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Radio War Nerd EP #557 — World of Wars: American Brain Rot, Venezuela, Ukraine War (Patreon)

Published:
2025-10-25 00:57:18
Imported:
2025-10
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Recorded: October 23, 2025

We discuss whatever passes for American populism and Trump's brain, Hegseth's gunboats v. Venezuela's anti-ship arsenal, and we catch up on all the Ukraine war latest...

Total time: 1:19:36Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

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Comments

John Waaben

Brecher had some real zingers in this one folks

Soda enthusiast

The condition trump is suffering from is brandonization

Matelda

Didn't know about the yearbook. Hope I'm wrong but now Platner is looking kinda Oswald-ish

Ander Pierce

My projection: Trump illegally strikes Colombia repeatedly, BRICS gains ground

T

John doing the old Norm MacDonald bit there “four tours of Iraq and a tour with backwater, and a totenkopf tattoo? Sounds like a real jerk”.

GC

"I think he was trying to suggest something about the triality of man SIR"

William

Last time someone massed troops on a border and no one thought the attack would come… lol. I don’t think there’s any need to guess Trump’s next move. We can just wait and see

William

Heard that palantir helped put together the oppo on platner? Idk who could confirm that

Nico

Mr. President, I diagnose you with terminal Brandonization

Horseloverfat

I find it pretty plausible that Platner got a skull and bones tattoo in Croatia not understanding what that particular one was and never had it called out because 99.9% of Americans could not pick a Nazi totenkopf out of a skull and bones lineup. The blackwater stuff — we’ll see. I do think that policy wise Fetterman had a lot more red flags (big Israel guy from the beginning) that people ignored because he was running against a fake tv doctor.

Chubby Justin

trump literally thinking about making a deal with satan 🤣

Chubby Justin

i thought Trump was trying to sound hardcore. Or maybe he just wants to say fuck you to the despicable American Evangelicals

Terry Dunk

Agreed. Important thing to remember is that Americans are by and large very ignorant and have profoundly incoherent politics, hence, principled anti-imperialist with totenkopf tattoo and 4 combat tours of Iraq is a completely run of the mill CV in the middle America milieu.

Terry Dunk

I think Platner is more of your typical shithead with incoherent politics and life choices, a very common archetype, than crypto-PMC Israel flack in waiting like Fetterman. I also have to say that I was ready for the worst when going to read the Reddit comments they unearthed and they're actually all pretty defensible IMO if a bit cringe in typical redditor fashion

Christopher Small

Yeah, the idea that Platner's some crypto fascist doesn't hold up. It seems like his politics mostly just aren't thought through in a way that would make them fixed, so he has all these contradictory things that make him take to whatever waters he's swimming in in the strongest possible way. And the risk with that is that he either crashes out or becomes very egotistical or something. Idk, seeing the reaction from all sides over the last few days, I hope it just doesn't matter in any way: none of this affects him politically, the tattoo was just what he basically said it was, and he ends up an idiosyncratic small state politician who's relatively good on most things.

grimbo

Mark - you should check out Indian Clubs for shoulder rehab. Start with 1lbs clubs.

William

So funny that trump’s cronies gutted all the softer power organizations; guaranteed they start saying, “we need a way to win over the population” and just reinvent the whole goddamn wheel

Karl Childers

as far as i know that's only speculation & politico has not specified how the info was collected. imo since all the "deleted posts" are entirely what's buttressing his "based leftist" image which has endeared him to people enough to overlook his mercenary past, occam's razor would be that his own campaign is the one putting out this "oppo research" themselves.

JoR

One of the best terms to ever come from the show lol I wonder if mark made it up or if it’s already a thing

Karl Childers

DSA as an organization has not endorsed Platner although some prominent members within DSA are certainly fans of his. Platner was hand picked by Democratic operatives, many of them ex-Obama staffers, so I think the idea that the Democratic establishment is really aligned against him is highly questionable. Politico has not named any sources for the dump of his alleged deleted post history (a history which none of us can verify ever actually existed) and since the main effect of people seeing these "based leftist" posts has been to inoculate him against criticism for his mercenary past & his nazi tattoo, I think it has to be at least considered that his own campaign may be the source. Platner's grandfather was a famous architect who worked on the headquarters of the Ford Foundation and the dormitories at Yale, Platner's father was a successful lawyer, and Platner himself is not really much more of an oyster farmer than George Dubya was a rancher. Personally I think the tattoo is less relevant than volunteering first for 3 tours overseas including both at Abu Ghraib prison and in Fallujah then signing up for Blackwater as dessert because he loved shooting people so much. He says he became disillusioned with military service but he's also said he's partially disabled and required years of physical therapy to recover from his time in combat so I think it's more likely the guy just kept on killing people til his back gave out and he couldn't physically do it anymore, at which point he went back home and bought an oyster farm with his family's money. Put this all together and what it says to me is that the Democratic Party is finally getting clever about their astroturfed outsider strategy.

Aidan Coffey

Solid points Karl. Platner seems to have the support of the more "progressive" elements of the democratic operative class, while the institutional elements (state party, DSCC) are supporting Mills. As far as intent behind these stories, considering that the most damaging stories have come out in politico, my guess is the right wing of the party is going after Platner on behalf of Mills. One of the more interesting statements has come from his former political director who is a DSA type. She said something along the lines that "Graham is a military history buff and he certainly knew better" in regards to the tattoo. She is also claiming they offered her 15 grand for an NDA after she quit. Supposedly they've brought in a new campaign manager and consulting firm which is trying to get the entire staff on NDAs. This seems more like panicking than a controlled leak.

John Waaben

They say it on Chapo a lot

George P

Boston Globe recently had a headline in a straight news piece describing Mills as the “safe choice”. She’s 77 years old and 55 percent of Maine voters disapprove of her! It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Dem establishment and their water carriers in the media are actively trying to lose.

Karl Childers

Maybe Mills is rigging it against herself but honestly I think it's more likely that a faction within the Democratic Party has just come around to the reality that gerontocracy is not a sustainable basis for their cushy consultant gigs in the long term, and they're easily outmaneuvering Mills because they were born some time after the invention of touch tone telephones.

Karl Childers

platner was addicted to killing brown people but he also posted good so i like him

Matt

Please promote NYS solidarity; not all Upstaters are snooty. No NYS balkanization! (Compromise solution: long island can be a city-state, maybe)

Rory Flaherty

Here's the thing about a guy who says he got a Nazi tattoo on accident: either he's lying, which is bad. Or he's telling the truth, which doesn't inspire confidence either

Terry Dunk

I don't particularly like him though he seems better on policy than most any Democrat. I don't put any faith in any Democrat though and I also don't think anyone who signed up for four tours in Iraq and then a stint at Blackwater is going to see Heaven.

Christopher Small

No, you're stringing together a lot of different things to suggest there's more there when there's probably less. The simplest explanation is just that there's a bunch of different people doing their own projects and oppo research. Platner's recruiters probably just knew a bunch of surface level stuff about him and were mostly going on a video he did against commercial fishing. The reddit posts were probably just a tech guy working with centrists/right wing people who thought it made him look bad. There were a lot of people who are pretty progressive in the early 2000s who could still be jugheads who thought going to war and being a GWOT military guy was a cool thing to do. You can try to read deeper meaning beyond that, but so much of it is just tarring by association that doesn't actually mean anything. Like, ok, his Grandfather was an architect who designed the Ford Foundation building. What’s that actually mean. Not a whole lot, in and of itself.

Karl Childers

I bring up his family lineage only to show that Platner's "working class" posturing is bullshit. Signing up again and again to murder foreigners tells us way more about this guy's character than any Reddit posts no matter who dug them up. And you cannot tell me that the media spectacle of his tattoo reveal and coverup was not stage-managed. His own campaign released the totenkopf tattoo vid on Pod Save America explicitly to get ahead of the story and those are their words not mine. It clearly worked, because all the progressive liberals now have cartoon heart eyes going "he learned & grew UwU."

Joe S.

Lol, "fuel."

Christopher Small

Well, 1. No, you brought up the Ford Foundation thing because you heard “Ford Foundation” and thought “spook,” just like everyone else 2. Yes, I absolutely can tell you it’s not staged managed. No one would orchestrate a media cycle where shirtless pictures of your candidate looking like a paunchy slob are plastered everywhere, and all their Twitter posts have a thousand people yelling “Nazi” at them. That’s just a shitshow So either there’s a cadre of Democratic operatives who are carrying out wildly contradictory strategies as part of some Machiavellian gambit. Or it’s just a bunch of different people fumbling around for their own, more or less surface level reasons. Knowing everything that’s happened in politics in the last 10 years, what sounds more likely?

Karl Childers

dogg his campaign literally released the shirtless vid themselves on pod save america the clip is widely available and if you think i'm making that up then you haven't even googled what you're talking about

Christopher Small

No amount of fake internet points will make me watch Pod Save America

Karl Childers

ok so you explicitly refuse to learn what you're talking about. i'm done talking to you.

Baily McDaniel

I genuinely love listening to you two describe your various injuries & discomforts. It reminds of home☺️

Baily McDaniel

Even if he isn't a crypto-zio, I definitely wouldn't trust him to resist the temptation to be one for the right price. The poor thing has no marketable skills except for terrorism, murder & getting libs to defend his disgusting CV😮‍💨

Dominic White

Personal view on Platner from outside the US - yet another one of those deeply weird idiosyncratic idiots that America vomits up every now and then. He’s almost definitely not a Nazi ideologue, but to have a totenkopf on your body for a decade and to never reevaluate it when running for the senate (!!) suggests he has a truly American one; the core American ideology being “I’m a good person, and I did this thing, therefore the thing I did must be benign at worst”. The US delights in elections, though only where your options are limited to Gina Gerontocracy vs Nazi-tattoo leftist.

Terry Dunk

That's definitely a plausible version of events but a am oppo hit job false flag very is very much not "Occams Razor"

Tom Warner

I almost wonder if the idea was to clean out the old-regime loyalists so as to replace them with new ones

.

He’s more than likely killed children. Anyone can forgive signing up after 9/11 when you’re young and the amount of propaganda and the constant viewing of the attack and people jumping out of the WTC’s to their deaths. I can totally get being swept up when you are young. What you should never forgive is multiple tours AND then signing up for a death squad in Blackwater. This is where American politics are at. The furthest left politics, the social democrats (Bernie sanders), are supporting this freak and make no mistake he is a total fucking freak regardless of what he says. Like mark said people have a right to be paranoid. The system is completely fucking broken. Even the “best” politicians in America are just completely stupid at best about what the American empire actually is and how we got to this point. Maybe they have more coherent politics in their private conversations but the actual material reality is this group of left of the Democratic Party do not want to dismantle the U.S. empire. They just want a softer version of it. Even Bernie talks about how Trump is right about immigration (what is the overall reason people are fleeing their countries to here?) but he doesn’t agree with how the policies are enacted I.e. don’t be a spectacle about it. I’m completely done with US politics. I will vote in my local elections but these people are all so demonic. Even the social democrats want to build a robust welfare state over the bodies of hundreds of thousands if not millions of children. It’s completely insane. https://youtu.be/OLNQEHbusSA?si=YJj-HouMais7S5hj

William

I almost just wonder if they’re dumb as shit

JoR

Surprised mark didn’t discuss the Massie / Trump split. Maybe there’s not much to discuss but trump is putting the heat on him, and massie isn’t necessarily backing down. Perhaps something to discuss for a few minutes next episode? Could be another maga fracture point: or maybe most people will side with trump lol

Garibaldi

Incredibly well said.

DumbDumDumbDumb

Venezuela may be the US military applying the Gaza model on an entire nation based on their profligate cold blooded murders at sea going on right now

Jeremy

Platner got the SS tattoo after killing children for fun overseas.

Jeremy

he also got the tattoo in fucking croatia, a country that didn't exist until the 3rd reich created it. Come on boys.

Nomad22

I got a front row seat to the Fetterman debacle as Pennsylvania ex-pat with family and friends still living in the state. It's true that he came from a wealthy backbround and was basically a trust fund baby, but his family was very nouveau rich, and he studied at Albright College (where he played football) and the University of Connecticut, so he was hardly some trust fund ivy league educated hipster. His AmeriCorps service led to him to Harvard (where he likely aquired his foreign policy views) and then tobecoming Mayor of Braddock, which even then seemed iike a a stunt to get him exposure for higher office. He was even giving Ted Talks in 2012. His backgound and tragectory remind me a lot of Cory Booker, who also used family wealth and media connections to force his way into the New Jersey democractic party. The only difference between the two was that Fetterman made his runs for Lt. Governor and the Senate in a much different political environment than Booker faced. Platner, on the other hand, seems more like some version of New England landed gentry, or at least a branch of it that slipped into the middle class. Nothing about him really seems to fit neatly into any kind of box, but the idea that he's some sort of CIA plant strikes me as somewhat unlikely because the CIA already can basically openly run candidates like Abigail Spanenberger and Elissa Slotkin, and there are far easier ways to give someone the sheen of military service than sending them for multiple tours of duty and then a stint in Blackwater - just look at Pete Buttigeig and current Maryland Governor Wes Moore to get an idea of what that looks like. Platner definetly popped up on someone's radar though, likely beacuse of his family history and his time in DC as a college student, and he must have been an oyster farmer for like a year before launching hisvcampaign, so his "occupation" looks like a cosmetic addition to his biography. Rather than fearing he's some kind of flake like Fetterman though, I'm more afraid he'll just abandon his progressivism once the priamry is over. The thing with Fetterman was that, beyond his politics, people who knew him fucking hated him on a personal level. Lefty activists in Pittsburgh hated him. He fought with centrist PA Governor and fellow Israel champion Josh Shapiro to the point where he may have sabatouged Shapiro's chances of becoming Harris's VP pick. From everything I've heard, he was just a self-centered jerk, and the stroke seems to have made everything exponentiallyt worse. He even caused a serious automobile accident by driving at unsafe speeds on a highway near DC. So far, at least from what I've been able to gather from the Maine subreddit, people seem to at least like Platner.

Nomad22

I'm genuinely curious who is behind Planter. The online left, or at least the younger Gen Z portion of it, was always skeptical of him even before the Nazi tattoo, but he seems to the have the support of both Obama people and what passses for instutionalized elements of the occupy and Bernie left, such as Sanders himself and the Jacobin founder. The DSA strikes me as too decentralized (by design from what I understand) to ascribe any singular position to it.

underthefloorboard

"doesn't simply consist of farmers in Indiana, it's people who are just very tired of a dishonest decorum that has lasted all their lives"

Ryan Nathaniel Kelley

That picture definitely makes him look like he has his ass on front.

CR

I think most of MAGA would side with Massie at this point because he is now the outsider and there is a plurality of MAGA who are pissed ably the Epstein shuffle. These people don’t care who is in the files. They want to wreak vengeance on whomever and satiate that bloodlust and that righteous anger they have at the belief that this is just proving by omission that every elite is a child predator or accessory to predation. Massie is scum, but these are people who still believe that it’s possible to break and drain the swamp and he and MTG are their last hope.

CR

MTG will be president before any female democrat.

CR

Jus needs more home remedies like leeches and Meckler’s Powder.

CR

I hate Bernie as a leftist sheepdog, but I’m pretty sure his stance acknowledges that our policies toward Latin America are feeding the immigrant flow.

CR

The consultants can control the weaker, older officials once they are literally and figuratively propped up. Someone under 40 with all their faculties is harder to control. It’s that simple.

Karl Childers

it's not a flattering pic but as a fat man myself and having seen some other pictures of him i have to say platner has a very healthy BMI, not svelte by any standard but frankly an attainable and aspirational physique for the heavyset male demographic

CR

Was Platner actually involved in any combat? I knew people who did multiple tours and then became mercenaries, and they didn’t do shit. It’s not like he’s running on having been a HSLD tier one operator. He could have been a fucking security guard for all I know and care. If he did try to join SOCOM and failed, then, yeah, that’s a sign of a serial killer. Otherwise, he just seems to be a dopey failson. But this is also starting to steam like the pile of shit that was Trump’s first transition period. People who tried to deal with him in good faith got slapped down by the DNC and someone who had no policies went all-in on “Fuck the libs” out of justified spite. I’d rather go with Mills at this point because I’m an accelerationist. But if you care, give it a shot. If he steps out of line, fuck it, write in Debs for all it matters.

CR

At least McVeigh had one confirmed kill.

CR

All points to “they’re stupid, but they did have reasons. But they also underestimated the value of soft power.” But them being stupid is a big part of the pie chart.

Karl Childers

he was a machine gunner in Fallujah and a perimeter guard at Abu Ghraib, and his leaked posting history includes him saying how much he loved combat referring to it as "like a game" plus opining that he wishes he could have fought in the Indian Wars and the US invasion of the Philipines, two of the most genocidal colonial wars the US ever fought. not only was he involved in combat, he was addicted to it and kept signing up to shoot brown people until his back gave out & he went home to buy an oyster farm with his family's money

CR

On an unrelated topic, Trump is full of shit about ending nine wars. That’s true. However, at least he didn’t make those nine conflicts worse. There’s still time, though.

Ryan Nathaniel Kelley

I didn't mean to offend, and I'm not commenting on his weight. I'm just saying that based on his happy trail and the perspective of the photo when minimized, it looks like there's a naked rear end facing the camera. No comments about weight intended.

Brian Brain

Boris Jordan returns! Thanks Mark.

M.K.

Just to correct Mark, Plattner is not a DSA member.

etienne

everyone is always hype to find deposits of rare earths until they find out the hard part is running a million tons of mud sludge into a bath of the most evil acids on earth to get a kilo of Unobtainium and it creates an environmental disaster that even the most hardened libertarian is going to have a hard time with

Henry Nichols

Has anyone been able to find what the carve-out was that Biden made for India to purchase Russian oil? Was it specifically for India?

a clash of purple

... So the solution is to recruit the villains from Captain Planet to carry out this process?

a clash of purple

It was a verbal agreement. Biden took Modi aside and said "Hey, listen up fat, this Putin is one bad dude. He reminds me of Corn Pop. When I was a lifeguard I was the only white lifeguard in town, and the black kids would show up and want to swim in the pool, and I'd say 'Alright, Jack, you can swim in the pool, but you have to pay to get in,' and they'd try to distract me with elaborate schemes and tricks, like making me chase one of them and run into a wall that they painted to look like a tunnel, or putting a mop on their head to make me think they're a sexy lady, and then sneak in while my eyes shoot out of my head and my tongue rolls across the floor, and that was all well and good, they'd come up and run their fingers over my leg hairs, because nobody'd ever seen blond leg hairs before, and they thought maybe I'd gilded my own hair, like King Midas, and I said 'No way, man, my hair is all-natural,' anyone who says I have plugs is, I'm sorry, full of baloney - I shouldn't have said that. I yield my time." Then he wandered away and the Indians decided to buy Russian oil.

Quinn

Good assessment of Platner yeah really drives me nuts hearing people act as if him being a "veteran" is the problem. We have guys like Seth Harp and Nico Walker that represent actual disillusionment and positive growth from the "kid signs up for something he's been culturally primed to misunderstand and becomes dillusioned, does something productive with it." Not to mention thousands of guys in VetsAboutFace and Iraq Veterans Against the War. Platner is an entirely unrepentent 4 tour + Blackwater professional soldier who talked openly online within the last 5 years about how much fun war is. He might also be an idiot but he's not some biker uncle that cooled down and still has a racist tat lol he is an international war criminal

JoR

Good analysis, but I think we have to be careful to judge the military and the militias in the wrong context. This is reminiscent of “the Soviets look lost in Finland!” And “Iran purged their officers!” Pre 1980. If/when the US invaded and subsequently occupies Venezuela, like in most cases the “best version” of the armed forces will quickly show itself. The population concerns are a legit point too, but hey, gals can fly drones right? lol

Michael Salmon

Isn’t there a lot of controversy about Argentina damaging British ships in the Falklands campaign? I know basically nothing about it so forgive me if I’m being naive

Mark Ames

Venezuela has lost about 7-8 million to emigration since the first big sanctions in 2014. Yet the population has only fallen a few million in those 10 years according to what I've seen, although peaked around 2016 it fell from its peak to about 28 million. Which is roughly Ukraine's population today (probably closer to 25 million), collapsed from 52 million in 1991, and about 35 million before Russia's 2022 invasion, because Ukraine's fertility rate went to nil and death rate soared under capitalism. Ukraine's economy is a corrupt basket case, the state totally alienated from the population; the median age is 42 years old, average soldier ~43. Yet Ukraine is still holding out against Russia into the 4th year, in part because of all the western help, but also because a) they're invaded, b) defense doesn't require good young motivated soldiers or even qualified commanders to make a mess for the invaders. Venezuela's median age is roughly 30, they have a couple hundred thousand paramilitaries, an armed force (that would be best used out of uniform against the Americans), all sorts of people whose interests are aligned with the regime's, a lot of young poor males and guns. If this hornet's nest is what Trump wants to spend his presidency on, he'll destroy maga.

Mark Ames

I had to look those up. Thanks for the tip. I'll be starting some weight resistance in a week or so, I'll run this by my PT, who I trust because he's a long-suffering Raider fan and thus my Raider therapist.