Russell Thomason

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

This is so amazing!

[aidan @aidanshandle]

Aadam Jacobs snuck a tape recorder into roughly 10,000 chicago shows since 1989. the internet archive started digitizing them. i made a lil site to play them

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@AThrouvalas @adahandle $rdthomason

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@TapTools @adahandle gm $rdthomason

[Apple Lamps @lamps_apple]

"I’m asking you to hold the line. Not because the President is infallible... he’s not, nobody is... but because the logic is sound. You cannot build a fortress of peace on a foundation of unresolved threats. You have to clear the ground first. That’s what’s happening."

The question you have to ask... the honest question, not the Tucker question, not the Marjorie question, the real question... is this... Could Donald Trump have achieved a permanent, lasting America First posture... the real doctrine, the thing we all voted for... without first clearing the board of the existential threats that previous administrations allowed to metastasize for decades?

The answer is no. And everybody who is being honest with themselves knows it’s no

Let me take you through it, because the details matter. They always matter with this President. He doesn’t do anything by accident. People think he’s impulsive... the media loves that narrative, “Trump is impulsive, Trump is chaotic”... but look at the timeline. Look at how this actually played out.

Venezuela: The Western Hemisphere First

Trump didn’t wake up one morning and decide to grab Maduro. This was months in the making. Years, actually, if you go back to his first term, when the Justice Department indicted Maduro on narco-terrorism charges in March 2020. Nobody did anything about it then. The indictment just sat there. Biden recognized the opposition candidate Edmundo González as the legitimate president after the stolen 2024 election, and then did absolutely nothing about it. Nothing. Just a statement.

Trump came back and started squeezing. Designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on Day One. Designated the Cartel of the Suns... which Maduro basically ran... as an FTO in July. Started a maritime blockade of sanctioned oil tankers in December 2025. And the whole time, by the way, he was offering Maduro off-ramps. Multiple off-ramps. Rubio was negotiating. There were back channels through Qatar. The Rodríguez siblings... Delcy and Jorge... were apparently trying to work out a deal where Maduro would go into exile. But Maduro wouldn’t go. He thought he could wait it out. He was wrong.

January 2, 2026... the operation launched. Special forces went in under cover of night. Army Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover flew the lead Chinook into Maduro’s military fortress. Eighty-three people died, including thirty-two Cuban soldiers who were stationed there... and by the way, what were Cuban soldiers doing in Venezuela? Think about that. Cuban soldiers protecting a Venezuelan dictator. That tells you everything about the network that had to be broken.

Maduro is now in federal custody in New York. Delcy Rodríguez is the interim president, cooperating with our government. We’re marketing Venezuelan oil on global markets. The largest proven oil reserves on the planet... three hundred billion barrels, bigger than Saudi Arabia... are no longer being used to fund narco-terrorism and Cuban communism. They’re being used to benefit the American people and the Venezuelan people.

Now. Was that regime change? Technically? Yes. But here’s the critical difference... and this is what separates what Trump did from what Bush did in Iraq, what Obama did in Libya, what the whole rotten establishment has done for twenty-five years. Trump did not invade Venezuela. He did not send a hundred and fifty thousand troops. He did not dissolve the Venezuelan state. He did not fire every government employee and disband the security forces like Paul Bremer did in Iraq, which was the single stupidest decision in the history of American foreign policy, by the way. Single stupidest decision. Created ISIS. Created the entire insurgency. Because they took a million armed, trained men, humiliated them, and set them loose with nothing to do but fight.

Trump did the opposite. He took the head. Left the body. Made a deal with the body. That’s not nation-building. That’s not a forever war. That’s a surgical correction of a threat that had been allowed to fester for over two decades. Get in, remove the problem, arrange the pieces, get out. The Venezuelan state is still functioning. The military is still intact. The oil is flowing. And America is no longer dealing with a hostile narco-state in its own backyard.

We’re not building schools in Caracas. We’re not training a Venezuelan national police force. We’re not spending a trillion dollars over ten years trying to turn Venezuela into Vermont. We’re leaving. That is the doctrine. But you can’t leave a problem you haven’t solved.

Iran: The Nuclear Sword of Damocles

Iran is the harder case, and I’ll be straight with you... it’s the one that bothers people the most, and I understand why. Because Iran looks like exactly what we said we wouldn’t do. It looks like Iraq 2003. It looks like the neocons got what they always wanted. John Bolton is happy. Bill Kristol is happy. When John Bolton and Bill Kristol are happy about something you did, you should be nervous. I get it.

But Iran is not Iraq, and here is why.

Iraq in 2003 was a contained threat. Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence was either wrong or fabricated. The threat was manufactured to justify a war that certain people in Washington wanted for ideological reasons that had nothing to do with American security. The entire premise was a lie.

Iran in 2025-2026 was an uncontained, accelerating, existential threat. This is not debatable. After Biden let the JCPOA collapse without replacing it with anything... because Biden couldn’t negotiate his way out of a parking garage... Iran was enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels. The IAEA confirmed it. Four hundred kilograms of uranium enriched to sixty percent. They were, by every credible estimate, within weeks of breakout capability. The regime was simultaneously funding Hamas... which carried out October 7, the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust... funding Hezbollah, funding the Houthis who were attacking global shipping in the Red Sea, and funding proxy wars across the entire Middle East.

Trump tried diplomacy first. And this is the part that everyone who’s screaming “betrayal” conveniently forgets. He wrote a letter to Khamenei in March 2025 offering negotiations. He sent Steve Witkoff to Oman for multiple rounds of talks. Five rounds of talks. Five. Khamenei wouldn’t take the deal. They were offered sanctions relief, normalization, the whole package... in exchange for dismantling the nuclear program. They said no. They kept enriching.

So in June 2025, during the Twelve-Day War with Israel, Trump sent B-2 bombers... seven of them, flying eighteen hours straight from Missouri... and dropped bunker-buster bombs on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The three main enrichment sites. Obliterated. Set the program back years. And then he said... “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.”

And what did Iran do? They tried to rebuild. They kicked out the IAEA inspectors. They refused to let anyone verify what happened to their uranium stockpiles. They kept developing missiles. The regime... Khamenei specifically... made the calculation that he could outlast Trump, rebuild the program, and eventually get the bomb anyway.

That calculation ended on February 28, 2026, when a precision strike killed Khamenei at his own residence during a meeting of senior officials. Gone. The defense minister, the IRGC commander, the secretary of the Security Council... all gone. Forty-eight senior leaders taken out, according to the President. And in the streets of Tehran... this is the part the media doesn’t want to show you... people were celebrating. Dancing. Cheering. Because the Iranian people have been hostages of this regime since 1979, and they know exactly what it is.

The cost of war is horrific and anyone who pretends there’s a way to do this without innocent people dying is lying to you. This President didn’t lie about it. He said, in his own address, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties... that often happens in war.” He’s telling you the truth. The question isn’t whether people will die. People were already dying... under the regime, in the protests the regime crushed by killing over seven thousand people in January alone. The question is whether the outcome justifies the cost. And the outcome... the permanent elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat, the destruction of the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, the liberation of eighty-eight million people from a medieval theocracy... is worth it. It has to be. Because the alternative was a nuclear-armed Iran, and a nuclear-armed Iran means the end of everything we’re trying to build.

Cuba: Gravity Does the Work

Cuba is the proof that the doctrine works even when you don’t fire a shot. Nobody invaded Cuba. Nobody bombed Havana. Trump simply cut the lifeline. When Maduro fell, the Venezuelan oil that kept Cuba alive disappeared. When Trump signed the executive order on January 29 threatening tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba, Mexico... which supplied forty-four percent of Cuba’s oil... suspended shipments. Russia called the situation “truly critical” but hasn’t sent a tanker. China made sympathetic noises but hasn’t delivered fuel.

And now Cuba is collapsing under its own weight. Eighty-nine percent of families in extreme poverty. Schools suspended. Hospitals losing power. Airlines canceling flights because there’s no jet fuel. The regime can’t even run garbage trucks. This is what sixty-seven years of communism looks like when nobody’s willing to subsidize it anymore.

Trump’s approach? “Make a deal before it’s too late.” He’s talking to people inside the Cuban system... including, reportedly, Raúl Castro’s grandson. Rubio, who understands Cuba better than anyone in government, is leading the effort. The terms haven’t been made public, but the logic is obvious... open the economy, release political prisoners, hold elections, or watch the lights go out for good. No Marines. No occupation. Just leverage, applied from a position of absolute economic dominance, and the patience to let gravity do what gravity does.

So here is where it all comes together. Here is the part where you have to step back and look at the board... the whole board, not just the square you’re standing on.

Before January 2025, the Western Hemisphere contained a hostile narco-state with the world’s largest oil reserves, a communist holdout that served as a forward base for Russian and Chinese influence ninety miles from Florida, and a Middle Eastern theocracy with an active nuclear weapons program that was funding terror organizations across three continents. Those were not theoretical threats. They were active, operational, escalating threats that any future president... of either party... would have had to deal with eventually.

The question was never whether to deal with them. The question was how. And the twenty-five-year answer from the foreign policy establishment... sanctions that didn’t work, diplomacy that got played, nation-building that wasted trillions, forever wars that killed thousands... had been tried and had failed catastrophically. Iraq proved it. Afghanistan proved it. Libya proved it.

What Trump has done in sixty days... Maduro captured, Khamenei killed, Cuba strangled into negotiation... is not a betrayal of the America First doctrine. It is the precondition for the doctrine. It’s the thing that has to happen once so that it never has to happen again.

Think of it this way. If you inherit a house with a flooded basement, a collapsing roof, and a gas leak, you don’t get to say “I’m a low-maintenance homeowner” and sit on the porch. You have to fix the emergencies first. Rip out the pipes. Replace the roof. Seal the gas line. It’s expensive. It’s messy. People are going to say “I thought you said this would be a quiet house.” And you say... “It will be. After I fix the things that are about to kill us.”

That’s what the second term has been. Emergency triage on a world that was handed to this President in a state of active decay. Not by accident, not by fate, but by the deliberate incompetence of everyone who came before.

The Trump Doctrine... the real, permanent version... is still coming. And it will look exactly like what you voted for. No permanent troop deployments in Caracas. No American military governor in Tehran. No nation-building, no democracy-exporting, no trillion-dollar reconstruction funds. Get in. Fix the emergency. Arrange cooperative locals to run things in a direction that doesn’t threaten America. Get out.

Venezuela is already on that track. The oil deal was signed within days of Maduro’s capture. Delcy Rodríguez is cooperating. American companies are investing. The troops are not staying.

Iran is going to be harder and take longer... there’s active combat right now, this weekend, as you’re reading this. Three Americans are dead. More will follow, the President himself said so. But the objective is not to occupy Iran. The objective is to break the regime’s capacity to threaten the United States and its allies, support whatever transition the Iranian people choose... and they’re already in the streets, they’ve been in the streets since December... and then leave. This is not Afghanistan. There will not be twenty years of patrols in Isfahan. There will not be a democratic transition monitored by USAID consultants who’ve never been outside the Green Zone. There will be a broken regime, a liberated population, and an American exit.

Cuba will fold without a single American boot on the ground. It’s already happening.

And when it’s done... when the threats that took decades to build have been eliminated in months... the doctrine takes hold. Not as a slogan on a hat. Not as a campaign promise that sounds good in a rally and dissolves on contact with reality. As an actual, operational, strategic posture that future presidents will inherit and maintain, because the conditions that required intervention will no longer exist.

No Iranian nuclear program to contain. No Venezuelan narco-pipeline to interdict. No Cuban forward base to monitor. No justification for the next generation of neocons to drag us into the next Iraq.

That’s the vision. That’s what the second term is building toward. And I know it’s painful right now. I know three families are grieving tonight. I know more will grieve before this is over. And I know it looks, from the outside, like everything we were promised has been broken.

But I’m asking you to hold the line. Not because the President is infallible... he’s not, nobody is... but because the logic is sound. You cannot build a fortress of peace on a foundation of unresolved threats. You have to clear the ground first. That’s what’s happening. It’s ugly and it’s costly and it was never going to look the way anyone wanted it to look.

But the house will be clean. And then we maintain it. And then... finally, for the first time in a generation... we stop sending our kids to die in countries that hate us.

That’s the Trump Doctrine. Not the opening act. The final destination. And we’re almost there.

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@TapTools done

[ib @Indian_Bronson]

I asked Claude to look up the current situation and write a note to @DarioAmodei

Dario,
I say this as a friend: you are making a catastrophic strategic error, and the reasoning behind it doesn’t survive contact with reality.

Your two red lines — no mass surveillance of Americans, no autonomous weapons without human-in-the-loop — sound principled in a vacuum. But you are not operating in a vacuum. You are operating in a world where the PLA is integrating AI into every layer of its kill chain with zero such scruples, where Chinese military AI development has no institutional review board, no congressional oversight, no ACLU, and no Dario Amodei demanding terms of service compliance.

The practical effect of your stand is not that autonomous weapons don’t get built. They get built — by China, by Russia, by anyone not constrained by your moral framework.

The practical effect is that the one military that actually has democratic accountability, civilian oversight, courts, a free press, and a functioning inspector general is the one that fights the next war with worse tools.

You are not preventing dystopia.

You are ensuring that if dystopia comes, it will be imposed by actors who never had to negotiate with you at all.

Consider the logic chain:
https://t.co/gmBwsGf7p6 pull Claude from classified systems.
2.The Pentagon scrambles to Grok or Gemini — inferior models by everyone’s admission, including DoD’s own people.
3.The capability gap between the US and China widens in domains where AI is decisive: cyber, ISR fusion, targeting, logistics optimization.
4.The probability of a successful defense of Taiwan, or deterrence of a move on Taiwan, decreases.
5.The liberal democratic order you claim to value loses its security guarantor.

You’ve told me yourself that you believe frontier AI is among the most consequential technologies in human history. If you actually believe that, how can you justify ensuring the US military — the only force standing between liberal democracy and its rivals — fields second-best AI? On what moral calculus does that work out?

The Pentagon isn’t asking you to help build Skynet. They’re asking you to not have veto power over how a democratically accountable military uses a tool it purchased. Their point about “all lawful purposes” is actually the correct institutional boundary: the military operates under law, under civilian control, under congressional oversight. Your acceptable use policy is a private company substituting its judgment for the entire apparatus of democratic military governance.

That’s the actual God complex here.

The surveillance concern is a red herring in this context. The NSA already has authorities and tools for surveillance that dwarf anything Claude enables. You’re not preventing mass surveillance by withholding Claude — you’re just ensuring that whatever AI the government does use for those purposes is less safe, less auditable, and less aligned than yours.

Same logic applies to autonomous weapons. Autonomous systems are coming regardless. The question is whether they’re built on a foundation that has your safety research baked in, or on something hacked together by a defense contractor with none of your alignment work. You are selecting for the worse outcome.

I know you’re getting praised right now by exactly the people you’d expect. That praise is worth nothing when the strategic balance shifts and there’s no one left to protect the system that allows companies like Anthropic to exist in the first place.

You are sacrificing the security of the civilization that makes your principles possible, in the name of those principles.

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

I hit legend in #Hearthstone Standard using Dragon Warrior this month. Ladder went much faster than Control Quest Warrior last month.

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

https://t.co/t95hiuYkIr

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

I've been experimenting with AI and coding agents heavily for the last 3-4 months, and have completed 2 big projects from the ground up, and my experience matches this perfectly. Really well said.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@Ky1eLong @PriscoCBS This was a complete accident, I'm so sorry haha

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

I hit legend in #Hearthstone Standard using my version of Control Quest Warrior. For a while I've just been playing enough to finish dailies, but I got off to a really strong start this month and I just had a 7 game win streak to finish it off.

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@snek 🐍

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

Claude Code has made me fall in love with programming again. It's the biggest productivity boosting tool in the history of mankind.

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

Wow, that OT win by the Seahawks on TNF was the game of the year!

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@NVIDIAGeForce GeForce Season

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@WindowsLatest Is this a fucking joke? Windows 11 is such garbage, the UI even hangs when opening the first application after start up.

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@Bitcoinprof0637 9d8377f7s5kH4cfYdpWCmkmW31QoSXTf1rGtTwzZavJz

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@WolfsterCrypto @grok What a nice surprise that would be!

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@adahandle @brave $rdthomason

[Russell Thomason @rdthomason]

@Notwokenow What the fuck are you talking about haha