Category: Political Commentary, US Politics, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Satire, War and Conflict, Economics, Urban Wronski

Split image evoking 1953 Tehran and 2026 missile strikes over Iran, with declassified document text bleeding across both halves.

The Monster They Made (Part 1)

The coup did not sow the seeds for the Islamic Revolution. It constructed the machinery. SAVAK liquidated every secular democrat who might have led a modern Iran. The mosque was left standing because it was the one institution the secret police found too difficult to penetrate. Every morning the Australian media tells us the bombing is regrettable but the regime is monstrous. It does not explain who built the regime.

A darkly comic music-hall illustration showing an oversized grotesque figure in a business suit pointing at a gilded mushroom cloud chandelier, while in the background a bombed city silhouette looms and a child holds an almost-empty water bottle beside a drainage culvert.

The Lovely War

Donald Trump threatens Iran the way he once threatened a recalcitrant steak: same wounded, flinty, infant-king fury. A working homage to Martin Amis — on the Epstein flights, the six-billion-dollar goon squad, the taunting of a proud civilisation, and a nine-year-old girl in Minab waiting for the water that is her birthright. The infant-king has other plans.

A baroque, maximalist digital composite in the style of a satirical political cartoon meets high-church iconography. Donald Trump sits enthroned at the head of a long gilded mahogany table, rendered in soft AI halo-light — the kind of beatific glow normally reserved for Renaissance altarpieces. He wears both a business suit and a suggestion of papal vestments, loosely layered. Around him, courtiers in military medals and tech-bro stubble genuflect, arms outstretched. Eagles, American flags, and a faint suggestion of dollar signs float among the golden light. The composition deliberately mimics Last Supper staging. Background hints at a gilded ballroom-temple with crystal chandeliers. Colour palette: deep crimson, imperial gold, and sickly angelic white. The mood is equal parts reverent and grotesque — Rubens meets Mad magazine. No text overlay.

Trump is not The Messiah, just a very Naughty Boy

When Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a divine healer — haloed, beatific, hovering over the sick like a Sistine saviour — the cult of self had finally annexed the cult of Christ. A satirical dispatch, written in homage to Martin Amis, from the gilded ballroom-temple of the Trumpian court: where the joke is on all of us.

Mission Impossible

Trump’s Hormuz blockade is live. Oil is at $102. China’s Defence Minister says the strait is open for Chinese ships and dares the US to stop them. A forty-nation coalition is forming against the blockade. And one of the last two tankers carrying pre-war oil on earth is heading to Australia. Urban Wronski on the war Trump cannot win.

Raccoon in a suit sitting between two men at an interview table with a microphone

VANCE DROPS IN

JD Vance has just returned from negotiations with Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Two C-130s are still on a dirt strip outside Isfahan. And the Vice President would like to explain, in his own words, why this is going tremendously. Urban Wronski channels Clarke and Dawe. Stand by.

The radome spheres of Pine Gap intelligence facility visible against the Australian desert sky at dusk, small against the vast red landscape

Not Reporting A War Part 2

Pete Hegseth is the Peter Principle applied to the largest weapons arsenal in human history. Pine Gap guides the missiles. Australian-made F-35 parts are in the payload. And our media calls it a partnership. Part Two of Urban Wronski’s investigation into what Australia’s press is not reporting, and what our silence is costing.