Carlos De Castro Pretelt is a retired Army officer and supporter of Veterans for Political Innovation.
"Their beliefs are an existential threat to America!"
In the festering, Lord of the Flies spring of gushing anxiety we refer to as “politics,” that offensive, trash-ass sentence has become the de facto approach to the disagreements of our era. As a very recently retired member of the military, with 22 years of undiluted indoctrination under my belt, I take these types of sentences, and the emotions they are meant to elicit, seriously.
During the travails of military service, I’ve been trained and qualified in the dispassionate application of violence. Who would like for you to believe there is any respite or righteousness in its application is not intimately familiar with the long-term effects of it. Much like in war, there are seldom any clear winners and losers. Everyone loses something. Thus, when I see or hear politicians make statements that inherently endorse or suggest hurting other Americans, it gives me great cause for concern.
This propensity to advocate for violence in politics is something that has been growing over the last few years. As the rate of polarization continues to increase – that is, the rate at which you believe your neighbor’s beliefs are an actual threat to your existence – the more likely you are to see others as less than human. Add to this the caustic and incendiary verbiage utilized by media outlets to keep your eyes and ears rapt in a near-constant state of flight or fight and you end up with an open Lemarchand’s Box, popularized by the Hellraiser movies. Basically, it invites a version of reality that nobody but the most gluttonous masochists enjoy. Which is sorta where we find ourselves. Sigh.
This is how we end up with representatives habitually making statements about how plainly stupid other members of Congress are and how they will make them pay, on your behalf, by inflicting violence upon them. Which is how you end up with a dentist who runs for political office and then makes a video of himself decapitating other members of Congress. Granted, in anime style. But also, what?
There are two things driving this madness. The first part is that this is all operatic. These individuals know violence will not help them achieve their goal, but they just want you to please look at them. Like a really, really old child vying for attention, it’s as if they never understood positive vs negative attention. The second part is about making a statement. Due to polarization, politicians must fend off challengers within their own party who are eager to paint them as soft on existential threats!
The good news is that we are not lost and we didn’t get to this wacky hellscape by mistake. We got here by design. You see, current politics are structured in a way that forces you to choose a side and swear loyalty to it, repeatedly. Like a really intense, super needy acquaintance. For example, name any contentious issue right now and you will see that the two parties have drawn imaginary lines and crafted talking points with specific words that you can use to proclaim your brand alignment to the world. This isolates you from competing views, which may provide a different approach to the issue, and it relegates your persona to future party edicts. The more brand allegiance the party has, the less uncertainty they can expect from you in the future. (Uncertainty referring to your ability to analyze extraneous ideas and decide if another party better represents your values.)
We do not have to continue playing this tired, silly game. We can break up the two-party duopoly by supercharging our voting processes. As a team, this is absolutely achievable. There are a number of ballot initiatives in Missouri, Wisconsin and Nevada that are meant to introduce open primaries and ranked-choice voting in our elections. This change would have a significant, if not historical, impact in the political environment, best explained by the following video, which uses cute cartoons and animals.
How Industry Competition Theory Can Help Fix U.S. Politicswww.youtube.com
As you find yourself crawling around the internet, numbing your awareness with torrents of information, keep in mind that none of these politicians would actually do the things they irresponsibly advocate for. It is just an easy, lazy way to get your attention. To get you riled up so you keep clicking on their videos. The parties want you to refresh your brand loyalty and get you angry at other Americans by feeding you talking points and making very complex problems seem misleadingly easy. Because, if these problems are easy to fix, then that means they are letting this happen. Their beliefs are an existential threat to America! Patriots must take action!
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.