Image is of a destroyed American AWACS plane in Saudi Arabia, of which there is a very limited supply and each of which is enormously expensive both monetarily and in terms of components. Iran hit this with a precision drone strike that likely cost ~$20,000.
I don't have much to add from the last megathread description. This isn't to say that nothing has happened or has changed since then - decades are still happening in weeks - but the general flow of the war is remaining the same. Trump sometimes threatens to open the Strait with troops and flatten Iran to rubble, and other times threatens that he's gonna back off and let other countries handle it if they really want little trifles like "fuel" and "energy" so much. Iran continues to strike across the Middle East. The West continues to bomb civilian infrastructure due to their relative inability to affect the missile cities. In all: things are generally getting worse for America and the Zionists.
April is the month where the last ships that left Hormuz before it was closed will arrive around the world, so the last month of economic turmoil has been a mere prelude to what's going to occur in the near-future. The silver lining is that Iran appears to be formalizing the new state of affairs in Hormuz, creating a rial-based toll to allow passage between a pair of Iranian-controlled islands where they can be monitored, meaning that, as long as the US doesn't do something exceptionally stupid, the global energy crisis may "only" last a couple years instead of simply being the new reality from now on. Some countries have already agreed to this arrangement, and others will inevitably follow despite their consternation as their economies increasingly suffer.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Trump's chief of staff was "concerned aides were... telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear. " -Time
The President has begun many recent mornings watching video clips compiled by military officials of battlefield successes.
"Trump told them he wants to wind down the campaign, wary of a protracted conflict that could hobble Republicans heading into the midterms. At the same time, he wants the operation to be a decisive success. "
"As preparations for the war began, the Administration believed it had a winning formula. The U.S. would deliver an opening strike so overwhelming Tehran’s only viable response would be limited retaliation—enough to satisfy domestic audiences without inviting more attacks."
"Hegseth was among those taken aback, says the person familiar with his thinking: “He was expecting the Iranians to fight back in some form. When they started attacking virtually the entire region, it sort of hit him like, ‘Whoa, we’re really in this now.’”
"Trump became wary enough of leaks that some of his own aides were the target of subterfuge. On Feb. 27, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago. Aides assembled in a makeshift Situation Room. Trump bristled at the number of people present. “He thought the group was too big,” one official recalls; it included people Trump didn’t recognize or didn’t feel he knew well enough."
https://time.com/article/2026/04/02/trump-iran-off-ramp/
Lack of empathy is going to bring down the empire. Reichers can’t even imagine other people’s interests and reactions, even when told about them explicitly.
It reminds me of the Blowback season with Cuba, there were descriptions of everyone in JFK's security Council trying to figure out why the USSR would be so crazy as to put nukes in Cuba to cause this crisis, even though Khruschev had said directly that's how the USSR felt every day with nukes in Turkey aimed at them.
But they just couldn't figure it out. Until one day, JFK was finally convinced to maybe consider why they would do that (I think by Adlai Stevenson the UN representative) and they were able to negotiate themselves out of nuclear Armageddon by removing their nukes from Turkey. But until that point, all these supposedly smart people and experienced generals were like, "This doesn't make any sense..." because they didn't know what fucking empathy was 🤦
And then jfk got a bullet for his efforts
There was a chapo reading series from a biography about the last days of the Trump I admin.
Basically the only people left at the end were mindless yes men who were only concerned about day to day career viability, they would go up a flight of stairs to avoid Trump if he was in a bad mood.
It's very obviously gotten worse during Trump II and we're in uncharted waters here wrt the level of sycophancy and amount of executive power in the highest office of a nuclear armed nation, much less a global hegemon.
This is only year 2!
I'm not saying that I believe that the US is at risk of coup due to palace infighting - though an American Prigozhin would be very, very funny - but I do feel like a majority of governments in the position that the US is currently in would have had the leader... "encouraged" to step down by some other figure in order to take control and stop the catastrophic damage the empire is doing to itself
I really do have to wonder if there's any really high-up people in the US government right now who are actually semi-competent administrators of empire who are at like "oh fuck, oh god, oh fuck, what do we do?"
maybe he really did successfully purge the deep state
I feel like I need to re-read The Eighteenth Brumaire again, it’s been a while. There were some comparisons between Trump and Louis Bonaparte in his first admin but it didn’t really seem to line up all that well, it felt a bit like a lazy comparison. But the point is Bonaparte eventually got the bourgeoisie to get in line behind him despite his incompetency, so maybe the comparison to Trump is more apt now than it was back during Trump 1.
Easier resd which extends the analysis and improves it, in my opinion, in Losurdo's Bonapartism book. Great stuff, would recommend it highly
I think these people are rightfully scared that doing so would be a catalyst for a chaotic revolutionary movement.
Think about it, what happens to maga when if the existing government gets couped? Where do they go?
They can't be sheepdogged back into conservatism if you do that, they will view every single person who doesn't call the new government illegitimate as a traitor. The only political response to it they would see as justified would be opposing it.
This whole maga movement would become unhinged from conservatism and see both the dems and conservatives as two halves of the same thing.
What they become after that is anyone's guess but the most obvious thing is that they would view the new government as genuinely truthfully illegitimate. Not performatively illegitimate like the whole ballot box vote fixing bullshit that they didn't really believe.
Maybe they don't become revolutionary but there would be an enormous collapse of belief in the system and processes. They would be dangerous and such an unknown factor that it's potentially a worse outcome than letting Trump die of natural causes.
They tried hitting him with the heart attack gun but he's been megadosing blood thinners so he's basically immune
I've been shocked at the lack of a military coup in the US watching this parade of ancient incompetents run the thing into the ground now for the last decade. The military is the most trusted institution in the US.
I think it's the civil religion honestly what else can it be? American exceptionalism is real, but it's actually that we are exceptionally ossified
footage of Hegseth being taken aback
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
A thinkin' fellas defense secretary.
Taken aback? Guy needs to be taken out back instead