Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:06 on 10 March 2026

Why the Weakness?

It’s not just Mark Carney refusing to give the fascist Trump regime the sort of full-throated denunciation it deserves. The German chancellor has been equally weak. The United Kingdom started out weak but then backpedaled in response to domestic pressure. In Western Europe, only Spain can as of this time be said to have stood tall. I have several theories as to what is going on here.

Old habits die hard. The U.S. empire has always had its ugly side, but it has only been relatively recently that it has been this ugly. And the business end of the ugly has traditionally been aimed at the Second and Third worlds, not the First. For whom, I might add, the U.S. Empire has generally been a good deal since the end of World War II. The new reality is unpleasant, unpleasant facts are not nice to face, and to reiterate old habits die hard.

Ukraine. One of the reasons the old empire worked out well for Europe was they got to benefit from high U.S. defence spending without having to spend so much themselves (this has long been a sore point on the U.S. political right). Now that Ukraine needs military help, Europe is not in a position to do it all by themselves (not yet, anyhow). European leaders correctly perceive the risk of letting Russia get away with its aggression, and are afraid that a U.S.A. both preoccupied with a war in the Middle East and snubbed by Europe will snub Europe back by directing materiel from Ukraine to the new Iran War.

Their nationals. There’s a lot of expats living in the region, particularly in the U.A.E. (home of Dubai). The war puts them at risk, and they want to cooperate with U.S. forces in evacuating their expats to safety.

For whatever reason, it is imperative that the weakness come to an early end. The U.S.A. cannot be counted on to help Ukraine indefinitely, and alternate measures need to be put in place (the Europeans already realize this and are working on it). Those at-risk expats should be offered rides home; if they refuse to accept, the consequences are then on them.

Iran, after all, whatever the many faults of the regime there, has not threatened the territory of any European nation the way the U.S.A. has been repeatedly threatening the Danish territory of Greenland. (And one can say the same for Canada.) To ignore this is beyond foolish, and calls to mind how Hitler’s expansionist rhetoric was similarly downplayed.

It is the U.S.A., not Iran, that is the greater threat to world peace here here. Which brings me to my next point.

Nuance and Complexity

The world is a complex and messy place that tends to defy easy classification into simplistic categories. Just because the regime in Iran is truly awful does not make it automatically the No. 1 threat to world peace everywhere. This is particularly the case now that Iran’s military is being seriously degraded.

One must look beyond raw malicious intent and figure in power to actualize that intent. Once this is done, the conclusion in the final paragraph of the previous section becomes inescapable.

It is Iran that is now doing the world the useful service of preoccupying that No. 1 threat and depleting its weaponry reserves. Whether this is being done as an expression of international goodwill (it is not) is beyond the point. The service is being rendered and it is useful. Saying this does not make the internal human rights record of that regime any less awful.

The Iranian Diaspora

Many of them have been enthusiastic supporters of Trump and Netanyahu’s war. This is understandable for two reasons.

First, we have the loyalists of the old absolute monarchy to contend with. They had no problem with the Shah’s secret police ripping out the fingernails of their opponents. They only have problems when someone else oppresses them. They are nothing more than the ghouls of the old ruling elite. Their pathetic bleatings are not to be taken seriously.

That doesn’t describe the entire disapora, of course. But it does describe some of them. Again, nuance and complexity. Conflicts are not always good versus evil. Sometimes it’s evil versus evil.

Regarding the rest of the diaspora, a lot of them are true victims and refugees of a brutal regime. It is possible to be both oppressed and wrong. Personally, I cut them some slack. They’ve been waiting for the fall of the regime for decades. Now, at long last, events start turning in ways that imperil that regime. Of course a lot of them are going to be happy.

But, ultimately, it does not matter. The naïve and unrealistic hopes of the oppressed are still naïve and unrealistic. Look at what Trump is doing within his country’s own borders with masked secret police and concentration camps. Look at how eager he was to cut a deal with the oppressive and undemocratic regime in Venezuela. To assume that his motive in Iran must be human rights is, quite simply, preposterous.

This Has Fractured Trump’s Base

I did not expect this. It turns out that there are limits to how much at least some of Trump’s MAGA base are willing to play the role of the fascist follower. I’ve seen it online and you can see it in the news. Figures like MTG and Tucker Carlson are not happy about this turn of events.

It turns out that Iraq and Afghanistan war burnout, and anger at the neocon establishment for getting the U.S.A. involved in two simultaneous conflicts, really was a big part of the equation that led many on the right to Trump.

Trump has, despite all his boasting about “landslide” wins, never really won by that much. Particularly now that he’s lost a lot of fence-sitting low-information voters, he can’t afford to lose a significant chunk of his formerly loyal base. This is a real opportunity to break Trump once and for all.

Revolution, not Reform

Because that ship has already sailed; the U.S.A. in in the midst of a fascist revolution already. The only question now is whether it is possible to have a prompt counterrevolution to that fascist revolution.

Even Democratic Party strategists are starting to admit that electoral politics won’t be enough: absent a groundswell of support from below, they won’t be able to turn this ship around. That is about as close an admission of the obvious as you are going to get from that crowd.

Minneapolis has shown the sentiment is out there. My money is on the Trump regime trying to stack or suppress the 2026 midterms, and having far more success in this endeavour than many now realize is possible.

Once that happens, there may be enough nationwide outrage for things to start getting interesting.

In other words, it’s all going to get significantly worse. Then it’s either going to get significantly better, or get worse yet.

Published at 07:03 on 4 March 2026

If you want to have some idea how this war is likely to go, I recommend paying attention to what experts, experts with a lot of inside information, were saying about a dozen days ago. And the answer is “not likely to go well for the Western imperialists.”

Published at 17:11 on 28 February 2026

The more I think of it, the more it becomes clear to me that Carney’s sucking up to Trump on the Iran attacks shows incredibly bad judgement. The Trump regime has threatened Canada before, and will threaten Canada again. Sending a message to the rest of the world that this fascist regime’s aggression can at times be acceptable is not only morally repulsive, it undermines Canada’s national security.

The was against Iran has nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with upholding international norms. To think that the actions of lawless president who has flaunted norm after norm, both domestic and international, can be being taken for such ends is beyond naïve.

It also has absolutely nothing to do with promoting democracy. Just look at what happened in Venezuela. The same regime remains in power, now with US backing, just with a different, more subservient, leadership. It would not surprise me in the least to see an analogous outcome in Iran.

Published at 07:15 on 28 February 2026

This is just about the worst take on anything ever from this PM. To assume that two fascist governments flexing their muscles in an attempt to make a third sovereign nation submit to their will could have anything in the least to do with democracy, human rights, or international norms is simply beyond belief. And to assume that two nuclear powers, one of them a nuclear proliferator who helped arm the apartheid regime in South Africa, have anything in principle against nuclear weapons, simply boggles the mind.

No thinking person is a fan of the vile regime that currently rules Iran, but come on. This is exactly the sort of naïveté that led democracies to underestimate the growing global threat posed by Hitler, who got people to tolerate his initial exercises in military adventurism by mostly directing them eastward, towards the widely-disliked Soviet regime.

It looks a whole lot like Carney just put the sign back in Canada’s window.

Published at 08:12 on 27 February 2026

Many of Trump’s critics are rightly denouncing the efforts of the RFK-led Department of “Health,” but I think they are missing the true scale of the malice behind it.

My theory is much darker. It is merely part of American fascism’s project of creating a fact-free world, so that disease is no longer based on its actual causes, enabling a fascist government to scapegoat the groups it hates. Nazis decried the Jews (and homosexuals) as “unhygienic;” expect the Trump regime to do so in earnest for the nonwhite immigrant groups it despises (not to mention the LGBTQIA community) once a critical mass of its base is sufficiently distant from fact-and-science-based theories of health.

It’s not about increasing the market for quack cures, it’s about increasing the market for fascist measures. They are building concentration camps and they intend to use them.

Published at 09:48 on 26 February 2026

Canada is sending aid to Cuba in response to increasing efforts by the USA to strangle the regime there.

I am 100% in support of this, not because I am a big fan of the regime there (I am not, it is a dictatorship), but because freedom has absolutely nothing to do with anything any fascist regime does (and the Trump regime most definitely is a fascist one).

When dealing with a long list of things one does not like, often one must prioritize. As Churchill, long a proud conservative and ardent anti-communist, once said when asked about Stalin after the Nazis invaded the USSR: “I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. It Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

So yes, supporting countries under US pressure right now is a good thing. The more fascism fails, and fails early, the better off the long-term prospects for the world as a whole.

And yes, I have been awfully quiet here recently. This is because I have been working on an involved software project, and have decided to mainly focus on that.

Published at 16:27 on 27 January 2026

Minneapolis might, just might, be the start of the sort of none-of-the-above grassroots opposition movement of which I have written.

Something is definitely happening there. A longtime anarchist activist who I trust (and whom I have worked with on some actions in years past) has noticed it. Even the staid old Atlantic seems to be noticing it.

The question is: what happens now? Trump is making feeble de-escalating noises. Will people fall for it, or will they realize that when something is wobbling a bit, that means it is time to give it a bigger shove?

Published at 08:22 on 20 January 2026

You promise an unflinching and united response should Trump decide to seize Greenland by force. Soon you will have to deliver one.

Because of course you will. Trump’s entire life, starting as a small child born into extreme wealth and privilege, has taught him that in a bourgeois society all men are not created equal, and that the children of privilege like himself can personally profit by being a liar, a bully, a cheat, and an overall scoundrel. And he has profited like few men in history have.

His entire life has taught him that he can seize Greenland and not only get away with it, but personally profit from it. So of course he will at least make a serious attempt at it. No other course of action is even remotely plausible. Sorry.

At that point, it becomes up to Europe to put up or shut up. If they choose the former, there is a chance — actually a fairly good chance — of engaging TACO mode, much like China did in response to Trump’s tariffs.

If they choose the latter, kiss Greenland goodbye. And then Canada comes next.

And you can spare me any thought of pushback from Republicans stopping this internally before the Europeans have to stop it externally. Rule No. 1 violation. Not gonna happen.

The world let Trump get away with Venezuela, and the lesson Trump took from this is that he can get away with subjugating Denmark and Greenland, too.

The proper reaction to what Trump did to Maduro would have been something along the lines of what Churchill alluded to when he once said, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” But for the most part that didn’t happen so here we are.

Maybe it will matter more this time. Greenland is full of brown people but Denmark as a whole is a first-world country full of white people, so if it matters more this time, that, and not any lofty principles about national sovereignty, will be the real reason behind it all. But we have to take our resistance to fascism however we find it; it is an imperfect world.

Published at 06:34 on 16 January 2026

And this is fundamentally the reason why.

It was the correct decision in the overall context, as difficult as China’s dismal human rights record makes it. At least China can reasonably be expected to follow through on the deals it cuts, which is more than one can say for Trump’s USA. And it is not China that has been threatening to annex Canada.

Now the question is how the fascist regime south of the border takes the news of the obvious consequences of their behaviour.

Published at 08:56 on 14 December 2025

Yes, I know that Trump is not exactly doing too hot in the polls right now. Political strategist Rick Wilson is positively giddy about it.

I have argued recently that a blue wave or two is likely to be significantly less consequential, in the long run, than many people think. Now I wish to argue that the hypothetical blue wave might not happen at all.

The reason is simple: war. Americans are, on the whole, an astonishingly ignorant people when it comes to foreign policy. This ignorance is no accident; Establishment politics has carefully tended and nurtured it for many decades. All the better to help prevent democratic accountability from interfering with military adventurism. It is one of the natural consequences of being a superpower, and a key reason why superpower status is a threat to free society.

Any administration that starts a war historically gets an incredible amount of deferential treatment from the mainstream media, the purported opposition party (both parties are united in their support for empire), and the populace as a whole. Do not think for a minute that this cannot apply to a war against Venezuela.

Maybe it won’t. We’re not that far past getting burned by the consequences of past deferential treatment for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe this one will come too soon on the heels of the earlier ones.

But don’t be too sure about that. It is at least as plausible that Trump will succeed in selling his Venezuela war. The authoritarian regime that runs Venezuela is not precisely the sort of government to inspire sympathy. Advocates of war will be able to paint opponents of war as Maduro allies or sympathizers, a characterization made all the easier by the shameful reality that it is not very hard to find American leftists that are allies or sympathizers of the Maduro regime. The Establishment media, already in many cases cravenly capitulating to Trump, could very easily once more assume its historic role as propagandists for the ruling class’ latest war of choice.

If this happens, Trump could easily prevail in the next few electoral cycles. I am quite sure, in fact, that this is a huge part of why Trump seems eager for a war with Venezuela. I will give the man credit for one thing: he knows advanced state of moral decline of the nation he leads better than virtually anyone else in the halls of power, and he has used this knowledge to become what is already one of the most successful, effective, and consequential presidents in U.S. history.

Yes, successful and effective. He has made more change, more quickly, than any president since FDR and quite possibly any since Lincoln. It is now part of established political precedent that U.S. presidents may incite coups to attempt to stay in power, can lie about just about anything, can make law and policy by fiat with little or no input from Congress, engage in crass nepotism, receive bribes, and cannot and should not be held accountable under the law.

To assume that a war in Venezuela will fail to keep Trump in power is to assume a moral and informed American public that, by and large, simply does not exist. See Rule No. 3.