What’s Going On

The War abroad, The War at Home, and what it all means

If you don’t know me by now, you will never, never know me. That is a little comic relief, and yes, I need it.

And let me keep it real with you before we go any further. I’m not good at pretending it doesn’t hurt. I’m not good at reading catastrophe in a monotone and calling that professionalism. I’m not built to narrate people’s fear like it’s weather.

Maybe that makes me a good journalist. Maybe that makes me a bad journalist. All I know is I’d rather be honest than numb.

Because we are living in the kind of world where you wake up, blink twice, and your first honest thought is not “good morning.” It’s Marvin Gaye. What’s going on.

And if we are doing the 2026 remix, let’s tell the truth: WTF is going on.

And that is why I keep hearing Marvin Gaye in my head.

That song did not come from some comfy place. “What’s Going On” was Marvin looking at a country chewing up its own children: Vietnam on the television, police turning protests into headlines, cities tense, families split, nerves shot. The first spark came from Renaldo “Obie” Benson after he watched police crack down on young people in the street, and Marvin took it and turned it into a prayer you could dance to.

And Berry Gordy was not sold. Motown was built on polish. Hits. The kind of bubblegum harmonies that keep the party moving and the bills paid. Gordy heard Marvin asking the nation a grown-man question and basically said: no. Too political. Too risky. Not the brand.

So Marvin held his ground. He refused to play nice and just cut another safe love song. He forced the label to pick: the old Motown machine, or the truth as music. And when it finally dropped, it did what real truth does. It outlived the doubts. It outlived the executives. It outlived the moment.

Which brings us right back here: the first casualty is still the truth, and the second casualty is the person who dares to tell it anyway.

And I’m going to take a risk right here, because the easiest thing in the world would be for me to write this like a press release. Dates, quotes, body counts, official statements. The tone that pretends this is just another day at the office.

But I’m not doing that. Because if I narrate this like it’s normal, I’m helping to make it normal. And I can’t lie to you: I’m overwhelmed. Not confused. Not “uninformed.” Overwhelmed in the very human sense of watching too many alarms go off at once, and realizing the noise is part of the strategy.

So when you feel your mind getting flooded, don’t shame yourself for it. That pressure is the point. War abroad makes the sky loud. War at home makes the air thick. One is fought with weapons. The other is fought with headlines, omissions, recycled talking points, and a weird social demand that you perform certainty on command. Everybody’s yelling. Everybody’s sure. And the minute you hesitate, somebody calls you a coward, a traitor, or worse, “confused.”

Listen, I can’t unsee the price tag on all this. The cost is our shared ability to tell the difference between proof and preference. The cost is the way our nervous systems get trained to crave simple villains, simple heroes, and simple permission. That’s shadow work at a national scale. When fear rises, projection becomes policy.

So this is me slowing it down. Not to be neutral. To be accurate. To look at what’s kept offscreen, what’s being blurred, what’s being sold as “obvious” without the receipts.

Because the moment war shows up, truth doesn’t just get “lost.” Truth gets worked on. Truth gets edited. Truth gets branded. Truth gets buried under a pile of urgent updates until you can’t tell the difference between what happened and what you were told to feel about what happened.

That’s why people keep saying it, like a cliché, like a proverb, like something your uncle repeats at Thanksgiving. But it’s not a slogan. It’s a warning.

TLDR

• I’m overwhelmed on purpose, because the noise is the strategy. If I narrate this like it’s normal, I help make it normal.

• This piece is a map of perception warfare: how truth gets edited first, then sold back to you as inevitability.

• The war at home isn’t just “polarization.” It’s a fight over what counts as real, and who gets to define it.

• The Iran escalation is the new playbook: no long ramp of pre-war persuasion, just action first and a flood of after-the-fact justification.

• It’s gotten so blatant that even an extremist like Nick Fuentes is telling his audience to sit out or vote Democratic out of disgust. [1][3]

Restack it and share it. Send it to one friend who keeps saying “this is just politics.”

If you want indie reporting while the bigger propaganda machine tightens up, go paid:

The first casualty of war is the truth.

Sun Tzu opens The Art of War with a cold, almost inconvenient truth: war is not just a clash of armies. It is a contest of perception, timing, morale, and narrative. Before a blade is drawn, the fight has already begun in the mind.

He is writing for generals, but he is really describing a human pattern: if you can shape what your opponent believes, you can shape what your opponent does. That is why he obsesses over deception, intelligence, terrain, and psychology. War is won by seeing clearly while the other side is made to see poorly.

So when I say “the first casualty of war is the truth,” I’m not being poetic. I’m being literal.

A clear definition: in war, truth is the earliest and most routinely sacrificed resource, because accurate information is power. The fastest way to gain advantage is to distort reality: hide losses, exaggerate victories, flood the public with noise, confuse timelines, muddy motives, and make ordinary people doubt their own eyes.

Now, the war at home.

Make no mistake about it: January 6, 2021 didn’t start the conflict. It made it undeniable. It was the day the cold thing we’d been pretending was just “politics” showed its teeth on live television.

Because this has been a kind of Cold War for a long time. You can trace the modern temperature back through Nixon: the Southern Strategy, the realignment, the long, patient project of turning grievance into an identity and power into a zero-sum game.

But even inside that Cold War, there used to be rules of the room. Rivals could still sit down. A Democratic Speaker of the House could still cordially meet with the president, even when they despised each other’s agenda, because there was at least a shared agreement about the building, the process, and the basic legitimacy of the other side.

And yes, I said Democratic. Not “Democrat” the way Rush Limbaugh used to spit it, like the word itself was an insult.

January 6 was the moment those old rules stopped protecting us, because it crossed a psychological line: the losing side didn’t just contest the outcome, it treated reality itself as negotiable, and then tried to enforce that negotiation with bodies, flags, fists, and spectacle.

That is Sun Tzu, domestic edition. Don’t beat your opponent only by force. Beat them by breaking the shared picture of what is true, who is legitimate, and what counts as “normal.” Once that shared picture cracks, every lie becomes a weapon, every correction becomes “bias,” and every institution becomes just another battlefield.

So if you’ve felt the temperature rising ever since, you’re not imagining it. You’re sensing the moment politics turned into perception warfare in public, on camera, in broad daylight.

And once that door opened, the next phase was predictable. During the Biden years, the loudest fight wasn’t just over policy. It was over what you were allowed to call real: the economy versus “your” economy, crime versus “your” crime, democracy versus “your” democracy. A constant churn of selective outrage, missing context, and manufactured amnesia.

That steady drip didn’t just fill the air. It laid track. It trained the eye. It primed the public for 2024.

Perception Warfare

This is where Trump and his loyalists got surgical.

Because if Sun Tzu is right that war is won by shaping what people believe, then the Biden years were not just a policy argument. They were a long, disciplined campaign to make millions of Americans experience Biden as a danger, even when the evidence was messy, mixed, or still unfolding.

First, they weaponized the news media.

They took every complex event and forced it through a simple template: Biden is weak, therefore enemies advance. Biden is corrupt, therefore every institution is lying for him. Biden is incompetent, therefore any pain you feel is his fault. It didn’t matter if the story was inflation, Ukraine, Gaza, border surges, crime footage, or a bad clip in a hallway. The point was repetition. The point was saturation. A thousand small impressions, building one big conclusion.

Second, they weaponized social media.

They understood what traditional journalists often refuse to admit: most people do not “arrive” at beliefs through calm evaluation. They absorb beliefs through mood, identity, and repeated emotional cues. So the content was designed to hit the nervous system first: short clips with missing context, viral captions that told you what to feel, constant insinuation, and the algorithmic trick of making every scandal feel like the final scandal.

If you can keep a person angry, disgusted, and suspicious, you don’t have to prove your case in court. You just have to keep them from trusting anyone who might disprove it.

Third, they weaponized the church.

Not every church. But enough pulpits and Christian media ecosystems to matter. They reframed politics as spiritual warfare: Biden was not simply wrong. He was the devil. Satan. An enemy of Jesus. Once you do that, facts become optional, because you have moved the argument into the realm of faith and fear.

And watch how these lanes fed each other.

Cable segments became TikToks. TikToks became sermons. Sermons became “prophecy” videos. Those videos got cited back on talk radio as if they were evidence.

And that “prophecy” lane mattered because it bypassed the normal standards of proof. If you can label a political outcome as a revelation from God, then disagreement isn’t just disagreement anymore. It becomes rebellion. Skepticism becomes “demonic.” Fact-checking becomes persecution.

That ecosystem ran on a familiar set of moves: end-times language, dreams and visions presented as certainty, “God showed me” testimonies, spiritual-warfare framing, and a constant promise that a hidden plan was about to be unveiled. It blurred the line between faith and forecasting, between prayer and prediction, until politics started to feel like prophecy and prophecy started to feel like evidence.

Then the loop closed: the more the predictions circulated, the more people read every headline as confirmation, every setback as a “test,” and every contradiction as proof of a cover-up. The system did not have to be perfect. It only had to be constant.

So yes, during Biden’s administration, perception warfare laid the groundwork for 2024.

It taught people to distrust the referee. It trained them to experience inconvenience as betrayal. It made “corruption” feel like a fog in the room rather than a claim you have to prove. It turned governance into vibes, and then it punished anyone who tried to speak in sentences longer than a slogan.

That is why I’m saying the war at home is real. The weapons look like clips, posts, headlines, and pulpits. But the target is still the same.

The shared picture of what is true.

2024

And here’s the throughline. That perception war didn’t just “set a mood.” It built a launchpad.

Because by the time the country hit the election that put Kamala Harris at the center of the ballot, the story had already been written for millions of people.

They didn’t have to argue policy. They had a character.

Here’s the chronology, clean.

Trump won because the war over perception did what Sun Tzu says it does: it made millions of people feel a reality that wasn’t fully true, and then act on that feeling as if it were.

Some people voted for him over a lie. Not one lie. A bundle of them: that Kamala was a warmonger who wanted endless conflict, that the economy was a deliberate sabotage, that “corruption” was the air itself, that the system was rigged unless their side won. When you repeat a story long enough, it stops sounding like propaganda and starts sounding like common sense.

And millions didn’t vote at all. Not because they loved Trump. Because they were exhausted. Because they felt lied to by everybody. Because the constant noise trained them into a kind of numbness that looks like apathy but is really emotional self-defense. That’s another victory for perception warfare: if you can’t recruit them, you can neutralize them.

By the time Kamala Harris was on the ballot, she wasn’t being debated. She was being cast. A warmonger in a blazer. A puppet. A threat to “real America.” And again, the point wasn’t accuracy. It was permission.

Permission to treat elections like warfare.

Permission to treat losing as theft.

Permission to treat governing as illegitimate.

And once a public gets trained to see the other side as the devil, not a rival, the social compact doesn’t erode. It dissolves. After that, things move fast, not because government became efficient, but because restraint got rebranded as weakness. Norms became optional. Laws became suggestions. The goal shifted from winning arguments to dominating institutions.

And you can see the next targets clearly.

The 14th Amendment isn’t just a paragraph in a textbook. It’s the legal spine of equal citizenship. So when you watch it come under attack, what you’re really watching is the definition of “who counts” getting renegotiated in real time.

Same with immigration enforcement. ICE stops being merely an agency carrying out policy and starts acting like a frontline force in a domestic power struggle. Blue jurisdictions become enemy territory. Sanctuary cities become “harboring.” Local leaders get pressured, threatened, publicly humiliated, and forced into a choice between cooperation and confrontation.

That is the war at home taking its next form: not tanks in the streets, but federal power testing how far it can go, and how afraid the rest of us are to call it what it is.

Which is why I keep coming back to Sun Tzu.

If you can control the story, you can control the public’s nervous system. If you can control the public’s nervous system, you can control what they will tolerate.

And once you can make people tolerate the unthinkable, the unthinkable stops being a warning. It becomes the plan.

And that’s why Iran isn’t some “separate” foreign-policy story happening on a different channel. It’s the same contest Sun Tzu was talking about: who controls the picture in your mind before you even see the full facts. Watch how fast the language shows up. “Preemptive.” “Necessary.” “Limited.” “Surgical.” Watch how quickly grief becomes a talking point, and how quickly questions get treated like disloyalty. If the first casualty of war is truth, this is the moment we find out whether we’ve built any immunity to the fog.

The US Iranian War

Let me say it plainly. Sometimes “diplomacy” is not used to avoid war. It is used to prepare the public for it.

You will recognize it by the script. There is always a “final offer” that was never meant to be accepted. There is always a “reasonable demand” built out of impossible terms. There is always a deadline that gets announced like a prophecy. There is always a leak, timed to make one side look sober and the other side look insane. There is always a photo of a handshake that becomes proof of virtue, even when nothing changed.

And when the escalation arrives, it shows up with paperwork.

Statements. Briefings. Carefully curated timelines. A stack of claims presented with such confidence that questioning them is treated like disloyalty. The record becomes less a history and more a document of lies: not always lies in the cartoon sense, but lies in the strategic sense. Selective truths. Missing context. Words engineered to narrow your options until war feels like the only adult choice left.

Sun Tzu told us this would happen. Before the first strike, the battle is fought in the mind. If you can shape what the public believes about motives, necessity, and inevitability, then the war is half-won before it begins.

So the question for us, right now, is not only what is happening with Iran. The question is how we are being walked toward it. Sentence by sentence.

And here’s the part that should scare you, because it’s new.

In the old playbook, they at least tried to manufacture consent before the first strike. You’d get the speech. The evidence binder. The solemn promises. The “we don’t want war, but…” performance.

This time, the TikTok version of consent is: do it first, sell it after.

Hit “post” with the bombs already falling. Let the public experience it as a fact of nature. Then flood the zone with justifications, with righteous captions, with carefully chosen words that make the decision feel inevitable, and any doubt feel like a personality defect.

It’s like being told you’re on a roller coaster after the first drop. And when you ask why you weren’t warned, somebody shrugs and says: the line was long. You would’ve complained.

That is not leadership. That is perception management.

So when I say the first casualty is truth, I’m also saying the second casualty is timing: the public doesn’t get informed. The public gets updated.

Conclusion

If you’re a conservative reader and you feel your indignation rising, I’m not here to scold you out of it. I’m here to aim it.

Because you have been made the customer in a perception war, and the product is your nervous system. Outrage on tap. Fear on schedule. Certainty delivered overnight. And the sickest part is how obvious it’s gotten.

So obvious that even Nick Fuentes, of all people, has been telling his audience to sit it out and let Republicans lose.

And if you don’t know who that is, you should. Fuentes isn’t some spicy “anti-establishment” commentator. He’s an out-and-out white supremacist livestreamer[4] who built a following through his America First brand and the Groyper movement: young, online militants who traffic in antisemitism, racist ideology, and “ironic” provocation as plausible deniability. This is a man widely associated with Holocaust denial and open admiration for authoritarian politics. Not a misunderstood conservative. An extremist.

So when that guy looks at the machine and says it’s broken, don’t take it as moral growth. Take it as a warning light on the dashboard.

His line, in an “emergency broadcast” reacting to the Iran strikes, was even more blunt: “Do not vote in the midterms. And if you do, vote for Democrats — f*ck this.” [3] He didn’t say it because he turned into a civic-minded Democrat. He said it because the far right is at war with itself, and the only thing they agree on is that the public is supposed to take orders.

And that’s the tell.

When the operators start arguing over which lie to sell, it means the lie is doing its job. It’s moving bodies. It’s moving money. It’s moving votes. It’s moving silence.

Now let me drag you back to 1917 for a second, because history is petty like that.

When British forces entered Baghdad, their general issued a proclamation meant to calm the public and sanctify the campaign. One of the lines that survives is: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” That line is not just a sentence. It’s a spell. It’s the kind of sentence that takes invasion and rewrites it as rescue.

They used the same kind of language on the Middle East and then called the wreckage “complicated.” They used the same kind of language on the American public and called the fallout “polarization.” Liberation as branding. Consent as an afterthought. Accountability as a punchline.

And yes, pop culture knew it too. In The Dark Knight Rises, “liberation” is literally the costume the villain wears while the city gets held hostage. That’s not subtle. That’s the joke and the warning in the same breath.

So if you’ve felt played, don’t gaslight yourself. You probably were.

The question is what we do with that realization. Do we keep letting people weaponize our grief and call it patriotism, or do we start demanding receipts, timelines, and consequences like grown adults?

If you’ve been reading this thinking “damn, somebody should cover this like an adult,” congratulations. You just found the somebody.

And I know. I know what you’re about to do. You’re going to nod, feel seen for eight seconds, then scroll away and tell yourself you’ll come back later. Later is America’s favorite religion.

But remember how this started. “If you don’t know me by now…” That was me trying to laugh so I wouldn’t crack. Marvin Gaye asking “What’s going on,” and me answering with the 2026 remix because my throat is tired of being polite.

So here’s the honest, slightly embarrassing ask. Hit that sunburnt button.

Hitting that sunburnt subscribe button is not you “supporting content.” It’s you refusing to outsource your reality to the same machine that keeps telling you everything is fine, right up until it isn’t. It’s you underwriting a newsroom that does not have a corporate parent to please, a billionaire to flatter, or a party line to memorize.

Because it’s about to get real. The same consolidation that swallowed half of Hollywood is now swallowing the news. Paramount, backed by Skydance, is moving to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which means CNN ends up inside the same corporate machinery as CBS and the rest of the empire. That is not “media synergy.” That is Big Brother getting better lighting.

And when Big Brother gets better lighting, the lies get prettier. The scripts get smoother. The war gets sold as a wellness plan.

If you want independent reporting while it’s still allowed to breathe, go paid. And if you don’t know me by now, you will never, never know me.

Sources:

1. https://www.mediamatters.org/nick-fuentes/nick-fuentes-tells-his-audience-do-not-vote-midterms-republicans-have-lose — Media Matters write-up citing Fuentes telling viewers not to vote in the midterms (published Feb. 18, 2026).

2. https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/mesopotamia-campaign — National Army Museum page quoting Sir Frederick Maude’s Baghdad Proclamation (March 18, 1917): “not as conquerors… but as liberators.”

3. https://www.infowars.com/posts/shut-it-down-fuentes-tells-supporters-to-vote-democrat-after-trump-breaks-promise-not-to-start-new-wars — Infowars post quoting Fuentes: “Do not vote in the midterms. And if you do, vote for Democrats — f*ck this.” (published March 1, 2026).

4. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/nick-fuentes/ — Southern Poverty Law Center extremist profile describing Fuentes as a white nationalist livestreamer and outlining his role in the Groyper movement.