Three big things this month that I think deserve a closer look.

1. What happens if the US sends troops to Iran and they rebel?

I’ve been theorising in my little newsletter for a long time that the endgame of the Trump administration is when they lose the Armed Forces. I feel like this endgame could get a whole lot closer if the US sends ground forces into Iran.

There’s precedence for this. A seldom-talked-about phenomenon is that towards the end of the Vietnam war the US armed forces were essentially collapsing. GI resistance movements were springing up left right and centre, and the practice of ‘fragging’ – using explosives and grenades to wound and kill senior officers – was becoming increasingly widespread.

It’s perhaps unsurprising this isn’t talked about, as it undermines the standard narrative that the problem was unpatriotic media and dissent back home and that, if the military was just left to get on with it, they were close to a decisive victory. They weren’t. The army was falling apart.

It’s also unsurprising that, with Vietnam in living memory, the George W Bush administration was so keen to declare victory and an end to the Iraq war at the first possible opportunity. The strength of the government depends on having functioning armed forces, and being able to back up decisions with extreme violence if necessary. Once that goes away, foreign adversaries and domestic resistance movements start circling like sharks.

I think this is why a swift and humiliating retreat from Vietnam was the only sensible strategy for the United States in the early 1970s. If it had become clear to the Soviet Union, at the height of the Cold War, that the United States was militarily impotent (despite being having best-funded military in the world) then maps might start getting re-drawn and the Cold War might start getting hot.

Fast forward to today.

I’ve seen credible journalism suggesting that the Pentagon is currently in no position to send troops to Iran, but the Trump administration might come to believe they have no other option.

Is the Trump administration’s current war with Iran likely to be more popular, or even as popular, as the Vietnam war with US soldiers? With the disaster of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the recent past, I think it’s reasonable to suggest Iran will be much less popular than Vietnam.

So what happens if the US Armed Forces, the final enforcement of Trump’s authority, refuse to fight and mount resistant campaigns like the ones in Vietnam? Many prominent figures in the MAGA movement have been advocating for a new American Civil War. However, if the Trump administration loses control of the Armed Forces in Iran and any domestic resistance movement starts to push for civil war, the Trump administration won’t realistically have an effective way to fight back. Knowing Trump, he might want to bomb his own citizens, but he wouldn’t be able to drop those bombs himself.

We’re still a way away from this kind of crunch point. But if you’re curious what it looks like in practice…

---

2. Bluesky CEO & founder Jay Graber steps down

There was a point in late 2024 when Jay Graber, founder of Bluesky, was arguably the most important person in tech. She was the creator of a social media platform that seemed to be billionaire proof, to the extent where she personally trolled Mark Zuckerberg. [world without caesars]

However, the platform seems to have lost a lot of its momentum. And there were questions about how truly billionaire proof it could be when it was funded by venture capital.

So, when Graber announced this month that she was stepping down as a CEO and would be replaced by a literal venture capitalist, this might seem to confirm the critics worst suspicions.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written about her in the past, it’s pretty obvious I’m something of a super fan. And it’s perhaps unsurprising that I have a different take.

I do think this is a really big deal, but it’s probably a positive one, and the right step for Graber to take.

Because she didn’t just step down as CEO. She technically demoted herself to chief technical officer. This means she is less focused on the Bluesky app itself, and more focused on the ‘AT protocol’ that it runs on.

For the fan boys like me, the protocol (which Graber built) has always been more exciting than the app, because it means if the app gets ruined in any way, you can take all your data and posts and social interactions and move them to another app on the same protocol. This is the reason why it’s billionaire proof.

This is all the more important in the Trump era. I think Bluesky was designed for the Biden era, when authoritarianism was knocking on the door but not making itself comfortable on your sofa.

I think the reason why Graber accepted funding from venture capitalists in the first place was because Bluesky was always just the shop window for the underlying protocol, and she wanted to grow it as quickly as possible to spread the word.

However, sooner or later venture capitalists are going to want a return on investment, and enough time has passed that she may have had to make the choice: pivot to making Bluesky profitable, or leave that to someone with a successful track record and instead focus on innovating the protocol.

I can see why she would’ve chosen the latter.

At the end of the day, Bluesky is just another Twitter clone, but the potential for the AT protocol ecosystem (‘the ATmosphere’) is pretty much infinite.

---

3. Kat Abughazaleh loses

Last year, independent journalist Kat Abughazaleh announced that she would be running for Congress in the 2026 Illinois Democrat primary.

10 days ago, she lost that election.

This is significant, because usually the winning candidate has a kind of energy behind their campaign. It’s the campaign everyone’s talking about. And Abughazaleh’s campaign was talked about around the world. You could feel it from across the Atlantic ocean.

She campaigned with an even more direct anti-oligarch tone than Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was scathing about congressional Democrats. And her slogan was “What if we didn’t suck?”

She lost to a slightly more progressive establishment Democrat. Daniel Biss is a local mayor who seems to be popular and has lived in the area much longer, and this was Abughazaleh’s first foray into electoral politics, so perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise. However, she came second out of fifteen candidates, she lost by only 4%, and without any of the major donor funding her rivals.

Above all this, however, the way she ran her campaign has been the talk of online politics. Her funding came from ordinary people instead of rich donors, and she spent the money directly on projects that helped her community. She frequently protested outside her local ICE detention centre, and got assaulted by ICE goons on camera.

In short, she proved to be the antithesis of the ‘politics as usual’ which voting citizens have grown to despise the world over.

Many, including myself, were expecting another Mamdani moment, but it didn’t happen. Why not? Everyone has their theories, but it’s hard to escape the issue of ‘Dark Money’.

Once upon a time, there was at least the pretence that political candidates had limits on the amount of money they could spend on their campaigns, even if Rupert Murdoch could spend whatever the hell he liked and would always get his preferred choice. Now, in the age of cryptocurrency, even that pretence has gone, and dark money is just the new political reality. Elections are pay-to-play.

It’s notable that both Biss and Kat were both on the receiving end of huge dark money attack campaigns, but in the final week, when they were both tying in the polls, Biss’s attack ads were all taken down and the attack ads against Abughazaleh intensified. In fact, in the final week a secret campaign was launchedoffering TikTok influencers $1,500 for every negative video about her.

I think there are many of lessons to learn here.

One is that financially supporting slightly more progressive establishment figures, in combination with infinite attack ads, might be the standard strategy for defeating candidates like Abughazaleh.

But for those paying attention, I think the biggest lesson is that Abughazaleh’s campaign was so effective that only an openly dirty dark money campaign could defeat her, and even then only narrowly. And even then, perhaps just because this was her first election.

She might well be the first of many.