“Tel Aviv will be destroyed, their military headquarters will be flattened, the prime minister’s residence will be flattened, Israel will be flattened, its airfields flattened, that’s the future of Israel and there is nothing they can do to stop it.” -Scott Ritter on October 11th, 2023, explaining what his sources say would happen if Israel invaded Gaza.
I wrote a thing yesterday noting that there is an entire group of internet commentators who have been making a lot of wrong predictions since the start of the Ukraine war. It is a group of people, and I said I wouldn’t name them, then I did name Scott Ritter (and Pepe Escobar).
I said “people probably associate me with these people,” and it is obvious why: in theory, I agree with them about every geopolitical issue. I have listened to Scott and read Pepe significantly, and I can’t think of any single matter of principle I have disagreed with them on. (I’m sure they are not quite as “racist” as I am, but that isn’t a geopolitical issue, and I don’t think it has ever even come up in anything I’ve read/listened to from either of them.)
If we went to the broader “movement” of these sorts of activists against the American empire, there would be varying levels of disagreement, perhaps. I completely disagree with John Mearsheimer’s views on China, and I’ve read every book that mentions China (frankly, his books do not really mention China very much) and tried to listen to most of his lectures on the topic. Although in general I agree with his worldview, on China, I completely disagree, and if you want to see where I disagree, you can watch one of several debates he’s had on the issue with Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is another person I would put in the “agree with him on everything” category, for the record. But regardless of potential agreement or disagreement, Mearsheimer and Sachs, as counter examples to Ritter and Escobar, do not make constant predictions citing secret “sources.” People from various governments definitely talk to John and Jeff, but these men don’t ever use whatever discussions they have with government officials as sources for predictions (Sachs will mention discussions he’s had with world leaders, but he does so in the form of anecdote). There are many others I have read or listened to in both categories, “source user predictors” and analysts, but I think these four men provide a good picture of the different “wings” of the current alternative media commentary ecosystem, and they are also probably the most prominent from each group.
This current iteration of a movement of alternative geopolitical commentators emerged after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. (Surely, the four mentioned, as well as several I am not mentioning, were around doing commentary before February of 2022, but I think it’s fair to say that that was the starting point of a new popular movement of alternative commentary focused on analyzing the “World War III” battle between the US-Jewish global order and those states intent on maintaining sovereignty in the face of an evil empire hellbent on solidifying global control.) Since this has started, I’ve done huge amounts of reading and podcast listening, and I have come to be very leery of anyone who talks about “my sources are telling me…” I recognize that “anonymous inside sources” is something that has been used in journalism for a long time with a varying, but certainly not great track record. Obviously during the Trump era, “insider sources say” has become a way for the New York Times to just make things up, totally shamelessly. That was also the case in the lead-up to the Iraq war. (To Ritter’s great credit, when he was working as a UN weapons inspector he was one of the loudest voices calling out the WMD scam. Though he knew that from inspecting, not from “his sources.”)
I don’t want to accuse Ritter or any of this crowd of consistently wrong “my sources are telling me…” people of lying. What is clear is that within this movement of anti-empire commentators, “my sources are telling me…” tends to almost always mean that whatever comes next is going to be wrong. It is possible that Ritter and the others are being fed disinformation from actual sources that are lying to them to make the anti-empire movement look ridiculous. But at some point, if your sources have been wrong this many times, you really have a responsibility to stop publishing things from these sources, whoever they are (and whether or not they actually exist), because it is unethical.
Some people were upset that I pointed out Ritter being wrong. And I understand the sentiment, because – one more time – I agree with him on all of the issues of principle. And it isn’t nice to look like you’re attacking people who are “on your own team.” Further, no one is right all the time. I have often stated “I’m right about everything,” and apparently some people don’t understand that there is a bit of self-deprecating humor there. I have been wrong, like everyone is sometimes, but I’m a whole lot more right than most people, and part of that is that as a rule, I don’t make bold, specific “predictions.” I don’t claim to have “insider sources” and I’m not a wizard, so all I can do is look at the available information, put it together, and come up with options for the most likely possible outcomes. Someone could make a list of the things I’ve analyzed and I’m 100% certain I can stand up to any other commentator and be shown to have a much better track record than virtually anyone. I actually can’t think of anyone with a better track record. Sometimes people will point out where I’ve been wrong, for example in suggesting Trump would likely end the Ukraine war in order to focus on helping Israel (which might still happen, I guess, though I didn’t expect him to escalate like he has, so I was definitely wrong on that). Of course I’m not right about everything. But I say: “point to anyone else in this political analysis game who is right more often than me,” and I’ve yet to be given a single name. (I think everyone is aware that many very prominent commentators have made careers off of copying my material while I’m locked in this censorship dungeon, and they didn’t do that because I’m wrong often wrong.)