"FOG OF WAR:" RememberAmalek's Guide to Decoding Iran War Propaganda
And how bad this could all get
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RememberAmalek aka @gaypride is one of Polymarket’s most storied and least filtered traders, with over $1.3m in profits since mid-2024. We last caught up with him during the New York mayoral election, where he spotted the electoral upside of ‘narcissistic psychopathy’ when Zohran Mamdani was trading at just 8%.
Amalek is also a serious student of Middle East history and has been turning his attention to the Iran war. The Oracle caught up with him to discuss drivers of the conflict, and how bad things could get.
This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.
You lost money fading the Iran strike, then had a big catchup. What happened?
My logic on basically all of the strike markets is just like, default NO until something happens, because the returns are often pretty good on the short term. And I really didn’t think it was going to happen. I knew they were sending assets, I knew the same things everyone knew. There was the talks and all the geopolitical noise. Some sounded like it was going positively, some negatively.
My main belief was just around the midterms being so close. We are really not that far from the midterm. It’s pretty likely this will spill at least deep into summer and end up being a very relevant point in the midterm. And you know, Senate terms are quite long, so if you start talking about Iowa going blue, Texas going blue, Alaska and all these various places, that’s just very consequential for an extended period of time in American politics.
When the strike happened, I lost a bunch on the NO positions. Then I made it all back and more on Khamenei being out of power. That’s the other half of the strategy. When you’re wrong on the fade, you have to be ready to flip. That’s where I think I have a real edge over a lot of people on this site.
How do you think about Trump’s psychology here? What motivated him to do this?
I would lean into the kind of megalomaniac, narcissist camp. I’m not really anti-Trump but I think probably he’s doing the same thing he did in his first term, leaning on the same people he knew from decades ago in New York. You know, many of those people are American Zionists. Kushner, Witkoff, many of these people. Trump is very, very reliant on the last guy that he talked to.
How should traders be thinking about Iranian escalation? What are you actually watching?
The mistake most people make is watching the American and Israeli side for signals. That’s where everyone is looking. I think it’ll be much easier to tell, and this is something that is kind of central to trading on Poly, by following the Iranian side of the conversation where things are actually escalating.
There’s tiers with anything. You know, there’s closing the strait, but then there’s how they’ve closed the strait. There’s hitting a couple tankers here and there and spiking insurance, versus hitting tanker after tanker after tanker. There’s hitting facilities in Fujairah on the UAE coast. There’s hitting the [Saudi] East-West pipeline. They have material for dirty bombs at a minimum. A fatwa from a senior Shia figure would be significant. They haven’t done any of that, and that says a lot.
What are the most important sources you’re following now for signal or anti-signal?
This is one of the most important things for anyone trading these markets right now. Israel went viral on Polymarket during the 12-day war. So there’s a huge amount of Israeli money on this platform. It’s already been at minimum an eight-figure transfer of wealth from Western traders to people following Israeli news; Israeli media was a lot more optimistic about the strikes than media in the west. For the strike markets and the Khamenei markets, all the supposed Polymarket sharps were heavily on the no side. The Israelis cleaned them out. A lot of those Israeli traders now have significantly more capital to throw around.
The problem is Israeli news is not what most of those traders think it is. Israel does not have a free press in the Western sense. They have a military censorship bureau and a press that is deeply interwoven with the defense establishment. Sometimes that means genuinely excellent advanced intelligence. Other times you get deliberate disinformation in service of Israeli military objectives. And the Israelis trading on this platform trust their news completely. They don’t see the other side of it.
Any specific stories that come to mind as being clearly bogus?
The News 12 report claiming it was the UAE that had struck Iranian desalination infrastructure. That was zero percent. The Emirates are a merchant state. They are not going to strike Iranian desalination sites 20 miles from their own coast when they’re so reliant on desalination themselves. The Israelis would love to get Gulf states visibly involved in a coordinated operation against Iran. That’s their dream scenario. So when that report dropped and the market spiked to 90 cents with real size, I was in hard on the other side. That’s wartime propaganda serving Israeli strategic interests, full stop. You don’t need to know anything else.
On the other end, when Israeli reporters were saying Mujtaba was going to be the next Supreme Leader, they’re not getting that wrong. How embarrassing would that be? Their whole posture is “we know everything about you.” The core of their intelligence reporting, from a handful of trusted reporters, is very, very good. Parsing the difference between those two types of reporting is where the money is right now.
Any interesting wallets you are watching here?
One big one is @thequietrisk. I think he has close to a 100% hit rate right now on the major calls. He was sizing up on these correlated positions in crazy size. I was fading him at first, like, come on, this guy’s nuts. He ended up hitting them. He also got the Hamas ceasefire right back in October, got in ahead of time when there was really no public talk of it. Every time I look at his wallet I think this guy is nuts and then he hits it. He’s big on Reza Pahlavi coming back too. I keep an eye on him.
Do you have a theory about what the US and Israel are actually trying to do here?
The IRGC was designed to be the vanguard of the revolution, the insulating protective force of the entire Iranian revolutionary structure. But it’s also extraordinarily wealthy. The profitable sectors of the Iranian economy are essentially controlled by them. And that creates a vulnerability. Wealth and ideology are not always compatible over time.
I think the American and Israeli strategy, though I can’t confirm this, is a selective decapitation program. Not just kill everyone, but kill the people who are hardliners and leave the people who are more conciliatory. You look at who they’ve targeted and who they’ve left around and it’s hard not to see a pattern. There are relatively senior figures who are still around, while two layers down their command chain have been killed. How do you explain that if not selection? They did the same thing in Afghanistan with the Taliban. They waited years for Mullah Omar to pass away, conducted an airstrike on the next guy, and the next guy after that was one they could work with.
But the decision to kill Khamenei was very strange. Very, very bizarre. Here’s the thing that almost nobody is talking about. By most accounts I’ve been able to piece together, Khamenei was actually one of the only senior figures in the Iranian regime who was genuinely opposed to nuclear proliferation. He was opposed to taking that final step. The entire regime has been absorbing all the downside of having a nuclear program, the sanctions, the isolation, the economic damage, and none of the upside of actually having a deterrent. That was a concession to the hardliners in the regime but the lack of going all the way, that was largely his opposition.
So when you kill the one guy who was restraining their nuclear program, you have to ask what the logic is. Either you have very high confidence in who replaces him and what concessions you can extract, or you wanted a justification to keep drawing the Americans deeper in. I don’t know which it is. But it is one of the most consequential decisions of the whole war and I don’t think it’s being analyzed correctly by almost anyone.
What about the opposition inside Iran? There was this view that we’re going to take out the regime and that will facilitate protesters taking over. Do you buy that?
Yes and no. The Iranian regime is actually fairly unpopular, especially in Tehran among the urban elite. That’s different from a lot of places where the capital is your base of support. In Iran the support for the regime is more in the rural Persian core.
But here’s the problem. There is no organized opposition that could serve as a catch-all. The MEK is a cult. It’s just a very weird organization, nobody actually likes it inside Iran. P-JAK is basically just a front for the PKK, which means it’s a foreign Kurdish operation. The Khuzestani separatists, come on, that’s just the Iran-Iraq War redux. Any of these separatist movements, Kurdish, Arab, Baluch, are going to repel the nationalist population, which is real and significant. Iran has a strong national identity, they see themselves as a great power. If your opposition network is entirely made up of separatist ethnic groups trying to break off pieces of the country, you’re not going to win the nationalists. That’s been a persistent strategic failure of the Israeli and American approach to Iran for decades.
Is the U.S. military capable of winning a ground war in Iran?
When you start to look at the US military and realize it’s not as strong as everyone thinks, it’s really a big deal. The whole Cold War justification was, okay, we might not make more fighters than the USSR but our fighters are better. Then we finally see interstate conventional conflict in Ukraine and it turns out that wasn’t really true either. It’s ahead sometimes, behind at others. And the US has zero cultural appetite for taking losses.
Iran looks at that and sees an opportunity. If they can make this costly enough, spike oil, cause a recession going into midterms, they can potentially break the political will on the American side. That is genuinely their strategic play. It’s not crazy. It worked in Vietnam. The question is whether they have enough runway to execute it before the Israelis and Americans finish what they started. Because if the Iranians end up holding out long enough and making this a high enough cost, and you see a withdrawal, there’s no one coming to replace American presence in the region. The Europeans aren’t coming. Nobody’s coming.
If this shit escalates from here, there’s a very real possibility this ends up being just a really, really, really big war. I don’t think Korea or Vietnam would really be as consequential as this could end up being. You have the global oil supply at stake. You have a potential nuclear proliferation moment. You have the existence of Israel and rule of the Sauds and Gulf monarchies in general endangered. You have the credibility of the entire US-backed regional order on the line.
If Iran weathers this and the Americans withdraw, the Israelis are a weaker country than they think, they live in the shadow of the Six-Day War but forget Yom Kippur where Golda Meir was issued cyanide capsules, nuclear bombers were readied, and a last stand in the Golan is what saved the Galilee. The Egyptians don’t like that peace deal. The Gulf states are hedging. They are just waiting to see which way this goes. The whole regional architecture is dependent on American credibility and willingness to stay engaged. If that breaks, you’re going to see a very different Middle East very quickly.
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