Follow Me For Updates From The 2025 NATO Summit

As I write this, I’m in the Netherlands, getting ready to head out for the annual NATO Summit that starts in a few hours. If you’re a longtime follower of this Substack, you may remember that I attended a prior NATO Summit in 2022 — and without excessively tooting my own horn, I think I supplied coverage that would’ve been completely non-existent had I not managed to find a way into the Summit. So if you’d be amenable to upgrading to a “paid” subscription, that would be appreciated. Here’s a link with other ways you can contribute, if you so please. (I really hate asking for money, and only do it as rarely as possible.)

Getting accredited for these functions is an art unto itself. I was accepted as media at the 2022 NATO Summit in Spain, then rejected for the 2023 NATO Summit in Lithuania, and rejected for the 2024 NATO Summit in Washington, DC. Why I was rejected to cover a NATO Summit held in my own home country, but accepted when it’s been held in other countries, is an interesting question to ponder. I’ll give more precise information about how I managed to finagle it this time once the Summit is over. I know I’m always interested in the “behind the scenes” story of how big media/political events really work — which is typically more illuminating than whatever public-facing material is put out.

Trump bombed Iran the night before I left for Europe. The following morning, I did a video reaction that was streamed here on Substack, and also YouTube and X. Here is the YouTube version. People always tell me I should focus more on pumping out YouTube content, so you should subscribe to the channel if you’d like. I admit I’m of mixed minds about it. I think the mass conversion to video/audio content, whereby people in the media never have to organize their thoughts sufficient to write something at length, is not a great development. It incentivizes disregulated, reflexive, and unstructured reasoning. My general rule of thumb has been that if I’m going to do a video, it should ideally be structured around something I’ve already written. Otherwise, I’m just pontificating aimlessly. I don’t always abide by this rule, but that’s my aspiration at least. Maybe I’m increasingly out of touch. I just know that I have little interest in hearing someone spout on video about some topic, if they don’t have the capacity or interest to discipline themselves to write about it at any length. Maybe that’s elitist or whatever, but it’s my sincere intuition.

So the basis for my video stream on Trump bombing Iran was heavily informed and structured by an article I wrote two days prior. The basic thesis is that Trump bombing Iran was an extremely foreseeable outcome, based on an extraordinarily vast body of evidence — from his first forays into the Republican Party in the early 2010s, to his 2016 presidential campaign, to his first term in office, to his 2020 presidential campaign, to his post-presidency interregnum period from 2021-2025, and then most conspicuously from his 2024 presidential campaign and actions in the first several months of his second term. Why is this important? Because if scores of people are now going to claim they were “betrayed” by Trump instigating a new war in the Middle East, which within a matter of days resulted in the US bombing Iran, they can only see this as a “betrayal” if there was something catastrophically wrong with how they were absorbing and processing political information. For this I place a large degree of blame on the polluted alternative-media ecosystem, which I have always partially inhabited, and which in 2024 came to function as an alternate-reality Trump agitprop echo chamber. Credulously consuming information filtered through this eco-system, it’s not hard to see how people came to believe that by voting to re-install Republican executive power, they were voting to dismantle the military-industrial complex, defeat the “Deep State,” restore civil liberties and Free Speech, and end wars abroad. These absurdities were perhaps most potently encouraged by the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose hallucinatory vortex the “alternative-media” was largely sucked into. And there were many other factors that warrant further elucidation.

I consider this an example of acute, catastrophic media failure. Something I’ve always done over the course of my time in journalism is chronicle what I consider to be examples of acute, catastrophic media failure. One was the 2016 presidential election, which I maintained was a historic example of media failure. Another was the saga formerly known as Russiagate. Another was the 2020 protests and riots. All of these I covered extremely intricately, with an eye toward highlighting how they illuminated various dimensions of media failure.

I consider the Trump-instigated Iran War another example of media failure in the same pantheon. The one major difference is that the culpable parties I’m pointing to now tend to be more in the “alternative media,” rather than the “mainstream media.” To the degree that the 2016 election, Russiagate, and the 2020 riots represented media failures, the failure was mostly on the part of the more traditional or “corporate” media. And while that wing of the media certainly is not blameless at present, it was the increasingly prominent “alternative-media” that was integral in pumping out fictitious depictions of Trump that I maintain were extremely influential in his success in the 2024 presidential election, and which deceived many voters. The Right, broadly construed, loved my documentation of media failure with respect to the 2016 election, Russiagate, and the 2020 riots. But they’re going to largely hate my documentation of this latest media failure. So be it; I’ve never tailored anything I’ve done journalistically to the presumed reaction of a certain audience, which is another big flaw in the modern alt-media landscape.

So that project is going to be a work in process.

On the Iran War front, the latest word is that there was just a “ceasefire” announced by Trump, which apparently entails Iran ceasing its fire, after which Israel is free to fire at Iran for another 12 hours, and then for 12 hours after that, unknown things will happen, and then finally the purported ceasefire will allegedly take affect. Trump and his administration have engaged in demonstrable, deliberate deception over the course of the past two weeks, and until further notice, I think the current “ceasefire” announcement should be viewed through that same prism. About three hours before the initial commencement of the Israeli bombing campaign, Trump put out a Truth Social post claiming that his entire administration remained vigorously committed to obtaining a diplomatic resolution with Iran. That was classic “disinformation” — not the kind that random commenters online get accused of for saying things that certain institutions don’t like, but active engagement in a disinformation campaign with the intent of lulling the enemy target into complacency, and in conjunction with that also deceiving Americans about what their own government is doing. Then a few days ago, Trump claimed that he was going to decide within “two weeks” whether to bomb Iran, after having already made the decision to bomb Iran. More disinformation and deception. It was only Sunday night that Trump then broke the taboo and started agitating outright for “regime change” in Iran. So I’d be wary of taking at face value any of these announcements, for the time being.

Whatever happens, the instant talking point that was promulgated to Administration media lackeys — that Trump now deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for purportedly securing a ceasefire, after having first instigated the war in concert with Israel, engaged in profligate disinformation to enable and prosecute the war, threatened to kill the Supreme Leader, ordered mass evacuations from Tehran, demanded “unconditional surrender,” and then proceeded to bomb Iran on ridiculously contrived pretenses — is absolutely shameless, but the shamelessness of the people in question already has no bottom. Not that I particularly care about the Nobel Peace Prize itself — that was already sullied enough when it was given to people like Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama — but the overall PR campaign to declare Trump a “peacemaker” after he engineered a “pre-emptive” Israeli bombing offensive, exposed US diplomacy to be a sham, and then bombed Iran for the first time since the advent of the Islamic Republic, is especially maddening.

Anyway, I’m sure this will be one of many topics I’ll explore at the NATO Summit over the next few days, so “stay tuned.”

---