinely don’t know what to make of the government’s decision on this or why now but there’s no defensible argument for foreign state ownership of UK media, as argued in this excellent piece the by the Guardian financial editor, Nils Pratley:
In it, he actually points to the example of the Guardian and how it explained that it was taking a stake in Tortoise Media to “enshrine our values in the new ownership structure”.
So where are these values? Who is the Guardian’s co-investor in the Observer? Why the lack of transparency? How does this serve the public interest?
The ‘how’ of thisI established these facts before Christmas, sent the right-to-replies and wrote it up as a straight-down-the-line news story. At that point, I sent it to trusted senior financial journalists and editors to sense-check it and get their input. And then I left it.
When I came to read it again, I doubted that anyone outside the small world of UK media would understand it or be interested. Stories about financial disclosures are pretty dull. More importantly, the “third person” omniscient voice is a con. A news story can look “balanced” and obscure all sorts of biases or agendas. And people know that. It’s why increasing numbers of people don’t trust newspapers any more.
I’ve taken a decision to write this in my own voice, as me, to clearly state my priors, and to lay out the evidence for you to judge for yourself. I’ve long been inspired by OSINT – open source intelligence. It’s a form of investigation that’s collaborative, open, doesn’t rely on unnamed sources and provides the evidence that you can double-check yourself. I’m not asking you to trust me on any of this.
I’m laying out what I’ve found. I don’t know what or who the North Hatley Trust is or why the Guardian and Observer won’t say. I doubt it’s in any way connected to the Palantir puff piece but I’ve decided to publish this today because it speaks to the central issue: it’s impossible to know when the newspaper won’t disclose its owners.
I have a personal stake in this story. I don’t want to pretend that doesn’t exist. It’s what also gives me a really deep understanding of the issues and what’s at stake. It’s why I care and why I’ve bothered to go digging and to ask the questions.
Press ownership matters. We are in a time of danger. And news organisations are falling like skittles. Guardian’s corporate structure – two boards, no effective governance – has enabled an executive leadership to make a series of decisions that, I believe, has unforgivably compromised its journalism. Whether those decisions – the deals with OpenAI and Tortoise Media – were the responsibility of the CEO, Anna Bateson, the chair of the Scott Trust, Ole Jacob Sunde, or others, I don’t know. But it’s the editor-in-chief, Kath Viner, who needs to answer these questions. She’s failed in her most important vital role: to protect her journalists and defend the Guardian’s journalism.
Not for the first time. Maybe I’m channelling my own trauma from my High Court trial here. It’s perhaps why I’m so reactive to what’s happening: secret deals with Silicon Valley companies, oligarchic power, shadowy moneymen. I don’t just know this stuff in my brain, I feel it in my cells.
The press is under a coordinated, global assault and I write this as a critical friend of what remains of Britain’s independent media: do not, in the historian Tim Snyder’s words, obey in advance. Stop doing dumb shortsighted self-sabotaging deals, stop thinking tech companies will save you, they never have and never will and answer the sodding questions when journalists put them to you.
PS. There’s one more piece of information that the filings threw up. This one is for my colleagues who remain at the Guardian. Skip to the end if you want to get the fun video. But what Guardian journalists won’t know, because the management never told them, is that the Guardian took a large undisclosed financial stake in Tortoise Media before the transfer of the Observer took place.
Tortoise’s annual accounts show the company took £2.7million in convertible loans before the transfer. In the same period, Guardian News & Media acquired 382,096 shares in the company. These were dissolved on April 22 last year, the day the Observer transferred ownership. On that same day, the Scott Trust – Guardian News & Media’s owner – acquired 803,640 shares.
It suggests that Tortoise Media needed a substantial cash injection to survive up to the date of the transfer. It raises a question over how much the Scott Trust actually invested, whether it was the £5m announced previously or more. And for my union colleagues who negotiated terms for their departing colleagues with the Guardian and Tortoise Media, they did so not knowing that the Guardian was already a major shareholder in Tortoise Media.
The Guardian and Observer declined to answer any of my questions in relation to this deal.
I know it’s very long, and not everybody’s cup of tea, but I think that Carole Cadwalladr is a brave and important voice, and these issues are a vital explanation of the degradation of our politics and culture. It is very copiously linked, almost all of which I had to deactivate. For anybody looking for it with active links, check her substack.
If the Right didn’t hate France so much (will they change their tune, if/when the RN takes over?), the new $ of His Orangeness could be called the Donald d’or, henceforth to be divided into 47 Donald d’argent.
FTFY
Conservatives are a whole different deal. A conservative may oppose a change you want. Or, more likely, want to make smaller changes or slower changes.
Trying to reverse decades (or centuries) of changes is NOT a conservative characteristic. And any real conservative will tell you that nobody in this administration qualifies as a conservative.
For example, the US military’s reluctance to embrace modern drone warfare. That’s conservative (dumb, too, at this point) but not reactionary. Reactionary is demanding to go back to battleships. (Or steam catapults on aircraft carriers.)
TP: I’d love to get back to tax policy discussions. I’m not sure why you would consider my comments as being an apologist for Trump, or why you would think I’m referring to any particular group of people being more worthy of protection than the next. I don’t think that way. At some point, the risk posed by Iran is too great. That is all I meant.
“which Iran supposedly (reportedly? says who?) has enough “enhanced uranium”. The Iranians reportedly bragged about it in negotiations.
Is that “weapons-grade” uranium, just waiting to be installed in warheads already sitting on ready-to-launch ICBMs, or what? 60% enriched. My understanding is that 60% is way beyond civilian use and signals the intent to produce a weapon. And it’s a “short technical step” away from fully-enriched uranium and that 99% of the work has been done to enrich it to weapons grade. As in weeks to weapons grade. And then you have a dirty bomb. I’ve seen estimates of a full-blown nuclear weapon ranging from just a few months to over a year. I think they were a ways from putting it on an ICBM, but would you wait until they have a bomb? You cited Who’s Next, but maybe we take the message differently? I get the hypocrisy angle, but do you want proliferation? Is it a right? And Iran launched two ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia. Bad accuracy, but range 4000km, more than the 2000km they claimed earlier. Enough to reach Europe.
GftNC: What is your angle in asking about MAGA? My response to nooneithinkisinmytree? I don’t want to bore you with the obvious, and yet “what is MAGA” can mean different things to different people from what I’ve seen. So maybe refine your question a bit? Thanks.
bc, it was fairly clear from your jokey response to nooneithinkisinmytree that you, very understandably, thought MAGA was neither a virus nor a bacterium, and probably nothing comparable. But as you have noted, your comments here frequently lead people to think you are a Trump apologist*. Since the MAGA people seem to be behind Trump no matter what he does, unlike more trad Republicans (whose ranks are anyway shrinking, and most of whom are MIA) not to mention conservatives like wj, I wondered what you make of MAGA? What do you think explains how this has come about, in people who voted for Trump when he said he would not get the US into foreign wars, claimed that the Biden administration (and family) were tremendously corrupt, and made a fetish of patriotism (USA! USA!) while insisting that the 2020 election was stolen in the face of all evidence to the contrary?
*For example, making a case about why it is desirable to ensure that Iran does not acquire or refine the means to make a nuclear weapon seems to ignore the fact that what the Trump administration did in its first term, and is now continuing, seems to make that outcome more rather than less likely.
And then you have a dirty bomb.
Pardon? A dirty bomb is a bomb loaded with radioactive material, intended to contaminate the area. Uranium enrichment has nothing to do with it.
…would you wait until they have a bomb?
The fewer nuclear weapons there are, and the fewer countries with them, the better. That applies particularly to countries with governments given to attacking other countries, such as the USA, Russia, Israel, and Iran.
The question is, how to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Perhaps it could be done with a sufficiently disruptive bombing campaign, which goes on for ever. If you’re not willing to do that – I’m not, nor apparently is Trump – the best I can think of is to get Iran to agree not to develop a bomb, and to allow a rigorous inspection programme, in return for not imposing economic sanctions. If only it were possible to negotiate such a deal.
A Robert Pape interview covering the Iran war predicament.
“This War Will FAIL” – Military Expert Prof Robert Pape
Pardon? A dirty bomb is a bomb loaded with radioactive material, intended to contaminate the area. Uranium enrichment has nothing to do with it.
Exactly. Lots of cobalt-60, strontium-90, and cesium-137. Where are you going to get it? An actual fission bomb will produce it, but you almost certainly want to consider the blast as your primary weapon. Or you can get a bunch of spent reactor fuel. Properly aged: thermally cool enough to work with, still radioactively hot enough to be “dirty”.
I suppose we should be grateful that Kegseth didn’t just force them into retirement.
Probably did in fairly short order. You can only sit at full colonel and get passed over for promotion to flag rank for so many years before retirement is mandatory.
If the military brass recommended you for promotion, and the Army Secretary approved, were you really “passed over”?
No doubt the term has a technical definition in this situation. But in any meaningful sense, these people weren’t passed over. It’s not like there was any professional shortcoming — or they wouldn’t have made the promotion list in the first place.
PS. I wonder if anyone got an explanation from Hegseth for why he demanded they be removed. You know, specifics. I’m curious whether he trotted out some obvious bullsh*t reason. Or stumbled into honesty, and claimed he thought DEI was why they were there. .
I think of people like Bolton, Pompeo, Nikki Haley, who were and presumably still are Iran Hawks and they must feel the same way that bc feels. However, I note that none of those folks have popped up lately to help explain to the American people why we have the 101st. the 1st MEF and the USS Tripoli on its way, so either ‘enough of us’ doesn’t include them, or they haven’t changed their minds, but they see Trump as a much bigger threat. Just sayin’.
The fewer nuclear weapons there are, and the fewer countries with them, the better. That applies particularly to countries with governments given to attacking other countries, such as the USA, Russia, Israel, and Iran.
Well, yes and no. I’m all for nuclear disarmament, however, it seems the trajectory is now headed in the opposite direction again.
Iran, though, until the recent crisis, hasn’t actually attacked any country since the Qajar dynasty, except in self-defense or retaliation.
Iran attacks other countries by proxy.
That applies particularly to countries with governments given to attacking other countries, such as the USA, Russia, Israel,
and Iran.AND India/Pakistan.
Iran attacks other countries by proxy.
By that definition the UK has beeb attacking Yemen for the past 11 years.
OK. The relevant question is how likely a given country with nuclear weapons is to use them. Currently the USA is at the top of the list, but Iran would not, in my estimation, be at the bottom.
bc: At some point, the risk posed by Iran is too great. That is all I meant.
“At some point”, yes. The question is whether you agree with He, Trump that the US (or even Israel) were at that point. And a forward-looking question: when the “Department of War” formally demands a $200B supplemental for the … excursion, will you be fer it or agin it?
FWIW: having played Greeks and Persians in my childhood (because my playmates and I had never heard of Cowboys and Indians) I am not remotely inclined to be an apologist for Iran. Theocrats of any flavor are not my cup of tea. That goes double for nuclear-armed theocrats like Bibi and the American bring-on-the-Rapture lunatics He, Trump caters to.
Further bc: My understanding is that 60% is way beyond civilian use and signals the intent to produce a weapon.
My understanding is that buying a box of cartridges signals the intent to shoot something. Could be a paper target, could be a classroom. Who gets to judge, and take preemptive action?
–TP
At some point, the risk posed by Iran is too great.
Let’s talk about risk.
Undoubtedly, Iran wants to have the option to develop nuclear weapons – there’s no other reason for its uranium enrichment programme. It’s not at all clear that it wants to actually make them – there are religious objections – until it sees an existential threat against it.
The JCPOA eliminated the risk that Iran would develop nuclear weapons. Trump withdrew from it.
Nevertheless, IAEA inspections continued. There was only a tiny risk that Iran would develop nuclear weapons, until Israel and the USA attacked it in June 2025.
Iran then, understandably, ended co-operation with the IAEA. The risk that it would develop nuclear weapons become non-negligible. The risk that it would be able to develop nuclear-armed missiles remained remote. And even if it did, there would be the same deterrents to their use as faced by every other nuclear-armed country.
Trump then started a war which he cannot win by conventional means. The risk that he will use nuclear weapons to attack Iran became significant.
If your concern is the use of nuclear weapons, you oppose Trump at every step.
I assuming we are talking about first use, as opposed to in response to an attack. Because otherwise we get into how likely a particular nuclear power is to come under a serious attack.
At the moment (until Trump is gone) the US probably is. After that, the current #2, Russia, moves up. Russia also moves up if Ukraine looks like seriously pushing the Russian army back towards the border.
Iran wouldn’t be at the bottom. But probably lower half.
wjca:
We’ve had this conversation before.
Purity. CharlesWT claims some kind of purity for Libertarians. You for conservatism.
Pure Christians, Muslims too, claim the same, each of them some jazz variation on the original texts, which were written by grifters, probably on the original ancient versions of X and Reddit, and all the other human crapola.
It comes down to who has better hats. MAGA’s got the hats. And the AI slop. Hitler and Stalin and Trump have bling, and the wardrobe, and the coffee cups and the brand and the influencers and the content creators and the fake fight clubs and all of the other sublimely stupid dogshit America is now stepping in with glee and we don’t know what we’re up against.
Try putting “We want small changes or slow changes” on a hat and see where it gets us.
America is done unless it confronts the evil of conservatism and Christianity as defined by the evil ones now in full power.
I don’t mistake you for them.
A personal note.
I graduated from the same university as Norman Vincent Peale, one of Mafia Putin rapist Trump’s influencers, along with other infamous grifters, including Hitler, whom he admires. Also the Pillow guy, but ya know fascist stooges need to sleep too.
The walkway leading to the main building on campus, over the past few decades, has been rebuilt to include cobblestones inscribed with the names of famous graduates, and wealthy donors.
The last couple of times I’ve visited, I notice Peale’s stone and I stomp on it as a private protest against an influencer who gave a dumbshit, fascist Queen’s grifter cheat and rapist his egotistical positive “outlook” 0n life.
What a load of WOKE horseshit.
Anyway, next time I visit I am going to appear at that walkway in the dark of night and chisel and pry that stone out of its cement setting and bring it to the celebration of the death of America as we once knew it.
I’m throwing it through someone’s expensive windshield with prejudice
Before Trump, when seeing that asshole’s stone, I would think of the maniacally grinning realtors, carsalessubhumans, stock brokers, insurance agents, musks, preachers, health food vitamin effs and MAGA who have batted their baby Aryan blues at me and extracted, not capitalized, extracted my precious bodily wallet fluids from me.
And Now MAGA for the Apocalypse, sold to me as a gold plated coffin for me and my loved ones.
I don’t believe I’ve overstated anything.
nooneithinkisinmytree,
I don’t believe I see purity in various flavors of conservatism. (And lots of folks who I see as conservatives, I disagree with on a wide variety of topics.) But I object (futily, I realize) to misuse of the term. Think of it, if you will, as a defense of the English language.
I see absolutely no way that those who are quite open about wanting to turn back the clock on almost everything can be accurately labeled as “conservative.” What, exactly, are they conserving?
Even if their vision of the past were accurate (which it never is), asking for radical changes to get there just isn’t conservative. Reversing an individual change which turned out not to work? Sure — provided you offer an alternative to address the original problem. But across the board changes? That’s not conservative. (And denial that there was anything wrong in the past? That’s just delusional. As is denying there is anything wrong now that might need to be addressed.)
This, from Robert Reich, might help.
H/T Balloon Juice.
In short, they ain’t conservative.
This is a piece about the very issue I was talking to bc about…
https://prospect.org/2026/03/27/apr-2026-magazine-how-republican-party-forgot-it-was-conservative/