Mr. Bet-David was up front early, telling the crowd there would be a political aspect to his overall presentation, and also professed himself a Christian, expressing that prayer would be involved. He was candid about the aims of the gathering, along with its undertones, but was respectful of people practicing other faiths.

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His predecessor on the stage said that Bet-David Consulting and his leveraged companies, existed to ‘Save America'. After a day and a half of programming, I still couldn't figure out what they were saving America from. Fifty-three percent tax rates? I'm still uncertain.

Mr. Bet-David was a gentleman to me, personally, and had a very unique knack for recognizing members of the audience who may have been less engaged due to the lack of attention from fellow conference-goers. He conducted himself as a decent human being and deserves credit for exhibiting good character.

I am a capitalist, but the excessive praise of the system that is obviously failing so many Americans, was a bit nauseating. There was no acknowledgement that trickle down economics hasn’t been serving all our citizens, has fostered a large volume of greed, creating gross income inequality throughout the United States and within much of western capitalism.

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As Canadian conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, told Joe Rogan, ‘fifty years ago a barber and a waitress could buy a house, have a big yard for the dog, have four kids and put meat and potatoes on the table every night; today a lawyer and an accountant can’t do the same’.

There was no understanding, nor empathy, that such economic footing is no longer available in North America. It was sickening, especially considering the vehement hatred towards socialism, which they falsely labeled communism.

After incorrectly claiming three times that he caused ‘The Governor of Minnesota to resign’, which PBD podcaster Vinnie Oshana properly corrected, they brought 23-year old YouTuber, Nick Shirley, to the stage. The young Mr. Shirley repeatedly spoke of ‘exposing’ the multi-billion dollar fraud scheme involving Somali immigrants, and mused to the audience that his life was turned upside down, when in fact, he should have been thanked by Democrats.

The excessive use of the word ‘exposed’ by right wing Independent Journalists is nothing short of goofy. Every week Candace Owens is ‘exposing’ some new pile of nonsense, rooted in extreme innuendo.

For Shirley to carry on about widespread fraud, and speak of the Vice President and Elon Musk citing his report, when they did so to advance their political agenda, rang as pathetic. He wore it as a badge of honor when his efforts were simply being used for the gain of individuals who have not a care in the world for him. Being retweeted by a MAGA-aligned politician or businessman doesn’t validate anyone’s ‘reporting’.

There was some fraud in the system, but the only reason MAGA jumped on the story is because ICE invaded Minneapolis and was efforting to turn the public against the immigrant community of one of America’s most peaceful cities. Within a month of Mr. Shirley’s video, two American citizens were murdered in cold blood by ICE agents on the streets of Minny.

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For this administration to be speaking about fraud or corruption committed by anyone else is ludicrous. This is, hands down, the most openly corrupt White House in the history of the United States. They have no shame. Their concentration on Minnesota in December and January of last year was nothing more than a gotcha game.

Then Mr. Shirley discussed how he wanted to see what a communist country was really like; so he took his YouTube channel to Cuba.

He claimed his freedom of speech was restricted from the time he arrived, not considering for a moment the U.S. has been nothing short of an aggressive enemy of the Cuban government since 1959. It appeared he had no understanding of the history of Castro’s Revolution, nor the significance of the acts of war taken against the Cuban people by the United States.

He went on to tell the audience that babies were starving and he spoke to people who hadn’t eaten a chicken in years. He made no mention of the fact that the United States has had an embargo in place against Cuba for sixty-seven years that has strangled their economy into abject poverty. Forget mentioning the education system in Cuba is known to be quite respectable.

I was once told by a Soviet-educated engineer from Cuba who left the island to raise his kids in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and works as a superintendent of a working-class/working-poor, low-rise apartment building, that there is no such thing as depression in Cuba. This is a man who believes in capitalism enough that he forwent opportunities as a professional throughout the Eastern Bloc to come work a hands on job that includes cleaning rat infested New York City basements. So he isn’t a huge proponent of communism, per se. But he consistently highlighted that the lack of a capitalist rat race in the Cuban system, makes for a more mentally healthy society.

Mr. Shirley’s lack of mention of the U.S. blockade that is actively killing Cubans, and has been for almost seventy years, was troubling. Considering his age, I doubt he even understands that’s why the country is so impoverished. Instead, he blamed it on their economic system, and not a single person in the audience had an inkling of doubt on their faces that his assessment was accurate.

There was no discussion that the Soviet Union, a purely communist country, spent at least half of last century as one of the world’s two pre-eminent superpowers. If Ronald Reagan didn’t frivolously print money, run up the debt and spend the USSR into the ground by forcing them into major military expenditure, the Soviet system would still be standing today with a massive global sphere of influence.

With the national debt accelerated during that era and since, the United States today finds itself $40 trillion in the hole and is actively falling behind ‘Communist’ China as the world's leading economic power. The rhetoric coming out of Vault 26 failed to acknowledge the devastating end in sight produced by such debt, and spoke as if all is well with capitalism; not because it is, but because it’s the anti-communism. When anyone spends their time bellyaching over the far side of the pendulum, their end tends to crumble, blind from senseless bias.

They incorrectly claimed, ‘they’ (meaning the Democratic Party) are embracing communism, and proceeded to identify the system as ‘free stuff’, showing a complete misunderstanding of economic theory, essentially on purpose, which is rhetoric designed to make people possessive of the fruits of their perceived labor.

Everyone knows that healthcare and its costs are a major issue in the United States. Yet, there was no acknowledgement that our European allies and Canada have excellent healthcare, and it’s built into the infrastructure of their economic system. Many of those insurance carriers say they don’t make money from writing policies and do it for the public good.

These nations’ systems are quite a bit more socialist. The European Union is the third largest economic bloc in the world, so it hasn't crushed them the way the attendees at Vault would have you believe.

That’s the difference between other cultures and the United States. The Germans are a people. The British are a people. The French are a people.

Americans aren’t one unified people. We are a hodge-podge of differing nationalities here for the sole purpose of profiting off the corporation that is the United States of America. Our citizens don’t care because we aren’t one culture trying preserve what’s best for one another.

Mr. Bet-David said, when he was selecting schools for his children, he asked what curriculum was taught regarding capitalism, socialism and communism. He was told kids were taught the pros and cons of all three. He seemed taken aback that anyone would teach the pros of a communist system.

Forget that makes a child educationally well-rounded, particularly from a standpoint of economics. Patrick felt it to be a corruption of his children’s young minds, and sent them to a Christian school so they would learn ‘conservative values’. He proceeded to say, he didn’t care if the other schools offered a greater entrance rate into Ivy League and higher-end universities.

For Mr. Bet-David that may be acceptable, being that his primary residence is worth $50 million. But for the audience of predominantly white men, who are constantly bellyaching about their beleaguered existence, they have no right to complain when their children have reduced opportunity as they enter college and the workforce.

As long as you prioritize the Bible and reinforcement of capitalism at the primary school level, don’t whine when your kids have half the opportunity of Jewish, Asian, or Indian families, putting their kids through schools that prepare them to attend the top universities and enter the workforce primed to attain the best jobs.

Most of the room were Trump voters engaging in a communism scarefest, and celebrating the broken system that is western capitalism.

Donald Trump was so hell bent on stifling Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, that after setting the investments back four years in Ohio, he relented, but forced Intel into giving the U.S. Government ten percent of their company, which is arguably the most socialist policy enacted in the United States in nearly a century.

When Barack Obama bailed out GM with a loan in 2008, which was paid back faster than expected, with interest, many Republicans opposed it because it was considered government intervention in free markets.

Mr. Trump forced a chip company to give ten percent of its company to the U.S. government, and no one from the MAGAsphere said a word, forgetting that it’s socialist policy.

There were six other microchip makers associated with the CHIPS and Science Act where the president forced some sort of government ownership. Overall, the Trump Administration has built a portfolio of nearly thirty companies the U.S. Government has taken an equity stake in during his time as president, including a ‘Golden Share’ in U.S. Steel that gives it veto power over major corporate decisions. Just this week, the U.S. Government is said to be taking a thirty-five percent stake in Venezuelan oil reserves, which doubles down on the communist dictatorship we recently claimed to overthrow; forget the fact that it’s open plunder.

Not only is this an egregious double standard, but I’m not sure these people are well versed enough in economics to be concerned that Donald Trump has engaged in the greatest set of purely communist policies of any president in my lifetime.

Perhaps they should have gone to better K-12 schools that taught all facets of economic theory rather than patronize schoolhouses that instill conservative values, rooted in senseless rhetoric.

Barring my disagreement with much of yesterday’s commentary, Pat was a gentleman, and perhaps one day I can have this debate with him, in depth, on a Valuetainment platform, and we can have a meaningful exchange of ideas.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ratcliffe came to deliver a message.

‘Do Not Test The Resolve of NATO With Direct Conflict’.

I think the message was delivered in a lot softer language and the visit saw Mr. Ratcliffe express to the Russians the pitfalls of war between the two parties; its negative impact on the entire world; the tremendous loss of life that would take place on both sides, the level of destruction that would be realized, and economic pain felt. And of course, the CIA Director likely spoke of the nuclear exchange that could emerge, threatening all of humanity.

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All of that is to say the WSJ was correct in their reporting. Mr. Ratcliffe could have been there, more fundamentally, to discuss Ukraine. Depending on which propaganda machine you listen to, depends on who you believe is controlling that war. But the lack of interceptors delivered to the Ukrainians by the United States has elevated the Russian battlefield advantage in recent weeks.

Italian-French made anti-aircraft systems have been delivered, the effectiveness of which is yet to be seen.

If anyone wants to understand why the United States backs wars like the one in Ukraine, or supports Israel’s use of U.S. weapons, all one needs to do is look at those Italian-French made platforms.

No one has any idea how they will perform in real world scenarios.

Türkiye, Japan, South Korea, the UK, the EU nations, even China, all have large homegrown arsenals, but have little understanding of their performance, nor how to tweak those platforms, because those countries don’t traverse the globe backing wars that utilize their hardware.

When the U.S. allows Israel to consistently use their weapons across West Asia, one of the goals is to get real time data on our kit utilizing a client state, formally distancing ourselves from the death they impose. It’s how the Pentagon and its weapons contractors scrap, upgrade and improve our hardware so it is war ready should we enter into conflict, and is a magnificent driver of the defense budget.

When the American people claim they have no interest in giving Israel weapons; of course they do. When they claim they don’t want their tax dollars going to the killing of children in Gaza; sadly, yes they do. Their ignorance doesn’t excuse their interests.

When the United States delivers weapons systems to the Israelis and allows them to use them in brutal perpetuity, it is part of the Pentagon budget the American people have consistently voted for every year of their lives, on both sides of the aisle, and is a crucial portion of the freedom they claim to enjoy through the armed forces.

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The electorate’s lack of knowledge does not indemnify them from responsibility for the U.S. armed forces engaging in real world weapons testing through our client states, particularly because the majority of voters consider themselves pro-military.

The American people are as responsible for Ukraine and Gaza as much as anyone else, whether they like it or not. Until they vote for someone who is going to slash the Pentagon budget by seventy-five or eighty percent, they are beyond complicit. Frankly, they are the culprit.

After three and half years of war in Ukraine, Russia has harnessed that very battlefield advantage. This conflict has allowed them to understand the effectiveness of their weaponry, and given them time to tweak its shortcomings. They also have an awareness of how their hardware performs against American built systems, which is what the majority of NATO possesses, and is one of the key reasons near term direct conflict is advantageous for Russia.

The Russians are already on a war footing. Their population is prepared, and they possess the most battle-hardened armed forces of any major power in the world. The logistical humiliation they suffered early on in Ukraine has been resolved; their supply lines honed, and their pre-positioning solidified.

By contrast, the Europeans haven’t been to war in eighty-one years. They haven’t had their cities bombed and set aflame in three generations, and their armed forces have seen no action on the continent whatsoever. Barring their roles in Afghanistan and Iraq, which at this juncture was a long time ago, the nations that make up the European pillar of NATO have not experienced live combat in nearly a century, leaving their militaries green, and their populations ill-prepared for pain.

They have gotten a solid lesson in logistics from the war in Ukraine, and have gained a strong understanding of Russian strategy and behavior. But that doesn’t prepare their population or soldiers for war.

Considering the United States has severe stockpile shortages with their most sophisticated weapons, the Russians may never find a better opportunity than the present. In the event of conflict, the U.S. could mobilize private industry under wartime directives to produce munitions at a much higher rate. But the United States and Europe still lack the industrial base and workforce that possesses the grit to churn out military assets in the numbers required to enter into, and maintain, major power war.

It’s conceivable Russia sees this as a generational opportunity.

The question would then have to be, with Donald Trump doing the bidding of the Kremlin for the majority of a decade, including on the battlefield in Ukraine, was the Iran War started to help disarm the United States and its allies?

Other than perhaps the impressionable, mindless, MAGAphants, everyone knows that any Iranian conflict could not be won without a massive ground force. Yet, the president proceeded anyway.

Everyone wants to blame Israel, but that’s simply not taking responsibility for the failures of our own elected officials. A little more than half of the American people elected Donald Trump to make his own informed assessment, along with our massive military and intelligence infrastructure, as to whether Israeli sentiment was reliable.

The United States is a superpower. We don’t get dragged into anything. The greatest nonsensical myth of this conflict is that our client state with ten million people and a GDP of $420 billion, dragged us into the Iran War. And if the lobby were so strong, Joe Biden would still be president. His coalition was destroyed by Israel’s campaign in Gaza, exhibiting the abject weakness of Israeli control over U.S. elections.

Blaming Israel for war in Iran is nothing more than the modern day WMD. It’s a bought and paid for narrative being peddled throughout independent media, which is now the mainstream, has permeated every corner of the internet, and is an extraordinarily uninformed silly position that is inconsistent with the facts.

The facts are, Israel has tried to get the numerous U.S. administrations to engage in conflict with Iran. None were successful until this president, who has a separate agenda than all of his predecessors, particularly one to weaken the United States on the world stage, and walk away from our allies and partners across the globe.

Not a single American voter elected Donald Trump to listen to our client state. If we put a president in office who is too dumb to adhere to basic American military doctrine, which is to not fight war without overwhelming force, then it’s the fault of the American people and the administration. They shouldn’t have casted their ballots for a man who is grossly incompetent, doesn’t listen to the Pentagon, and appointed a Secretary of Defense who fired everyone with informed opinions.

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The Iran War is proving to be the catalyst for advancement of Russian interests. It has exhausted our munitions while Trump’s Chinese trade war makes it incredibly difficult to rearm, and has caused him to abandon our Asian and European allies, while he also destroys our relationship with Canada. And it has kept the price of energy high, which fuels the Russian war machine.

The weakening of the United States and American withdrawal from the world is not in Israeli interests, unless they see their own alignment with Russia as a goal. There is an argument to be made for that which no one addresses, that I see as, not only possible, but probable in the coming decades.

But the good news for the American people is, if that’s the case, Israel has no future interest in the United States or its government.

But if the Israelis are responsible for the manner in which the United States chose to fight this war, their only aim would have been to separate from the U.S. in the future, not further integration. It was clear to every honest thinker that the American war plan, as constructed, was only going to benefit Russia, to a lesser degree, China, and possibly Iran.

All the results of the Iran War have been completely in Russia’s interest, and we know Mr. Trump’s Russian entanglement is real.

There is no other explanation for fighting a war without rallying the world and our allies to our side. Under no circumstances would the United States choose to fight an air war that was guaranteed to fail, nor would they knowingly exhaust all their munitions. You don’t have to read the Art of War to know the American war plan would end in failure.

Prior to February 28, I posted a seventeen point post on a childhood friend’s unfortunate Facebook page describing in detail why the United States required a massive ground force to topple Iran, and I don’t work in the Pentagon.

The decision to fight the Iran War the way the U.S. chose wasn’t simply incompetence.

Incompetence is one of the world’s great shields for corruption and often runs interference for an organization’s true aims.

All one needed to do is listen to Colin Powell’s commentary on overwhelming force, which wasn’t all that long ago. Believing the Trump Administration entered the Iranian conflict to win, is naive at this point.

If Putin attacks NATO, there will be no question the president went to war as part of a Kremlin plan. A Russian attack on Europe will not be some innocuous byproduct of the Iran War. Anyone who suggests that, has no understanding of Russian capability, thought process, or intelligence posture, and continues to ignore the obvious Russian problem Donald Trump has had since he came down the escalator.

He has delivered Putin a demoralized, disarmed United States, who is fresh out of resolve, turned its back on its allies, while exposing Europe as a nearly defenseless target for the Kremlin. And Ukraine is well on its way to being sacked.

Russia seems to be setting up for the expansion of war. The Belarusians are engaged in training exercises in numbers that are concerning, and Lukashenko met Putin yesterday in Moscow. They appear to be conducting movements that suggest support for the Russian military; perhaps a Baltic incursion.

The Russians are in the midst of a troop buildup outside of St. Petersburg. Right now it appears to be in the low tens of thousands rather than the 120,000 or greater range that would raise formal alarm bells in Brussels, but there is a level of unease throughout Europe that precipitated the CIA Director’s Russian visit.

Germany uncovered a series of heavily armed drones within their borders. Where they got the intelligence of their existence or how they got into the country is unknown. Whether the aircraft entered through another EU country, a port, or an unguarded shore is unclear. Earlier this month, Russian drones came close to taking down a Ukrainian flagged cargo plane in Germany, both incidents exhibiting the nightmare of drone warfare.

German intelligence fingered the man responsible for the seized drones as a Ukrainian national considered to be a Russian intelligence asset. The intent of these weapons was to launch them at targets from inside Germany, either to go after Ukrainian weapons production on German soil, or launch them at NATO targets similar to what Israel did from inside Iranian territory at the start of that war.

That’s a tactic that will be seen during the kick off of future engagements. Attackers will not only fly sorties and fire medium to long range drones and missiles. But picking up key hits from slow moving, low flying drones, launched from inside the defender’s territory will become commonplace.

Those close in launches will be harder to detect on radar, creating less time to react. In this case, a nation like Germany or Poland will be concentrating on getting their air forces into the sky, shooting down Russian Su-35s and Su-57s, rather than small drones coming from inside their own territory, not flying much higher than a local police drone.

How many other NATO countries have drones been smuggled into? A drone can easily be taken apart, fit in the back of an SUV, moved in large numbers, and assembled upon arrival. The Russians have been engaging in drone warfare, both offensively and defensively for years. The United States has not, and has proven in Iran, they’re not prepared for it. It lends to reason, neither is the rest of NATO.

Both missiles and drones destroyed U.S. bases, particularly in Bahrain, that served as supply hubs for Navy ships currently unable to properly feed their sailors. That isn’t a function of apathy or wasteful Pentagon spending. It was a collapse of U.S. supply lines and an Iranian defeat of American wartime logistics.

They say, Colonels think in terms of strategy and tactics. Generals think in terms of logistics. It’s one of four key reasons we were interested in defending Ukraine.

1. We couldn’t allow Russia to invade a sovereign European state, especially one whom we issued security guarantees for giving up their nuclear weapons.

2. We wanted to weaken Russia and get a greater understanding of their war machine.

3. We wanted to understand the performance of our weaponry against Russian kit.

4. We wanted to practice the logistics of war into Europe.

Moving our war machine across the Atlantic is no easy feat. Getting an understanding of what that looks like before you actually have to move troops, is crucial information for the U.S. military to gather. So we, just as much as the Russians, have prepared for this eventuality over the last three and half years.

There is a clear disconnect between Donald Trump and CIA. There always has been. His famous speech in front of the wall that holds stars for fallen CIA officers across the globe will always be considered gross disrespect. It’s almost surprising they haven’t killed him, because that was a stunning move that spat on our intelligence services, and should have been considered unpatriotic enough to never garner another vote. So Ratcliffe going overseas doesn’t necessarily represent the administration in its purest form, and the president has distanced himself from any potential red line the director issued over NATO.

Russia has the advantage of a friend in the White House who is more poised to help the Kremlin than our allies; or at least stand idly by. When you add the Korean issue of last week, considering North Korea has combat troops fighting with the Russians in Ukraine, and has deployed missile systems with their operating units inside Russia, it’s obvious the President of the United States is preparing to assist our enemies in taking down our allies across the world by standing aside under the banner of America First.

When you consider that’s his tact, it makes it obvious that Donald Trump’s purpose for the Iran War was to exhaust the United States for his Russian partners. Knowing the history of America First, it’s no shock their online information machine blamed the Jews.

Russia stated publicly this week that if Ukraine doesn’t make an agreement by the end of the year, Moscow will be issuing them a surrender document, citing the Ukrainian inability to protect Kyiv.

History will show the Iran War was designed as a losing effort to exhaust the United States of its munitions, military morale, and its people of their resolve; and Donald Trump will have done so in concert with Vladimir Putin.

That’s why a private ninety minute conversation between the two during the second week of the Iran War resulted with the President of the United States going on a two week, full bore, pathetic, blame game attack on NATO for the Hormuz closure, which seemed to be the death knell for transatlantic relations.

With the Pentagon redeploying Patriot missile batteries to the Persian Gulf, followed by the president restricting future military exercises, our abandonment of the Korean Peninsula is nearing completion.

If Japan didn’t have the ability to dump massive amounts of U.S. Treasuries on the open market, collapsing the U.S. economy, Mr. Trump would be dismantling that alliance too.

Add the escalation of an irrational, senseless trade war with Canada at the exact wrong time for the American economy, Donald Trump’s overt dismantling of the U.S. empire, real time, is happening before our eyes. He is visibly setting up American allies for defeat at the hands of their foes by walking away from American interests, one by one, across the globe.

If he isn’t removed from office, the United States will collapse as a superpower. All of our interests and client states across the world will be overrun by their natural regional enemies.

The America First dream of becoming the hegemon of the western hemisphere, retreating to the role of a regional power, resulting in the rise of authoritarian multi-polarity, will soon be realized. Sadly, Mr. Vance will pursue the same agenda.

The United States cannot survive twenty-eight more months of an America First government without experiencing a final geopolitical shift that results in the destruction of the post-World War II order.

J.D. Vance remarked that Canada came in with an eleventh hour stance that was unreasonable, but only said so after Canadian officials claimed the U.S. did the same, which is in line with the way Donald Trump has negotiated with a whole host of nations around the world.

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This is just the latest in a spate of allies the president has kicked in the teeth over the last two weeks. He threatened to bomb Oman, vowed to scale back military exercises with South Korea, and now Mr. Trump continues to violate his own USMCA, a trade agreement he called one of the best in history.

Mr. Carney, in a multi-party system, has an approval rating in the 70% range, and it rises every time Mr. Trump attacks Canada. By contrast, the president’s approval rating is in the toilet. At home, the two leaders are not on the same footing.

The economy is not doing particularly well in either country. In the U.S., the AI boom is increasingly considered a bubble, and is almost universally understood to be the underpinning of all American economic growth.

Last month’s jobs number in the United States was terrible. Most voters, economists, and politicians agree Trump’s tariff scheme has been a complete failure and has done nothing but put undue strain on the economy. A new trade war with Canada is not going to be well received by the public in the U.S., particularly when Mr. Carney is openly saying Canada was attacked. The Canadians will have to respond, and thus far they have vowed a dollar of dollar retaliation against the United States. But if Canada were to escalate by cutting off electricity to the northeastern and northern midwestern states, or were to restrict sales of crude, energy prices will continue to climb.

With 81% of U.S. electricity imports, and 60% of oil imports coming from Canada, when coupled with the global energy deficiencies presented by the Iran and Ukraine Wars, the American consumer will experience lighter wallets because of this latest foolish gambit by Donald Trump.

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But this isn’t merely a near term food fight started by a president with weird ideas.

One of my big positions during the 2016 presidential campaign was, if Donald Trump were to be elected, America First would seek to absorb Canada and will eventually begin an economic war with our northern neighbor, attempting to destabilize them from within.

They started by renegotiating NAFTA in 2017, but with stable professionals in the Trump Administration at the time, the president lacked the wherewithal to truly attack Canada.

The next big phase of attacks came during the ‘Canadian Freedom Convoy’ in 2022. A few months later at the Munich Security Conference, Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, was asked if the money behind the trucker fiasco was coming from people associated with Donald Trump. She responded, ‘I’m not going to name names, but we know where the money is coming from’. That’s why the Canadian government was so heavy handed and froze the bank accounts of the people involved.

The ‘Convoy’ was a coordinated effort to destabilize Canada, particularly by manipulating blue collar people unhappy with the COVID policies of the Canadian government, by zeroing in on an anti-vax position. Even the online videos used to promote the happening were produced identically to the MAGA media of the era. It was obvious who was financing, what amounted to, an uprising from Canadian workers.

Within ten days of taking office for his second term, President Trump started aggressively attacking Canada, and before the end of January, 2025, Justin Trudeau gave his famous speech that prepared the Canadian public for an unfortunate reset in future relations with the United States. Mr. Trump started into his ‘51st State’ nonsense, which is completely belligerent, disrespectful, and challenged the sovereignty of our border partner. Even yesterday the president posted on Truth Social that ‘[Canada] wants the benefits of being a State, without being one’ (sic).

That’s patently false and isn’t worthy of discussion.

This is a significant position for America First and exhibits they seek a future authoritarian United States that dominates the western hemisphere. Otherwise, no Republican president would be eager to absorb forty-two million new citizens, thirty million of which would be Democratic voters.

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In the 2016 primaries, when Donald Trump started saying, ‘America First’, the ADL asked the Trump campaign to be cognizant of what it meant as a historical matter, being that its roots were pro-Nazi.

Though headquartered in Chicago in the 1930s, much of the financing for the America First Committee and the German-American Bund came from Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side.

Some of the money that has been there for over a century still remains, including the kids of Fred Trump’s friends. The America First we see today is made up of the children and grandchildren of those two groups, the latter of which was directly financed by Rudolph Hess and the German Nazi Party.

Trump and Brexit were part of the same intelligence operation and was a deal between the Russians, an out of power group of German elites who now make up the AfD party in Germany, and the historic German-American wealth behind America First. It also features other cultural enemies of Great Britain within the United States.

The goal was to isolate and put an end to the hegemony of the United Kingdom and the offshoots of their empire, which up until 2016, included the U.S. Almost all American presidents have been English, Welch, Scot or Ulster-Scot. The majority of those who were not, were one termers, assassinated, or disgraced, and the Founding Fathers were Brits who didn’t want to pay taxes to the King for their hard work in the New World.

To avoid scrutiny in 2016, America First started as a slogan, which shifted to America First policies, and ultimately to the America First movement many of their backers feel they’re a part of today.

Getting the United Kingdom out of the European Union will lead to the rise of Germany as the hegemon of Western Europe. During the 2008 global recession, the Germans bought up a lot of the continent by bailing out failing economies within the bloc.

The goal of this rising cabal was to remove the UK from the EU and diminish British wealth and influence, while simultaneously having a German-American-America First president elected in the United States. From there they would seek to absorb or harm all historic British assets throughout the world; and that includes Canada as a Commonwealth country.

As a Colonial matter, with Persia initially being a British oil asset; whether you look at the Iran War; or the desire to separate from Israel, which was a British post-World War II political project; or the effort to absorb Canada and Greenland, the America First U.S. government has implemented a plan to see through the same endgame sought by the Third Reich in the Second World War, from the eastern German flank through the Bearing Strait.

The destabilization of Canada is nothing more than a desire to steal its natural resources. They are full of oil, possess many of the rare earth minerals the United States yearns for, and offer a gateway to the arctic, which the U.S. lacks.

It is nothing more than belligerent Nazi imperialism cloaked in Stars and Stripes, which is exactly what America First was in the late 1930s. Publicly, America First sought to distance themselves from the German-American Bund because of accusations of antisemitism and removed Charles Lindbergh as their spokesman. But the overlap of ideology and membership between the two organizations can’t be ignored.

The election of Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 was no different than the election of Fitz Kuhn would have been in the 1930s. The Republicans complain when people in the United States call them Nazis. The reality is, America First are real live Nazis, and they have been after or against anything and everything British since 2016.

That’s what this really is about.

This trade war has no good financial purpose. Trying to damage the Canadian marketplace, particularly while the U.S. economy is in a precarious position, has no sound reasoning. This is an economic attack with long term ideological focus.

If this were a serious trade dispute between the United States and Canada, before America First came to power, it wouldn’t include vicious propaganda from the White House. But that’s not what this is, and never has been.

Two of the last minute bombs dropped in negotiations from the Trump side were, Canada can’t have any other trade deals, of which Mark Carney has struck twenty since taking office; and the United States refused to put bilingual labels on products, which would have maintained the standard labeling of goods for sale in French speaking Canadian provinces, again showing this is an ideological conflict not rooted in economic upheaval.

It was not Mr. Trump’s intention to save American companies money on printing costs. Bilingual labels on products for Canadian export is an irrelevant matter. It was an effort to eradicate British aligned French influence for the eventual annexation of Canadian territory.

Whichever way Donald Trump and America First want to cloak their economic war against Canada, it’s simply more theft of British assets from the same ancestral German forces that have taken control of the American government.

Behind the scenes, the Trump Administration and the America First talkers who have broken with him on the Iran War are one big happy family, and much of their policy and rhetoric is identical to that of the Germans in the 1930s. It’s viciously anti-British and seeks to attack anyone and anything historically aligned with Great Britain.

The result is, the United Kingdom sits isolated and broke outside of the EU, with the deep ties between Wall Street and The City on its last legs. Germany is remilitarizing, and the AfD is increasingly popular in a manner not thought possible a decade ago. Within Germany, the AfD is seen as a modern day extension of the Nazi party who requires repudiation. Yet, the America Firsters in and around the U.S. government support them.

After the 2024 U.S. election, Elon Musk joined their convention by video, and J.D. Vance as sitting Vice President of the United States went to Germany and didn’t meet with then-German Chancellor Sholz, but rather the AfD, who are also an advocate for future deep ties with Russia, beginning with a big fat long term energy deal between the two powers.

The United States doesn’t have a trade problem with Canada. It has a Nazi problem within its own government who is seeking to absorb or destroy anything and everything British, and refight the two world wars of the twentieth century without a shot being fired.

‘When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war will be inevitable’.

America First, the architects of the AfD, and the Russians, have perpetrated a coordinated attack on the British led western world with the intention of seizing it all. That’s what destabilizing and vilifying Canada is all about, and why it was predictable a decade ago. One just had to properly identify who America First really is.

It’s World War I all over again, except this time it’s the descendants of Nikolas and Wilhelm joining together to defeat George, rather than the Nicky and George uniting to defeat Willy.

My thoughts aren’t rooted in German paranoia. They are a brilliant people who are one of the few cultures who believe it’s their God given right to control humanity, and they possess the sophistication to do it.

They financed the return of Lenin from Switzerland, fomenting the Russian Revolution, so the Russians would remove themselves from World War I. It resulted in the rise of the Soviet Union, one of the great superpowers of the twentieth century.

The Germans have shown their ability to manipulate the largest governments and alter geopolitical polarity. America First taking control of the United States is their latest endeavor, and they want Canada just like the Third Reich wanted to possess all of North America, had they gotten that far.

America First ambitions look much like the globe Hitler wanted for his Thousand Year Reich. Often times you will see identical America First memes of western hemisphere maps doused in stars and stripes that were once printed with swastikas in Nazi red and black.

It was a deal they cut with the Russians in exchange for assistance with Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election. The out of power Germans who make up the AfD, and stateside ancestral German wealth, needed the capability of a nation state to harness control of the United States and get the UK out of the EU. As historical cousins, the Russians provided that service with an agreement to split the northern hemisphere from one end of the Bearing Strait to the other, with the intention of removing the Anglo-Saxons from power.

Three campaigns and four years in office, Donald Trump nor his allies, said a single word about the 51st State. Days into this term, it became a central North American policy of this administration.

This has been a core thesis of mine since 2016. Starting with economic warfare, ultimately, America First would seek to absorb Canadian territory. Because I have never been fooled or deluded about who America First is, their once in a century reshaping of the globe has been clear to me.

Canada is merely one of numerous instances, globally, where the policies of the Reich are being seen through by the current U.S. Government under the banner of America First.

Germany will be the last shoe to drop in this global authoritarian takeover.

This position is rooted in the history of 1914-1945, and came about just in time for ‘the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war’ to die.

This is not about a trade deficit; it’s not about American farmers; it’s not about wildfire smoke. It’s what the sons and grandsons of the Founding Fathers referred to in the 1840s as, ‘The German Problem’.

It’s nothing more than the same people, fighting the same wars for a thousand years, with its once every century or two realignment.

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Under any other circumstances, I would say it’s a shocking development. But President Trump routinely takes steps to harm our allies, cozy up to our enemies, and institute policies that are devastating to the United States on the world stage.

The U.S. has more than 28,000 troops on the DMZ, staring the nuclear armed North in the face from a mere two and a half miles away. The American military presence in South Korea goes back to 1945, and they have been our ally since the signing of the Mutual Defense Treaty in 1954.

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Mr. Trump also mentioned that the South Koreans, once again, declined to assist the U.S. in Iran as they did back in March when the president called on them, and NATO, to undertake a suicide mission by thrusting their warships into the Strait of Hormuz. In recent remarks where the president vowed to get out of North Atlantic Alliance, he repeated the ludicrous fallacy that the mission he asked of our European and Asian allies was ‘very safe’.

The way Donald Trump has been ceding American influence around the globe, it appears he is intent on destroying the United States. There can be no other reason for his continuous disrespect of our allies, that results in self-imposed strategic defeat, handing our adversaries victory after victory without a shot being fired; and in the case of the Iran War, shots were fired.

The USS George Washington is en route to the Middle East from East Asia to take over aircraft carrier duties left behind by the Abraham Lincoln, who is getting a much needed rotation out of the region. When you add that to the munition stockpiles the Pentagon removed from South Korea in earlier phases of the Iran War, the United States appears close to abandoning one of our two most important Asian allies.

How can the U.S. continue to tolerate Donald Trump actively destroying their forward deployment around the globe? I understand that America First has injected poison into the American body politic, claiming we don’t need a presence outside of the western hemisphere; handing Russia and China their own expanded sphere of influence, loudly advocating for the Monroe Doctrine. (It’s my view the plan is to cede Eastern Europe to Russia, and for a rising future authoritarian Germany to control Western Europe, thus why America First has shown support for the AfD).

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Like most political happenings in the U.S., when one party pronounces an updated political slant that seems popular, the other party shifts to the center on the issue because the political cost of maintaining their previous position is too great at the ballot box.

A good example is China before Donald Trump came down the escalator. Barack Obama identified China as our biggest competitor, but more often than not, he fell short of calling them a threat. George W. Bush was relatively pragmatic on China, and was very measured with his language when the U.S. EP-3E Aries II was forced into an emergency landing on Hainan Island in the first few months of his presidency.

After Trump’s 2016 campaign made the vilification of China central to his foreign policy, in order to not appear weak on China, Joe Biden spoke about them in harsh terms. He famously called Xi Jinping a dictator during his press conference after their bilateral meetings in San Francisco in 2023. Secretary of State Blinken lowered his head and winced like he had seen a horrific car wreck because that wasn’t the tact the State Department wanted to take. But Biden chose to play politics, engaged in the appearance of strength, and described Mr. Xi’s position derogatorily.

The same goes for the Democratic Party and their stateside agenda. Most of what they want to accomplish is domestic, and they know the American people are no longer keen on foreign intervention, and in many cases don’t understand the necessity of our presence abroad. The result has been, many Democrats speaking about foreign policy like America-First-Light.

Previously, as a balance to Republican hawkish foreign policy, the Democratic party was vocal about strengthening our international alliances, exhibiting they were competent on national security. Since America First has taken control of the GOP, now it’s the opposite, and the Democrats get more mileage out of questioning our global expanse.

Because Donald Trump has support for his regionalist/isolationist positions, which will be a death knell to the future of the United States, the Democrats have shifted to a softer form of the same. The foolishness of the Iran War has only amplified that sentiment amongst the center-left.

If the Russians wanted to invade Europe tomorrow and began striking NATO countries directly, Donald Trump would do nothing. And with his recent flailing commentary about North and South Korea, it is highly likely the United States would not defend its interests on the peninsula should Kim decide to wage war. Mr. Trump couldn’t have given him a larger green light.

The next step could be the U.S. removing forces from South Korea all together, giving the United States no reason to intervene.

This can’t make the Japanese comfortable. They are the largest holder of U.S. debt. As their American security guarantees face more and more uncertainty, they could eventually decide to dump U.S. Treasuries on the market, which Scott Bessent just stopped them from doing by buying billions of Yen with stored up Euros.

Aside from being a rotten thing to do to the Europeans, it artificially propped up the Yen in the short term. But as time goes on, will the Japanese simply decide to build a nuclear weapon and begin to cut economic ties with the United States knowing Trump’s position on South Korea will eventually spread throughout Asia?

Of course Japan won’t distance themselves from the Americans quite yet. Their hatred for China is too great. But if they see they are headed for economic upheaval, and they believe the future of Japanese national security is no longer a priority in Washington, how long will it be before Tokyo decides to build a nuke and ultimately dump U.S. Treasuries? A decade? Less?

When Donald Trump and America First begin a policy shift, it usually accelerates over about a decade’s time. What began as tariffs and a renegotiation of NAFTA, turned into a trade war and belligerent talk of making Canada the 51st state. An off the cuff desire to buy Greenland, shifted to the Trump administration claiming Denmark no longer had the right to possess the semi-autonomous island, because they could not defend it. That resulted into a perceived military threat, causing the Danish to deploy troops with the French and British considering the same.

What started as meetings with Kim, turned into love letters; now we are at the stage of calling joint military exercises with an ally we have a defense treaty with ‘an insult’ to the North Koreans, ‘who have been nothing but respectful’. It’s hard to imagine a future America First president wouldn’t shift that into a policy of withdrawal, removing American troops from South Korea, clearing the way for the North to plow right through.

Japan can’t tolerate that sort of risk, and it could cause them to eventually sink the American economy to save their own long term. They know the ultimate plan from America First is to implement some form of the Monroe Doctrine and allow China to take over the entire region. If South Korea is the first shoe to drop, Japan won’t be far behind. That says nothing for the first chain of Pacific Islands who are already a sitting duck for the Chinese, much less the second chain.

The cascading effect of these comments by the president turns into policy, which turns future policy into withdrawal, resulting in disaster for the United States and our post-World War II allies, most likely fostering a wave of global authoritarianism.

This is just the latest step in the restructuring of the globe that America First has been undertaking. The similarity between their aims and those of the Nazis, particularly as it relates to Western Europe and the western hemisphere cannot be understated.

If I didn’t know any better, I would say this is the rise of the Fourth Reich, this time under the banner of the stars and stripes.

Disclaimer: Considering who I believe America First to be, that’s exactly what I think.

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The timing of the story was unusual. More than a month after the event, they released this whacky tale to the press, and of course within a couple days, at least one major outlet ran a headline blaming Israel. Just another day in America at this point.

Land of the Flee and Home of the Blame.

If the Israelis had intelligence pointing towards an assassination plot against Donald Trump, it’s incumbent upon them to pass that information to the United States, otherwise the bilateral relationship would be severed. That goes for any ally who gets wind of a plot to assassinate a U.S. president.

CIA said they had a ‘Low Confidence Assessment’. That means they couldn’t corroborate it with second or third sourcing. It doesn’t mean it’s not true. They just didn’t have verification.

The Secret Service has their own group of professionals who make the decision about what steps are needed to protect the president. A foreign intelligence service doesn’t decide how the United States uses the information. They’re simply bound to pass it on, and CIA has their say on the quality of the intelligence and veracity of the threat.

The Secret Service felt the best possible course of action was to move the president out of Air Force One in a catering cart. Talk about dine and dash.

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There is nothing bizarre about that at all! (This administration gets more and more strange by the day).

The Qatari plane is insufficient for presidential travel, especially during a time of war. The Iranians have said openly and loudly they want to kill Donald Trump anywhere on the globe they can find him. Professor Mohammed Mirandi told Mario Nawfal two weeks ago that all the officials who had anything to do with the war of aggression against Iran will need to walk around with security the rest of their lives.

The threat is legitimate.

Knowing this, the Qatari plane shouldn’t be used as Air Force One at all. It should have never been made the presidential aircraft, nor should Donald Trump have accepted a $400 million gift from a foreign government.

It isn’t equipped to protect the president or his accompanying party. The paint scheme of the Air Force One we have always known is for the purposes of camouflaging the plane in the sky. The new paint job of the Qatari aircraft fails to accomplish that goal. More importantly, it lacks key defensive capability, which is why the original story was that Trump had been told to fly to the UK on the current Air Force One instead of the Qatari version.

If the Secret Service were so concerned about the safety of the traditional Air Force One, why let Marco Rubio, Steven Miller and members of the press corps fly on it?

It doesn’t make a lick of sense. If you were going to let them fly, you would wait until it’s dark, shut off the lights at the airport, and turn off the lights on the aircraft. After an hour or two, you would have Air Force One take off, with or without the president, and you would probably have other aircraft take off intermittently throughout that time so anyone launching a missile wouldn’t know what airplane they were firing at.

But they didn’t do that. They hid the man in a food truck and let his staff take off at twilight. If that doesn’t scream that it’s just another engineered, but real story from the White House, I don’t know what does.

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I’m not saying they didn’t force the president to switch airplanes in some silly elaborate scheme. But, if they thought the threat were real, they wouldn’t have let Secretary of State/National Security Advisor fly on the real Air Force One.

They waited nearly four weeks to release the story, and forty-eight hours later, they put a headline up on the front page of the Washington Post blaming Israel, which of course was loudly repeated by the Cenk Uygurs of the world.

I find it unusual that for all the money we spend in this country on our vast capability, the American people take no responsibility for anything anymore. Somehow every single person in the U.S. Government has lost free will, even if they aren’t an elected official. China, Russia, Israel, Canada, the nations of Europe; nothing has been the fault of the United States since January 20, 2025.

This entire fiasco was just another strange moment for an administration who has a reputation of apathy, incompetence, and a lack of truthfulness; and sometimes they’re plain weird. No matter which of these, or all of them, it’s just another moment where the Trump administration is incompetent, they probably lied, and it’s Israel’s fault. That sums up everything in the United States at this point.

By being the dumbest, most impressionable folks in the free world, We the People have created a mess. Sadly, it appears we are poised to make it worse; not better.

Last year, the Buss Family, who are NBA royalty, sold their famed franchise to businessman and current Los Angeles Dodgers owner, Mark Walters.

Dr. Jerry Buss bought the team in 1979. They had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on their roster, who at the time, was the best player in the NBA, and along with ‘Dr. J’ Julius Erving, made up the sport’s two most recognizable faces.

The league was struggling compared to its American pro sports counterparts. Major League Baseball was America’s pastime, the NFL was emerging as a powerhouse, developing stalwart brands like the Dallas Cowboys, Pittsburgh Steelers and Oakland Raiders. A dozen years after expanding beyond their Original Six franchises, the NHL was also gaining popularity.

Then Dr. Buss drafted Erving ‘Magic’ Johnson. Larry Bird had been drafted by the Boston Celtics the year prior, but chose to stay at Indiana State for his senior season, which was allowable by rule. They both entered the NBA for the 1979-1980 season.

From there, the NBA progressively blasted off into a forty-five year run of prosperity. The NFL took over the American sporting landscape, and Major League Baseball fell to third place, with the National Basketball Association advancing into the second position.

Longtime NBA commissioner, David Stern, took steps to internationalize the game, which has steadily continued under his successor, Adam Silver.

Even without much success on the field over the last thirty years, the Dallas Cowboys are still the NFL’s most beloved team, nationally. Using the modern day metric of popularity--social media--the Cowboys have 4.9 million Instagram followers. By contrast, Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls have 9.9 million followers on the same platform, which properly illustrates the globalization of basketball, as the Bulls are not twice as popular as the Cowboys in the United States.

The L.A. Lakers have a whopping 24.6 million Instagram followers, by far the most in American professional team sports. They are a powerhouse brand; an absolute juggernaut on and off the court. They have won seventeen NBA titles, only trailing the eighteen possessed by the Boston Celtics, and have the largest stable of stars of any team in league history.

For a long time there has been an adage around basketball, ‘so go the Lakers, so goes the NBA’.

For forty-six years, the Buss Family ran the organization with pride. It was shocking to many when Lakers Governor and majority owner Jeanie Buss, who grew up around her father’s franchise from a young age, sold the team last year.

NBA owners keep their teams for an average of a dozen or so years, and sports teams in the United States as a whole are oftentimes owned for decades by the same principals, with NFL owners being the longest tenured at over forty years. Owners do not regularly part ways with the most valuable brands in sports. Ms. Buss doing so was unusual. There are exceptions, like the Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs and Boston Celtics. But the New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys, Chicago Bears and many of the stalwart shields in pro sports, remain with those who have controlled them for decades.

That’s why yesterday when the news broke that Mark Walters sold the Lakers to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner in a mere ten months, it was unusual enough to deserve scrutiny. Somehow, there was none to be had.

Mark Walters and his businesses are under investigation by the DOJ for a series of issues I won’t claim to understand, and being an ongoing investigation, there’s been limited reporting on it. We know his office was raided and cell phone seized last year, and there is concern over loans his insurance companies made to his other businesses.

I don’t have significant knowledge of his dealings, but I am well acquainted with the business of sports and began following it long before it became financially respected. In the last fifteen years, it has become an investment vehicle for billionaires rather than merely a toy.

It’s unclear if Mr. Walters had to unload the Lakers because he needed the money, or if the money he used to purchase the team a year ago came from gains the Justice Department would deem ill-gotten. Regardless, selling any major sports franchise in what amounted to a flip, is beyond irregular; especially a best in class brand like the Los Angeles Lakers.

Should an individual or a group be fortunate enough to purchase the Lakers, selling them in the short to mid-term would not be in the cards. Whether it involve the initial sale by the Buss family, the flip by Walters, or the acquisition by Kushner and Iger, there has to be some sort of illegality or corruption involved. There is no other answer.

I appreciate that some news outlets discussing the deal are reporting the investigation into Mr. Walters, but only as a caveat. From Bloomberg to ESPN, and everyone in between, no one is questioning how the Los Angeles Lakers could be unloaded before the ink is even dry on the Buss family sale.

It was unexpected, so there was no prior investigative reporting into the matter, and reputable news outlets can’t begin to run stories suggesting that either Mark Walters, or Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, are engaged in illegal activity without defamation liability. But not even the peanut gallery is churning.

It has the stench of money laundering. Not like the MAGA folks who routinely levy the charge while showing they don’t understand the crime; but rather, actual money laundering.

Did Mr. Walters buy the Lakers with dirty money and the Department of Justice is close to prosecution, informed Adam Silver of a looming indictment, indicating the Lakers could end up a seized asset, which would be devastating for the league?

Those who understand the mechanics of the NBA have no problem believing Mr. Silver made arrangements with Iger and Kushner to purchase the team. So the first question is, what caused Mark Walters to sell the L.A. Lakers after ten months? If he used the purchase to legitimize billions of dollars and then it fell into the scope of the DOJ investigation, that would cause the NBA to force a sale behind the scenes.

I wouldn’t imagine the sale itself was the act of legitimizing any potential dirty funds, particularly while under the DOJ microscope. That would be as bold as it would be unwise.

Had the franchise been considered a dirty asset in a forthcoming indictment, just like boats, houses and cars, it could have been repossessed by the federal government. That would have frozen all normal operational flexibility for the Lakers, and it would have been delivered into the hands of a court appointee until any potential case is adjudicated. Under those circumstances, the Lakers would bottom out on the court, which would be a disaster for the NBA.

Josh Kushner and Bob Iger also come into question. Mr. Kushner is the managing partner of venture capital firm, Thrive Capital, and Mr. Iger is the two time CEO of The Walt Disney Company. In recent years, Iger joined Thrive as a strategic advisor, uniting the 41 and 75 year-olds in business.

Thrive Capital has an offshoot called Thrive Eternal, that is designed to purchase equity in assets that can survive major disruption, specifically AI and the evolution of technology. Sports are one of those interests, and earlier this year, they announced the acquisition of a minority stake in MLB’s San Francisco Giants.

The two paid $12.5 Billion for the Lakers; 25% more than it sold for ten months ago. That sort of increase doesn’t make much financial sense in such a short period of time. The $10 billion that Mr. Walters paid was already a record for an American professional sports franchise. It’s not like $3 billion to $4 billion, which is nowhere near the ceiling in this day and age, but even that would have been unusual. To top a record high by 25% in under a year stinks to high heaven.

If Mr. Walters was in trouble, why would you allow him to make a massive profit in such a short period of time? In most businesses, that’s an instance where you would hold his feet to the fire. Sports franchises rarely, if ever, lose value. So I can see why Mr. Iger and Mr. Kushner would not want to offer less for the team and set a precedent for the devaluation of NBA franchises, particularly with the Lakers being the league’s top brand. But how about offering Mr. Walters an increase of 10% for the hassle, representing a mere $1 billion? 25% in ten months for anything is a lot, especially when it sets another record price for the industry.

The expansion of the net worth of the Kushner family since Donald Trump’s election to the White House in 2016 has been otherworldly, and much of that is for a different article at a different time.

In 2017, the Kushner Companies were in pretty significant trouble with its’ lenders at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and were desperate to raise cash. They replaced a maturing loan on the Aon Building in Chicago for $184 million issued by Apollo Global Management, in part because of the difficulty associated with 666 Fifth.

By and large, Kushner Companies has been a stable, well managed North Jersey-New York City real estate investment and management firm. But much of what they were involved with for many decades were low-rise buildings. They got into the high-rise business closer to the time that Jared Kushner began dating Ivanka Trump in 2007. So when they purchased 666 Fifth at the top of the market, and found themselves in trouble a decade later, it was a headache they were inexperienced with. They had never been overleveraged with such a large portion of their portfolio, as it was a much bigger note than they ever previously possessed on any single asset.

It was said around the New York City real estate business and beyond, their problem was severe. It wouldn’t have bankrupted their company and put them in the poor house, but they would have taken a huge hit; the sort of setback that would’ve followed Jared Kushner’s reputation, as it was his brainchild. It had the potential to be the type of generational failure that both his family, and their peers, would have taken notice of. The question around the city would have been, does the incoming generation have the brains and toughness to take over their parent’s fortunes fought for in the trenches of the five boroughs and North Jersey?

After Jared Kushner began working in Donald Trump’s White House in 2017, much scrutinized talks emerged with Qatari investors to rescue Kushner Companies from their maturing loan at 666 Fifth Avenue. In 2018, they struck a deal to lease the building for 99 years to Brookfield Asset Management, who had minority Qatari ownership, for an up front payment of the same $1.1 billion the Kushner’s required to satisfy their Fifth Avenue loan. Without that deal, it’s likely the property would have been foreclosed on.

Since that questionable transaction, which had the appearance of an unseen level of public corruption involving a White House official, particularly as it relates to foreign investment, the Kushner family has taken off financially into an entirely different sphere of wealth.

Upon exit of the White House in 2021, Jared Kushner famously accepted $2 billion from Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund for his private equity fund, Affinity Partners, with no stated investment target. And that’s just one deal we know the 45 year old Jared Kushner made involving people atop foreign governments related to his White House portfolio.

The repositioning of their family fortune filtered down to his younger brother Josh, who is now a venture capitalist, running around with the seventy-five year old Iger as a peer. The amount of money the Kushner brothers have made in the last eight years since the Brookfield deal is unseemly at best.

Where did Josh Kushner and Bob Iger get the gumption to overpay for the Lakers, and make the purchase without any external financing? Eight years ago, all the Kushners combined needed $1.1 billion in up front lease costs to stop their business from taking on water. Now the younger Kushner alone, and his partner Iger, can dole out $12.5 billion by themselves for a basketball team without a banking deal.

The amount of money the Kushner family has made from the unabated corruption of Jared Kushner and the Trump administration should never be allowed to take place in the United States ever again.

It begs the question, is some of their income so filthy that it’s the reason Kushner and Iger are willing to plow so much capital into the Lakers with such an incredible short term gain in valuation? That’s the sort of price you are willing to pay when the money you are investing is dirty.

With all the obvious manipulation in the oil markets over the last four months, with Josh Kushner’s plug into the White House, is he one of the parties making the ten figure oil trades at the same time on a weekly basis? I’m not making that accusation, but they certainly have a whole lot of extra money to put into the Lakers without financing. And considering the prior transaction was a mere ten months ago, they overpaid by 25%.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven. Mark Walters was likely forced to sell the Lakers because of his illegal behavior, and Josh Kushner has managed to amass such a large fortune in less than a decade of his family business being in difficult straits, that he is buying the Los Angeles Lakers with the former two time chairman of Disney.

Jared’s globetrotting--trading White House favors for billions--has allowed the Kushner brothers to become two of the most corrupt young tycoons in the United States. And now it’s bleeding over into basketball, resulting in the most stank purchase of a professional sports franchise in American history.

It’s troubling there aren’t many articles throughout the sports and business world discussing this matter, and is indicative of why public sentiment towards wealth and media is experiencing irreparable fracture.

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For a change, the questions raised won’t be his use of federal aircraft and taxpayer money for personal travel. Let’s hope he is not caught on camera guzzling vodka like a frat guy staring down a dare.

No FBI Director has visited Russia since Robert Mueller in 2013. The Russia Hoax advocates will make a connection between that trip and the choice of Mueller as Special Counsel overseeing the Russia Investigation during the first Trump Administration. But much more legitimately, the timing of Mr. Patel’s visit is far more peculiar and deserves scrutiny.

It is expected that he will be greeted and accompanied by the FSB Chief, which is very troubling. Does that mean Mr. Patel is the wolf is in the hen house? As FBI Director, he has perfect cover. After all, he is just doing his job.

Even if there were nothing afoot, why would the FBI Director be visiting Russia two weeks before the midterms where there is grave concern that the Department of Justice and the FBI will attempt to directly impact the election? Ballot seizure and other sorts of tactics by the Trump Administration have been booted about as a viable threat in November.

In the last week or two, I heard a right leaning commentator on a well known independent media channel, tell a host we are all acquainted with, that he knows for a fact that discussions to deploy the National Guard to polling stations have taken place within the administration. Whether such a decision will be implemented is uncertain.

There have been a large amount of articles written about how Trump will steal or delegitimize the midterms. The SAVE America Act is not being framed accurately by the administration. It seeks to make it law for voters to have a passport or birth certificate at the ballot box to be eligible to vote. Under the legislation, a State ID or a Driver’s License would no longer be deemed sufficient.

Their rationale is that blue states routinely allow undocumented people to obtain State issued IDs, which fosters the narrative that large numbers of people without citizenship are voting in our elections.

Mr. Patel was one of the key voices in the Stop the Steal campaign of 2020 and beyond. His name was constantly attached to wild claims and ‘evidence’ that proved the election had been rigged in favor of Joe Biden, costing Donald Trump two consecutive terms in the White House. Within the Trump sphere, it’s what he’s known for. It was his role. That’s a key reason he was installed as FBI Director. Without a trip to Russia at an ill advised time, Mr. Patel is considered a potential threat to our electoral system going into November.

What MAGA calls election integrity, is otherwise known as fraud, especially when you work for Donald Trump. The president didn’t challenge the 2018 midterms, but there were people in the administration with some semblance of integrity, and he had yet to be impeached, which could happen again should his party lose the House in November.

Being this is Kash’s first national election as Director of the FBI, this could be his time to shine. Going to Russia within nineteen days of Tuesday, November 3, is terrible judgement at best; treason at worst.

We are coming off a primary night in Los Angeles where the coordinated social media blitz was telling us that Spencer Pratt was cheated out of a spot in the runoff for the mayoral race. Roughly 14% of registered voters in Los Angeles are Republican, and every other day of the week we are told about liberal Hollywood. After the ballots were counted, MAGA, their sycophants and paid accounts tried to convince everyone that a large swath of the good people of L.A. were passionate about a washed up reality TV star (God that sounds familiar) who hasn’t been relevant in twenty years, whose character has always been questionable.

Whether the rest of us in the country know or remember anything about Spencer and Heidi, sadly, a large swath of L.A. voters have a pretty good idea of what they’ve been up to since their time on The Hills. That’s a community aware of news involving Mr. Pratt, and most of it hadn’t been all that good since his thirty minutes of fame.

MAGA began their fraud claims saying that both Pratt and Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, had both been cheated out of their runoff advancements with mail-in ballots, causing both GOP candidates to begin trailing in their respective races. X was awash with posts claiming it was mathematically impossible for Nithya Raman to take the lead over Pratt. When Mr. Hilton came back to win and advance to the runoff against Xavier Becerra, the noise quieted because the arguments used in support of Mr. Pratt were the same as the ones used in favor of Mr. Hilton. Within a few days, those behind the misinformation campaign realized how inconsistent and silly they were sounding, so the nonsense stopped.

The same online bots, paid accounts and sycophants were touting Donald Trump’s perfect primary record of something in the neighborhood of 114-0, which is vastly more questionable than a Republican not advancing to the Los Angeles Mayoral runoff.

The ridiculous nature of MAGA making fraud claims in an election in Hollywood speaks for itself. Their clear strategy was, if we can convince our voters that we were cheated in a leading liberal enclave like Los Angeles, then they will stick with us in November when we claim the same in purple districts throughout the country, and that will give us the public support to use the levers of government to illegally and openly steal the midterms.

It’s very similar to why the Trump fraud machine attacked Georgia so heavily in 2020.

His first move was to employ one of his favorite tactics; race baiting through inference. The states that Trump went after were ones that contained a large city with a heavy black population. He highlighted Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta as problematic while going after Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

By delegitimizing a Republican state like Georgia, he hoped people would believe there was fraud in states with heavy Democratic political infrastructure.

‘If the RINOs can screw us in red country, then just imagine what the Democrats are doing?’

Same thing in reverse here. ‘If we are winning in Los Angeles but they are cheating us, obviously we are winning everywhere else.’

I would say that it won’t work this time because Donald Trump is far more unpopular now than in 2020. But he was grossly unpopular in 2020 as well. So I’m not sure that matters to Republican voters. It probably won’t have an impact on whether they try to defraud the United States again, which is a crime Jack Smith charged him with, where he should have been tried, convicted and sent to Colorado Supermax for life.

Yet, here we are. If that doesn’t convince you how sick the people of the United States are, I’m not sure what will.

Also in the case of Georgia, it was designed to punish state Republicans who didn’t tilt the election in his favor, as was made clear by the untold amount of threats Brad Raffensberger and his team received after the election. Mr. Trump also backed gubernatorial primary candidate, David Perdue, against Brian Kemp in 2022 because the Governor refused to step in and break the law by using his power to support Trump’s fraud claims. It was intended to serve as future marching orders. ‘Either you are with me in defrauding voters, or I will attempt to destroy you, and in your state, I am far more popular than you’.

Donald Trump’s desire to go to wild lengths to get his SAVE America Act passed is very indicative of his looming approach to the midterms.

He refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill passed by both chambers until the Senate took up his SAVE Act. The GOP, with absolutely no accomplishments in this term other than the Big Beautiful Bill, which took healthcare away from millions of people, gave tax cuts to the wealthy, and was massively unpopular, is the only legislative achievement in nearly two years.

Going into the midterms, the Republicans had an opportunity to offer assistance to the housing strain. It’s one of the most pressing issues in the country; one the majority of Americans agree on. They would’ve been seen as working across the aisle, showing for the first time in a while they know how to govern. The President refused to sign the bill until they took up his voting act.

In the end, Donald Trump never signed, nor vetoed the housing legislation. So it became law after the requisite ten day presidential review period expired with no action taken.

It shows that Mr. Trump will use the system to eliminate votes.

There are other instances where the President and his party have made decisions over the last nineteen months that are politically mind boggling and scream of candidates who don’t expect to face voters. It makes a whole lot of people believe this election is going to be stolen by the federal government right out in the open. And along with recently confirmed Attorney General and former Trump lawyer, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel would be central to this effort.

Russian interference was key to the outcome of the 2016 election, so Kash’s trip should leave every American prepared for a fraudulent autumn. Last week, in documents declassified by the administration designed to aide their push for the SAVE Act, it was once again laid out that U.S. Intelligence had credible information of Russia using their influence, mainly online, to alter the outcome of the presidential race.

We take it for granted now, but flooding the internet with disinformation through bots and paid accounts was very cutting edge in 2016, and had not been done the way we have come to know it today. The Russians are responsible for that. It was genius.

Along with the consistent lies of Donald Trump, it has changed the entire political and social landscape of the United States, and created a mistrust of government that goes far beyond anything we have seen before. It was already bad coming out of 9/11, WMD, and because of the plentiful racism in the U.S., the election of Barack Obama.

Now, almost any theory about virtually every event, gains traction. These days, conspiracies blaming Israel for almost everything seems to be the going favorite. But they are simply the latest scapegoat since Donald Trump came down the escalator. There have been many over the last ten years. It was inevitable that America First would eventually get to the Jews.

Between the lack of knowledge portrayed by the American public, especially young people, along with the hard-headedness of Boomers, the internet has become a cesspool where anything goes; and our politics have followed suit. Clever algorithms that target segments of the population who are most likely to accept it only exacerbate the problem.

It should be noted; I am not fundamentally anti-Russia. I have extreme fascination with the USSR, and although I often disagree, I respect the scale and scope of what they have achieved over the centuries. Part of that comes with the understanding that they are intent on becoming, and remaining, the world’s greatest power.

A culture such as theirs doesn’t live through the collapse of the Soviet Union and simply forget about it, especially because the entire event was fostered by the United States and its’ allies, particularly the UK. So when Vladimir Putin says he is at war with the Anglo-Saxons, he means it.

If Mr. Patel’s trip is followed by an election where President Trump sends the national guard to polling stations, and the Department of Justice through the FBI goes around the country, particularly in blue and purple districts seizing ballots, it will be hard to believe there isn’t a direct connection. Because the president still has his base properly trained to believe the Russians are harmless, and any suggestion of cooperation between the two to undermine our electoral system are simply Democratic lies, it may prove difficult for the obvious to stick.

If Kash Patel is on the front lines in November, telling the country there is severe election fraud at the state level, the federal government and the FBI must step in, and there is an immense onslaught of internet bots, accompanied by hacking or false digital ‘evidence’ that supposedly lays out a cheating scheme by the Democratic Party or its’ candidates, the purpose of this trip will be plain.

Should questions arise as to why someone with his background of undermining American elections would go visit our adversary during a time of war and be met by an intelligence chief from an agency, also with a background of meddling in U.S. elections, I believe Republican voters and those who want to ‘Own the Libs’, will stand with the president and minimize this visit as unrelated, and just another Russia Hoax.

Who better to give advice on how to corrupt elections than the Russians? If there’s a visible coordinated effort featuring a blitz of bots and waves of disinformation designed to support the falsification of results, the United States is in trouble at a systemic level.

And don’t be surprised if there is an online campaign to blame Israel. That’s a popular thing right now as Tucker Carlson just told Hunter Biden on his podcast that two people who worked for Benjamin Netanyahu informed him of grotesque material on his laptop.

We all know Tucker is a liar. It’s beyond me how how anyone is still interested in what he says after the Dominion case where his text messages proved he was knowingly lying to his audience.

A man like that still having popularity exhibits that people want to be lied to. It’s one of the gross flaws of the human condition. But there is no doubt his comments to Mr. Biden were laying the ground work to blame the Israelis for whatever falsehoods are peddled about the midterms. And when it happens, I will repost this article on a daily basis, as long as the constitutional crisis unfolds that MAGA and America First are preparing.

The same people who will suggest that such a predictive accusation is crazy, will be the same people who believe and disseminate it online when it starts.

There is a reasonable chance that all this is going to draw back to Kash Patel’s wartime, election season trip to Russia.

Under most known circumstances, taking a trip to Moscow during a proxy war where the United States is directly arming a country slaughtering Russians by the hundreds of thousands, would be considered unsafe for most American officials. Somehow, not for Kash Patel. That, in and of itself, should sound alarm bells. For the Russians to accept a visit from a Senate confirmed official right now means he’s not just coming in peace, but cooperation.

At so many different levels, it’s a threat to national security. However unlikely, they could hit him over the head with a tuna and tear his fingernails out. To take this trip at a time like this, is completely insane. If a meeting were necessary, neutral soil would be in order. But going to Russia is foolish. There has to be something nefarious about the trip, because he certainly isn’t going there to confront them about any of the pressing issues around the globe.

Considering Kash was given the FBI role for his rigorous loyalty in aiding Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 race, and has always been expected to use that authority when the time comes to swing an election in favor of the Republicans with more false fraud claims, this overseas meeting has to be highlighted by every single American official who values our democracy.

In office or out of office, if Kash Patel is going to Russia to meet with the FSB chief two weeks before the midterms, especially with the current state of U.S.-Russia relations, it’s obvious he is there to coordinate an election fraud scheme. There is no other common sense reason.

In people’s heart of hearts, they know that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Most understand that the visible pro-Russian policy of MAGA and America First has made it obvious there was no hoax. The way Steve Witkoff has been cultivated by the Kremlin on his trips to discuss the war in Ukraine has continued their culture of influencing officials close with President Trump.

It was clear Hillary Clinton was right about Tulsi Gabbard. It’s incredible how Ms. Gabbard became so beloved by the Trump crowd a short time after being a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. She was one of the most visibly outspoken voices against the war in Ukraine, loudly spewing Russian propaganda. It was clear that Mrs. Clinton was correct.

Trump can call Hillary a deep stater all he wants. Perhaps he is right, because she is clearly plugged into U.S. intelligence circles, which is no surprise after being in the White House for eight years, the Senator from New York for eight years, and Secretary of State for four years. But she was right about Tulsi Gabbard, and no one understood her comments when she made them, especially because she was not running in that primary and hadn’t endorsed a candidate. Seemingly, it came out of left field. Within five years, Donald Trump made Gabbard Director of National Intelligence. It’s like a spy novel.

There was a time where even the mere scent of such an accusation would disqualify someone from an intelligence post. Not for this White House, and also not for this Senate who confirmed her. The same principle exists with Mr. Patel.

Ms. Gabbard was the stateside mouthpiece for the Kremlin at the onset of the Ukraine War, and she wasn’t even holding public office. She may as well have worn a sign saying Mrs. Clinton was correct about her being compromised by Russia. Russian State TV once referred to her as ‘our girlfriend’, and she went on to become DNI. What an embarrassment for the United States.

The Republican Party should be ashamed of themselves. Ronald Reagan is turning over in his grave.

It’s entirely reasonable to suggest that Kash Patel is just as corrupt, and the rest of the administration is in relative lockstep with Russia as it relates to rigging our elections, particularly those that negatively impact American democracy and keep Donald Trump and his party in power.

When they look themselves in the mirror, MAGA voters know Donald Trump lost in 2020. Everyone lived through 2020. It was widely considered the worst year anyone had in their lives. There is very little chance any incumbent would have been elected to the White House; especially Donald Trump. So maybe the lies and election fraud claims have begun to wear thin amongst GOP voters, because after a week, the Spencer Pratt nonsense dissipated to not much more than a lull.

It didn’t really seem to take off with Trump’s base. Even they understood that a bunch of liberal gay lesbian Jewish Hispanic black people having abortions wouldn’t vote Republican, which is the way they view Californians; and don’t forget, they’re all trans.

What discussion does Kash Patel need to have face to face with the head of the FSB that can’t take place on the telephone from inside the United States? The whole thing screams of the administration setting up a scam in November that will make 2020 look mild.

The irony of course is, with all the personal trips he’s taken on the tax payer dime that he said were official business; now Mr. Patel is going to make a visit to an adversarial country during a time of war, and say it was personal.

Türkiye, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia joined hands in a strategic military partnership that includes all the properties of a regional powerhouse. The alliance features more than just the bond of Sunni Islam. It is a potent counterbalance to Israel and the rising Shia stalwart of Iran. It’s a regional Axis prepared for the geostrategic ‘Big Time’.

The Turks are a historic great power. The Saudis are one of the most energy rich countries in the world. And the Pakistanis are a nuclear armed nation. This gives them a potent trifecta of gravitas, wealth, and military might that promises to impact the region for generations to come.

With the correct foreign leadership, it has the potential to corral the trio into unified normalized relations with Israel. If we had serious professionals in the White House that wanted to bring common sense to the issue, spearhead negotiations and restart a real peace process, the military teeth behind this alliance can bring some stick to the table for the Palestinians in a multi-pronged effort.

The intellectual illness on both sides regarding the Israel issue in the United States is so severe, it’s unlikely for an American government to possess the will or knowhow necessary for a breakthrough. Along with the poison America First has injected into the larger American body politic, it’s hard to see the U.S. being the catalyst for future peace in the region.

I will be writing extensively about future Israel-Russia relations in the coming weeks, particularly as they may stand should the political class of the United States walk away from Israel all together. For now I will say, if Russia can resolve their war in Ukraine, particularly victoriously, they are the best positioned major power to bring peace to West Asia.

The Chinese have significant leverage over Pakistan, but they have lacked a relationship of significance with Türkiye and Saudi Arabia, as both have been tied to the United States.

The Russians, however, have a relationship with the Turks, and a much longer standing presence in the region. They defended Assad in Syria, have assisted Iran since the final decade of the Soviet Union, and Israel features two million Russian speakers.

If China, Russia or the United States could effectively plug themselves into regional peace talks between the Sunni Muslims and Israel, the weight this alliance carries gives serious negotiations a greater chance of success than any time over the last two decades.

It will require new, proper and appropriately pragmatic leadership in Israel. The paranoia that the Jewish state lives under has to be tamped down, and the realization of the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction must be realized. Progress is possible if Israel can embrace that beyond of the Masada-level-ideal behind the Sampson Option.

With Pakistan now bound to join any war that Israel should wage with Türkiye, it means a nuclear armed Israel is under just as much threat of disintegration as the Turks would be.

NATO is still a major factor in any kinetic run-in between Israel and Türkiye. But with the deterioration of the North Atlantic Alliance under Donald Trump, Türkiye has lined up a highly capable Plan B.

In a purely conventional war, I am not convinced Türkiye would require assistance. It’s entirely possible they defeat Israel, and do so rather easily. Behind the United States, the Turks have the largest Army in NATO. F-35 or no F-35, without the use of nuclear weapons, it’s hard to see an Israeli victory.

A large portion of Israeli oil transits through Turkish territory, so it lends to reason that in any conflict, the Turks can negatively impact the Israeli war machine. Had the United States been successful in seizing the entirety of Iranian and Iraqi oil, there wouldn’t be as large of a strategic concern for Israel. But how they power their military in a kinetic conflict with Türkiye has to be of some concern.

Nuclear capability is the major advantage Israel possesses in a conflict with Türkiye. With Pakistan bringing nukes to the table as the Turk’s new regional defense partner, should that conflict arise, MAD is now in effect.

The Saudis benefit tremendously from this alliance. It allows them to no longer need the United States for their defense. Not only did the Americans cause Iranian missiles and drones to rain down upon Saudi Arabia, but American bases in the region have been heavily damaged or destroyed. It’s difficult to see the Iranians allowing this conflict to end without the U.S. military exiting West Asia all together, including U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia. The urgency for the Saudis to establish a new security architecture became crucial in recent weeks.

Pakistan has rather significant economic challenges. The Saudis and Turks can only aide the Pakistanis with further global integration, and could be an example of rising tides raising all boats. Providing their two Sunni partners with a nuclear umbrella, Pakistan will curry favor and gain assistance with future economic development.

The main reason for this unification of forces is not just Israel. It’s Iran.

Sunni and Shia Islam have been at war for 1400 years. With all the newfound love for Muslims in the United States, the American people fail to understand that the two sects of Islam have serious problems with one another. Far too often as of late, I see Americans suggesting that Iran and their Sunni neighbors are one big happy Islamic family.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re different people, with different cultures and differing religions.

Saudi Arabia is scared to death about the rise of Iran. The Iranians are poised to seize long term control over the Strait of Hormuz, and the momentum gained by fending off the U.S. and Israel will embolden them militarily. The Saudis are concerned the Iranians will remember they allowed the United States to conduct military strikes against the Islamic Republic from Saudi soil. Iran is certain to remember the 150,000 Yemeni people killed by Saudi Arabia in the proxy war between the two last decade.

Saudi Arabia may have to deal with those same Iranian proxies in Yemen in the future. After the war with the U.S. and Israel, the Iranians would be more likely to lob drones and missiles across the Persian Gulf at the Saudis. The newly minted alliance between the big three Sunni powers all but eliminates the possibility that Iran would involve themselves militarily in further Saudi-Yemeni conflict.

Iran and Türkiye are both great historic powers who could be on a collision course at some point this century. It’s unlikely to be in the cards over the next twenty years. But as we get on the other side of 2050, the ambitions of these two historic empires could find themselves on divergent paths that could result in the ultimate Sunni-Shia war.

Just like the assistance the Turks would get against Israel, they also gain major backing in any potential conflict with Iran, particularly with the expectation that Iran is going to develop a nuclear weapon.

The whole world agrees; Iran is far better off developing a nuke than not. Countries that possess one don’t get attacked by major powers; in the Iranian’s case, the United States. By contrast, we see the U.S. has left North Korea alone.

The Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons in 1994 with security guarantees from the United States and the United Kingdom, along with assurances from the Russian Federation that they would respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Obviously the Budapest Memorandum has not worked out well for Kyiv.

The Saudis and Turks cannot leave themselves exposed to a newly empowered Shia Iran poised to develop a nuclear weapon. A formal defense pact with a nuclear Pakistan gives them the security posture they need, and they are well positioned to defend against the Iranians, ideologically, economically and militarily.

Should Israel not change its’ behavior and dial back their globally derided treatment of the Palestinians, this axis could proceed offensively against Israel. The Israelis are said to possess at least two hundred nuclear weapons. That could do some terrible damage to these three nations, if not heavily wipe them out. But the Pakistanis would only need to use two or three nukes to completely destroy Israel.

From a conventional standpoint, there is no way 10 Million Israelis can hold off three nations with a combined population of approximately 390 Million people.

This should be a sobering moment for Israel; even more than their recent experience with Iran. Once Netanyahu and his coalition government held together by religious extremists are defeated at the ballot box, perhaps an incoming Israeli government can realize what they’re up against and fundamentally change their behavior.

The candidates for Prime Minister and the coalition governments that need to be formed are unlikely to bring about massive ideological change in Israel. But perhaps they can find their way back to something closer to the pre-2000s posture and seek peace with their neighbors once and for all.

That is going to prove difficult as the Palestinians stock has never been higher. They have no great reason to agree to peace with Israel, especially after the scars left in Gaza. But we can only hope, because without it, this trio and Israel could find themselves in a very dangerous conflict that could gravely impact the rest of the world.

The big three Sunni Arab states created a mega-alliance that has given them insurance against Israel and Iran.

Insurance with a ‘Capital I’.

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It was said this week that U.S. Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is set to strip sanctions from Iranian airlines associated with the IRGC, which is a huge concession for the Americans to include in a deal to open the strait. Iran is also restricting movement of all American ships through the waterway, and are prepared to institute wild financial demands for the passage of all other vessels.

It shows that Trump’s TACO last weekend was probably rooted in looming crisis, both known and unknown. These clauses go far beyond June’s Memorandum of Understanding. There was thinking that we would be returning to the terms of the MoU with some wrinkles and semantics that required sorting between the two combatants, with Oman, effectively, representing the United States.

Irrationally hoping Iran would alter their stance, the U.S. spent two weeks unleashing more bombs, dragging their Arab allies into further conflict. The USAF retreated to Jordan and Israel, and for the first time in the war, the United States lost escalation dominance.

Scott Bessent’s to-do list that was caught on camera by reporters appears to have resulted in the New York Fed selling between $5-$10 Billion of Euros for Yen, through Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, on behalf of the U.S. Treasury. Japan holds the most T-Bills in the world. The intent was to stop the Japanese from selling them to strengthen their own currency because a substantial increase of U.S. Bonds on the market would raise interest rates; so Mr. Bessent went on a Yen buying spree.

There are any number of causes for a weak Yen, including the carry trade, but with the Japanese buying 90% of their crude from West Asia, it’s very hard to imagine the strait closure didn’t apply significant pressure to their economy. If Japan dumps a large amount of U.S. Treasuries, there would be a cascading effect resulting in a bond market crisis, which could foster systemic disaster across broader American markets.

It appears to be a significant driver of why the U.S. decided to make another embarrassing deal to open the strait. Iran outmaneuvered the Trump Administration and achieved a humiliating checkmate.

The widespread reporting that the United States is virtually out of key munitions and will not be able to replenish their stockpiles to pre-February levels until early next decade has forced the Americans into an impossible position. President Donald Trump and the pathetic team he assembled are the only ones to blame.

That leaves the world with nearly as big of a mess in Ukraine, where the violence on both sides has ratcheted up significantly since the war in Iran began nearly five months ago. Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked President Trump for an emergency delivery of Patriot missiles last week during their meeting in Washington. The President declined the request, citing those same dangerously low stockpiles in the U.S. arsenal. That admission is a magnificent failure for the United States, specifically for the newly rebranded Department of War.

Secretary Pete Hegseth must resign.

The Trump Administration didn’t even blame the prior four years of war in Ukraine, as the U.S. used vastly more munitions in the much shorter conflict with Iran. They could claim the cupboards were bare, but it’s clear the Biden Administration’s paced rollout of hardware in Ukraine was predicated on weapons availability. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin understood what they could and could not deliver, and in what timeframe.

They viewed the October 7 attack in Israel as a pressing military emergency. That’s when the rate of use escalated significantly.

I purposely failed to mention Secretary Blinken, which highlights why Marco Rubio should not be both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. Albeit a similar skill set, they’re two separate jobs requiring different voices. That’s why Condoleezza Rice was able to transition effectively from one role to the other. But they represent divergent roles in government, need to assess issues independently, then collaborate with the president in the Oval Office, resulting in cogent policy.

The Ukrainians requested a license to produce Patriot missiles with the intent of piecing together the materials from wherever they can source them. Much would still come from the U.S., but it highlights the unfortunate state of the American industrial base. Ukraine believes they can manufacture those arms at a substantially faster rate than the Americans. Perhaps having a couple million migrants around to work in factories would have been helpful to the U.S. military.

Mr. Trump was correct to not issue Ukraine the production license for Patriots. It would commit the Americans to their war effort, which the president has made clear he has little interest in doing. Should the U.S. walk away from the Ukraine War and the Ukrainians find themselves under duress, they could disseminate that technology, which is a major national security risk for the United States.

Conceivably, they could covertly fall into Russian hands in a peace deal. The Russian Army could get a jailbreak, march straight into Kyiv, and in rapid succession the Ukrainians could be forced to flee for their lives rather than hang in the middle of the city square, leaving classified technology behind for our adversaries to seize.

From a national security perspective, issuing Ukraine a license for such sensitive hardware is a bad idea if the United States is not fully committed to their survival.

However, that leaves all of Ukraine exposed to significant missile strikes, especially Kyiv, and threatens to severely demoralize their army and population alike.

There was a significant long form report on Bloomberg on Monday saying that Ukraine was gaining ground against the Russians and all seemed to be swell on the battlefield.

I have a very hard time believing that. The Ukrainians are soon to run low on all kinds of weapons, not just interceptors. The $14 Billion aid bill that was passed in 2024 was the last significant American arms package. Since that time, the United States has only delivered $400 Million. The Europeans delivered $100 Billion for 2026 and 2027, but the weapons they are able to purchase with that money does not have the same bite as the U.S. munitions that are currently unavailable.

Ukraine has properly invested in their drone program and have a large arsenal which is capable of assisting their offensive effort. But as long as they can’t stop heavy incoming iron, it’s hard to see them lasting.

It was reported Wednesday that Ukrainian intelligence has detected a dedicated missile unit of about ninety North Korean troops that have been deployed inside Russia with 120 ballistic missiles. It appears the Russians and their allies are preparing to pour it on.

If you said at any time before 2017 that the United States and NATO would not engage in direct military action against Russia should they invade Ukraine, with North Korean troops in tow, no one would have believed you. If an American President or U.S. Senator would have run on that policy, they would have been roundly defeated at the ballot box. Any time in my life, it would have meant war.

There is no doubt that Barack Obama was soft in his response to Russia when they took Crimea in 2014. As I wrote on Wednesday, the concept of plausible deniability matters in armed conflict and international relations. Putin using Little Green Men made it so the Kremlin was able to suggest they were not involved. It’s ridiculous for the world to work that way, but that’s the system of cynicism we as humans have set up around warfare.

The United States and its’ allies kicking Russia out of the G8 was swift economic and diplomatic action, but it paled in comparison to what Putin gained by seizing such a strategically significant land mass. Crimea is on the Black Sea, which gives the Russian Navy passage to open waters.

Obviously there was no hoax involved with Russia and Trump in 2016. Every serious intelligence analyst considers Russian interference in that American election to be a watershed moment in the deterioration of the west that we have seen over the last decade. With the addition of Russian acts of war against the United Kingdom, we live in a very different world than ten years ago.

Donald Trump got the Russia Hawks in the Party of Reagan to oppose defending Ukraine from a Russian land invasion, and he did so from both inside and outside the White House. Despite Mr. Trump’s claims, this war would have happened whether he was elected in 2020 or not. He has failed to stop the war in twenty-four hours because Vladimir Putin finds him to be a useful idiot and has no intention of shifting policy for Donald Trump. The Russian president has certain objectives in his special military operation, and he is not going to rest until he achieves them.

Putin isn’t simply interested in the Donbass region. He sees the Ukrainians getting weaker, and with the U.S. and NATO lacking the ability and will to step in militarily, his aim is to fight as long as it takes, lose as many lives as he must to swallow all of Ukraine. It’s the centuries old Russian way of war.

In the end, if he is the leader who raises the Russian flag over Kyiv, and every inch of Ukrainian territory becomes part of the Russian Federation, there will be statues of him in Moscow next to the rest of their greatest leaders.

Analysts say the Chinese benefited from the war in Iran more than anyone else, except for maybe the Iranians. That’s hard to argue with, but the Russians made out extraordinarily well.

Though the temporary waiver of oil sanctions against Russia expired, they were able to sell their crude at sea for a handsome sum, the timing of which could not have been better. Scott Bessent felt he had to flood the market with extra petroleum for price stability, and the Russians made a fortune. At $100/barrel or more, they gained significant funds for their war coffers which were desperately needed.

The U.S. took their eye off the ball in Ukraine and used a remarkable amount of munitions. Now the Ukrainians are defenseless against incoming missiles, which threatens to change the tide of the rest of the war. It’s entirely possible that history will show the war in Iran was the catalyst for the Russians regaining full control of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin very well could have been involved in spurring on the Iranian conflict. It’s not a suggestion rooted in Russian paranoia; but one of respect for his expertise and skill as an elite strategist.

It’s hard for Americans and westerners to grasp that possibility. But Mr. Putin famously said in a bilateral meeting with the United States, ‘You think because we look like you, that we think like you. We don’t think like you’.

When you consider the wedge Donald Trump put between the United States and NATO during the war in March when the president childishly blamed our allies for his own failure, accompanied with a ten day coordinated effort on X to smear our own military alliance, all within forty-eight hours of a private phone call with Putin, it’s difficult for me to discount the Russian president playing the 5-D chess Trump supporters are always boasting.

Considering he placed the American President in the White House, I can’t discount his genius.

It’s too convenient to blame Trump’s stupidity, the Israelis, the Gulf states, or Big Oil. As the dust settles, this entire conflict is going to give Russia, China and Iran the future of their dreams. I’m not willing rule out that Russia was one of the chief architects of this entire scheme. It achieved over a dozen major aims, which is the hallmark of any great intelligence operation.

Russia has outmaneuvered the west at every turn since 2014. From the invasion of Crimea; to murders using chemical and biological weapons on British soil; to Brexit, and then the election of Donald Trump four months later; Vladimir Putin has given a masterclass on high level statecraft.

Engineering the war in Iran to substantially expand his territory, isolate American control over global energy markets, and begin to decompose the petrodollar, is a coup de grace I’m not going to discount. Only history will tell.

At the minimum, it highlights the advantage of having an ex-KGB officer as head of state, rather than a reality TV star.

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Granted we have seen remarkable manipulation of oil markets, especially every Monday at around 6:55am EST with a ramp up of hostilities during the week. But under $80 oil really isn’t something we have seen a whole lot of since March.

The markets are aware that Trump can’t continue to TACO. It’s embarrassing and the Iranians know there isn’t much more bite to his bark. It’s been made clear that Saudi Arabia has more pull in Washington than Israel, and MBS is not particularly interested in his entire kingdom being at risk from the collapse of Saudi society should Iran strike his desalination plants, bring down the electrical grid, and destroy their oil infrastructure, taking the economy with it.

The Israelis really aren’t keen on a war that doesn’t achieve full regime change, even if that mean the use of nuclear weapons by either the U.S. or Israel. They are low on interceptors and underestimated the power and accuracy of Iranian missile capability. So a war of half measures is incredibly destructive for them.

The United States, according to reports, is dangerously short of smart weapons. The U.S. military could begin to use a higher volume of dumb bombs, but they’re not as effective and put the U.S. in a position where they can’t take any action elsewhere in the world should they need. They lack the capability to invade the geographic fortress of Iran. The political will for a ground attack that results in large numbers of casualties in non-existent. And with the President fresh out of wolf cries, it appears concessions will be made. The question remains, what will they be?

Word on the street is, inbound traffic will come through the Iranian side. That means they won’t be charging for the movement of goods. They will be assessing a fee for the passage of ships.

It is truly amazing that we live in a world where such petty semantics governs international relations, but it has for a long time and continues to.

The Europeans design and manufacture drones that are assembled in Ukraine and strike inside Russian territory. Because of plausible deniability, Russia hasn’t directly attacked the source of those weapons on NATO soil. It’s a big part of why intelligence agencies execute operations. Other intel agencies know who attacked them and are the ones who respond, resulting in tit for tat covert operations. There are unwritten rules to kinetic conflict.

The United States will suffer less humiliation by allowing the Iranians to charge empty tankers and cargo ships going through their territorial waters, and onward north into the Persian Gulf.

In the meantime, the deal is said to have outbound ships going through the Omani side, likely at no cost. I would gather the Iranians would split the fees they collect with Oman. So it’s like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey charging a toll on the inbound side of the Lincoln Tunnel, but not the outbound side, with the two states chopping up the spoils.

It’s semantics.

Because Oman isn’t charging, the United States will save face and the right of free maritime trade remains intact, and the Iranians are not extoring the nations of the world to get their oil out of the Persian Gulf.

This is a far cry from Unconditional Surrender, but seems to be the best near term solution for the Americans as global oil supply runs dangerously low.

The biggest question remains, will the oil be sold in U.S. Dollars? I would imagine so. The reason the United States is willing to do this deal is, the toll on the Iranian side will be collected in whatever currency Iran chooses. But it will maintain the status quo with the receivers of oil shipments paying for them in U.S. Dollars.

Iranian control over the Strait the U.S. agreed to in the MoU couldn’t be accepted under any circumstances. But as Mr. Trump acknowledged at the time, the United States only had about four weeks of oil left in its’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve, so he signed the Memorandum as a stopgap measure. Had Iran continued to stipulate that all outbound oil be sold in Chinese Yuan, it would have forced President Trump into some sort of invasion or seizure of Iranian territory, and is conceivably something that could cause the use of a nuclear weapon. It’s the underpinning of the entire American economy.

When the dollar went off the gold standard in the 1970s, it became backed by crude oil. If an increasing amount of nations are buying petroleum in other currencies, the U.S. Dollar would be in danger of collapse. When you add the debt level the U.S. Government is carrying, it would be a death knell for the way of life of the American people, would lead to the end of the American empire, and likely would do so rapidly.

From what I surmise, this saves the U.S. from that eventuality, at least in the near term. The Americans have a good relationship with the Omanis and trust there won’t be additional tolls slapped on shipping exiting the Strait through western lanes, and Oman won’t demand that all purchasing countries pay for their load with Yuan. The United States has become so jammed up by the Iranians, that this is probably the best deal they are going to get, as once again, global oil supply needs relief.

The leverage Iran maintains is, they can attack shipping in the Gulf should the United States reinstitute their strikes. Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the Americans ‘Agreement-Incapable’. Considering the U.S. has struck Iran at least three times over the last fourteen months while in the midst of negotiations or a ceasefire, the Iranians are aware they may need to stop ships from exiting the Omani side by force and go back to a posture of full control of the waterway with nothing entering or exiting without their consent.

The detrimental terms the United States could not deal with was all oil exiting the Gulf being sold in currency other than U.S. Dollars. Control of global oil markets is not only energy security, but currency security. Remaining the world’s reserve currency is national security, props up the entire American economy and was a big driver for the continuation of this war.

The one thing the United States learned from this conflict is, what Iran will do in the event of a U.S. war with China. How effective it will be; what it will require to get Iran to relinquish control of the Strait militarily; and even though they weren’t successful in regime change and dismantling the Iran nuclear program, the U.S. now knows exactly what they must do tactically and strategically to maintain control of Gulf oil in the event of major power war.

It doesn’t make the war a success, unless the goal was to lose on purpose so the U.S. could withdraw their troops from East Asia, retreat to the western hemisphere, absorb Canada and Greenland and settle into a multi-polar world, as the Monroe Doctrine states and America First espouses. With the abject incompetence of the American war plan, along with the obvious manipulation of oil markets on a weekly basis, I won’t discount that being the real purpose of the conflict. Only time will tell.

But aside from that angle, which is not widely considered, the U.S. is set to leave the Iranians their toll system, and the Americans get to maintain the petrodollar for the foreseeable future, as long as they leave Iran alone. Whether the U.S. can do so depends on their actual goals and how much leverage the Saudis, Gulf states and Israelis have over the United States, particularly with Donald Trump in the White House.

With the President threatening more bombing should a deal not be finalized by the end of Tuesday, it doesn’t feel like the conflict is over, though I don’t see Mr. Trump delivering on his latest bluster any time this week. The U.S. and the world need to stabilize the prices and supply of crude. The Americans desperately need to ramp up their munitions manufacturing and replenish their stockpiles, and do so while ensuring the Ukrainians and Israelis can defend themselves. With the midterms on the horizon, this could actually be a sustained pause in fighting.

It’s hard to see those priorities taking a back seat to near term conflict, considering the massive TACO of this past weekend. However, it’s also difficult to imagine the United States will walk away altogether.

No matter who is elected, there is still a National Security State that runs the country and supersedes our politicians. They adjust their posture to the sensibility of the president in office.

Bush/Cheney loved war, so they used them to put hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama ran on ending the Iraq War, and the American people wanted their troops out of East Asia as quickly and safely as possible, so they used French and British air power, along with CIA and dissident groups on the ground, to oust Khadafi. CIA decided to arm opposition groups, aided by U.S. special forces and American air power to start a civil war in Syria and topple Assad, which lasted throughout three administrations.

The occupant of the White House doesn’t matter beyond strategy and tactics. Policy doesn’t change. Along with Donald Trump’s decades long disdain for the Iranians, that’s why despite his promises, we are at war with Iran today. With all that’s unfolded this century, along with the 2000 position paper the United States has been executing for twenty-five years, (Rebuilding America’s Defenses), a near term deal for the passage of cargo through the Strait of Hormuz is probably just a pause in hostilities.

TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out.

That cowardice and bluster has become a hallmark of this administration during the Iran War.

The latest performative tomfoolery from the President came this past weekend when Mr. Trump claimed he was going to hit all the critical infrastructure in Iran, and for at least the tenth time on record after making that threat, he folded without delivering. Once again, he told the American people and the world that Iran called and wanted to make a deal. This time President Trump did so on Saturday, which is earlier than his usual Monday, but as always it was still before oil markets opened in the United States for the trading week.

It seems that when Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington for Lindsey Graham’s funeral, Israel had agreed to rejoin the U.S. in their latest round of strikes.

As I mentioned last week, I don’t believe Israel is interested in a continued tit for tat kinetic conflict with Iran that continuously results in Trump’s diplomatic solutions; particularly ones that are akin to surrender. Israel dealt with the April 8 cease fire, and they were interjected into June’s MoU. The Israelis weren’t interested in either negotiation. Israel is either all in, or all out on this war, and there was belief the result of the President’s meeting with Netanyahu last Tuesday was that Mr. Trump was committed to going for the gold. Instead, the Israelis got the fold.

It’s been reported that the IDF was operationally prepared to proceed. The nation’s first responders were put at the ready, its’ citizens prepared to return to war with Iran, and would once again see missiles and drones falling from Israeli skies.

Apparently Israel didn’t find out about Trump’s latest TACO until his post on Truth Social, where he claimed Iran asked not to be bombed, agreed to the framework of a peace deal that included the Iranians fully opening the Strait of Hormuz, and of course to get rid of their nuclear program. Mr. Trump also claimed the Saudis and other Gulf states asked him not to strike. The President told the world in his latest social media shame that the United States remains ‘locked and loaded’, and is willing to unleash ‘military terror, strength and power not seen since World War II’.

The President of the United States writing that the U.S. military is going to unleash terror is a disgrace to our men and women in uniform, and much more a statement of the Axis than the Allies (since he mentioned the second world war).

It has been reported that Mohammed bin Salman called the President and asked him to call off the strikes because Iran promised that should the Americans deliver on Trump’s threat, they would destroy all the critical infrastructure on the Arabian Peninsula, specifically the entire energy industry, which is the backbone of their collective economies. In addition, the Iranians made plain that they would disable their electricity and fresh water supply, which would result in a historic refugee crisis and could possibly lead to the collapse of the fragile kingdoms the British installed nearly one hundred years ago.

The people who believe Israel completely controls the United States and were solely the cause of this war, don’t believe the U.S. has their own vital interests, and choose to ignore that Jared Kushner and the Trump family have received billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, must now face the reality that the Saudis are heavily driving the American bus.

They were actively engaged militarily with the Houthis in recent weeks that began with the bombing of a runway forcing an airplane of diplomats to land at an alternative airport, and after a long series of back and forth attacks, resulted in the closure of the Bab-el-Mandeb waterway at the bottom of the Red Sea, closing off Saudi oil to the world from both sides of the Arabian Peninsula.

Saudi Arabia fought alongside the United States in a back and forth conflict with Iran and its’ proxies that saw the MoU torn up by both sides. In the meantime, the Israelis sat at home not striking Iran, and not being struck by the Iranians. Netanyahu left Washington believing he was going all in with President Trump and returning to war. The Saudis said no, leading Donald Trump to chicken out, once again.

Honest people who have been watching in recent months have to acknowledge that other than the Americans themselves, it’s clear that Saudi Arabia has more to do with the decision making of the United States than any other ally in East Asia right now. I understand how painful that must be to the grossly bias thinkers who believe that Israel has full and complete control of the United States at every level. But to continue to suggest as much, with the evolving developments on the ground telling a completely different story, is not much more than an intellectual illness at this point.

The Saudis overruled the Israelis, and the decision of the White House sat with Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that the Saudis, who fought a proxy war with Iran for nearly a decade that saw the death of 325,000 people, may have been heavily involved in the initial decision of the United States to go to war with Iran on February 28 of this year. Over the last month, Riyadh has been an active belligerent, whose involvement in the war has turned on and off in lockstep with Washington in a manner Tel Aviv has not.

As expected, the Iranians said they did not call D.C. and ask the Americans to forgo Mr. Trump’s promised attack. They never agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz, and on Sunday promptly fired an anti-ship missile at a tanker attempting to transit the waterway, leaving the Iranian position the same as it was Friday before Trump’s latest TACO.

Initially the online comedy channel Puppet Regime (who I recommend to everyone) coined a song with a puppet Trump singing ‘they used to call me TACO’. The puppet went on to croon, using an impression of the President’s voice, ‘now they call me NACHO’. The bit continued to have Puppet Trump tell the American people in song, they need to save their hard earned cheese because of the coming economic downturn that will result from an inflationary climate driven by the increased price of oil from the Iran War.

Now, even more cleverly, intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance has coined NACHO as, Not a Chance Hormuz Opens. So not only do we have a consistent TACO out of the President, but the situation he created continues to result in NACHO.

As of Monday morning, August 3, 2026, the Iranians exhibit as much control over Hormuz as Friday when Trump threatened to destroy their country in historic fashion, showing just how tepid and goofy Donald Trump’s threats have become at this point.

Far more importantly, this came after a week where for the first time Iran seized escalation dominance militarily and began to strike U.S. forces and bases without being struck first. To follow that stunning humiliation with ludicrous bluster for the tenth time in five months, only to do nothing, and then go on to tell the same childish lies of Iranian capitulation, is devastating to the reputation of the United States.

The Iranians have driven the U.S. out of a large swath of the bases we’ve had in the region for decades in a mere five months of fighting, and instead of sticking to his off ramp, or even buckling down and showing resolve militarily, Donald Trump puffs his chest, doesn’t deliver, and then lies that the opposition begged for mercy only for them to fire missiles within twenty-four hours, proving they have not and never suggested as much.

How long can the American people accept this clown show?!

It has destroyed the reputation of the White House. It dismantled the credibility of the Pentagon and every aspect of the U.S. military. It exhibits no willingness to actually fight, which is nothing short of cowardice.

The United States of America will not recover from this humiliation for decades. The intense lack of seriousness cannot be overstated.

By contrast, Russia is struggling in Ukraine. But they have shown a willingness to endure over a million casualties with almost a quarter million dead. Though they have not achieved their objectives, the Kremlin cannot be seen as weak. They may be hesitant to commit brutal war crimes because Putin views the Ukrainian people as their cousins of sorts. But the Russians aren’t cowards.

It took the thrashing of Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991 for the U.S. to come back strong and re-establish their military gravitas after the shame of Vietnam. The problem this time around is, relinquishing control of the Strait of Hormuz will lead to the erosion, and possibly the eventual collapse of the petrodollar. Simply looking forward to the next war two decades from now to reinstitute our dominance is unlikely to work this time around.

Once oil is not traded in U.S. dollars and is no longer the world’s reserve currency, the $40 Trillion debt load the United States carries will stifle its’ ability to borrow in the future, leaving printing dollars our only alternative. Those circumstances will lead to hyperinflation that will erode the quality of life for the American people significantly. It could cause our current creditors to call in their loans and dump U.S. Treasuries, further devaluing the dollar and creating even more need for the U.S. to print its’ way out of the crisis, causing a vicious spiral that won’t be easily contained.

Some economists predict that living standards in the U.S. could be reduced by 30% if the U.S. Dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. The more oil that is traded in other currencies, the closer we are to that potential. With the Strait of Hormuz controlled by the Iranians who generally require oil passing through to be sold in Chinese Yuan, that potential becomes an eventuality.

Considering the existing political climate in the United States, the amount of bad information that makes its’ way around the internet, the foolish things that are believed and designed for people to be at odds with one another, the atmosphere is ripe for a level of social unrest that most Americans are grossly unprepared for.

Simply allowing the Iranians to control the Strait of Hormuz is not really something the United States can accept if it hopes to remain intact as the preeminent global power.

Iranian sources have told the Wall Street Journal that they expect to continue to strike at American targets throughout the region. Coupled with their attack on shipping yesterday, it is abundantly clear that the President of the United States is lying in a pathetic defeatist manner, and now Iran is rubbing his face in it.

Donald Trump is a loser and a liar; pure and simple. And the mess he has gotten his country into as its’ head of state isn’t the fault of anyone but the President himself and the band of incompetents he has surrounded himself with in this administration.

The United States would not be in this situation with Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly and H.R. McMaster in the White House like Trump 1.0. But the American people voted for a man who wanted complete control of the government, who was only going to hire a bunch of sycophants. This administration hates experts, made that clear, and caused their voters to despise our best and brightest by calling them unelected bureaucrats. Project 2025 was a campaign of eliminating them in favor of the judgement and expertise of a failed New York City landlord who is a pathological liar.

That has resulted in a war for oil, oil checkpoints, the petrodollar; and against the petroyuan. And instead of accepting that We the People voted for a complete idiot, all the American public wants to do, is blame a single client state with 10 million people and a GDP of $420 Billion.

It’s pathetic.

It’s high time the citizenry of the United States look in the mirror and acknowledge they voted for (or against), a narcissist who was such an immense failure in business, that he came into the White House owing favors to people in a manner we have never seen in the Oval Office. The American people should have had the better judgement to not elect a man whose entire business is predicated on owing money to institutions.

A high level individual at the mortgage brokerage who routinely represents the Kushner Companies once told me, wealth is not about what you have, it’s about what you can finance. And Donald Trump’s real estate business is completely predicated on shaky financing delivered by bankers who hold severe leverage over him because of his historic dishonesty, which resulted in weakness. Being bankrupt on numerous occasions put him in a precarious position with few lenders wanting to take a chance on him, being that he is an unethical rotten risk.

We the People, should have known that; certainly every homeowner who pays a mortgage or property tax. And We the People should have recognized his character and incompetence during his first administration, especially after his performance between March of 2020 and January of 2021. In that time alone, he mismanaged a global emergency, helped fuel racial strife on the streets of America, lied about a rigged election, attempted to commit fraud on tape by pressuring state election officials, started a riot at the U.S. Capitol in order to stop the certification of that presidential election by Congress, and didn’t attend his successor’s inauguration.

It’s time for the electorate to take responsibility for being fooled by a pathological liar, who has put his dishonesty on global Front Street, and has been roundly laughed at across the world for his performance throughout this conflict. He has destroyed the credibility of this country, and possibly its’ core economic strength.

Current Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh, is now in a position where he has to raise interest rates. The bond market in recent weeks has made it clear they believe the Fed is late in doing so. Former Fed Chair Jerome Powell saved this country from economic disaster. The level of inflation we would be experiencing right now had he allowed Donald Trump to bully him into a rate cut, would be astounding. And it would have been all self inflicted by this president, with no pressing emergency.

Mr. Powell averted an economic meltdown by not allowing the same stable genius president, to overheat the economy with the exact wrong policy at the exact wrong time. President Trump using the Department of Justice to intimidate J. Powell into getting his way on rate cuts, in order to rev up the U.S. economy for improved near term performance, for his own political gain, should be an impeachable offense.

This war has created economic stressors that have raised inflation by shortening global oil availability. Trump tried to jail the man who stopped him from putting our economy in a position where it could have been devastated by this war. Americans owe J. Powell a huge debt of gratitude for being a good steward of the economy and resisting the whims of an idiot the majority of the American people put in charge knowing he was an idiot.

The President who thought he knew more than the generals believed he could topple the Iranian government with air power alone. We learned through Cheney, Powell and Schwarzkopf in 1991 that overwhelming force is the only proper way to fight a war. He didn’t have to delve deeply into the history books to know his strategy would be ineffective.

Mr. Trump rid the government of experts who would have impressed upon any president that, if attacked, Iran would close and seize the Strait of Hormuz, and without the military resolve to lose thousands of troops and a significant number of Naval assets, we probably would not be able to pry it away from them.

Experts were also eliminated from government who would tell the president that once the Iranians controlled Hormuz, considering we lack the resolve and force structure to regain the waterway, barring nuclear strikes, that it would begin to erode and ultimately lead to the end of the petrodollar, which would then lead to the end of the dominance of the U.S. dollar, ultimately decreasing living standards in the United States by a significant amount, which could then result in social and civil unrest that may be difficult to contain. In addition to all that, instead of achieving the initial desire of isolating China’s oil supply, we would also be bolstering the petroyuan.

The United States has used a large swath of its’ missile interceptors, and even with the lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War, the U.S. has lacked the foresight to understand we could not sustain a long conflict against cheap and plentiful Iranian drones. On top of that, the Americans would drop a ridiculous amount of ordnance that cannot easily be replaced because the Chinese cut off the rare earth minerals required to produce those munitions in response to Donald Trump’s belligerent and foolish trade war.

We also lack the industrial base to manufacture those weapons quickly and in large quantities, which would have been easier if the significant amount of migrants who entered the United States were put to work for the national interest instead of imprisoned and deported. And we don’t possess the numbers to mount a respectable ground force, which may have been aided by the very same migrant population that Donald Trump vilified for the last decade.

All of this took place because of the stupidity of the American people. No one engages in scapegoating and blame like an American. And instead of taking responsibility for their moronic vote, lack of education and impressionability, they have begun to do what countless other societies have done in the face of failure throughout history; blame the Jews.

The reality is, the American electorate needs to look at themselves in the mirror, realize they made a mistake by electing a corrupt failure who is a known cheat, realize they’ve been had, stop blaming AIPAC who conveniently weren’t able to influence other U.S. presidents into this mess of a policy, and blame themselves for their own stupidity.

If AIPAC ran the country, Joe Biden wouldn’t have lost his coalition and would still be president. We wouldn’t be at war with Iran, and none of the End of an Empire geoeconomic and geostrategic calamities we are facing would be in play. Israel would still be ethnically cleansing Gaza, committing war crimes, and Democratic voters would have pulled their lever for Mr. Biden in disapproval with no ability to protest his Palestinian policy.

It’s time to stop solely blaming Israel for the Iran War, realize that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arabs had, and still have plenty to do with this conflict, as we have seen over the last month, all the way up to and including Saturday’s decision to TACO.

The American people should be demanding Donald J. Trump resign the Presidency, and possibly even Mr. Vance and Speaker Johnson. We are in a crisis of foolishness that is not going to be fixed simply with the next man up.

We need serious leadership and we need it now. Some hick from Appalachia with too much mascara isn’t going to get it done, and neither is an Evangelical Christian who governs based on his End Times beliefs.

However unrealistic, without a special election we are on our way to complete downfall by 2040. If this administration is allowed to continue in office, we will not be able to undo the damage Donald Trump has done.

Being the United States is a democracy (or a democratic republic), this is the fault of the American people, and it’s high time they stop scapegoating like the cowards they are, get off the internet and begin to protest the way we knew how in generations gone by.

This is not a Zionist problem. This is not a Saudi problem. It’s an Big Oil problem, a National Security Apparatus problem, a Donald John Trump problem and an America First problem. As long as we are led by the dumbest, ill tempered head of state of any major nation since Hitler towards the end of the Reich, the United States of America is on its’ way out as the global hegemon. All of our allies know it, including the Israelis, NATO, Asians and Gulf Arabs, and they all have a Plan B.

Continued vilification of our allies will get the American people nowhere but where they find themselves today. No one hates their friends, allies and opposes their strategic interests like an American.

Militarily, economically, geopolitically, and morally, President Trump has destroyed the full faith and credit of the United States.

The problem is not the Zionists. It’s not the immigrants. It’s not the Muslims. It’s not the Socialists or the Liberals. It’s not even the Neocons or the former Republican Establishment. It’s We the People!

People elect the leaders they deserve. Blame yourselves and demand Donald John Trump resign the Presidency. Anything less than that, you will continue to be the problem.

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- Charles Barkley

I am not here to paint a rosy picture of Israel. I am often accused of being anti-Israel by Zionists, and pro-Zionist by those who are anti-Israeli. That’s why I consider my down the middle position to be fair, and brutally honest. People on both sides are inundated with an intellectual poison that doesn’t acknowledge truth, often times in the face of obvious real time facts. I fully understand that slamming Israel for everything, including my dinner getting cold, is the best way to garner readers on this platform. I am fully knowledgeable that writing anything about the Jewish state that indemnifies them of certain actions and holds the United States accountable for their own policies and interests, no matter how much historical precedent, along with independent journalists whose bias has resulted in incorrect assessments, particularly as developments on the ground have changed, is a great way to get people not read my pieces and unsubscribe from my newsletter.

I don’t care. Truth as I find it and my free thinking, heavily uninfluenced, rooted in independent thought is the aim of this Substack.

A decade ago, long before this platform, I told anyone who would listen that America First would seek to absorb Canada. I was told I was crazy and engaging in some whacko conspiracy that no one else was suggesting anywhere. Three campaigns and four years in office, and not a single serious word about it. Less that ten days into the current Trump Administration, in the face of 51st State comments, Justin Trudeau was giving his nation a heart to heart speech about the fundamental shift in relations with the United States.

I am not in the business of regurgitation. I call things as I see them, often far in advance. I effort not to be influenced by the latest hysteria, no matter how popular, and write for the purpose of putting forth my best analysis on the state of geopolitics and foreign affairs, and the underpinning geoeconomics and geostrategy.

With all that out of the way, let’s move forward.

As the Iran War has unfolded, the situation with Israel has shifted dramatically. It may be the most underreported happening of the entire conflict so far. The intelligentsia who claimed the U.S. war with Iran was entirely about Israel don’t look so hot, and moreso, all the real time prediction artists who claimed Israel was going to be the party that destroyed the MoU, including the skewed politically motivated comments from J.D. Vance on Joe Rogan, were wrong.

Obviously facts don’t matter with Israel, on either side. The boogieman image is out of the bag and has not found its’ way back in. Their unhinged prosecution of the war in Gaza eviscerated their ability to contain wild out of control theories that, more often than not, contradict one another.

A great example of this is, Israel is so powerful that they are responsible for almost everything in the world, and especially in West Asia, but they were roundly defeated by the Iranians. Israel dragged the United States into war, but were too stupid to remind them that using a huge ground force was the only way to be successful and an air war would only spawn a set of tit for tat strikes from all sides that doesn’t result in decisive victory, and puts them at a severe disadvantage with the size of their population and land mass.

If you hit Israel with five missiles on a daily basis, and you drop twenty-five bombs on Iran in the same day; Iran being the size of Western Europe and Israel the size of New Jersey, Iran is going to outlast them quite easily. So if they were the culprit behind U.S. military action, they certainly forgot to give sound advice on how to be most effective. And I don’t believe knowledgeable parties thought the Iranian government would fall in a few days.

It’s possible that Donald Trump held that opinion, having little knowledge and a barbaric racist view of his opponent. But Israel does recognize the brilliant, ancient nature of the Persians, and over the years have had very effective intelligence inside Iran. It’s hard to believe, no matter the reporting, that the Israelis thought the Iranian governmental infrastructure was so weak, that it would crumble under the threat of a few bombs, especially if there wasn’t a simultaneous effort to heavily arm the Iranian population and back a sophisticated violent uprising.

Israel surely had interest in war with Iran. Netanyahu absolutely lobbied the White House and the rest of the U.S. government to engage in military action against Iran. That came with a wave of accusations that Israel controls the entire U.S. government, which is reminiscent of the position held by the Third Reich. I challenge anyone to do some basic research about America First, their financial backers, ancestral bloodlines and partners in the shadows. It is my very strong position that this rhetoric has been inevitable since the escalator.

Not only was Israel unable to get the Biden or Obama administrations to go to war with Iran, but people talk like AIPAC is the only lobbyist in Washington. Of course they flood a ton of money into American politics. So does Big Oil. And big oil just manipulated gas prices for four years under Joe Biden to continue to drive inflation just to get the oil war Republicans back in office. The notion that AIPAC runs all, has become a wild theory that has little basis in reality.

Others who had significant interest in this war were the Sunni Arab states, whom recently are constantly being spoken of as wanting U.S. troops on the ground in Iran. Barring whether that’s true or not, what we do know is that Saudi Arabia fought a proxy war with Iran in Yemen during the first Trump term, killed 150,000 people (twice the Palestinian assessments in Gaza), and another 175,000 died as a byproduct of that war (starvation, disease, etc). They gave Jared Kushner $2 Billion when he left office. Though it was $600 Billion, during 2.0, Donald Trump claimed he garnered $1 Trillion in investment from the Saudis. It’s safe to say like everything else in the last seventeen months, Trump’s friends and family probably plugged themselves into the stateside portion of those investments. Qatar gave Donald Trump a $400 Million dollar airplane when everyone knows Trump needed a new personal jet and his ego has only ever been soothed by large body aircraft. So it was very much a personal gift.

Not only will having the Iranians out of the way help the Arab states gain even more control over the global oil trade, but the 1400 year fight between Sunni and Shia Islam existed all the way up until 2019 in Yemen. The Saudis hit Shia targets in Iraq just this week. Yet, people irrationally refuse all that history and recent enrichment of the Trump clan, which outdoes Miriam Adelson significantly, and refuse to acknowledge that perhaps the Sunni Arabs had as much to do with dragging the U.S. into this conflict as the Israelis.

And at the end of the day, all that is tertiary. The United States went to war to have full control of global energy markets, especially with control of Taiwan being a hardened Chinese policy, and their ability to cut off microchips to the U.S. being a problematic future for the Americans. Having the ability to starve China of middle eastern oil is a proper response to balancing that leverage. That was my position on the first day of this war. Mario Nawfal started speaking of that around day five, which is a great example of calling it how I see it before it entering the public sphere, which also happened with my July 19 piece about the fusing of the Ukraine and Iran Wars, which became the story of this week.

The Israelis came into this war with the hopes of having a great victory over Iran. They believed with the right pressure that Iran would begin to slowly but surely break down. But I don’t believe they saw it as a quick victory. That is one reason they are hesitant to get back into the war today. They don’t view the United States as being willing to finish the job and that Trump is more likely to go out and make some deal with the Iranians that are unfavorable to both the U.S. and Israel, just to have better results at home. With the midterms coming, the President’s open corruption and the likelihood the Democrats will to win going away, Trump will be on the hot seat. At the minimum it will make him the lamest of ducks and get him impeached; at the maximum, removed from office in shame.

No one knows this better than Netanyahu. To stay out of prison he put a governing coalition together that includes the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party. I think the problematic nature of that speaks for itself. In order to stay in power, Mr. Netanyahu has let these people run wild whether he agrees with them or not, because if they bail on his coalition, the government dissolves, there is an election called, he loses and goes to jail.

As a result, he has let the most radical wing of Israeli politics, representing the most radical wing of the Israeli public, create a shift in policy to one that the world labels as genocide. And what you get is, Ben-Gvir storming the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount last week with 3200 settlers accompanied by Israeli soldiers, claiming they will take over the entire West Bank.

After Hezbollah joined the Iranians in the war against the U.S. and Israel, the Israelis sent entire IDF divisions into Southern Lebanon. Israel is highly effective at jamming guided ordnance. Hezbollah decided to utilize the highly effective Ukrainian tactic of hitting Israeli armored vehicles and positions with fiber optic drones, and as a result, the Israelis began to take significant losses in both casualties, and hardware.

Israel began to completely level entire portions of Southern Lebanon, creating another massive refugee crisis. They reinstituted their indiscriminate bombing, wired entire neighborhoods and large swaths of land for demolition, and continued their ethnic cleansing campaign that I don’t think would be taking place, even in the face of an Iran War and a full Hezbollah conflict, without Netanyahu in office. Naftali Bennett is a hawk and wants to go to war with Turkey. But I don’t see the recent tactics in Lebanon taking place under his leadership.

The other factor is, Donald Trump has always been happy to let the Israelis hang themselves. He’s not a staunch supporter of Israel. And his seeming support doesn’t have to do with the Epstein files or Miriam Adelson. The leverage they have on him is the people who founded Ladder Capital and saved his real estate portfolio, particularly in New York, are ultra-Orthodox Labuvitch who are friends with the people in Otzma Yehudit and other groups, and could call in his loans at any time, take away all his assets and evict him from his homes in his own buildings, sending him onto the streets of Manhattan with a moving truck in shame, particularly during his first administration.

Ultimately that relationship came through Jared Kushner and his dealings with Meridian Capital, and has subsequently maintained itself into the second Trump administration, with the continuing loan terms unknown. It would have to be gathered that the Trump Organization is not nearly as exposed as they were in 2016. But for all the people, especially Jewish people out there who think Donald Trump is some great friend of Israel, and his grandchildren are Jewish and all this nonsense, need to get that out of their heads, just like those who think his blind eye towards Israel and desire to wage war with Iran is because of Epstein blackmail.

The result of all this is Israel finding themselves in a state of reckless aggression towards its’ neighbors. But, the Iran War did seem to settle them down quite significantly. They took heavy missile fire. The Iranians were increasingly effective at hitting their targets due to a shift to Chinese GPS. The Israeli people spent a lot of time in bunkers, which is not good for a society and terrible for a nation’s economy, especially for a country that would rank somewhere on the other side of the top twenty of U.S. states in GDP.

The rebuilding of the infrastructure can ultimately be profitable by putting people to work and the bankers that finance it. But the economic cost of logistical problems in the near term throughout the country, along with quality of life, suffer as a result. And there are a great many Israelis with foreign citizenship who can leave. Germany has instituted a program that allows families of holocaust survivors to rather easily gain German citizenship and is the most common place Israelis are going to flee the war, according to recent reports. So it’s not in Israel’s interest to challenge the population into a difficult life when a great many of them have alternatives in countries with wealthy western economies.

The strategic issue is a problem that I believe the Israelis have had a come to Jesus moment with (though don’t use that term with them). They were provided with a few KC-135s by the United States. But by and large, for significantly sized Israeli military operations in Iran, they require U.S. assistance with air refueling in major ways. With that support set to dry up from any future White House, but also if the U.S. Congress turns Democratic in January and cuts off funding for the Iran War, should the Israelis get caught up in an ongoing conflict, their reliance on the United States could leave them exposed mid-escalation, without the ability to respond. Also, Israel is dangerously low on interceptors.

We could be seeing a historic shift in military capability that has been seen throughout history with chariots versus infantry, or the advent of the machine gun. Close, medium and long range missiles, along with a high volume of cheap slow moving drones have proven to be more effective than cutting edge air forces in the two major wars going on right now. The Russians have not been able to establish air superiority in four years with some of the best fighter jets in the world because of American anti-aircraft systems. And though the U.S. and Israel have been able to establish air superiority in Iran, they haven’t been substantially more effective than mid range Iranian missiles, which are much cheaper, realize little risk to force, and don’t require the same amount of jet fuel to operate, which in a conflict such as this, is quickly becoming a consideration. In the future we could easily see defense establishments all over the world be much more interested in ballistic missiles and drones than fifth generation aircraft.

The Israelis have, on the very high side, three hundred fighter jets, not all of them operational and capable of force projection. The F-15E can carry the largest missile payload at fifteen air-to ground missiles. Some say more. The F-16 and F-35 can’t carry anything near that. So when you factor the amount of sorties, the amount of refueling runs required in a one thousand mile flight to and from Tehran, along with the cost, the Iranians have shown the world the significant advantage of firing missiles at your target from the comfort of your own home. Add the fact that Iran has shown they can hit your bases, which means they can take out your runways, potentially causing Israeli aircraft an inability to land, which would cause them to need an Arab state or the Turks to allow them to do so. The United States could arrange that for them, but as is customary in war, those countries may not refuel them or allow the Israeli jets to take off again, sidelining those aircraft for the duration of the conflict. So, the Israelis have seen first hand that their strategic advantage, in 2026, may now be a strategic disadvantage.

So when you combine the cost to the economy, harm to the citizenry, taxation on future population and strategic disadvantage, I think Israel has decided that they are less than interested in fighting this war. I wrote in recent weeks a couple of headlines that suggested that Israel was sidelined in this latest round of fighting by the United States because that’s what the White House said. Go figure, I don’t any longer believe that to be true, and shame on me for believing anything this White House says is the truth.

The Israelis have bailed on this war because the cost is not balancing the reward, and without U.S. resolve, their strategic goals are unrealizable. And as long as Donald Trump is signing surrender documents at Versailles, the Israelis have no path forward other than damage and potential defeat, and they know it.

The U.S. put them in a position to have to cease fighting in Lebanon, without consultation, in the MoU. So much for the Israel running the U.S., in another contradiction for that team. The Israelis almost completely toned down their war in Lebanon, in another bad prediction for the anti-Israel squad, proving just how irrational that side can be.

Although it’s illegal under Lebanese law for the government to negotiate with the Israelis bilaterally, weeks back Netanyahu announced a deal to tone down the fighting in Lebanon, resulting in peace talks in Rome two weeks ago. Hezbollah has de-escalated their attacks to an unmentionable amount, and the Israelis have reciprocated.

The United States keeps a large amount of KC-135s in Ben-Gurion airport. The Israelis have requested numerous times in the last two weeks for the U.S. to remove them under the guise of needing space for commercial aviation and aircraft parking. But they don’t want the Iranians to attack.

The Iranians have cleaned out the U.S. bases in the region. The Americans have abandoned the massive al-Udid Air Base in Qatar, which is a massive humiliation for the United States. It’s not just the strategic defeat associated with the Strait of Hormuz like we were talking about for the last five months. U.S. redeployment out of the Gulf is a huge tangible military victory for the Iranians the likes of which the U.S. hasn’t seen in its' history. No fixed military base has ever been destroyed in a time of war outside of the country. This is Alamo stuff, but on the road.

Now American positions in Jordan are getting hit hard as the U.S. had to remove much of its’ forces from the Arabian Peninsula to maintain operational safety. That means the missiles that are actively engaging the U.S. Air Force are getting closer and closer to Israel. And the Israelis know if the United States doesn’t move those tankers, which are the fundamental core of America’s ability to strike Iran from the air, that the Iranians are going to strike them. Yet, the U.S. refuses to move them. One would think that the United States is desperately trying to drag Israel back into this war, not vice versa.

After the MoU, almost every single analyst, particularly the large swath who blamed Israel for the war, carried on day after day saying Israel will be the ones to violate, disrupt and hijack the peace process, mainly by continuing their action in Lebanon. So did the American negotiating team. That’s why they agreed to a clause they had no business entering into. It was not for them to agree to something on behalf of Israel, and of course shouldn't be possible if Israel runs the U.S. It was designed for Israeli violation. Yet, Israel shocked the world and has tamped down fighting in Lebanon.

When J.D. Vance said that there were Israeli cabinet members trying to undermine the MoU, he failed to remind the American people that it’s a parliamentary government and that members of the cabinet often times have completely divergent views from the Prime Minister and are not there to execute the policy of the executive like in the United States. And the PM can’t remain in power without that portion of their governing coalition. So Vance’s commentary was purposefully misleading. He presented it as if a U.S. cabinet official made comments against the president’s policy and the president can simply fire him for the major violation of trust. The Israeli system doesn’t work that way.

Yet, the Israelis still ceased most military action in Lebanon, making Mr. Vance and all the geopolitical pundits look foolish. Sadly, because there is no thoughtful moderation on Israel that adjusts to the reality on the ground, those same analysts just went on the last three weeks and addressed the U.S. restarting the war with Iran on their own as the main antagonist, and ceased to even mention Israel. Though Robert Pape did so on Diary of a CEO in last week, none of the rest of the usual suspects came onto their streams and acknowledged that they thought the Israelis would be the ones to violate the MoU, but at every turn it has been the United States, and Israel has quietly bowed out of the war and shows no signs of wanting to continue. And God knows they didn't admit they were wrong.

Rather than that being proof that the U.S. started the war for their own reasons, which is now common sense, of course the extreme Israeli detractors, mainly in comment threads, talk about how they’re cowards, started the war, now sit on the sidelines and let the United States fight on their behalf. Obviously that’s another contradiction of the crowd that claims Israel is a blood cult that only knows war and wants to genocidally attack its’ neighbors at all times. That’s not true anymore, apparently.

By and large, most serious analysts have had to stop talking about the Israelis carrying on this war at all costs, and will undermine the United States in any way they can. Facts and the military conditions on the ground don’t bear that out in any way, shape or form. Granted it did come back yesterday with that clan claiming the U.S. ships in Egypt that were struck had to be an Israeli false flag, as if the Iranians haven't, one by one, painfully shown the Americans that they can close every shipping choke point in the region if they want. First the Strait of Hormuz, then the Bab-el-Mandeb, and now the Suez Canal.

The only thing that is borne out is, the U.S. put the Israelis in an MoU they did not believe the Israelis would abide by, and the United States won’t remove its’ critical aircraft from the main Israeli commercial airport, begging them to get struck, which will certainly require the Israel to respond.

Anyone honestly assessing the situation over the last thirty days would have to acknowledge that it surely looks more like the United States is trying to draw Israel back into this war and keep them there than vice versa.

It begs to question, with America First’s coordinated effort to claim this war was on behalf of Israel after the start and the days leading up, along with Vance’s disingenuous out of context comments that turned out to be wholly inaccurate in comparison to the facts on the ground today, if much of this full court press to blame Israel for the war and violation of the cease fire, wasn’t pre-determined propaganda; especially considering who the America First movement is, and has been since the 1930s.

The rhetoric is so bad that young people believe that oil, which was never a stated interest of any cause for any U.S. war in the Middle East and Africa, is the propaganda, and the whole thing was Israel all along going back to 9/11. The bizarre nature of that, considering that every single excuse in the world, from regime change to WMD, was used to avoid admitting to the American people and the world that the impetus for our wars in the region was oil, doesn’t have to be reinforced.

But we are looking at the least educated generation of Americans in the last one hundred years. Gen Z kids actually believe that history has no bearing on the present, and how we got here, and 120 years of western policy in the Middle East no longer applies. They get inaccurate information on social media, and they ask large language models questions that provide answers with little context. Prior generations had to read two hundred pages to obtain a dozen facts, and those readings provided the necessary context that resulted in real knowledge.

Israel didn’t violate the Memorandum of Understanding, heavily stopped their fighting in Lebanon, has not struck Iran, and have no current involvement in this war. Those are the facts. Convincing your average American of that reality is difficult, because when it comes to Israel, they twist themselves into pretzels blaming every aspect of every conflict on them and engage in endless contradiction.

None of that indemnifies Israel from seizing the Golan Heights, placing their embassy in Jerusalem, war crimes in Gaza, border expansion into Lebanon, or the sheer belligerence of settlers in the West Bank.

But we are seeing first hand just how crucial oil is to the U.S. and the world. The reason for this war is actively being reinforced by the conflict itself as huge swaths of serious economists believe the world is on the precipice of a global recession should the Strait of Hormuz not return to a high rate of passage, managed by the Iranians or otherwise. Energy runs the world, and oil is still humanity’s largest source of it.

The American people and the United States need to take responsibility for fighting another war for oil in the Middle East, and stop this insidious desire to blame the Jews. But with America First in control of the U.S. right wing, no one with any knowledge of their history can be surprised.

As time moved along and we got closer to his slated trial of August of 2025, it became more clear throughout corners of the internet that there were problems with the case the State of Idaho was preparing to mount.

Then, seemingly out of left field, Mr. Kohberger pled guilty in July of 2025.

Some people who supported the state and wanted Kohberger to be convicted and imprisoned for life (whom had become called Guilters), celebrated with glee. Then there were extra blood thirsty Guilters who wanted him to go to trial, be convicted by a jury of his peers and face the firing squad that the State of Idaho had recently reinstated as a penalty for death, seemingly in response to this case.

The group that advocated for Bryan Kohberger’s innocence, or at least whom had developed a high level of confidence that a story very different than the one told by prosecutors must be the actual truth (often called Probergers), also wanted a trial so the state would have to prove their burden and present the evidence they compiled throughout the two and a half year investigation since the time of the crime. The Probergers had spent those years highlighting the holes in the prosecution’s narrative and timeline, that was so meticulously reinforced by the press.

A gag order was imposed by Judge Steven Hippler from the onset of the case, which was grossly violated by one side or the other. There was an administrative, and a subsequent criminal investigation into the leak, the second of which is still ongoing. But the information put into the public sphere, particularly the most significant reporting done by the media outlets who integrally covered the case, convicted Mr. Kohberger in the court of public opinion with remarkably flimsy evidence; which after the plea, had become exposed in documents unsealed by the court. It became widely understood that according to those released court filings, much of that reporting was patently false.

At the plea hearing on July 2, 2025, Judge Hippler asked Bryan Kohberger if he had killed the four students, naming them one by one. Mr. Kohberger affirmatively announced ‘yes’ to the courtroom in response to each count. Moving forward, this became the greatest piece of evidence in the world for Guilters. As the filings shattered their reality, and it became obvious that the state and media had lied, his plea became their evidentiary holy grail.

The Probergers, correctly identified that the plea bargain system in the United States is broken, and criminal defendants routinely plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit, especially with the death penalty hanging over their heads.

From there, both sides repeatedly claimed that death penalty cases should not allow plea bargains, which is rooted in zero legal theory, the least of which being that it is constitutionally unsound. As much as both sides of the case were vehement about their feelings, they often proved their understanding of the law and the American Criminal Justice System was quite poor.

As the documents, videos and tapes continued to be unsealed by Judge Hippler, they immediately raised alarm bells, and the legions of Probergers grew. What started as a band of inexperienced internet sleuths, became a much more expansive group that began to attract law enforcement types and lawyers from throughout the United States and across the world.

The Probergers truly are a global community. It’s quite a social phenomenon, as it appears from the outside to be a bunch of conspiracy theorists enamoured by a mass murderer. But that’s not really accurate as it became apparent that you could drive an eighteen wheeler through the holes in the prosecution’s story.

What was almost immediately obvious was the state flatly lied about a whole host of issues from the very start of the case, both to the press and in the Probable Cause Affidavit. The coroner came out in the immediate days after the crime and said the four kids were killed in their sleep and were likely unaware of what was happening at the time of their demise. It turns out that all were awake, most had defensive wounds, some fought like hell for their lives and the lights were on.

It became rather clear that Bryan Kohberger’s white Hyundai Elantra pegged as the suspect vehicle was very likely not associated with the crime, for a whole host of reasons. It was also peculiar that when the police initially claimed they were on the hunt for a 2014 Hyundai Elantra, they released a stock photo rather than a captured video still, associated with the crime.

They claimed Mr. Kohberger went back to the house at 9:00am hours after he committed the homicides, but didn’t have any video of the same car going by any of the same cameras they say it had earlier, while tracking his path to and from 1122 King Road.

That could lead one to believe, the following morning he didn’t take the same route to and from the house or he possibly didn’t drive, the latter of which isn’t realistic. There is only one way in and one way out to the location of the crimes in the final stages of the route, so that’s also not possible. That means it either wasn’t his vehicle in the videos they used to make their case, or the cell phone data they hung their hat on was faulty, or both. That established a belief that the twenty-three times they claimed he was near the house in the weeks leading up to the crimes, he was likely somewhere else close by in the very small, and in some cases congested, college town of Moscow, Idaho.

And that was the least of it. The documents and videos proved that the state was grossly incompetent, or they were highly corrupt and lied repeatedly from the start.

This caused a studious group of internet hawks to begin to FOIA documents, video and police interviews in droves; some not even associated with the murders themselves, but situations involving potential alternative suspects that made much more sense to a public operating without all the facts.

The Moscow Police Department unethically began to charge immense amounts of money for the evidence requested, which at the minimum led people to believe that the small college town was profiteering on the backs of a quadruple homicide. Others felt they didn’t want the facts of the case to get into the public sphere. They redacted wild portions of audio and video in a manner that is not standard, sending theories about Kohberger being framed into hyperdrive. There are valid suggestions that the evidence provided through Freedom of Information Act requests were fraudulently altered to hide the truth from the public.

It didn’t help that Prosecutor Bill Thompson told the court the day of the plea that they couldn’t put Kohberger in the house, could not establish a motive, couldn’t connect him to the victims in any way, and peculiarly went on the tell the court they were certain the crimes were not sexual in nature.

Investigators who stood for a press conference moments later reinforced they had no idea how Bryan Kohberger fit into the crime other than his touch DNA was found on the knife sheath that was found underneath one of the legs of the victims. For the first time, they acknowledged to the public there were two weapons, and in addition to the K-Bar knife they had spoken of for years, there was also a blunt force object utilized in the crime. Investigators also said that through incredibly painstaking work, they were never able to connect Mr. Kohberger to the victims. This is after someone violated a gag order and leaked to the press that the defendant had repeatedly stalked the victims, including on social media, and in the Probable Cause Affidavit, had claimed that Bryan had visited the house twenty-three times prior to the murders.

One of the police reports initially said that a knife sheath was found on the floor, not on the bed underneath one of the victims. That is not a mistake that any police officer would or could make. Either a knife sheath in a visible knife crime was on the floor, or it was found on the bed. It cannot be both, and a mistake like that from a responding or investigating police officer is not believable.

Forensics expert, Dr. Brent Turvey, told the public in May of this year that where the scabbard (as he called it) was wedged under Madison Mogen’s leg, there was no blood on top of it. Yet the bed was soaked in blood, indicating that the sheath must have been placed there after the fact. Dr. Turvey has published twenty-two books in the field of criminal forensic science and claims he only cares about the evidence, and it has been never been relevant to him if a defendant is guilty or not. He believes his role is simply to objectively assess the evidence, historically does not meet with defendants, and never spoke with Bryan Kohberger.

Dr. Turvey felt so strongly about what he had seen and the data he had compiled, that after cooperating with former FBI agent Christopher Whitcomb on his book, Broken Plea, which was released in April of this year, he began to appear on a handful of podcasts and YouTube programs, mainly hosted by attorneys, including elite Chicago defense attorney Donna Rotunno’s show on Fox Podcasts.

Dr. Turvey said he had full access to the evidence, and as an expert for the defense, he criticized public defender Anne Taylor’s handling of the case, particularly as it relates to how she processed that evidence. Taylor subsequently released a statement accusing Dr. Turvey of violating a non-disclosure agreement for his statements in his interviews, leading all to believe that Ms. Taylor was still representing Bryan Kohberger, which Dr. Turvey had confirmed in those appearances.

As things unwound, it surely seemed that exculpatory evidence in the case was suppressed. It looked like the Moscow Police Department engaged in somewhere between sloppy investigative techniques, and dirty police work. At the minimum they engaged in a massive coverup. Officers were caught lying, in some cases under oath, and potential suspects were interviewed with no rigor or desire to drill down on facts that could solve the case.

The path of the suspect vehicle seemed to be completely incorrect, or it could not have been Mr. Kohberger’s car, which was a huge part of putting him at the scene. The cell phone information compiled mischaracterized Mr. Kohberger’s proximity to the house. And considering the DNA in the JonBennet Ramsay case found in her underwear turned out to be from a gentleman who packaged the garment in the factory, it is not impossible to suggest that a distant relative of Bryan Kohberger, whom is from the northeast, handled the knife sheath somewhere along the line, particularly in the source factory, which is in the same region of the country.

There is no other DNA in the house from Bryan Kohberger. Not a hair, not any skin cells; nothing. But there is other male blood DNA at the crime scene that doesn’t match either Mr. Kohberger, nor victim Ethan Chapin. It was never determined who that blood belonged to, which could have had tremendous negative ramifications for the prosecution’s case.

There were no footprints outside the house. There were virtually no visible footprints inside the house; seemingly only one which was found using Amido Black, a substance that connects itself to proteins in blood not visible to the naked eye. This fueled accusations of a cleanup after the murders, which could not have been done in the fifteen to twenty minutes in which the state claimed the crime took place, at least not by a single individual. That certainly would have implicated other defendants, if not for the homicides themselves, certainly for Obstruction of Justice.

In a quadruple stabbing homicide, where according to the state, the suspect was in and out of the house in twenty minutes or less; no DNA, blood, hair or clothing fibers or anything else were found in Mr. Kohberger’s car. They say the vehicle was virtually stripped down to the frame, and nothing was found.

That is far more compelling than a touch DNA sample on a knife sheath that had different recorded whereabouts by police within the crime scene, and was found underneath a victim in an area doused with blood, with no additional blood on the sheath, meaning it must have been placed there after the blood that was present had dried. In short, the knife sheath was planted where it was found.

By any known standard of the law, that volume of evidence would make the knife sheath inadmissible at trial, which would leave the prosecution, effectively, without a case.

It doesn’t matter how meticulously you clean a vehicle. The only way to relieve a car of that evidence is to douse it with chemicals and burn it. So the chances of a killer who just stabbed four human beings well over one hundred times, with less than twenty minutes to situate and clean himself, having a car completely clean of every last possible stitch of evidence is not believable. The same went for his apartment.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The mountain of evidence that Bryan Kohberger didn’t commit this crime, or certainly didn’t commit it alone as the state claims is overwhelming. Former FBI Special Agent Christopher Whitcomb, who engaged in famous and controversial FBI moments such as Ruby Ridge and Waco, wrote a four hundred page book on the matter that laid out tremendous amounts of problems with the state’s case. The ability for me to do that here in one Substack article is not realistic.

Behavior from law enforcement; local, state and federal, somehow fostered a movement in the mainstream press that falsely reported vast portions of the case on a consistent basis. They spun all kinds of very normal things in a nefarious manner that were designed to poison the public against Mr. Kohberger. It was almost bizarre.

From releasing a selfie he took of himself the morning of the murders that didn’t indicate any wounds on his hands, which he probably would have endured after a crime of that sort; to showing him looking a bit disheveled in a Costco in the early hours of November 13; the press attempted to use those innocuous images to paint the man as guilty.

They suggested that because an autistic man walked into a Costco on a Sunday morning without a membership card with his shirt partially untucked, that he must have committed a violent quadruple knife homicide just hours before. It was the strangest, most agenda driven framing from the media one could imagine. It crossed lines into a place that clearly sought a predetermined outcome in the case. They even released a video of him in his jail cell standing there doing the sort of nothing that a man isolated in a cage for years might engage in.

It was very clear from the police interviews that one of the surviving roommates whom they got a tremendous amount of their core information and timeline from, was not telling the truth. In any other case, she would have been severely pressured by law enforcement and likely threatened with Obstruction of Justice if she didn’t become more forthright.

The other surviving roommate went home to Reno and sought protection from the State of Nevada from being compelled to testify in Idaho, and it was said that she was never known to have returned to Moscow ever again. A recent taped interview with police from another college student who was with the surviving roomates the prior evening, made statements that contradict what at least one of them said.

The list of evidence that doesn’t point to Bryan Kohberger is unspeakably long. The bit of evidence that he did commit the crime, is paltry at best and likely inadmissible.

He used a Public Defender, whom are rarely helpful to criminal defendants in the United States. 90%-95% of cases handled by public defenders end in plea bargains. They’re not there to mount a rigorous well funded defense. They are there for procedural purposes at best, and to keep the docket moving for the prosecutor’s office. That’s the reality of the American Criminal Justice System.

Monday, Bryan Kohberger filed a motion for Post-Conviction Relief, which was predicted and anticipated by the entire Proberger Community. There was universal celebration from these tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people, whom have become virtual activists about the case and engage with its’ issues on a daily basis. They claim they don’t really care if Kohberber is guilty or not, but that the process was so corrupt, he deserves his day in court because this sort of police work and prosecutorial misconduct cannot not be allowed to take place in the United States.

Many started into the case believing Mr. Kohberger was guilty, but in time, a great many changed their tune and came to believe that the evidence was so thin, the witness statements so weak, the investigation so sloppy and potentially filthy, that he is likely innocent.

In Monday’s petition, Mr. Kohberger claimed Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, which was expected, and wrote to the court in his own hand, that he is indigent and requires an appellate attorney. Sadly that means Mr. Kohberger is going to have to accept representation from another publicly provided lawyer from the same criminal justice infrastructure that mistreated him the first time.

He said he was railroaded by his legal team; told that he was best off lying and admitting guilt in exchange for a whole host of concessions in confinement, that of course also kept him off of death row. Most crucially, he claimed that potentially exculpatory discovery was withheld from him.

There are questions about all sorts of pieces of evidence that point to at least a second perpetrator, multiple weapons, and a potentially planted knife sheath with a smidgen of touch DNA. It appears he is seeking a trial at this juncture, and is willing to risk putting the Death Penalty back on the table.

We will see what comes of the filing. If Kohberger draws the same Judge Hippler, his motion will be an uphill battle as the jurist actively ruled against the Defendant the first time around when the state’s burden was far greater.

If Mr. Kohberger is well represented and has decently funded counsel, he should earn the trial that both Probergers and Guilters have thirsted for, for nearly four years.

The likelihood the Moscow Police Department, the Idaho State Police, the FBI, the Prosecutor’s office and the Judge being exposed for the corruption they engaged in throughout this investigation and prosecution, is highly unlikely. I don’t expect that any of these people ultimately face justice, but Mr. Kohberger deserves to be released for the shameful railroading he received in the backwards State of Idaho.

Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador said, ‘my office stands ready to do whatever is necessary to ensure justice is fully carried out’. That is not a statement vowing to keep Mr. Kohberger behind bars reaffirming the state’s stance that he is unequivocally the single killer, and he will do whatever it takes to make certain that he never sees the light of day. I believe AG Labrador said what he meant to say and left the door open for some sort of acknowledgement that the case was mishandled and the state will not be proceeding with a trial. But that can only happen if Judge Hippler grants Bryan Kohberger’s petition and finds with him on the Ineffective Assistance claim.

One defense expert said he would never work a case in the State of Idaho again. Another said Judge Hippler would put him in jail if he could. The notion that serious professionals simply working on a defense, either refuse to work in Idaho in the future, or are fearful of working in the state moving forward, is indicative of just how corrupt this case, and the criminal justice system is in that state.

The University of Idaho desperately wanted the truth covered up, no matter what that actually was, and could not afford for their campus to empty out in fear, especially after two years of a shuttered town from COVID-19.

We saw at Penn State, in the largest case of its’ kind in U.S. history this side of Jeffrey Epstein and the Archdiocese, that if a university wants to cover up a crime, they can and they will. They tore down the statue of legendary head coach Joe Paterno, and University President Graham Spanier served jail time. So there absolutely is precedent for universities breaking the law to do what’s best for their town, their school and their brand. That surely seems to be one of the things at play in this case.

It appears that Mr. Kohberger is on the docket for his petition for Post-Conviction Relief, and time will tell what happens next. But I predict that if Judge Hippler grants Kohberger a new trial, the state will withdraw their charges and manufacture some reason that will be less than acceptable to the public. This will shield the state from being humiliated with an acquittal, and from having the horrific behavior of all those who handled this case brought into the public square and exposed in open court.

Bryan Kohberger would then be released under the guise of a guilty man who got off on a technicality, rather than an innocent man who was abused by a failed investigation that leaves one or more violent killers at large.

Guilters and Probergers, alike, will have to stay tuned which they surely will.

Little did I expect that within a week, Ukraine would strike Iranian commercial shipping in the Caspian Sea. Though reports suggest different sets of events, both nations agree that Ukraine did, in fact, strike an Iranian vessel.

Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed that Ukraine hit an Iranian commercial ship with a drone, killing one crewmember and injuring another. Tehran called it a ‘hostile and criminal act’. In calls to EU officials, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Kyiv’s provocation ‘cannot go unanswered’, and of course proceeded to blame Israel for the Ukrainian decision to strike his nation’s maritime asset. Iran said Ukraine’s actions ‘risks expanding the flames of war’ and with no Ukrainian ambassador stationed in Tehran, the Iranians summoned their charge d’affaires.

President Zelenskyy wrote on X that Ukraine struck vessels in the Caspian Sea ‘used in military cargo shipments involving Iran’. Peculiarly, he went on to say that Russia provided satellite data for Iran’s attacks against four air bases on July 19-20; two in Bahrain, one in Jordan and one in Kuwait. Ukraine suddenly feeling the need to meet out punishment for Iran striking Arab states using Russian targeting data is bizarre, none of their business, and their decision to do so substantially elevates the risk of extreme global instability.

It’s a confounding maneuver by the Ukrainians. It makes perfect sense to strike Russian assets in the Caspian Sea and anywhere they can find them, as they also claim a Russian warship was damaged in the same set of attacks. But where did the intestinal fortitude come from to undertake such a dangerous action against Iran?

Some in the pro-Russia camp in the United States, who make it obvious who is buttering their bread with their commentary, believe it’s simply Zelenskyy flailing about because the Ukrainian military is under tremendous duress, ceding ground, and under real threat of collapse.

The truth of that is disputed, depending on which side of the Russia-Ukraine Information War you believe. Each side will say the other is at a tipping point.

The pro-Ukraine side will have you believe recent strikes inside Russia, particularly in Moscow, have been devastating to the morale of the Russian public, and that certain Russian elites and military brass are so angry that they are on the precipice of toppling Putin.

The Russian side suggests their military objectives reserved for 2027 will be achieved in 2026, and the U.S. weapons shortage along with EU economic suffering from the Iran War, is accelerating Russian strategic success. Putin went as far as to say that after the war, Ukraine will cease to exist and ultimately be swallowed by Russia, Poland and Hungary.

Time will tell where the truth lies.

Iran’s suggestion that Israel was behind pushing the Ukrainians to strike Iranian targets in the Caspian doesn’t really jibe with their current posture. Israel has asked the United States to remove their KC-135s from Ben Gurion Airport because they don’t want to be struck by Iran, and see that as the U.S. Air Force pulls further and further towards Israel’s borders and abandons their air stations in the Gulf states, the Iranians strike closer and closer to Israeli territory in effort to destroy USAF assets.

Israel has made it plain that they really don’t feel Trump is in it to win it, and aren’t exceedingly interested in re-entering a war designed to conclude with diplomacy. They have taken a beating militarily and economically. The social cost to Israel has also been great from a standpoint of stress to its’ population, along with the flight of citizens and residents who are able to leave for elsewhere. As a safe haven for global Jewry, Israel once had an appeal for millions of Jews throughout the world. That image has been shattered in the eyes of many, and the continued shrinking of the Israeli population is not an outcome that suits its’ future.

This past week Israel sailed at least one Dolphin class submarine, which are believed to be armed with nuclear tipped cruise missiles, into the Red Sea and surfaced off the coast of Eilat, signaling to Iran their desire to be left alone.

Some will say encouraging Ukraine to involve themselves in the East Asian conflict is an Israeli effort to drag the EU and UK into the war against Iran. But it’s a bit much to suggest the Israelis have that much influence over the Ukrainians, and also Israel doesn’t really want to antagonize Russia.

Netanyahu has always maintained a good relationship with Putin. It has been reciprocated, being that between one and a half and two out of ten Israelis are Russian speakers, which Putin values. As much as Americans from both sides of the aisle want to abandon Israel, I believe the necessary strategic Israeli default position is to show up on the doorstep of the Kremlin should the United States become viciously unfriendly.

The standard accusation from the Iranians that Israel was behind this particular event doesn’t have a lot of veracity. Of course there will be those who believe the Israelis are trying to draw NATO into the Iranian conflict, but that’s not really in Israel’s interest for a litany of reasons, the least of which being that uniting the Alliance while Israel is experiencing paranoia over Türkiye is strategically divergent.

Was the White House behind this Ukrainian strike? With Trump’s known affinity for Putin, it’s hard to believe. But it also seems that within the United States, the National Security Establishment has taken control of the Ukraine War. Was there a suggestion made to the Ukrainians that should they begin to rattle Iran and increase their insecurity through aggressive action, Ukraine will be rewarded with the munitions they so desperately need?

It’s easily sold to the Ukrainians that Iran would be unlikely to respond. With thirty Russian missiles raining down on Ukraine on a daily basis, what’s one more from Iran, other than possibly making the Iranians feel good? Iran has proven to be a strategic actor in this war. It’s simply not necessary for them to strike Ukraine.

Iran would be tipping their hand in terms of their long range missile capability, which could prove unwise depending on how effective it is (or isn’t). There is also the danger of some sort of misfire or targeting issue with that hardware that could risk landing in NATO territory, triggering a wider war through Article 5. Ukraine knows this and clearly had little fear of Iranian reprisal. So were they enticed by the United States?

It will be interesting to see how Trump, Netanyahu and Zelenskyy interact with all three coming together for Lindsay Graham’s funeral in D.C. and South Carolina this week. After this incident, what comes out of their meetings is something both our allies and adversaries will be watching closely.

Regardless of the driving factor behind Ukrainian actions, whether they be autonomous, encouragement from the United States, or more boogieman Israeli influence, this event is the first open blending of military affairs that could seriously threaten to merge the two conflicts. At this juncture, the only real geographic divide between both wars is Turkish territory. A look at a map shows just how close these hot zones are, which goes back to my question in last week’s article; Are We There Yet?

With China responsibly on the sidelines, but their allies North Korea and Iran supporting the Russians in their active conflict with Ukraine; the United States and NATO backing Ukraine, with the U.S. and Arab states currently at war with Iran, along with the recent key involvement from Israel; a strike from the Ukrainians on an Iranian commercial asset, which is an act of war, brings the world ever closer to World War III.

History may one day record we are already there.

Being a newer newsletter, it has taken a bit of time to get an understanding of what the ideal pace of material is, and I am sure in the future, other changes will be made.

But for now, I intend for my content creation to be as follows.

• Monday, Wednesday and Friday I will be issuing a full article similar to the ones you have been receiving.

• Monday and Friday will have specific emphasis on the developments of the week.

• Wednesday may as well, but is likely to be more broad based commentary on geopolitics rather than a piece that is critical to breaking news.

In addition, I will be posting Substack notes daily, either independent of, or in support of my articles.

• In the coming weeks, perhaps as early as this week, I will likely be starting a piece called Sports Saturday. It could end up being Sports Sunday. That is yet to be determined. It will be a weekly piece on a sports or sports betting topic of relevance with no intended political spin. I may wait until after Labor Day to begin this piece, so stay tuned.

I am fully aware that the algorithm is going to hate my departure from geopolitics, albeit one day a week. And as I increase my social media presence in support of this newsletter, it may require some tweaking in terms of seperate channels or accounts on the social side.

I will cross that bridge when I come to it after seeing how the internet gods react.

Thanks again for reading and your support. Have a great week!

Philly Newchivega

Yesterday, Donald Trump vowed to supply Saudi Arabia with nuclear fuel. Is it a bluff? Is he making a false promise to the Saudis in order to garner favor in the war moving forward? It’s hard to say. But no other conceivable policy could have such an unknown and immense impact on the future of the region and US-Saudi relations as providing nuclear material to the Royal Family.

In two decades Saudi Arabia could find themselves allied with China, and the United States could rue the day they opened the door to Saudi nuclear capability. If they were to develop a nuclear weapon as a result of this decision, the Saudis could have a belligerent leader after MBS that takes issue with the U.S., or hates Israel and threatens them with annihilation. Conceivably, MBS could do the same himself.

The oft rumored ‘new security architecture’ in the Middle East reported on by Larry Johnson and Pepe Escobar earlier in the war, developed by Russia and China, that is centered around a coalition of Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, could lead a nuclear armed Saudi Arabia to no longer require friendliness to the United States, and as a global energy supplier, could hold much of the world hostage any time it should see fit. Perhaps it’s an admission by the Trump Administration that the United States can’t stop Iran from developing or obtaining a nuclear weapon. Does the U.S. believe Iran already has a bomb, as was reported by those same two thinkers a month ago, and possesses intelligence to support that fear?

The best nuclear developers in the world are France, Russia and China. The question begs to ask why Saudi Arabia would want to jointly build a nuclear reactor with the United States. They are no longer a leader in nuclear technology, and much of their nuclear fuel comes from Russia. So if the Saudis really wanted a nuclear plant, partnering with the U.S. isn’t their best path forward. Being that the entire story is coming from the Americans, it’s hard to take seriously under this administration and logically has to be considered wartime propaganda to intimidate Iran.

It’s very hard to decipher where US-Saudi relations lie. A day after the start of May 4th’s Project Freedom, Saudi Arabia restricted America’s use of their runways and air space, shutting down Trump’s half brained scheme of using the U.S. Navy to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, something both parties knew could not safely be done without extreme Iranian reprisal.

By contrast, the Saudi backed Yemeni government bombed a runway last week to stop the Houthi delegation to Khamenei’s funeral from landing back in Yemen, which must have had tacit approval from the Royals, knowing the imminent Houthi response would be to strike Saudi Arabia with missiles and drones. The Saudis denied they struck the Yemeni runway, but U.S. officials confirmed otherwise. That, in and of itself, is difficult to make an assessment on with the United States being the least truthful out of all dozen parties in this conflict.

So where Saudi Arabia stands in this war is uncertain and seems to change week to week. The information or misinformation regarding their plans or position is bipolar.

Kuwait has been getting absolutely smashed by the Iranians during the post-MoU round of fighting. The thinking from many analysts is that Iran expects any potential ground invasion to be sourced in Kuwait and it will be the land from which the U.S. fights war, whether it be an amphibious assault, an air drop, or both.

The U.S. Naval base in Bahrain has been destroyed and the Fifth Fleet is now out of a home. Their energy infrastructure has been hit. There is concern that when the dust settles and the war is over, Bahrain will be once again be Iraqi territory. They are energy rich and militarily inconsequential, so if the resolution of this conflict ends with the United States withdrawing from the region, the expectation is that Bahrain will not survive as an independent country.

The UAE got pounded in the last round of conflict before the April 8 ceasefire. Their airports were attacked. Drones were flown towards their high rises with minimal realistic effect, but did tremendous damage to the Emirati business model. For a country that fancies itself a safety zone in the Middle East that caters to the one percent as a tax haven, whose real estate business is fundamental to its’ recent success, the fear induced by this war has severely damaged their brand. They have a lot of oil, but their desire to be a financial hub full of tech bros and billionaires hiding money while they engage in finance deals doesn’t have much veracity with Iranian missiles falling from their skies. Though they have managed to escape much destruction in the post-MoU round of fighting, their image in the region as an American and Israeli stooge makes them forever a hard target in the event of future regional conflict.

Oman seems to have some sort of desire to make a deal with Iran and co-administer the Strait of Hormuz. It would be a massive financial boon for them, and the Iranians in their willingness to be fair have expressed openness to share transit revenue with the Omanis. Yet, they are stuck in a position of being an ally of the United States and have been brutally attacked over the last twelve days. Their unfortunate role as a pawn in a game far larger than their stature has caused them significant pain and consternation.

Qatar is the most self interested, two faced country in the Gulf who seems to have a magic diplomatic tongue. They are at the center of every peace deal, while simultaneously undermining everyone in the region. After developing a fair amount of diplomatic good will with Iran, the Iranians have been lobbing missiles at them throughout the last week, which is somewhat just deserts for the Qataris. They do, however, always seem to land on the right side of any conflict and when the dust settles, it’s hard to imagine Qatar won’t find themselves on the same page with the victor.

Jordan has been the most heavily damaged in recent days as the U.S. Air Force has attempted to move their assets further away from the Gulf. The only non-GCC state in this latest round of conflict, Jordan has become a flashpoint for Iranian attack. The Jordanians have been publicly silent while they allow the United States to conduct operations from their soil, and in turn are getting hammered. At what point will they tell the United States that it’s time to leave? Chances are, for a whole host of reasons, most of them financial, the least of them being they border Israel, Jordan finds themselves in an extreme conundrum they avoided during the last round of conflict. They too are in a helpless situation subject to the will of the Americans.

The one thing of which we can be certain is, if President Trump delivers on his threats to go after the critical infrastructure of Iran in any significant manner, the Iranians have vowed to respond by hitting the energy infrastructure of the Gulf states. Iran has been very truthful about delivering on their threats throughout the war, and if they are pushed the way Mr. Trump keeps posting on Truth Social, the entire Arabian Peninsula is going to feel pain it cannot withstand.

The GCC nations have extreme concern about vows of Iranian reprisal. If their desalination plants, oil infrastructure, electricity and power plants are hit, the heat of the region alone this time of year will cause mass chaos and see millions of refugees exiting the western shores of the Persian Gulf and will likely cause the collapse of the puppet kingdoms initially installed by Great Britain early last century.

The downside of such an outcome would be disastrous for the world. All of the sudden, a huge swath of the global oil supply, along with natural gas, helium and fertilizer will be in the hands of destabilized nations and failed states, controlled by warlords and tribal interests.

Bloomberg reported today that the Gulf states are pushing the U.S. to undertake a ground invasion in Iran. I am a decades long advocate of Bloomberg and view it as the only consistently credible American news outlet. But it’s very hard to believe the Arabs want this war to escalate into a ground conflict that would almost certainly make this a years long war where the U.S. would lose large amounts of troops, continue fighting long term, creating an imminent quagmire that won’t quickly be resolved.

I am of the thinking that Iran doesn’t want to see the destruction and full destabilization of the GCC. It is widely thought that if they can have a decisive victory over the United States, and the Americans withdraw from the region, the Iranians can enter into a financial pact of mutual benefit that is diplomatically copacetic with the Gulf states. If the Iranians maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz, they can profit from every barrel of oil the Arabs send through the Gulf. That will give the GCC countries the ability to set a level of production that is less subject to pressure from the west, and the Iranians will make a fortune in their own right.

It’s hard to decipher the desires of the Sunni Arabs. Do they quietly want out from under the thumb of the United States knowing the U.S. demands that Israel be the regional hegemon? Or do they want to double down on the wealth and power of the Americans, not be forced into a long term financial agreement with the Iranians, and maintain the historic divide between them and the Shia?

On February 28, 2026, the U.S. decided to engage in kinetic conflict with Iran. In December of last year when anti-government protests broke out in the Islamic Republic, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to warn Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and moreso the political arm of his government that runs day to day affairs, should they engage in violence against their own citizens, ‘which is their custom’, that the U.S. was ‘locked and loaded and ready to go’. This led those paying attention around the world to believe that Mr. Trump was willing to use military force to protect the Iranian people in their struggle for CIA-Mossad induced freedom.

Being that the holiday season was upon us and the U.S. military was engaged in some bizarre act of Christmas plunder in Venezuela, the majority of Americans were distracted from the potential of additional military action in Iran. It highlights the problem with having a U.S. President who is always making threats he often doesn’t deliver upon, putting wild ideas into the ether via social media numerous times a week. It devalues the policy of the White House with ill messaging by flooding the zone with internet posts no one can keep up with, in turn causing the American people and the world to tune out the President of the United States. As we entered 2026 and the public returned to work and re-engaged with political current events, Mr. Trump went on to tell the protesters that ‘help is on the way’, clearing the path for military strikes under a different guise than June 2025’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities.

Even with his feeble effort in prior weeks to back the rebellion, when the U.S. began its’ military campaign on February 28, 2026, the reasoning shifted to barring Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The President had told the nation last June that the bunker busters delivered by American B-2 bombers had ‘obliterated’ Iranian nuclear sites. Albeit the United States of Amnesia, the press began questioning Mr. Trump about why we would require sustained strikes on Iran when we destroyed their capability of developing the bomb just eight months earlier.

There really wasn’t a good answer from the White House, even though many intelligence assessments said in June, 2025, that our strikes had minimal effectiveness and the Iranian nuclear program had only suffered marginal setbacks. At the time, Mr. Trump doubled down on his initial claims and said, ‘Iran would not be in the nuclear business for decades, if ever again’.

Having to face down those exaggerations, aided by an army of MAGA defectors on social and independent Media, Marco Rubio told the public that Israel was going to attack Iran, and knowing that American assets in the region would be hit in retaliation, the U.S. was engaging in pre-emptive strikes to protect its’ position in the region.

Within days of the first actions by the U.S. and Israel, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz. It was said that they mined the waterway, and they began attacks on commercial shipping. Lloyd’s of London ceased to insure cargo ships and tankers traveling through the Strait, and an armada of commercial vessels carrying some of the world’s most critical resources, including oil, liquified natural gas, helium and fertilizer, began to stack up in the Persian Gulf.

Up until this point, our European allies made it plain to the United States and the world that they were not involved. The U.K. publicly claimed they would not allow ‘offensive strikes’ from their runways, but quickly began to allow ‘defensive strikes’. That sentiment was echoed by the Germans and Italians.

A number of days would pass, and with Donald Trump’s expectations of a quick and decisive victory going unrealized, the Strait closed, and with EU member Cyprus taking Iranian fire, the French dispatched their de Gaulle aircraft carrier group to the Mediterranean. With their British military base in Cyprus being Iran’s target, the United Kingdom also offered to send two carriers to the region. Having already claimed victory in the face of a global energy crisis driven by losing control of the world’s most critical waterway, President Trump rebuffed the British, telling them he didn’t need their help ‘after we already won’, and went on to slam their ships as grossly inferior compared to their American counterparts.

Contrary to known reality, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth continued to deny the closure to the nation and the world saying, ‘the Strait of Hormuz is open’. Within a day or so, Mr. Trump told the press that the U.S. Navy was actively escorting ships through the Strait. The unfortunate reality was, the Navy wasn’t even in the Persian Gulf and was keeping a safe distance because of historic risk to force that modern surface Navies are experiencing, as was learned from the Russia-Ukraine War where the Russian Navy took heavy losses and was run out of the Black Sea.

The following day, as it became verifiably false that the U.S. Navy was doing nothing of the sort, when asked by the press when American ships would begin their escorts, the President responded, ‘very soon’.

Having been told by CENTCOM Commander, Admiral Bradley Cooper, that no such mission was possible without risking the sinking of American vessels, Donald Trump turned to appealing to our allies in Europe and Asia, and even made an appeal to China to send warships to help open the Strait.

First, in a moderate tone he asked the French, British, Italians, South Koreans and Chinese to send Naval assets to the Gulf. The Chinese immediately refused, and our allies also quickly rebuffed his request. Within a few hours, the President had reverted back to the idea that the United States was going to open the strait and claimed that ‘it would be an honor to do that for China’.

The following day once again, Trump sheepishly appealed to China for Naval help, but his tone had become harsh towards our allies, disingenuously claiming they should send warships to the Persian Gulf because, ‘they need the Strait more than we do’. Obviously the Europeans and South Koreans knew that such a mission was suicide and that if the mighty United States Navy, who is by far the largest and most sophisticated Navy in the world, could not enter the Persian Gulf safely, neither could they. All were aware that the Iranians recognized them as allies of the United States, their ships would take fire and almost certainly be sunk.

Mr. Trump and his army of bots, paid influencers and sycophants on X immediately began a two week campaign of hatred towards our NATO allies, and sought to use it as potential impetus for the withdrawal from the Alliance and place blame on them for his failure in the Gulf. They smeared the same European countries that hosted the U.S. military on runways that had gotten all American air assets into the Iranian theater of operations. Logistically, they made the entire war possible for the United States. Yet, Donald Trump lashed out over their refusal to send their sailors to die in order to open the Strait of Hormuz; a problem caused by the attacks of the U.S. and Israel.

It was a pathetic showing by the President. It was reported, and supported by related comments made by Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff, that Mr. Trump believed the Iranians would capitulate before closing the Strait, contrary to all prior war gaming. Having gotten drunk on his recent military success in Venezuela, lacking nuance, any cultural and geographic understanding of Iran, along with ignoring realistic advice from the Pentagon, Mr. Trump vastly overestimated the effectiveness of the U.S. military as a tool in the Iranian nuclear conflict that had largely been solved by the JCPOA.

The Europeans publicly claimed they were not involving themselves by allowing the U.S. use of their runways and airspace. However, the key air stations in the U.K., Germany and Italy were heavily utilized, and the French allowed the Americans flyover rights. The only country outspoken who followed their rhetoric through with policy forbidding the United States from all air and land use, was Spain.

For Donald Trump to shield his own inadequacies as a wartime President by slamming our own military alliance for not sending their warships on a suicide mission, while refusing to acknowledge their logistical assistance, which is absolutely central to the American war fighting effort, was a disgrace. The entire forward deployment of the United States to the majority of the world is based on cooperation from those countries and is the core of U.S. military might that keeps America the global superpower.

His words and actions defy logic in every imaginable way. Without it, should the U.S. retreat to the western hemisphere, which under the Monroe Doctrine that America First has sought to impose on the country and the world, the United States would become a regional power. Regional powers cannot thrive with $40 Trillion in debt.

Unlike George H.W. Bush, who gathered approximately thirty-five countries (sources vary) in his coalition for the Gulf War, or George W. Bush’s commitment from over fifty nations for intelligence, overflight rights and logistics for the Afghan War, along with forty-eight countries who joined the Iraq War effort, Donald Trump didn’t even consult NATO regarding U.S. military action in Iran. To ridicule them for not aiding his failed project, asking them to reopen the Strait of Hormuz at extreme risk to their own forces with no prior discussion, is shameful treatment of key allies and unfit for an American President.

Trump seemed to finally cross a line for the U.K. and our EU allies with this latest gambit of rhetorical tomfoolery. Their level of tolerance for his abusive commentary seemed to reach its’ peak. German Chancellor Merz said the Iranian conflict was not their war, and went on to say that the United States was being humiliated, which is a magnificently bold, and quite unfriendly remark.

Minister of everything related to U.S. foreign policy, Marco Rubio, proceeded to respond to Mr. Merz by claiming the Russia-Ukraine War was not America’s war, which is rich considering that CIA toppling of the pro-Russian Ukrainian government during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and 2005, along with the Euromaidan of 2014, was huge impetus for the 2022 Russian invasion.

All of these remarks have no basis in common sense for the national security of the United States. It’s simply red meat for a Trump base that before his ride down the escalator had been the Party of Reagan, full of Russia hawks who felt that a strong NATO was crucial to U.S. hegemony across the globe, albeit a weakened Russian Bear after the fall of the Soviet Union. 2008 Republican nominee, John McCain, adhered to this philosophy and considered himself a ‘foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution’. 2012 party nominee, Mitt Romney, said during the campaign that Russia, not China, was still America’s chief geopolitical foe, causing Barack Obama’s famous debate retort of, ‘the 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back’. But under Trump, the GOP base adopted a wholesale shift to a policy that reflected something between regionalism and isolationism.

Obama would go on to regret that comment when Russia attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. election by subverting the information sphere on social media, which at the time was highly experimental. Knowing how common that sort of information warfare is today, we take it for granted. But it was the Russians in 2016 who had the ingenuity to spread extreme disinformation via social media to influence elections, and the world hasn’t been the same since.

Instead of amplifying the importance of maintaining and even strengthening NATO, President Trump has gone out of his way to weaken the alliance at every turn. Like many other issues where the GOP previously disagreed with his policies, Republican voters rallied to his side by expressing visceral opposition to our international coalition of the prior eight decades. It is one of the hallmark issues that signified the shift from the Party of Reagan to the party of MAGA.

Earlier this month, the President went to the NATO Summit in Ankara, angry but subdued. The United States had taken a proper licking in Iran. At the recent G7 meeting in France, he signed the Memorandum of Understanding agreed to with the Iranians that provided them immediate oil sanctions relief, unfroze $12 Billion of their assets, in the future would seek to strip all economic sanctions from the Islamic Republic, unfreeze another $12 Billion in assets, allow them to keep their ballistic missiles, and deliver the Iranian government $300 Billion.

Somehow when he signed such a financially unfavorable document at the Palace of Versailles, not a single person in the White House thought to mention that doing so would appear defeatist while ringing the bell of history, drawing comparisons to Germany’s humiliating and economically crippling surrender with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Then again, history nor international relations is a strong suit of the average American, so perhaps it was considered and dismissed based on a lack of fundamental knowledge amongst voters.

Stewing in shame, barring some sideways comments towards the E3, the president shifted gears and sought to make supplying F-35s to Türkiye the centerpiece of his agenda in Ankara, and also met with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine.

The childish strategy of using the early failings of the Iran War to further divide the NATO Alliance is an unfortunate development for the United States. It can’t go unnoticed that the U.S. rhetoric blaming NATO came within forty-eight hours of a 90 minute private phone call between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, of which the only readout came from the Kremlin.

The fundamental lack of honesty coming out of the White House during this conflict has destroyed the wartime credibility of the United States. Obviously there are issues at home, such as casualty numbers, omitting hardware losses and the destruction of bases. But the President’s brazen lies about the closure of the Strait, which is a very crucial international affair that impacts the broader global economy, along with his lies by omission regarding the logistical assistance of NATO, and calling his request for them to reopen the Strait by using their warships ‘very safe’, he eroded every ounce of remaining trust that western democracies still had in the United States.

The Chinese, and to a lesser degree the Russians, are giving Iran targeting data to strike American assets in the Middle East.

There is a sense that the United States needs to make sure that China knows such activity cannot go unanswered. In the mean time, we would consider it an entry into great power conflict if the Russians took action against the U.S. directly for doing the same.

When a country is the world’s pre-eminent superpower with the largest economy and most advanced military, perhaps you play by a different set of rules. But the hubris shown by the United States is remarkable. The outrage we exhibit when others consider engaging in the behavior we do, is remarkable.

The U.S. and our NATO partners have made it possible for Ukraine to strike inside Russia. In the beginning of the war, it was considered risky and something the Americans were to reticent to do.

There was a time early in the conflict where we claimed we didn’t have enough F-16s to send to Ukraine. The U.S. has F-16s like Wrigley Field has blades of grass. But we didn’t want to give an advanced fourth generation fighter jet to a country actively in a hot war with Russia because Moscow could respond with direct action against the United States.

We didn’t want to provide the Ukrainians with ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) because they would inevitably be used to strike Russian territory. So we chose to do it little by little; take a bite here, grab a piece there. Here we are years later, and drones are flying into Moscow, one of the world’s great power centers, and until 1991, every bit as globally respected of a city as Washington D.C. It has been absolutely stunning for those of us old enough to remember the Cold War.

If the Chinese or Russians provided Iran any sort of weaponry that would allow strikes inside the United States, it would mean World War III. If they provided the Iranians small ships that could launch drones from the shores of the Atlantic to hit New York City, the Caribbean to hit Miami, or ICBMs to hit D.C., our response would be drastic.

It goes to show how measured the Russians have been and why Putin is on the hot seat within Russia with a large portion of the population, along with many elites who want to retaliate against NATO directly. They are a great nuclear power. In a worst case scenario, they can destroy the United States and Europe every bit as much as we can destroy them. In a conventional conflict, they have critical war fighting abilities the U.S. does not possess, which is resolve, the willingness to use ground troops, and take large numbers of casualties, which is a hallmark of Russian warfighting.

Since 7:32pm Moscow time, Christmas Day 1991, when the Soviet flag was lowered and the Russian flag raised, the United States has acted with impunity around the world. In the Iranian conflict, we have begun to target critical infrastructure, including striking a nuclear facility yesterday. The Iranians are the first nation who have shown they are willing to fight fire with fire against the United States, and have begun to target similar assets in the Gulf Arab states, particularly oil fields and desalination plants.

We are at a flashpoint where either the U.S. is going to back down because that sort of Iranian reprisal will crush the global economy, and likely the American economy along with it, or the U.S. is going to climb the escalation ladder that Professor Robert Pape routinely speaks of.

Destroying a large portion of drinking water in the Gulf states will cause a massive refugee crisis, potential famine, and the destabilization of the Arab Kingdoms currently allied with the United States who possess a huge swath of the world’s oil. The price of fuel would go through the roof and historic stagflation would be upon us.

You have to give Iran credit. They’re not adhering to the old double standard the Americans have lived by for three and a half decades. They are lashing out reciprocally at U.S. interests in a manner that puts the entire American economy in peril. It gives them tremendous leverage and it’s clear that they have been planning for this war since 1979.

For all those who espouse that the United States of America is a Christian country, we certainly don’t adhere to the words of Jesus and ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. The Iranians are demanding respect, and the double standard appears to be coming to an end.

Although the U.S. is still only utilizing air power, there is growing thought that they are preparing for the use of ground troops, and the target set they have been striking in recent days seems intent on degrading Iranian logistics infrastructure in effort to stifle their ability to thwart an invasion.

CENTCOM claims they have hit Iranian surveillance sites, bridges, underground weapons storage and maritime capabilities. They sustained strikes against the Iranian coastline, and there is general thought in the analyst community that taking the Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf with the intent of regaining control of the Strait of Hormuz, is the mission they’re preparing for.

Admiral Brad Cooper is still the CENTCOM Commander. Unless the U.S. is keeping it under wraps, there doesn’t appear to be a senior U.S. Army or Marine Commander who has arrived on the scene to conduct any sort of assault. Amphibious or not, it is hard to imagine the U.S. would undertake a ground invasion run by a Navy Admiral. Until we see senior Army or Marine brass directing traffic, an imminent ground attack from the United States remains uncertain. The command structure could be in place but has yet to be publicized to maintain operational security, because even with its’ political sensitivity at home, Donald Trump seems poised to give the order.

Simultaneously, Ukraine is taking a severe pounding. The potent strikes the Ukrainians have executed in recent weeks inside Russia, particularly in Moscow, have been militarily impressive, but dangerously escalatory. The Russians have responded violently.

Unlike the sentiment in the United States, Vladimir Putin is under tremendous pressure to escalate the war. Many believe he is under threat of being deposed because of his lack of ruthlessness in smashing the Ukrainian military, even if it require slaughtering more civilians. Apparently there has been a significant swath of yachts belonging to Russian oligarchs that have set sail for Türkiye, leading many to believe they are concerned about a new Russian government that would repossess the assets bestowed upon them by Putin over the last twenty-six years. The call for increased violence from the Russian people, Russian military brass and the Russian elite grows louder by the day, along with a palpable desire to attack European targets, even if they be in NATO territory.

The Ukrainian drones have performed tremendously well, but there are reports that they are being engineered and manufactured in NATO countries, and they’re merely assembled in Ukraine. There is a segment of important Russians who want to strike those factories, even if it means confronting NATO directly.

For nearly four years, Iranian drones have been utilized by the Russians in Ukraine. This year, North Korea provided 11,000 troops to aide Russia in their bloody struggle.

NATO has provided Ukraine with all the weaponry they’ve managed to obtain throughout the war. Seventy-nine F-16s have been pledged by the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium. Estimates suggest the Ukrainians have received thirty-nine of those aircraft, all operational. Poland delivered fourteen MiG-29s and fourteen more were expected, but tensions between Warsaw and Kyiv have halted those deliveries, and the aircraft will remain with the Polish Air Force until retirement in 2027.

The Americans have been giving the Ukrainians targeting information since the start of the war, which has been a tremendous asset for their defense effort. Without it, the Ukrainians would not have been remotely as successful as they’ve been.

In their fight with the United States, the Iranians have been using Chinese and Russian anti-aircraft systems. They’re also receiving targeting information from both nations. Just like the Russia-Ukraine War, that satellite data has been invaluable to Iran’s ability to strike back at American assets in the Middle East, and has aided their ability to pound U.S. partners in the region.

Israel has been an active participant in the war with Iran, though in recent weeks they seem to want little part of the conflict. Initially the U.S. said they asked Israel to stay on the sidelines during the onset of the post-MoU-round-two. But that seems to be just another false claim by the Americans. Israel asked the U.S. to remove their KC-135s from Ben Gurion Airport, assumingly to remain off Iran’s target list. The United States refused.

Israel’s interceptor stockpile is bare. They know that the Russians and Chinese are providing targeting data. Israel’s ability to spoof the Iranian GPS used on their missiles and drones ended when Iran shifted to the Chinese BeiDou-3 satellite navigation system, causing much more accurate strikes.

Their population has been in bomb shelters for months. The PTSD levels of both their troops and citizens is reportedly very high. They seem uninterested in taking Iranian fire, especially at their main commercial airport, because they would be forced to respond.

It appears Israel wants to avoid the escalation ladder. Their fighting with Hezbollah has subsided, and they were in Rome this past week in talks with the Lebanese. That said, it is hard to imagine the Israelis remaining militarily dormant for the duration of the war.

In the mean time, the United States has dragged the GCC states and Jordan into the conflict, and those allies have been struck by the Iranians over the last seven days. The Kuwaitis approved the U.S. utilization of surface to surface missiles launched from their soil. The Saudi backed government in Yemen bombed the main Yemeni airport this past Monday to disallow the Houthi delegation returning from Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral from landing. The Houthis fired missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia’s Abha Airport in retaliation.

The United States, Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are all in hot conflict. Israel is in a respite, and Belarus poised to come off the bench.

Barring the rest of NATO and Chinese assets being at a safe distance, it’s increasingly difficult to say that the world is not at war.

The North Koreans and Iranians are allied with the Russians. The Ukrainians, Israelis, the GCC countries and Jordan are allied with the United States. The only thing stopping everyone from acknowledging that World War III is upon us, is Europe being fully engaged with the Russians in kinetic conflict.

If Europe weren’t the main battleground of the first two world wars, considering the size and potency of force (or lack thereof), along with American nuclear assets kept on the continent, most would consider the world already at war. If we are not there, the edge of the cliff is a short distance away.

Nuclear armed nations of India and Pakistan being on the sidelines can also be considered a disqualifier. If things continue to unravel, the Turks will have something to say about the matter.

Coupled with Israeli action in Lebanon, should Syria heed Trump’s call to enter into conflict with Hezbollah, they will be in the mix, and that portion of the Middle East is an increasingly complex conflict zone. The Kurds are getting hammered by Iran, and with an impotent government, it is inevitable that Iraq will become a battleground in any prolonged war in East Asia.

Fourteen countries have been engaged in the current conflict and have recently been on the offense, or been struck with bombs, drones and missiles, including four nuclear powers.

With the desire of some Russians to attack Europe, we are one missile strike away, and one NATO reprisal, from there being no question that the third world war has begun. Should a coup arrive in Moscow, unless the Europeans de-escalate, the likelihood of such an event happening is quite high.

There are so many nations currently in kinetic conflict, whether offensively or defensively, either presently or very recently, humanity could be knee deep in the next global catastrophe. Seventeen countries, four possessing nuclear weapons, with the two pre-eminent nuclear powers on opposite sides of both flashpoints; no one is at ease.

It’s entirely possible that history will reflect, this is World War III.

Also, as the world’s great new superpower in the west, Department of Defense, rather than Department of War, signified a nation that was not actively on the offense, spreading an international ideal of warmongering. Department of Defense was a softer label that was designed to exemplify the good that the Americans were trying to espouse on the global stage as the standard bearer of democracy. After all, spreading democracy by force, in theory, is not a strategy the United States would seek to employ. Obviously that didn’t remain the case.

When Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth renamed the DoD to the Department of War last September, it was sadly appropriate in a great many ways. Not only had democracy deteriorated in the U.S., most notably beginning on January 6, 2021, but under the current Trump Administration, the United States had begun a strategy of imperialism that we tried to avoid making so obvious in prior generations.

The belligerence associated with the President openly stating that he wanted to make Canada the 51st State had previously been unthinkable. An ally on our border who had fought so valiantly beside us in World War I; had gone through great pains and undertaken tremendous risk to aid in freeing our hostages from Iran in 1980; and took on our airborne aircraft in a safety and logistical nightmare during the historic threat to the homeland on September 11, 2001, the Canadians have been nothing but a staunch ally and friend of the United States. This level of open imperialism against an allied border state with a shared history, caught a great many by surprise.

The stated goal of acquiring Greenland from Denmark, by force if necessary, was a wild threat made by President Trump. Denmark has been an informal ally of the United States since the early 1800s. In 1917, they sold the Danish West Indies, which are now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands, to the Americans. And of course, in 1949, Denmark was one of the initial dozen nations that came together to form NATO, the most dominant military alliance in history. The insanity associated with making an open threat of invasion against the territory of a military ally of more than seventy-five years was mind boggling.

Last year when the United States began to build up a massive armada in the Caribbean, it was rather jarring. Obviously we have a long standing issue with Cuba going back to 1959, and CIA toppled the government of Chile in 1973. We invaded Grenada in 1983 and overthrew Noriega in Panama in 1989. The CIA had worked tirelessly to install friendly governments in Central and South America to allow our corporations unabated access to their natural resources. The desire to keep the Soviet Union and Communism off American shores, away from our sphere of influence and out of the western hemisphere, was also a national security aim of the highest order.

However, not since the month after the fall of the Berlin Wall had the United States used its’ military to overthrow a Central or South American government. With the demise of the USSR in 1991, the need to do so minimized, and the politics associated with such belligerence had become virtually unacceptable. In that time, Cuba is the only country where the American people have imagined that such military strikes were even possible. Not since the United Kingdom’s war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982, had a democracy had such a massive military buildup in the Western hemisphere.

In January of this year, the United States struck Venezuela. According to the Pentagon, over 150 aircraft were used. Bombs were dropped on Caracas, and U.S. Special Forces swooped in and captured President Nicholas Maduro. It was a gross violation of International Law that had first been sold to the American public as an effort to rid the United States of drugs.

As it became clear the vast majority of narcotics coming into the U.S. were not from Venezuela, Donald Trump acknowledged that the war was to topple their government, install a regime that answered to the United States, and seize their oil.

It was the first time an American President had openly stated that his military aim was plunder, which is a war crime. Had Mr. Trump stuck to the drug angle, it would have been widely accepted by his advocates, criticized by his opponents, but the United States will have done what the America does, which is go to war to leverage the natural resources of another country. It was shocking when he told the public the truth about his ambitions.

Then the United States went to war in Iran. And no matter what the reasoning in the public sphere these days, the truth of the matter is, the United States is at war with the Iranians for long term energy security and increased control over global energy markets. Anyone who knows history understands the conflict between the U.S. and Iran goes back to at least 1953, and really 1908 when the British discovered the first oil fields in the Middle East in Persia.

Add to it the fact that the Israelis were happy to participate and wanted the U.S. to go to war with Iran for decades, and the Bush/Cheney Administration surrounded Iran by placing large armies on both its’ eastern and western borders during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, war with Iran has been imminent for decades.

Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which was a 2000 position paper written by think tank, Project for a New American Century, designed a strategy for American global domination in the post-Cold War era, which had a stated goal of never allowing a regional power, nor a superpower, to rise in the future so American hegemony could go forever unchallenged.

In addition, the Saudis had fought a proxy war with the Iranians during the first Trump administration in Yemen, killing 150,000 people. They proceeded to give Donald Trump and his family untold billions of dollars. Toppling the Iranian regime was a well known desire of the Saudi Arabia.

To expand our control over Middle Eastern oil, ensure control over the Strait of Hormuz and aid our allies in the region in becoming more powerful and unchallenged, the United States decided to attack Iran, and as things stand today, the two are still engaged in an open kinetic conflict.

The lack of military success in Operation Epic Fury has been a historic disaster. Never has the U.S. been at war for forty or so days and taken an immediate strategic loss, in this case, losing control of the Strait of Hormuz with no military ability to retake it without extreme risk to force, specifically the U.S. Navy.

We also had thirteen bases blown apart to the degree that they are currently unusable, including in Bahrain where the U.S. Naval Fifth Fleet was stationed. Over forty aircraft were lost. Billion dollar radars that are crucial to our ability to detect incoming fire were destroyed.

Never had the United States taken such a beating in a war from its’ outset. Vietnam turned bad. But our time there didn’t start with historic losses.

Dealing with the scourge of the insurgency, Iraq became a stalemate. But the U.S. military rolled through all the way to Baghdad and tore down the Saddam statue only to have a large crowd beat it with their shoes. Then we undertook a mission of De-Baathification and had a famous deck of cards of the most important Iraqis we wanted dead. After the brief tenure of Jay Garner, the U.S. installed Jerry Bremmer to administer Iraq until we put a formal Iraqi government in place. We haven’t had anything that has approached that sort of military success in Iran.

We bombed Afghanistan mercilessly in the early days of the war and successfully installed a new government, albeit ineffective and weak because of the tribal nature and geography of the country. But we did plaster Afghans on American television with their fingers marked to signify their vote had been cast, in what would be a victory for our first installed puppet, Hamid Karzai.

Talk about no voter ID! Imagine the claims of Afghan voter fraud from today’s White House?

When it came time to leave, Donald Trump turned the country back over to the Taliban and reduced American troop levels down to an unsafe 2500 during a presidential transition he did not participate in. As we know, after nearly twenty years, the Afghan government crumbled in days while the U.S. was exiting the country, causing American death and humiliation. However, that occurred after two decades, not the first forty days.

So as we have transitioned into the Department of War, our brazen desire to destabilize, intimidate, humiliate and plunder the world, both allies and enemies alike, with rhetoric and war that enforces those aims, is quite a change for the White House and the Pentagon.

The current Secretary of War is a reservist who didn’t see active duty until the last decade, and was promptly dismissed in disgrace for his white supremacist tattoos and speech. He also is a drunk who is a married man with multiple mistresses.

The video of the killing of boaters in the Caribbean by U.S. pilots that has horrified nearly every member of Congress who has seen it, is considered a war crime by any known standard, and was ordered by Secretary Hegseth.

He has put forth his philosophy of the warrior ethos, which is essentially a code of conduct endorsing war crimes and espousing some sort of goofy machismo by wannabe tiered operators, with their beards and tattoos.

He famously gathered the Pentagon brass in a room in D.C., which was a foolish National Security risk, only to speak about fitness tests, telling them to lose weight and run a mile. Yet there is film of him doing the most pathetic pull ups in the history of gyms, and tapping out on a bench press in humiliating fashion that would send even the most hardened lifter home for the day with a defeated attitude. Perhaps someone should tell him that consistent alcohol abuse heavily harms one’s workouts as they age.

He famously said in the conflict with Iran that the United States negotiates with bombs. Having struck Iran in the midst of negotiations in June of 2025 and again in February of 2026, it would have to be acknowledged that he certainly was being truthful. He all but endorsed the bombing of Iranian targets that are questionable in terms of military value and alluded to the idea of inflicting pain on the population in order to get the Iranian regime to capitulate. And of course, he did not apologize, much less acknowledge a mistake in the bombing and murder of 180 Iranian schoolgirls in the early days of the war.

The irony of changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, in the face of this despicable behavior and failed war effort, is visible to everyone.

The Secretary lost the first conflict where another nation fired back, and took losses the U.S. military hadn’t seen in over fifty years. Granted, now that the MoU has been torn up and we are back in a hot conflict, perhaps the United States will have a strong second half. But as of now, Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz, which they did not before the war. The Iranians gaining control of the most strategic waterway in the world when they didn’t possess it prior to the conflict, and the U.S. having yet to pry it from their hands, means the United States is losing by every known military measure.

So as things stand, after changing the name to the Department of War, the United States is losing its’ first war.

His speech on the warrior ethos highlighted an acceptance of a level of reckless violence previously disallowed by the Pentagon, at least publicly. He killed people in boats in the Caribbean with no trial, nor conviction. The violation of their human rights was a grotesque display by the United States, thus why the video is sealed. When it is released in future administrations, the call for prosecution and prison time for the secretary is going to be raucous. He bombed a school full of young girls early in a war, never acknowledged fault, nor apologized. It left the nation and the world believing that the U.S. did it on purpose, and if we didn’t, we certainly didn’t care.

Why? That’s our new warrior ethos.

We have replaced a government in our own hemisphere and threaten to topple another in Cuba. We are attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime. We are threatening to steal land from our neighbor, who was at one time one of our very few closest allies. In addition, the U.S. is actively trying to destabilize the Canadian economy and is pumping money into the Alberta Separatist Movement, which houses the oil the President seeks to steal. The United States is also spending a great deal of money attempting to convince Greenlanders that it is in their interest to become Americans rather than remaining a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. And of course, Donald Trump has openly threatened to take the North Atlantic island by force, which would trigger NATO Article 5 against the United States, which is about the most self-defeating policy imaginable.

There are retired military members in the analyst community who are career people, both on the officer side and the enlisted side, that have suggested that after this administration leaves office, the entire U.S. Military needs to be stood down, retrained and re-sworn-in because of the damage done by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth.

The military has become a tool openly used for violence, evil, war crimes and plunder. I am not ex-military, and I have always seen the U.S. Armed Forces as a tool to spread American power across the globe through violence. But at least we were coy about it.

Now, the name change from Department of Defense to Department of War, has amplified that bad behavior and come to define the disgrace it has brought upon the country under the current administration.

Pete Hegseth just announced that testosterone levels will be checked for all military personnel 30 and older. It is a direct attack on women in our military and not particularly quietly. It also seeks to rid the Armed Forces of gay folks and continues their perceived cleansing of ‘wokeism’.

I recently spoke to a female member of the U.S. Army who has spent a tremendous amount of time deployed overseas in combat zones over the last eighteen years. She is bothered that her friends are charged with being on a protection detail for Pete Hegseth’s mistress. Can you imagine the insult associated with his policies that seek to minimize, if not disqualify, the life risking service she has given to this country in theaters of conflict?

In recent days, the U.S. Navy Blue Angels demo team were flying their F-18s over the ocean in Florida. One jet did a rather low fly by over beach goers. Those airplanes are tremendously loud. From watching every fighter in the U.S. Air Force, other than the F-15, fly at Nellis AFB in Southern Nevada, to having seen the Blue Angels practice and perform at the Chicago Air and Water show for years, the volume and sheer energy produced by those aircraft is remarkable. It can be quite nerve-racking, especially if you are close and unprepared.

Granted they weren’t using their afterburners, as the U.S. Air Force and Navy flies those planes, typically at the speed of sound at low altitude over the citizens of nations we are at war with when they don’t possess any anti aircraft missiles or artillery, seeking to intimidate the population, breaking windows, busting ear drums, and in some cases in third world countries, destabilizing structures.

To fly that low over land past unsuspecting beach goers, was completely unprofessional and inconsiderate. For a senior with a heart condition, it can startle one into cardiac arrest. It can be grossly cruel to anyone with hearing issues, and it’s potentially dangerous for the ears of young children.

Secretary Hegseth posted on his X account that the flyovers will continue until ‘morale improves’. If that isn’t the most Soviet thing I’ve ever heard in my life, I don’t know what is.

The newly minted Secretary of the Navy said, ‘That’s the sound of freedom’. I guess that’s the brass Pete Hegseth is bringing into the Pentagon who espouse his warrior ethos.

Personally, I love those airplanes and I am not one to criticize the stateside use of them. But I know how loud they are, and even I have not been close enough to have their jet engines blow umbrellas, chairs, sand and trash down the beach while roaring past me on land with a deck of a few hundred feet or less.

If you want to show off U.S. air prowess to the American people from that altitude, you can do so over water, which is routinely done for a reason. The noise is so severe that around Air Force and Naval Air Stations, when flying more aircraft than usual, they put a noise warning out to the public. So these beachgoers have a legitimate complaint.

This pilot screamed over their head and accelerated back into the sky. And he did so with the tacit approval, if not direction of the U.S. Navy, and from his comments, the Secretary of the Department of War.

They have failed at much of what they do. They have shamed this country and the men and women who have ever worn the uniform, past and present. They don’t achieve their stated goals in embarrassing fashion from the Secretary down; from the bench press to war with Iran.

Their goofiness, their belligerence, and their ineffectiveness have been their badge of honor since renaming the Department and the whole world has taken notice. If you are going to make the name change, not humiliating yourselves across the board is a worthy aim.

Open plunder, belligerence towards allies and neighbors alike, committing war crimes without apology and harassing your own citizens into patriotism are shameful acts. Possibly being able to do some pullups is advisable too.