Lust Darkens the Mind
. . . the proud, “self-doomed” Satan deteriorated into a babbling old devil, he remained among the company of the damned.[1]
In a press conference held on Air Force One after a funeral service for seven dead soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, President Donald Trump denied that American forces had killed over 150 school girls in a deliberate attack and then launched into a rambling monologue justifying the attack by claiming that Iranians “chop heads of babies and cut women in half.”
This statement was duly recorded by a reporter from The Washington Post who accepted everything Trump said at face value, probably because he would have been kicked off the plane if the hadn’t, and failed to ask follow up questions like “Were the Iranian women sawed in half horizontally or vertically?” I have been to Iran many times and have never seen a woman sawed in half there either horizontally or vertically, but I do remember seeing a woman sawed in half on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 1950s, which is probably where Trump, who is roughly my age, got the idea:
The magician most famously associated with performing the “sawing a woman in half” illusion on The Ed Sullivan Show was Richiardi Jr. (often billed simply as Richiardi or Aldo Richiardi; real name Aldo Izquierdo Colosi). He was a Peruvian illusionist renowned for dramatic, high-impact, and sometimes gory presentations of classic tricks, including vivid versions of sawing a woman in half (often using a buzzsaw that appeared to cut through his assistant with dramatic flair, including “blood” effects in some performances). Richiardi appeared on the show multiple times—24 appearances total, more than any other magician—throughout the 1950s and 1960s, showcasing illusions that captivated audiences.[2]
Taken aback by the president’s delusional state of mind, a CBS reporter wrote:
The Trump administration concealed the true extent of Iran’s strike on a US base in Kuwait. Dozens of service members suffered severe injuries. 30 remain hospitalized right now. They hid it. The New York Times: A US military investigation has concluded the United States was responsible for the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. 165 girls. Ages 7 to 12. Trump said the Tomahawk was “very generic.” Trump said Iran bombed its own school. Trump said he’s “willing to live with” whatever the report shows. The report shows it was us. And while Trump was lying about dead children, his administration was hiding dozens of wounded American service members from their own families and the American public. Concealing American casualties. Lying about dead Iranian children. Blocking terror warnings to law enforcement. Sealing the Epstein files. This is a pattern.[3]
Confronted with Trump’s mental decline during his second term in office and statements which are both grandiose and delusional, I suggested that he may be suffering from tertiary syphilis. According to conventional wisdom, syphilis ceased to be an existential threat in the 1940s when penicillin became widely available. We know, however, that Bill Gates contracted a venereal disease from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s teenage prostitutes long after the arrival of penicillin. We also know Donald Trump was a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and was hardly a model of chastity during his youth.
Over the course of centuries, syphilis became less and less virulent to the point where its symptoms could be ignored because of its tendency to masquerade as something else, a trait which led to syphilis being called the great imitator. Even at its most virulent, syphilis goes into remission during the natural course of infection only to appear decades later after it has migrated to the brain causing tertiary or neurosyphilis whose symptoms include delusions of grandeur, as manifested in examples as diverse as Nietzsche’s later writings and Howard Hughes’s spruce goose, the then biggest airplane in the world, which unfortunately never got more than six feet off the ground.
Was Trump’s delusional foreign policy which began with threats to annex Greenland, Alberta, and Cuba followed by the kidnapping of the Venezuelan head of state, followed by an unprovoked attack on Iran manifestations of the grandiosity that characterizes tertiary syphilis or do we need to appeal to other categories for a better explanation? Was it a manifestation of the narcissism which Christopher Lasch described as America’s characteristic trait in his book The Culture of Narcissism? Was religious fanaticism in general and Chistian Zionism in particular the cause of Trump’s grandiosity and disconnection from reality? If so, whatever Trump had was apparently contagious.
In a 2018 speech at an Arutz Sheva conference in Jerusalem, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth speculated on the possibility of rebuilding a third Jewish temple on the Temple Mount, saying: “There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible… I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen, but I know that it could happen.”
One tweeter felt that desperation at America’s failure to conclude the attack on Iran as quickly as the US had concluded its kidnapping of President Maduro in Venezuela explained the delusional nature of America’s foreign policy. Similarly delusional in a manner we have come to expect from Christian Zionists, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee told Tucker Carlson that it was fine with him if Israel took over every neighboring country in the Middle East. None of these comments addressed the reality of the situation after less than a week of war:
America is burning through strategic interceptor inventory at ratios that cannot be sustained, defending targets across five countries simultaneously against a weapons system that Iran manufactures in the hundreds of thousands, that requires no pilot, no runway, no sophisticated logistics chain, and costs less than a second-hand car. And that’s before a single hypersonic missile has been fired — before the Fattah-2, before the systems Washington not only has no analog for and possesses no air defence system capable of intercepting at speed and altitude. No Patriot battery stops Mach 15. No THAAD engages a manoeuvring hypersonic glide vehicle at terminal phase. The Pentagon knows this. It knew it before the first bomb dropped on February 28th. How’s the war going, Pete? How’s it going? If you can’t stop Shahed you are screwed.[4]
Hegseth’s speech aligned with the Christian Zionist eschatological belief that a rebuilt temple will play a role in end-times events leading to Armageddon and Christ’s return after it has been desecrated by the Antichrist but before Jesus establishes his millennial kingdom in Jerusalem. After the US attack on Iran, these thoughts became widespread among Christian Zionist military commanders, prompting complaints that commanders at more than 40 units across at least 30 installations framed the Iran conflict as part of “God’s divine plan” tied to biblical end times.[5]
One detailed complaint from a non-commissioned officer (NCO) described a combat-unit commander urging NCOs during a readiness briefing to tell troops that the operations were fulfilling prophecies from the Book of Revelation, involving Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. The commander reportedly stated that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein has criticized these incidents as violations of the separation of church and state, potentially breaching the Uniform Code of Military Justice.[6]
Is Christian Zionism, rather than tertiary syphilis, the source of Trump’s delusional behavior? Is there a rational explanation for America’s irrational foreign policy moves over the past few months? Yes, the fundamental issue facing the deep state is unrepayable sovereign debt. As C. H. Douglas pointed out, usury leads inexorably to war. That progression is inexorable because of the nature of compound interest, which becomes unrepayable on a floating loan after 70 years. The compound interest trajectory which began with the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, became unrepayable 70 years later, and led to America’s war of independence after Lord Townsend and Adam Smith imposed the Stamp Act on the colonies in 1763 in an attempt to save England from default and bankruptcy.
More than dementia of the biological or theological variety, Donald Trump’s invasions of Venezuela and Iran are manifestations of Douglas’s claim that usury leads to war. At present, the sovereign debt of the United States stands at $38.85 trillion. Current GDP is $24.1 trillion, which means that the current US debt to GDP ratio is 120 percent. According to the World Bank, “Sovereign Debt turns Bad” at anywhere from 64 % to 77 %. Faced with unrepayable debt, central banks seek military solutions after asking themselves, “Where are we going to get that kind of money?” At this point, Trump’s foreign policy begins to make sense because the combined current dollar value of the oil reserves of Venezuela and Iran is $43 trillion, a figure which actually exceeds by roughly $5 trillion the current US sovereign debt.
The United States government is currently paying approximately $1.0 trillion to $1.04 trillion annually in net interest to service its sovereign debt. This cost is the fastest-growing line item of the federal budget, and it now exceeds spending on defense or Medicare in some periods and is projected to rise further to $2.1 trillion annually by 2036. In or about 13–14% of total federal outlays.[7]
Many libertarian supporters of the gold standard claim that the US dollar is a fiat currency. This is not true. The US dollar is an oil backed currency which came into being on August 15, 1971, when Richard Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard and replaced it with the petro dollar. Oil now functions as backing for the dollar just as gold did in the past. The dollar now serves as the world’s reserve currency, which serves as the economic foundation of the American empire. That economic foundation rests on the United States’ Navy’s ability to keep the world’s sea lanes open. When it comes to oil, the main chokepoint in the world is the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s petroleum and 20 percent of the global LNG trade flow. The current war between the United States and Iran comes down to a simple binary equation. The Strait of Hormuz is either open or closed. If it is open, the American empire has won the war. If the strait is closed, Iran has won this war, and the American empire no longer exists.
These economic calculations reveal that the hidden grammar of geopolitics is morality. Usury, which is a sin, leads to war, which is the punishment for sin.
From 1973 to the present, Jewish usurers transferred trillions of dollars from the pockets of the middle class into the bank accounts of the one percent, all the while using sexual liberation to distract us from their theft. The result was exactly what Ezra Pound predicted in his radio broadcasts. Jewish usury led directly to Jewish wars in the Middle East, which America pursued at its own expense for Israel’s benefit.
How do all of these parts—psychological, biological, theological, economic, and geopolitical—fit together? The answer is eschatology. Grandiose epics demand equally grandiose reviews. Dementia is the category which links Donald Trump’s grandiose and paranoid foreign policy at the end of America’s third republic, which he may have inherited from his parents, or which may be a symptom of tertiary syphilis, to Ezra Pound, who tried to merge Douglas and Dante and failed, just as Trump’s attack on Iran failed. Trump could have carried out that mandate from God peacefully, but he chose war to bring it about, along with the demise of Israel, in spite of his intentions, in a way that Hegel referred to as the cunning of reason. Islam is the scourge of God.
According to Mike Adams, who has “watched, analyzed, and reported on geopolitical shifts for decades”:
What we are witnessing in March 2026 is not just another conflict. It is the final, convulsive act of a dying American empire. On February 28, President Donald Trump, in concert with Israel, launched Operation Epic Fury—a massive air campaign aimed at regime change in Iran. The administration frames this as a decisive, necessary stroke. But from my perspective, this war was lost before the first missile was fired. The outcome guarantees a seismic shift in global power, and it hands the ultimate leverage not to Washington, but to Tehran.[8]
The “frantic, unhinged rhetoric of a trapped American president” bespeaks “a catastrophic miscalculation rooted in the same hubris that doomed prior American adventures” and leaves Trump with a choice between “humiliating surrender to Iran’s terms and total economic collapse.”
President Trump’s “threatening, unhinged rhetoric”—demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender”—is the sound of a trapped animal, a confession of strategic bankruptcy,” which has left “Iran, through strategic patience, asymmetric capability, and geographic luck,” now holding “the master key to the world economy.”
Strategy is to geopolitics what form is to poetry. Just as tertiary syphilis robbed James Joyce of the esemplastic power he needed to unify his grandiose epic novel, and just as dementia robbed Ezra Pound of the esemplastic power he needed to unify his grandiose epic poem, lust morphing into dementia robbed Donald Trump of the esemplastic power he needed to come up with a coherent strategy which could unify America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
The stunning reversal of America’s position in the Persian Gulf is an example of what Hegel would call the cunning of reason. God has anointed Donald Trump to bring about the end of the American Empire. God has anointed Bibi Netanyahu to bring about the chastisement of Israel, a mission which may have brought about his own death but is certainly bringing about the death of his idol Israel. War is punishment for sin, but God’s punishment is also liberation from sin. This is a truth which the Hebrews had to learn in the expensive school of experience. When Israel refused to repent, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple and carried its vessels and its people into the Babylonian captivity. The prophet Jeremiah told the Hebrews that God considered Nebuchadnezzar “my servant” because he was about to teach the Jews a lesson. In Jeremiah 25:8–9, God declares: “Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: Because you have not obeyed my words, behold, I will send for all the tribes of the north, declares the Lord, and for Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land… and I will devote them to destruction.”
Because the Jewish kingdom proved incapable of reforming itself from within, God sent Nebuchadnezzar to reform it from without in a series of stages which began in 605 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar first besieged Jerusalem, taking captives including Daniel, and ended in 586 BC when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, razing the city and exiling most remaining inhabitants as recounted in 2 Kings 24–25; 2 Chronicles 36; Jeremiah 52.
When the 70 years of bondage and punishment decreed by God came to an end, Cyrus, King of Persia, drove Nebuchadnezzar from his throne and set the Hebrew captives free to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple.
Something similar is happening in our day. Islam, as Martin Luther said, “is the scourge of God.” In Luther’s day, the Turks marched up the Danube and punished Christendom for the sin of division which the Reformation made manifest.
Two years after the fall of Constantinople, the Turks besieged the gates of Belgrade and were only deterred because St. John Capitstran preached repentance there. In 1525, the Turks swept a hapless ad hoc Christian army from the field in the Battle of Mohacs. In 1684, the Turks besieged the gates of Vienna and would have swept Christendom out of the rest of Europe but for Jan Sobieski and the Polish cavalry.
Islam is the scourge of God, but God’s punishment is always a manifestation of his mercy. The same is true today. God is using Iran to punish the United States and Israel for their wickedness. This isn’t the only time God has used Persia to punish a wicked empire. When Julian the Apostate tried to destroy Christianity and return Rome to its obsolete pagan gods, God raised up Shapur II, king of Persia, who drove Rome’s legions from Asia, never to return, just as the Iranians are now driving the American empire out of the Persian Gulf. The loss of Rome’s eastern provinces set in motion the collapse of the Roman Empire 47 years later.
Donald Trump was ready to attack Iran in January 2026, but he held off until the eve of Purim, hoping for good juju from his Jewish soothsayers because God used the Persian king Mordecai and his Hebrew wife Queen Esther to thwart Haman’s plot to kill the Jews.
When God decided to allow the Gentiles to worship Christ, the newborn king of the Jews, he chose the three Persians who have come to be known as the Magi, who were instrumental in saving Christ from death because they went home “by a different way” and refused to reveal Christ’s whereabouts to Herod.
Persia stands out in salvation history not as a theological innovator or covenant partner, but as a divinely appointed secular empire whose tolerance, decrees, and order provided the historical framework for Israel’s survival, the Second Temple era, and the preparation for the Messiah’s arrival—ensuring the continuity of God’s redemptive plan from exile to the coming of Christ.
According to Israel Shamir, “The Jews are running out of time.”
There has never been a Jewish kingdom that has lasted longer than 80 years and 2028 is coming up fast. From the local PTA to international organizations, Christians and Muslims are getting to know one another, making an end-run around their Jewish handlers. The Purim War against Iran is a clear sign of Jewish desperation. They already lost the moral high ground when they began firebombing Gazan ghettos. This latest Jewish war is the proverbial step too far, and when Israel falls you can bet they are going to try and take down everyone else with them. The first step towards ending the Iran War is the resolution of the Gazan Genocide. Once Israel is defused, the entire world powder keg will unravel. Imagine it! Christians and Muslims working together in Christ’s name to purge school libraries of Kabbalistic sex manuals! Ukraine will deport all the Jewish adventurers and get back to being the breadbasket of Europe! Jerusalem will become a UN protectorate, ensuring all religions have a seat at the tables of the Holy Land! Trump can go back to being a MAGA guy, the US military can be safely reduced and funds invested in US manufacturing! Congress can go back to representing the American people! Western businesses will thrive on all that cheap oil delivered by our new Muslim friends in the Middle East![9]
Israel delenda est. Our deliverance is at hand.
Notes
[1] Kathleen Ferris, James Joyce and the Burden of Disease (Kindle edition), p. 17
[2] Grok
[3] X (formerly Twitter) post by analyst Brian Allen (@allenanalysis), dated March 11, 2026
[4] X (Twitter) post by THE ISLANDER (@IslanderWORLD), posted on or around March 6, 2026.
[5] jonathanlarsen.substack.com
[6] jonathanlarsen.substack.com
[7] Grok
[8] Why Iran, Not America, Now Controls the Global Energy Economy
[9] Israel Shamir, Unz Review https://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-purim-war-against-iran/