Global War is a Serious Matter and It Should be Discussed with Some Gravity

By Andrew Anglin  ·  June 16, 2025  ·  in featured stories, insight

“Tel Aviv will be destroyed, their military headquarters will be flatted, the prime minister’s residence will be flattened, Israel will be flattened, its airfields flattened, that’s the future of Israel and there is nothing they can do to stop it.” -Scott Ritter on October 11th, 2023, explaining his view on what would happen if Israel invaded Gaza. 

I wrote a thing yesterday noting that there is an entire group of internet commentators who have been making a lot of wrong predictions since the start of the Ukraine war. It is a group of people, and I said I wouldn’t name them, then I did name Scott Ritter and Pepe Escobar.

I said “people probably associate me with these people,” and it is very obvious why: in theory, I agree with them about every geopolitical issue. I have read Pepe and listened to Scott significantly, and I can’t think of any single issue I have disagreed with them on. (I’m sure they are not quite as “racist” as I am, but that isn’t a geopolitical issue, and I don’t think it has ever even come up in anything I’ve read/listened to from either of them.)

If we went to the broader “movement” of these sorts of activists against the American empire, there would be varying levels of disagreement, perhaps. I completely disagree with John Mearshiemer’s views on China, and I’ve read every book that mentions China (frankly, his books do not really mention China very much) and tried to listen to most of his lectures on the topic. Although in general I agree with his worldview, on China, I completely disagree, and if you want to see where I disagree, you can watch one of several debates he’s had on the issue with Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is another person I would put in the “agree with him on everything” category, for the record. But regardless of potential agreement or disagreement, Mearshimer and Sachs, as counter examples to Ritter and Escobar, do not make constant predictions citing various “sources.” People from various governments definitely talk to John and Jeff, but they don’t ever use them as sources for claims. Again, I could name off ten other prominent or semi-prominent alternative media commentators that I read/listen to in both groups – the “source users” and the “analysts.”

This current iteration of a movement of alternative geopolitical commentators emerged after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. (Obviously, the four mentioned, as well as several I am not mentioning, were around doing commentary before February of 2022, but I think it’s fair to say that that was the starting point of a new popular movement of alternative commentary focused on analyzing the “World War III” battle between the US empire and those states intent on maintaining sovereignty in the face of an evil empire hellbent on solidifying global control.) Since this has started, I’ve done huge amounts of reading and podcast listening, and I have come to be very leery of anyone who talks about “my sources are telling me…” I don’t know anything about the nature of these sources, but they appear to be consistently wrong. Certainly, I recognize that “anonymous inside sources” is something that has been used in journalism for a long time with a varying, but certainly not great track record. Obviously during the Trump era, “insider sources say” has become a way for the New York Times to just make things up. That was also the case in the lead-up to the Iraq war. (As a side, to Ritter’s great credit, when he was working as a UN weapons inspector he was one of the loudest voices calling out the WMD scam. Though he knew that from inspecting, not from “his sources.”)

I don’t want to accuse Ritter or any of this crowd of consistently wrong “my sources are telling me…” people of lying. What is clear is that within this movement of anti-empire commentators, “my sources are telling me…” tends to almost always mean that whatever comes next is going to be wrong. It is possible that Ritter and the others are being fed disinformation from actual sources that are lying to them to make the anti-empire movement look silly. But at some point, if your sources have been wrong this many times, you really have a responsibility to stop publishing things from these sources, whoever they are, because it is unethical.

Some people were upset that I pointed out Ritter being wrong. And I understand the sentiment, because – one more time – I agree with him on all of the issues. And it isn’t nice to look like you’re attacking people who are “on your own team.” Further, no one is right all the time. I have often stated “I’m right about everything,” and apparently some people don’t understand that there is a bit of self-deprecating humor there. I have been wrong, like everyone is, but I’m a whole lot more right than most people, and part of that is that as a rule, I don’t make “predictions.” I don’t claim to have “insider sources” and I’m not a wizard, so all I can do is look at the available information, put it together, and come up with options for the most likely possible outcomes. And someone could make a list of the things I’ve laid out and I’m 100% certain I can stand up to any other commentator and be shown to have a much better track record than virtually anyone. I actually can’t think of anyone with a better track record. Sometimes people will point out where I’ve been wrong, for example in suggesting Trump would likely end the Ukraine war in order to focus on Israel (which might still happen, I guess, though I didn’t expect him to escalate like he has, so I was definitely wrong on that) and I say “okay, well point to anyone else in this political analysis game who is right more often than me” and I’ve yet to be given a single name. (I think everyone is aware that many very prominent commentators have made careers off of copying my material while I’m locked in this censorship dungeon.)

But talking about myself is a digression. I simply wanted to explain what I view as the ethical way to comment on politics, which is to do your best to analyze based on data and theories about the way various actors act, and then say “this is what seems most likely.” I will very often insert caveats in my analyses. For example, I said that Trump would go to war with Iran in some form, that this was virtually a certainty, but then also added that the only way I can see this not happening is if Bibi is removed from power. I made that analysis based on the data and the way the actors involved behave. That is: “Trump is clearly beholden to Israel, but in terms of his view of himself and his legacy, he would prefer not to have a war with Iran. Bibi is obsessed with dragging the US into a war Iran but has lost huge amounts of popularity in Israel and in the diaspora due primarily to his failure to ‘win’ the Gaza war and/or get the hostages back. The US is committed to joining any way Israel starts, meaning Bibi is able to dictate whether or not Trump is forced to go to war with Iran, but if Bibi were removed from power, it’s very possible that whoever replaced him would be significantly less extreme and therefore would not drag the US into a war with Iran.”

That’s the analysis I did probably 14 months ago, as soon as it became clear Trump was going to win (which I was also right about and won significant money betting on), and I think the analysis has held up pretty well. We saw the Bibi-Trump rift spill into the public, then we saw Bibi move to start the war, to force Iran to strike back and cause the US to enter the war. At time of writing, the US hasn’t entered the war, but all it would take would be for the Israelis to blow up some random US military installation in Iraq and say Iran did it and all of the sudden, the US is joining Israel in the bombing, and moving even more troops to the region. I think trying to analyze how the war will play out is very difficult, so (and this is another thing I do, which is responsible), I don’t really want to speculate too strongly.

Briefly: We have already passed the point of no return with Israel attacking Iran’s oil fields. So, there will be some kind of “regime change,” and that might be impossible from the air. However, I would note that what Israel’s war in Gaza has shown is that the American people and Westerners in general will tolerate infinite slaughter of civilian populations, which is something that wouldn’t have been tolerated by anyone 20 years ago (also remember Colon [sic] Powell had to go to the UN and explain that they had an actual reason for attacking Iraq; though it was a scam, there was an actual process, whereas now everything is just “gahhhhhahahahahahaha, die, die, die!”). Because of the “100% tolerance for mass civilian slaughter because we don’t have a choice because Jews are the chosen ones and Hitler put their shoes in a pile” attitude of the West in the current year, a lot of damage is possible from the air. Iran is a big country, but the US has a lot of bombs. Meanwhile, it is difficult to imagine a full-on Iraq style US invasion, but this model of using social media to recruit Sunni jihadis from all over the world and then enabling their entry to the country, and arming them to the teeth, worked pretty well in Syria. There is still an army of terrorists in Syria and parts of Iraq that they can just roll over to Iran. Further, Azerbaijan will allow terrorists from the various Stans to fly into Baku and cross into Iran. Remember, during the Syrian war, Turkey was just letting these people come on commercial flights and then helping them across the border.

Then, of course, there are also the minority ethnic groups in Iran, which include the Kurds, who are another separate US-backed terrorist already armed to the teeth. Only 60% of the country is Persian. I don’t know the ins and outs of how well these various groups get along, but it’s been pretty well demonstrated that any time there is a war in the Middle East, more or less every ethnic minority has groups that will accept weapons from the US.

So while I wouldn’t say US “boots on the ground” is impossible, and it could even be inevitable depending on how prepared Iran is for the post-state phase of the war, it is certainly unlikely in the short term.

The wildcard, which I think is interesting, is that the Iranians have been expecting a US invasion for 20 years. They are a relatively high IQ population, and so they’ve set up groups of militias which are designed to act without direction from a central government. And of course, we’ve seen that the drones can do a lot of damage, and one would expect that China and Russia would be providing support in terms of drones. What is unlikely and borders on impossible (though is not technically impossible) is that Russia will send troops like they did to Syria. Probably, any deal that Trump might or might not make with the Russians to end the Ukraine war would include an agreement that they not send troops to Iran. And I don’t think they would do it anyway after what happened in Syria (a debacle that apparently happened in part due to ridiculous mismanagement of the Syrian warlords by the Iranians).

So, that’s how I analyze things. (See what I did there? I gave an analysis of a current event while demonstrating the methodology of the analysis at the same time. See that? It was exceedingly clever. It’s not quite noon, but I think I might just pour myself a drink in honor of my own cleverness.)

Needless to say, Iran is not going to destroy Israel, as was claimed by Scott Ritter.

And I suppose we should go back to Scott Ritter. I feel a little bit bad about this, because I don’t have anything personal against the guy and I don’t like to be viewed as “attacking” others on the woke right (unless I know or strongly suspect they’re working with the Jews/feds, which unfortunately includes most of the internet right-wing). It’s especially sad given that there are so many others online doing the same “my sources are telling me…” thing, and Scott actually was raided by the FBI for like, supporting Russia or whatever, and also hit with some trumped-up jailbait swindles that actually got him thrown in prison. No wonder he joined up with Russia, where tourism advertisements say “Come to Russia, where jailbait is sort of a legal gray area, but we’re not actually going to prosecute you unless you’re a pervert.”

But Scott is probably the most popular, so I’ve gone ahead and run the transcripts of a bunch of his podcast interviews through an AI, and here’s an abridged list of predictions he’s made (it was too hard to figure out how to note which ones included “my sources are telling me…” and which ones he just said without any claim of a basis).

🚨 Highly Abridged List of Scott Ritter’s Wrong Predictions (2021–2024) 🚨

🌍 Russia-Ukraine War

  • Feb 2022: “Russia will take Kyiv in 72 hours.”
  • March 2022: “Odessa will fall within a week.”
  • April 2022: “Ukraine’s military will collapse by summer.”
  • Sept 2022: “Ukraine’s Kharkiv counteroffensive is a trap—Russia will encircle them!”
  • Nov 2022: “Kherson will never be retaken by Ukraine.”
  • June 2023: “Ukraine’s counteroffensive will cause their military to collapse.”
  • Dec 2023: “Russia will win the war by early 2024.”

☢️ NATO & Nuclear Threats

  • 2022: “NATO will fracture over Ukraine aid.” (Finland and Sweden joined after he said this)
  • 2023: “Poland will leave NATO due to Ukraine tensions.”
  • 2024: “The U.S. will cut all military aid to Ukraine by mid-2024.”

🇮🇱 Israel-Iran & Middle East

  • Oct 2023: “Israel won’t invade Gaza—they don’t have the capability.”
  • April 2024: “If Israel strikes Iran, Iran will destroy Israeli military bases and decapitate its leadership.”
  • June 2024: “Iran’s air defenses will shut down Israeli airstrikes.”

🇨🇳 China

  • 2023: “China will invade Taiwan by 2024.”

🤡 Bonus: Miscellaneous Nonsense

  • 2022: “The West will abandon Ukraine by winter.”
  • 2023: “Russia will nuke Kyiv if NATO sends tanks.”
  • 2024: “Ukraine’s government will flee to Lviv by summer.”

In the spirit of fairness, I went through the things he was right about, and it was even worse. Every time he was right, it was either late (ten wrong timelines on the liberation of Bakmut), exaggerated (Iran responding to Israeli attack), or just coincidental (just like Alex Jones, he makes so many predictions, some of them are eventually bound to be right just by the nature of statistics).

Why We Shouldn’t be Goofy and Ridiculous

There is some question about whether it could actually be good for Ritter and his compatriots to just go around making all these wild predictions, as it builds up momentum. What’s more, he keeps getting invited onto RT and is actually a paid contributor to RT, so at first glance, that implies “The Kremlin” likes what he’s doing. But “The Kremlin” doesn’t really run RT, Margarita Simonyan does, and her instinct is towards Buzzfeed type clickbait-mongering. Frankly, though RT does some great stuff, I don’t think there is enough oversight when it comes to some of the silly people they bring on. So no, I don’t think that Ritter being on RT necessarily means his “my sources are telling me…” bit is viewed positively by the Russian state. I think they just like pro-Russian Westerners, and many of us (like myself) are a bit too hot, and Ritter has the credential of having been the UN weapons inspector who tried to stop the Iraq war.

To be clear, I am not against “cheerleading.” I think we should cheerlead Russia, Palestine, all of the people fighting against the global gay Jewish-American empire. I am one such cheerleader. I always support anyone fighting against these people. Remember my Niger banners? Real ones remember.

Click to enlarge (these were kind of funny, though the context is lost to time.)

But I wasn’t saying “my sources are telling me Niger is going to invade New York and tear down that feminist statue on Wall Street.”

What the “my sources are telling me…” predictor crowd does is give people hopium dopamine hits. We all like imagining things like Tel Aviv being bombed into oblivion. But I like imagining fighting the White Walkers with Jon Snow as well. Fantasy is fun and it has its place, but that place is not in geopolitical commentary, and it is especially not alongside people like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs who are doing broad-spectrum adult analysis of these situations and actually helping people understand how the system works. Yet, on virtually every single podcast that John and Jeff appear on, you’ve also got Scott (and, increasingly, Pepe Escobar) saying this really silly stuff, and it is just obvious that valuable informations and serious voices are being tainted by unseriousness.

There are ways to be sensationalistic without promoting disinformation. I did it for a long time. I used facts and serious analysis and wrapped it around outrageous vulgarity and mex lulz. I get that this model doesn’t really work in most contexts. But it was obviously effective, as I am the most banned person ever. Point being: you can find other ways to draw attention to yourself and create hype and interest that don’t totally discredit you and everyone around you. I think this is what the comedy podcasters are doing. I listen to this fat Irish slob, I think his name is Finn O’Shaughnessy, and he does an excellent job of creating hype and dopamine while keeping it real.

Fake predictions are a cheap way to gain clicks, it discredits legitimate criticism of US/NATO/Israel, and it makes everyone dumber. I am against it.

I understand things are tough out there and Scott Ritter needs to get paid. I really am not doing this out of mean-spiritedness, but rather a genuine concern for the alternative media ecosystem and something that I see as kind of a big problem. People actually believe this stuff and it must be totally demoralizing.

PS

I also think this “Axis of Resistance” thing is really gay. These countries should be called “Brick Squad” or “Council of Doom” or something else cool like that.

PPS

Let’s just hope Scott Ritter doesn’t drop a diss track on me.

Tags: iran war, iraq war, israel, israel war, scott ritter