Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 05:42
VIEWED: 15626
PAGE 28 of 73
Hegseth Accidentally Reveals Big Hole in Trump Victory Claim
Who blinked first? So Iran came to the table because Trump threatened to blow up their civilization, eh? Sorry, that spin is in tatters.
By Greg Sargent | April 8, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/article/208794/hegseth-reveals-hole-trump-vict
ory-claim
Now that Donald Trump has backed off his threat to obliterate a nation of 93 million people, his propagandists are already retconning it into proof of his Solomon-like foresight and wisdom. The new spin is that the war with Iran temporarily ended in a ceasefire precisely because he made this threat, forcing Iran to renegotiate on more favorable terms.
“Iran ultimately understood—their ability to produce, to generate power, to fuel their terrorist regime—was in our hands,” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth told reporters Wednesday, in response to questions about Trump’s threat. Hegseth insisted Trump’s vow to eradicate “a whole civilization” persuaded Iran that he could crush their ability to “export energy” and thus end the entire basis for the regime’s existence.
“That type of threat is what brought them to the place where they effectively said, ‘We want to cut this deal,’” Hegseth continued. This talking point has gone out widely: GOP Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a top target of Democrats, suggested that due to Trump’s “extreme rhetoric,” the Iranians “understand for once that they need to actually negotiate.”
But there’s a small problem with this spin. It’s that the Iranians were already negotiating with Trump before the war started. Trump largely sabotaged those negotiations, because he was talked into believing the war would be easy and deliver a quick burst of glory. Trump’s approach to the talks made success impossible—deliberately.
As The New York Times’ magnum opus on this reveals, Trump had decided to take the plunge (all that remained uncertain was the timing) weeks before those talks with Iran hit their critical phase. This was partly because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked Trump into believing the risks of war were manageable—that strikes could render the Iranian regime too debilitated to close the Strait of Hormuz (which proved disastrously wrong). U.S. intelligence officials disputed Israeli confidence about all this, the Times reports, but Trump brushed off these warnings—because he “appeared to think it would be a very quick war.”
The prewar talks with Iran were doomed because Trump shifted between objectives in a way that ensured that outcome. The core issue was supposed to be ending Iran’s capacity to develop a nuke. But the Times also reveals that Iran was prepared to make meaningful concessions on that front, yet Trump officials effectively decided only regime change was acceptable, ensuring war.
For Hegseth’s story to be true, Iran would have to be more willing to give Trump the concessions he wants than before, due to his mighty threats. But, while the war did badly degrade the Iranian military and kill many senior leaders, here’s what else we know: The regime is still there in more radicalized and brutal form. The strait is being reopened, but as Ben Rhodes notes, the regime’s control over it now appears tighter. The fate of Iran’s nuclear material remains as indeterminate as ever.
Will talks now get Trump a better deal than he might have gotten the first time? Maybe, but Iran seems emboldened by its survival to demand more this time. The points that Trump accepted as the basis for talks appear more friendly to Iran than before.
“Iran is at the table because Trump now appears willing to base negotiations on a wider range of Iranian demands,” Sina Toossi, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, told me. He cites Trump’s apparent willingness to entertain total relief from U.S. sanctions, continued control over the strait, and some form of uranium enrichment: “The civilizational threat did not factor into the ceasefire.”
So
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lol @ your fanfic.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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You guys are hilarious....
"IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! HE'S GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED!!!!!!"
6 HOURS LATER:
"HAHA! TACO TUESDAY TRUMP! WE KNEW THAT PUSSY COWARD WASN'T GONNA DO SHIT!"
You should consider yourselves very lucky that you have a President that allows you to continue being annoying, idiot jagoff assholes to everyone around you since it seems like this is the way you want to continue living your sad, pathetic lives until the very end.
I guess this means we're not going to invoke the 25th Amendment now, huh?
Retard, faggots.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Only Losers Play the Madman
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You guys are hilarious....
"IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! HE'S GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED!!!!!!"
6 HOURS LATER:
"HAHA! TACO TUESDAY TRUMP! WE KNEW THAT PUSSY COWARD WASN'T GONNA DO SHIT!"
You should consider yourselves very lucky that you have a President that allows you to continue being annoying, idiot jagoff assholes to everyone around you since it seems like this is the way you want to continue living your sad, pathetic lives until the very end.
I guess this means we're not going to invoke the 25th Amendment now, huh?
Retard, faggots.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Does Trump seem crazy? Sure. Credible, not so much.
By David Frum | April 8, 2026, 4:43 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/trump-iran-war-ceasefire/686
736/
The most important thing to understand about the “madman theory” of foreign policy is that it was designed by losers for losers.
The world first heard of the madman theory from a 1978 memoir by President Richard Nixon’s former chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. According to Haldeman, Nixon said: “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” Faced with an otherwise hopeless war in Vietnam, Nixon would pretend to be crazy to intimidate the North Vietnamese into allowing him some face-saving escape.
Nobody executes a madman strategy when he feels that he’s winning. Strong and successful powers emphasize consistency and predictability. So do powers that hope to be seen as strong and successful. When China’s foreign minister speaks to the world, he uses language such as “China will be a reliable force for stability” and China “is providing the greatest certainty in this uncertain world.” He understands that true power does not need to boast or yell.
Those who feel their power ebbing, however, may bluster and bellow. Over the seven weeks of his Iran war so far, Donald Trump has discovered that no amount of the force at his disposal will calm world energy markets or boost his sagging poll numbers. He has tried a double strategy of promising imminent breakthroughs in negotiations while posting ever more violent threats on social media to ostensibly accelerate those negotiations. But if this was a madman strategy, it signally failed to gain the advantage that he sought. Everyone could see that Trump wanted a deal more than his Iranian counterparts did. A good rule of thumb is that the side that wants a deal more is the side that is losing.
The madman strategy is for not-crazy leaders caught in adverse predicaments. It’s a strategy of deception. The madman strategist pretends to be willing to do things that he’s not really willing to do. This approach relies on credibility: Rivals must be able to take the threat of extreme action seriously.
Trump’s problems with this strategy are ironic. Foreign leaders are surely willing to believe that Trump is “crazy” in the sense that he is detached from reality. They have seen him miscalculate risk and bungle all kinds of projects, such as his trade wars with China and his attempted coup on January 6, 2021. But they also know that when push really comes to shove, Trump will flinch. TACO has become, like NATO, an acronym so familiar that it no longer needs spelling out.
The Iranians just executed the most dramatic TACO event in history. Trump threatened to annihilate their entire civilization if they didn’t agree to his demands to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran defied the threat—and now Trump has apparently conceded control over the strait and the right to impose tolls on the ships that navigate it. On the point in which Trump tried hardest to terrorize, the Iranians aptly guessed that he was bluffing.
Trump has taught the world that he
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Iran Deal By Obama:
• Strait of Hormuz open for free
• Iran limits Uranium enrichment
• Iran agrees to make no nuclear weapons
• Iran allows Int'l inspectors to ensure compliance
• Inspectors confirm Iran's full compliance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal
Iran Ceasefire By Trump:
• Strait of Hormuz closed, only open for $2M Per Ship
• Iran makes no guarantee of limit on uranium enrichment
• Iran makes no guarantee of no nuclear weapons
• Iran makes no guarantee to allow Int'l inspectors
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/08/nx-s1-5771492/iran-war-goals-unmet-ceas
efire-strait-hormuz-trump
MAGA:
Trump Playing 5D Chess!
Art Of The Deal!!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You're such a fucking loser dude.
America hates you more than you hate America.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:You act this way because you swallowed Trump's blue pill.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're such a fucking loser dude.
America hates you more than you hate America.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Quote:The Next MAGA Matrix Dilemma Has Arrived
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!
. . .
President DONALD J. TRUMP
Apr 09, 2026, 3:28 PM
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116376634773749603
April 10, 2026
https://www.newsweek.com/maga-matrix-red-blue-pill-trump-iran-war-1180
9689
When The Matrix was absorbed into MAGA’s political symbolism during Donald Trump’s rise, the movie’s famous pill metaphor was blunt and effective.
Voters were told they faced a profound choice: take the blue pill and remain trapped in a comforting but false reality constructed by elites, or swallow the red pill and confront the hard truths about America, power and decline, with Trump as their guide.
It helped define a movement that prided itself on skepticism of institutions and hostility to official narratives. Being “redpilled” added a certain cachet to conservatives who declared themselves as enlightened swallowers.
But MAGA’s most potent metaphor is returning in an unexpected form. This time, the dilemma is internal. And this time, Trump is the blue pill.
A Breaking Point Years in the Making
The Jeffrey Epstein files episode had already begun to erode Trump’s standing as the movement’s ultimate truth-teller, exposing limits to his ability—or willingness—to confront uncomfortable realities favored by his base.
Pressure has been building inside MAGA for weeks over the U.S. war in Iran and Trump’s close alignment with Israel.
Iran, and serious questions about its consequences for the U.S., has forced the issue for Trump.
Unlike previous flashpoints, this one implicated a core ideological promise of MAGA: that a Trump-led America would avoid foreign entanglements and reject the interventionism of the pre-2016 Republican Party.
Instead, the movement now faces a reality in which Trump is justifying a war that many of his most vocal allies believe no “America First” president should have initiated or sustained.
It’s a choice between ideological purity and personal loyalty. At one point, they were the same thing within MAGA. But the divergence has arrived.
The Rebellion of MAGA Media Heavyweights
Some of the loudest challenges to Trump on Iran have come from prominent figures who once echoed or amplified his worldview.
Tucker Carlson, long one of the most influential voices in the MAGA sphere, and a guru of America First, delivered a blistering monologue criticizing Trump, U.S. involvement in Iran, and trashing its strategic and moral logic.
His comments, shared widely online, positioned the war as a betrayal of the populist mandate Trump once embodied, and that Carlson himself had campaigned for. He also blasted Trump for the tone and content of an explicit threat issued against Iran on Easter.
Megyn Kelly followed with a sharply critical segment on her own show, similarly arguing that escalation in Iran cut against the promises that initially animated Trump’s political revolution, calling his threats of civilizational destruction “disgusting” and a sign of weakness.
"I am sick of this s**t," Kelly said. "I am sick of it. Can't he just behave like a normal human?"
They were not alone. Candace Owens, who has maintained a massive online audience by blending cultural grievance, anti-establishment politics, and outright conspiracy peddling, r
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The only people swallowing anything here is all that NeoCon cock you and Ted were sucking on leading up to the 2024 election.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Losing the World's Respect
The Iran War looks like a tipping point
Apr 10, 2026
All around the world, big, strong men with tears in their eyes are coming up to Donald Trump and saying, “Sir, you’re a loser.”
Something has palpably changed in the world in the last few days.
As regular watchers of Donald Trump know, Trump has a thing about insisting that people treat him with immense respect — the big, strong men with tears in their eyes thing, “Sir” stories. And in particular about believing that the world despised America under Joe Biden and respects it now under his leadership, which was never true either in the first part or the second.
But it is true that until quite recently, many people in the world at least felt obliged to pretend to respect Trump, felt obliged to flatter him, to stifle the negative feelings that they were having about the course of the United States under current management. And maybe Trump actually took these kinds of coerced professions of respect as reality. But in the last few days, suddenly the masks are off.
Volodymyr Zelensky just yesterday tweeted out a part of an interview that he gave in which he said, among other things, “In my view, Russia played the Americans again.”
So it was just saying, basically, that Trump is working with the Russians, which obviously he’s known and has surely thought for a long, long time. But to say it that openly is something new.
Zelensky — not a big, strong man — but Zelensky is a tough guy. Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of Britain is, alas, not. But also Starmer just in a statement said that we’re tired of a world in which, I’ll quote, “bills go up or down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump.” Equivalence, Trump and Putin in the same sentence, in the same breath, that’s pretty stiff stuff.
And Starmer has been notable in trying to preserve the special relationship, avoid offending Trump, trying to make him get a few points off the tariff rate, whatever. But now Starmer is pretty much openly saying, you know, you are the problem and we don’t trust you.
What’s this about? Well, obviously, the United States went to war with a fourth-rate power, Iran, and lost. Exactly how that plays out, we don’t know. But it was truly impressive how poorly the United States military and US strategic thinking has played out here.
The United States has also proved both temperamental and weak, lashing out at our erstwhile allies and veering between threats of war crimes and then what looks a whole lot like abject surrender.
So the world no longer either fears or trusts us. It turns out that our military might is not what it was cracked up to be, and our reliability is essentially zero at this point. We can’t count on the United States to do anything that it has promised. It’s a world in which the hegemon has basically gone AWOL. So that’s a big thing.
There’s another story that I think is important, which has kind of been overshadowed by the debacle in Iran: the bigger ongoing war, Ukraine-Russia, is not going well for Russia. It is, if anything, tilting increasingly in Ukraine’s favor. Now, what’s interesting about that? Why is that relevant?
Trump is basically on the side of Putin. He’s been unwilling and probably unable to just openly support Russia, but has effectively pulled all aid from Ukraine. There’s essentially no money, no military aid, no economic aid flowing from the US to Ukraine anymore — it’s all on the Europeans. The Europeans have still been buying some U.S. weapons and transferring them to Ukraine, but that’s been largely choked off. And I think the assumption was that Ukraine would be in grave danger, would perhaps collapse without American support.
Not happening. What’s actually happening is that Ukraine appears to be gaining the upper hand in the drone war, which is what this war is mostly about. And Ukraine’s success in adapting to modern warfare has been so great that now it looks like there are a significant number of Ukrainian drones and, to some extent, maybe personnel already deployed i
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Iran Could Be America’s Next Vietnam
By Graeme Wood | April 11, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/iran-vietnam-war-invasion/68
6769/
The prediction that Iran will be America’s next Vietnam—a moral catastrophe, an abyss into which money and lives have been pitched, with the sole effect of weakening the United States and heartening its enemies—is already in general circulation among Americans. A few days ago, the Iranian embassy in Hanoi joined the doomsaying. Its X account featured an AI-generated image of a mouth-breathing American GI being lectured to by a smiling Vietnamese soldier in Saigon on April 30, 1975. “We thought that after the Vietnam War, you would never invade any country again,” the soldier says. “It seems that after 50 years you have forgotten that devastating defeat.”
Fifty years before 1975 was 1925. Why not show present-day Vietnam? Probably because it would be a nightmarish scene, not for an American but for a Vietnamese Communist or, for that matter, for a present-day Iranian hard-liner. Modern Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) is the site of a total victory for market economics, global trade, and consumer culture. American products compete without stigma: You can get a Vietnamese-style coffee at Starbucks. In 2023, Vietnam entered into a comprehensive strategic partnership with the United States, an official diplomatic designation for the highest level of cooperation. Vietnam is not a democracy, and its government would happily forget Western notions of human rights and civil liberties. But it does not hate America—which is why, to invoke the Vietnam parallel, Iran has to pretend that the past 50 years went rather differently.
At this point, Iran as America’s next Vietnam sounds less like a curse than like a relatively optimistic scenario for all involved. Here is the course of events:
1. The United States attacks and escalates when an adversary refuses to surrender.
2. The United States grows stymied and confused that this adversary persists, despite devastation.
3. The United States leaves in a huff, and in denial about having lost the war.
4. The attacked country celebrates its heroic resistance—but soon realizes that it has been reduced to rubble.
The Iranian case tracks the Vietnamese one, in mercifully abbreviated form—five weeks rather than two decades—at least up through the second step. Steps 3 and 4 might be coming. If they do, once the afterglow of defeating America fades, Iran’s best hope will be to speed-run the Vietnamese path from victory to prosperity, and even to pro-Americanism.
I asked Vietnam experts how a country spoiled for reasons to hate America eventually came to have such fondness for it—and whether Iran, now in a self-congratulatory phase, might have anything in common with Vietnam after their respective wars. K. W. Taylor, a historian at Cornell, told me that at least one aspect of the postwar situations already matches. “In Vietnam,” Taylor said, “you had a very autocratic authoritarian regime, and that aspect of it just strengthened as a result of the war.” Iran, according to most analysis, is more tightly controlled by authoritarian hard-liners than it was before the war. When supposed reformers such as ex–Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have spoken up meekly to suggest compromise, the regime has threatened to arrest them.
After the fall of Saigon, normalization with the United States took another 20 years. That is long enough for a generation to pass. But Taylor stressed that the very hard-liners who had espoused anti-American ideology were seeking reconciliation with the United States as early as the late 1970s. “Vietnam moved straight to fighting another war, this time with China and Cambodia,” Taylor said. “Vietnam was open to normalization much earlier, but the United States bet on China.” The intervening two decades were marked by isolation, poverty, and eventual abandonment by Vietnam’s main remaining patron, the Soviet Union.
“Vietnam had the support of China and the Soviet Union during
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