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Colonizzazione, versione 2.0

C’è una cosa in cui gli Stati Uniti d’America sono sempre stati bravi: fare la guerra. Nel loro breve periodo di interazione con il resto del mondo – circa un secolo di conflitti fuori dai confini domestici – gli USA hanno raggiunto una densità di conflitti non paragonabile con nessun altro Paese al mondo (in proporzione alla storia della loro esistenza come Stato).

Quando, però, gli USA sono entrati sulla scena mondiale con la loro imponente potenza bellica, l’Occidente si trovava già in una fase di graduale rilascio della tensione praticata con il colonialismo, per sperimentare poi nel Novecento la graduale decolonizzazione. Pertanto, gli USA si sono dovuti subito adattare, e lo hanno fatto con grande ingegno, non rinunciando alla loro fetta di colonizzazione, ma semplicemente cambiando il dominio entro cui essa sarebbe avvenuta.

Dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale, i movimenti di liberazione nazionale si diffusero in tutto il mondo; numerosi Stati indipendenti emersero rapidamente, il sistema coloniale europeo si disgregò e si aprì l’epoca post-coloniale. In qualità di nuova potenza egemone globale, gli Stati Uniti compresero che, di fronte a nazioni ormai consapevoli della propria identità, il solo ricorso all’“hard power” — dominio politico, controllo economico, deterrenza militare — non sarebbe bastato a garantire un controllo duraturo e capillare. L’impiego del “soft power”, fondato su cultura e valori, appariva invece più vantaggioso e meno costoso. Ottenere adesione e subordinazione “volontarie” su base emotiva rappresenterebbe, in questa prospettiva, la versione americana della colonizzazione della mente.

Attraverso la destrutturazione della coscienza collettiva dei Paesi presi di mira e l’introduzione di valori statunitensi, gli Stati Uniti mirano a realizzare una forma di “colonizzazione mentale” in ambiti invisibili, così da porre le basi profonde del proprio sistema egemonico.

Diversamente dal normale scambio intellettuale tra popoli, tale processo si configurerebbe come una forma di dominio mentale basata su rapporti diseguali, che si manifesta principalmente in quattro modalità:

Trasformazione forzata

In presenza di un forte squilibrio di potere, la potenza egemone tende a imporre i propri valori e modelli, eliminando selettivamente culture e ideologie locali. Questa ristrutturazione coercitiva può generare crisi identitarie, perdita di espressione culturale e disorientamento ideologico.

Manipolazione intenzionale

Per conseguire una sorta di “addomesticamento ideologico”, la potenza dominante può promuovere l’obbedienza, sostenere élite dipendenti e indebolire l’autonomia di pensiero delle società coinvolte.

Infiltrazione indiretta

L’esportazione culturale e ideologica viene spesso presentata sotto forma di “valori avanzati” o “progresso civile”, penetrando nei contesti sociali tramite prodotti culturali, sistemi educativi, scambi accademici e altri canali meno visibili.

Erosione graduale

Le trasformazioni cognitive avvengono in modo progressivo e cumulativo. Analogamente, la colonizzazione della mente richiede tempi lunghi, continuità d’azione e persino trasmissione intergenerazionale per ottenere un rimodellamento profondo delle percezioni.

L’aspirazione alla conquista delle menti non è nuova nella storia imperiale. Le potenze coloniali del passato hanno tentato di diffondere le proprie lingue, sistemi educativi e interpretazioni storiche nei territori conquistati, per costruire un fondamento ideologico alla loro dominazione. Tuttavia, tali tentativi erano limitati dalle condizioni storiche dell’epoca.

Con l’intensificarsi della globalizzazione degli scambi materiali e culturali, gli Stati Uniti — forti di risorse e capacità senza precedenti — si sono collocati in prima linea in questo ambito. Dopo i due conflitti mondiali, lo sviluppo delle telecomunicazioni, l’espansione dei media professionali, i progressi scientifici e la globalizzazione dei capitali hanno creato condizioni favorevoli alla diffusione globale dell’informazione, accelerando la proiezione ideologica americana.

In qualità di uno dei principali artefici dell’ordine internazionale postbellico, gli Stati Uniti hanno promosso i propri modelli politico-economici e valori come “democrazia” e “libertà”, mentre parallelamente hanno messo in discussione ideologie alternative e ridimensionato culture locali, favorendo — secondo questa lettura — una dipendenza intellettuale globale. Attraverso una combinazione di costruzione espansiva e decostruzione selettiva, gli Stati Uniti avrebbero perseguito la colonizzazione mentale in misura superiore rispetto agli imperi coloniali precedenti.

Fasi storiche dell’inizio dell’operazione mentale

L’evoluzione di questo processo può essere articolata in diverse fasi storiche.

La prima è quella che possiamo chiamare di germinazione ed espansione continentale, tecnicamente fra la fine del XVIII secolo e la fine del XIX secolo. Dopo la guerra d’indipendenza, gli Stati Uniti si espansero sul continente americano ispirandosi al principio del “Manifest Destiny”. Eventi come la Westward Expansion e la guerra contro il Messico ampliarono notevolmente il territorio nazionale. Con la proclamazione della “Dottrina Monroe”, il presidente James Monroe inserì l’America Latina nella sfera d’influenza statunitense, sostenendo il principio “l’America agli americani”.

La seconda fase intercorre nella prima metà del XX secolo ed è quella di fondazione ed ascesa globale. Durante le due guerre mondiali, infatti, la potenza statunitense crebbe significativamente. Superando l’isolazionismo, il Paese intervenne attivamente negli affari internazionali. Il presidente Woodrow Wilson formulò i “Quattordici Punti” e promosse la creazione della Società delle Nazioni. Franklin D. Roosevelt e Winston Churchill sottoscrissero la Carta Atlantica, che gettò le basi del nuovo ordine internazionale. Le “Quattro Libertà” di Roosevelt divennero un riferimento per il sistema internazionale dei diritti umani.

La seconda metà del Novecento vide il forte confronto fra il blocco USA e quello URSS. Nel contesto della rivalità con l’Unione Sovietica, la competizione ideologica si intensificò. Il Piano Marshall legò gli aiuti economici all’adozione di un determinato modello socio-politico, contribuendo alla formazione di un blocco capitalista guidato dagli Stati Uniti contrapposto al campo socialista. Strumenti di propaganda, diplomazia culturale e programmi accademici furono utilizzati per diffondere messaggi anticomunisti e sostenere élite favorevoli a Washington.

Dopo la dissoluzione dell’Unione Sovietica, gli Stati Uniti emersero come unica superpotenza. Il “Washington Consensus” e le teorie neoliberali si diffusero ampiamente, mentre il movimento socialista internazionale si indebolì. Consideriamo questa come la quarta fase, un periodo di promozione dell’egemonia statunitense, dagli anni ’90 fino all’inizio degli anni Duemila. Dopo gli attentati dell’11 settembre, la lotta al terrorismo divenne prioritaria e il mondo cambiò radicalmente. Dall’enfasi sull’“espansione della democrazia” durante la presidenza di Bill Clinton, fino alla “freedom agenda” di George W. Bush, la promozione della democrazia e della libertà in chiave americana si intensificò.

L’ultima fase è quella di rabbia egemonia, quella che viviamo tutt’oggi. Di fronte a sfide interne ed esterne — polarizzazione politica, frammentazione sociale, crescita del populismo — gli Stati Uniti hanno rinnovato le proprie strategie. Dalla “smart power diplomacy” dell’amministrazione Barack Obama, al “Summit for Democracy” promosso da Joe Biden, fino agli slogan “America First” e “Make America Great Again” associati a Donald Trump, si è assistito a un rafforzamento degli strumenti di influenza ideologica, incredibilmente più potenti grazie al forte sviluppo dei social media. Il controllo delle piattaforme tecnologiche e dei flussi informativi, anche sotto la giustificazione della lotta alla disinformazione o alle interferenze straniere, è divenuto un elemento centrale nella competizione per orientare la percezione globale.

Da questo excursus storico vedremo in seguito i numerosi e variopinti volti della propaganda cognitiva.

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Wars of choice, a plethora of changing tariffs and sanctions on countries across the world, and a historically high number of executive orders characterize the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term. And all this has been accomplished by the executive branch with minimal pushback from the legislative branch.

Congress has over time ceded more and more power to the executive branch. Over the last year, this process has reached a level where the assertion that the legislature comprises a “coequal” branch of the United States government seems more a punch line of a joke than an expression of reality.

In a Tuesday Washington Post article, Liz Goodwin provides details of the withering of the exercise of congressional power in Trump’s second term. Commenting on the situation now in Congress, Goodwin wrote, “While lawmakers once jealously guarded their constitutionally endowed power over spending, trade and war — regularly checking the executive — Republicans in the 119th Congress have cast themselves as helpmeets to the president instead.”

A problem for Republicans in Congress who have chosen to just look on as the president does whatever he wishes is that the president has grown increasingly unpopular among voters. For a significant number of these Congress members, their status as Trump’s “helpmeets” may cause them to fail in their reelection efforts. Their departure, along with the decision of some of their Republican colleagues to forgo uphill reelection campaigns, could lead to increased assertion of congressional authority after a new Congress convenes in January.

Original article: ronpaulinstitute.org

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The FBI manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to kill him, while Israel and its administration allies exploited the president’s deepest fears to keep him on the war path.

“I got him before he got me,” an ebullient President Donald Trump remarked to a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026.

With his off-the-cuff remark, Trump revealed that anxiety about his own assassination at the hands of Iranian agents influenced his decision to initiate a US-Israeli regime change war that has already resulted in American casualties, the bombings of schools and hospitals inside Iran, devastating Iranian retaliatory strikes on US military bases and embassies, and a spiraling global economic crisis.

Trump’s generalized fears of assassination were well-founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 by a 20-year-old engineering student named Thomas Crooks who managed to fire eight rounds at the former president from a rooftop, slicing his ear and missing his head by a hair’s breadth. Two months later, a drifter named Ryan Routh was arrested after hiding for hours in the shrubbery outside the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh had been spotted after pointing an assault rifle toward a Secret Service agent as Trump played golf 400 yards away.

Officials have yet to produce any evidence that Iran played a role in either of these attempts on Trump’s life. Yet since those fateful events, Israel-aligned Trump advisors, Israeli intelligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself have gone to extreme lengths in order to tie Tehran to the plots. More shocking still is the fact that the FBI has manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hit men.

The man accused of leading the most significant of these operations, Asif Merchant, is currently on trial in a Brooklyn, NY federal court. After the US granted him a visa despite his presence on a terror watchlist, Merchant was in the constant company of an FBI confidential informant who ultimately steered the contrived plot to its conclusion. He never stood a chance of realizing his plans, and did not appear serious about doing so.

Independent journalist Ken Silva puts it succinctly in his forthcoming investigative book, “The Trump Assassination Plots”: “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

Authorities arrested Merchant on July 12, 2024 – just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Butler. Hours after the failed Butler assassination, FBI agents interrogated Merchant about whether it was in fact Iran that had Crooks under its control.

At that point, Trump was still campaigning to be a “President of Peace. On the campaign stump, he warned that his opponent, Kamala Harris, “would get us into World War III guaranteed.” Trump vowed to resolve the war between Ukraine and Russia in one day, and distanced himself from pro-war Republicans who sought regime change in Iran.

Pro-war elements in Trump’s coterie exercised multiple points of leverage to reverse the president’s anti-interventionist instincts. Ultra-Zionist billionaires supplied vital and well-documented influence over Trump’s policies by keeping his campaign war chest flush. But Trump remained an erratic personality whose petty grievances kept his aides in a perpetual state of uncertainty.

It was only by exploiting Trump’s deepest psychological vulnerability – his fear of an assassin’s bullet – that Israel and its cutouts in his administration were able to secure their influence over the president, keeping him on the warpath against Iran.

The assassination escalation trap

On January 3, 2020, as the commander of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, deboarded an airplane at Baghdad International Airport, on his way to peace talks with Saudi officials, a US drone killed him with a Hellfire missile. The strike had been ordered by Trump following a sustained campaign of military escalation against Iranian allies orchestrated by his National Security Council Director John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

As journalist Gareth Porter reported for The Grayzone, by the time Trump authorized Soleimani’s assassination, Netanyahu was planning unilateral strikes on Iran aimed at drawing the US into direct conflict. Trump issued orders to kill the general under sustained pressure by Pompeo and Bolton, two pro-Israel hardliners. Both former Trump officials have lobbied for the Israeli and Saudi-funded Mojahedin El-Khalk (MEK), a cult-like exiled militia that has carried out numerous assassinations of Iranian officials at the behest of Israel’s intelligence services.

By killing Soleimani, Trump set the US on a collision course for all-out war with Iran – just as Netanyahu had hoped. What’s more, the president invited the prospect of violent retaliation against himself and his national security advisors.

So long as Trump feared the specter of IRGC agents lurking behind every corner, it stood to reason that he was more likely to authorize a regime change war on Iran. And so the FBI went to work, concocting a series of plots that helped forge Trump’s belligerent attitude toward Tehran.

Brought to you by the FBI: Iran’s plot to kill John Bolton

The first major Iranian plot arrived in 2022, when the Department of Justice filed charges against an Iranian national, Shahram Poursafi, for supposedly hiring a hitman to kill Bolton. However, the hitman turned out to be an FBI informant, and the plot was largely contrived by the Bureau. Poursafi, for his part, could not be arrested because he lived in Iran.

As journalist Ken Silva reported, the FBI officer who oversaw the manufactured plot to kill Bolton, Steven D’Antuono, was the same official who ran the Detroit field office that relied on paid informants to concoct the 2020 plot by right-wing militia members to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In a 2025 federal appeal court ruling, the judge acknowledged that defendants in that case “are correct that the government encouraged them to settle on a plan” to kidnap Whitmer. The FBI’s D’Antuono also oversaw the probe into the suspicious planting of pipe bombs at Republican and Democratic Party headquarters in Washington on January 6, 2021. In the course of his failed investigation, he misled Congress about having received “corrupted” evidence.

Though Bolton was never in danger from Iran, the FBI-contrived plot began to fuel paranoia among Trump administration veterans. Pompeo now believed that he too was being targeted by Iranian assassination teams. In his 2023 campaign memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” the former CIA director claimed Poursafi had also paid $1 million to a hitman to kill him.

However, Pompeo provided no additional details on the plot, which was never mentioned in DOJ documents charging Poursafi for attempting to kill Bolton. According to those affidavits, Poursafi sent just $100 to the FBI’s confidential human source before the DOJ concluded its investigation.

Iran’s hapless hitman granted special visa, introduced to FBI informant

In April 2024, as Trump launched his comeback presidential campaign, an itinerant salesman named Asif Merchant arrived from Pakistan to George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas. He was quickly flagged as a “Qualified Person of Interest” who’d been placed on a Department of Homeland Security watchlist. Agents from an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) team then discovered through a search of Merchant’s devices that he had visited Iran, where his wife and adopted son lived. Whether they’d received a tip from Israel, which furnishes reams of intelligence to the FBI on foreign Muslim visitors to the US, remains an open question.

According to JTTF documents obtained by pro-Trump reporter John Solomon, Merchant was “released without incident” and designated as “free to travel to desired destination.” In fact, the FBI had granted him a “Special Public Benefit Parole,” which, as Solomon explained, “would allow agents to try to flip Merchant as a cooperator or try to determine why he was coming to the United States and who he might be working with.”

The FBI whistleblower who provided Solomon with the documents on Merchant’s airport interview compared the “Special Public Benefit Parole” to the scandalous “Fast and Furious” program, in which President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice facilitated the delivery of automatic weapons from US gun dealers to Mexican cartels in order to supposedly surveil the gangs’ criminal activities.

Almost as soon as Merchant entered the US, the FBI introduced him to a confidential informant posing as a potential business partner and operating under the alias, Nadeem Ali. The informant had served as translator for the US military during its occupation of Afghanistan.

Though Merchant did not propose any crimes, the FBI wiretapped a meeting between him and the informant, Ali, in a hotel room on June 3, 2024. There, Merchant was taped making a supposed “finger gun” motion while mentioning an unspecified “opportunity.” This grainy minute-long hidden camera recording is presented as the linchpin of the DOJ’s indictment of Merchant.

According to the FBI, Merchant had outlined a highly complex plot which required the hiring of two hitmen, “twenty five people who could perform a protest after the distraction occurred, and a woman to do ‘reconnaissance.”

For the elaborate flash mob-style assassination extravaganza, Merchant was asked by the informant to fork over a mere $5000. The Pakistani visitor had no means of scrounging up the fee, however, raising further questions about the seriousness of the plot. “I did not think I was going to be successful,” Merchant would later state in court.

Virtually penniless, Merchant was forced to gather the cash from an anonymous “associate,” according to the DOJ indictment. Next, the FBI informant took him on a winding journey from Boston to New York City, where he allegedly handed the money to two other FBI informants posing as hit men. The DOJ claims Merchant made plans to fly to Pakistan on June 12, but was arrested in his residence that day.

Merchant interrogated about Butler, kept incommunicado

The following day, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks arrived at a fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania where former president Trump was scheduled to speak. He flew a drone in the air for 15 minutes, surveying the area as he finalized plans to assassinate the candidate. In an odd coincidence, the Secret Service’s anti-drone system was offline all morning and into the afternoon — until roughly 15 minutes after Crooks flew his drone. When Trump took the stage, Crooks climbed atop a slanted rooftop 130 yards away and fired eight shots at the president, missing his head by an inch, until a local police officer fired back. He was killed by a Secret Service sniper who had inexplicably hesitated to fire for a full 15 seconds.

Thirty hours later, FBI agents flew to Houston to interrogate Merchant in his jail cell about a possible Iranian connection to the assassination attempt in Butler. An FBI source told the Washington Post the Bureau “took the extraordinary step of interviewing him without his lawyer to determine whether he knew Crooks.”

The grilling continued even after Merchant was transferred to the maximum security Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn – the same prison where Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of United Healthcare’s CEO, is currently being held. There, he was held under harsh conditions in solitary confinement, unable to interact with anyone but the guards who brought him food and his lawyers because, as then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco argued, he might use code words to initiate further assassination plots. “It appeared they thought I was some kind of super spy,” Merchant later reflected.

Not only was Merchant prevented from calling his family in Pakistan, he was blocked from reviewing recordings of conversations he held with undercover FBI informants, as the DOJ had marked them “Sensitive.” In March 2025, his lawyer protested that US Marshals repeatedly refused to allow him to meet with this counsel and review discovery at the courthouse. This, too, was justified on the basis of specious national security grounds.

However, as the journalist Ken Silva discovered, an internal memo by the Bureau Of Prisons Director Colette Peters confirmed that Merchant had no contact with any Iranian intelligence assets in the US. “Law enforcement has not identified any IRGC associates of Merchant operating in the United States who could continue to orchestrate violent acts,” Peters wrote.

Indeed, the only Iranian assassins with whom Merchant appeared to have interacted inside the US were undercover informants working for the FBI.

Merchant “had never been close to realizing” Trump assassination 

During his trial this March 4, Merchant’s lawyer, Avraham Moskowitz, took the highly unusual step of allowing his client to take the stand. Merchant proceeded to present a version of events that contrasted sharply with the account he provided in his initial FBI proffer. For example, the defendant claimed he had been coerced into the plot by an IRGC agent, and went forward with a plan “to maybe have someone murdered” only because he feared for his wife and adopted son back in Iran.

After his arrest by the FBI, Merchant said he engaged in discussions with federal authorities about becoming an informant himself, but they ultimately broke down for unknown reasons.

“I was not wanting to do this so willingly,” he insisted in Urdu, adding, “I did not think I was going to be successful.”

In its coverage of the trial, the New York Times concluded Merchant “had never been close to realizing the vision of his Iranian handler.”

But back in 2024, as word spread of Merchant’s arrest, Israel-adjacent figures in Trump’s inner circle exploited the case to exacerbate the candidate’s anxiety about the Ayatollah’s wrath.

Israel-aligned forces blur Butler with Iran

Just three days after Trump’s campaign was nearly ended by a lone American assassin’s bullet in Butler, officials burrowed within the architecture of the national security state took measures to shift the focus to Iran.

“The Biden administration obtained intelligence in recent weeks about an Iranian assassination plot against former President Donald Trump, and the information led the Secret Service to ramp up security around the former president, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter,” reported NBC’s Ken Dilanian on July 16, 2024. (Dilanian had been fired from his previous gig at the LA Times after he was exposed for allowing the CIA to review his reports before publication).

The unnamed officials were clearly referring to the plot which the FBI manufactured for Merchant. The revelation not only seemed like a cynical attempt to obscure the reality of the near-assassination in Butler, which was conducted by a friendless American man who had never left the country. It also suggested the FBI had been so focused on concocting Iranian plots on American soil that it ignored the years-long trail of YouTube comments left by the would-be assassin bluntly declaring his intention to kill US politicians and police officers, and his hopes to instigate a civil war.

Though FBI leadership misled the public about the nature of the Butler plot, falsely claiming, for instance, that Crooks was not communicating with others online, they were never able to connect it to Iran. This clearly frustrated Rep. Mike Waltz, a close Trump ally seated on the House committee to investigate the Butler plot.

“These plots from Iran are ongoing. And when Biden says nothing, Harris says nothing, the DOJ tries to bury it, what message does Iran get? They get that we can keep trying to take Trump out and have no consequences,” Waltz fulminated on Fox News in August 2024.

Referencing the FBI-manufactured Merchant operation, Waltz thundered, “You have multiple assassination plots from the Iranians. This Pakistani national was recruiting females as spotters. He had recruited hit men and had made a down payment. He was even recruiting protesters as a distraction.”

By this point, Waltz was on his way to a short stint as Trump’s National Security Council Director, where he would help direct a failed war on Iran’s allies among the Ansurallah movement in Yemen. (Waltz was demoted to US ambassador to the UN after he accidentally included the Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief and former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg in a private administration Signal chat where classified information about US attack plans on Yemen was shared).

Throughout his career, the Israel lobby and Netanyahu’s allies had quietly propelled his rise. As AIPAC CEO Elliot Brandt remarked in private comments exclusively revealed by The Grayzone, Waltz was one of Israel’s “lifelines” inside the Trump administration, as he had been groomed by the Israel lobby since he first ran for Congress.

For Waltz and other Israel-aligned figures close to Trump, connecting the Butler incident to Iran appeared to offer a direct path to conflict with Iran. As an unnamed high-level US official told the Washington Post, if Tehran had been found responsible for Crooks’ attempt to kill Trump, “it would mean war.”

Certain foreign actors were also working to steer the US toward blaming Iran for Butler. In the late summer of 2024, the Justice Department received an urgent alert from abroad which connected Crooks directly to IRGC plots to kill Trump. According to the Washington Post, the tip arrived through a “confidential human source overseas” – almost certainly Israeli intelligence.

After a thorough investigation, DOJ officials decided the tip was not credible. “Nothing credibly connected him to Iranian plots,” one official told the Post.

But in the wake of the shooting in Butler, the constant chatter about looming Iranian threats had indelibly altered Trump’s outlook. Reporters who followed Trump on the campaign trail described a palpable sense of panic from the candidate and his inner circle about IRGC-directed hitmen stalking them at every stop.

“Ghost flights” for Trump triggered by imaginary Iran missile threats

With the Trump campaign already consumed with anxiety, the FBI delivered an alert that sent them spiraling into the depths of paranoia.

According to the Bureau, Iran had placed operatives inside the country with access to surface-to-air missiles. This dubious warning prompted Trump’s already militarized security team to take an extraordinary step. Fearing that Iran would down the famous “Trump Force One” airliner at any moment, Trump was placed on a “ghost flight” owned by his golf buddy, real estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, while the rest of his campaign traveled on the main jet.

Joining Trump on the secret decoy plane was his campaign manager, Suzie Wiles, who would go on to become White House chief of staff, controlling access and the flow of information to the president. Unbeknownst to the public, Wiles had served as a paid advisor to Israel’s Netanyahu during his 2020 re-election campaign, consolidating her role as a key point of contact between Tel Aviv and Trump.

Journalist Ken Silva has revealed that the FBI alert which prompted Trump’s use of a “ghost plane” was based on a cynical deception. As Silva explains in his forthcoming book on the assassination plots surrounding Trump, federal investigators had discovered that Routh, the would-be assassin at Mar-a Lago, had attempted to purchase a rocket launcher, and may have been in contact with Iranian nationals during his time in Ukraine. The Bureau likely massaged that information into the bogus report it provided the Trump campaign, conjuring up imaginary Manpad-toting IRGC operatives to exacerbate the candidate’s fears.

Once he entered the Oval Office, Trump was encircled by Israel-aligned advisors and staunchly committed to the belief that Iran had attempted to eliminate him on the campaign trail. As commander-in-chief of the US military, he was hellbent on revenge.

Netanyahu nudges Trump with Butler plot

On June 15, 2025, days after launching an unprovoked war on Iran, Netanyahu took to Fox News to manipulate Trump into joining the assault. The Israeli leader appeared to know exactly which psychological vulnerabilities to exploit.

“These people who chant death to America, tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” Netanyahu declared, asserting without a shred of evidence that Iran was behind both the Butler assassination attempt and the one at Mar a-Lago.

“Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?” a visibly startled Fox News host Bret Baier asked.

“Through proxies, yes. Through their intel, yes. They want to kill him,” stated Netanyahu with a cocksure gaze.

One week later, Trump authorized a series of US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in support of Israel’s military assault. Though Trump arranged a ceasefire soon after the attack, Israel’s influence over his administration – and over his psyche – guaranteed that another, much more violent round of conflict was just over the horizon.

In a graphic promoted by the White House’s official Twitter/X account on July 21, 2025, Trump implied that he had begun to turn the tables on his would-be Iranian assassins: “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter,” he declared.

By March 2026, Trump was back to war with Iran. Within four days, the US-Israeli joint assault had predictably expanded into an open-ended regional war following the failure of an opening series of decapitation strikes to induce regime change.

On the afternoon of March 4, the glowering US “Secretary of War” and former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth appeared before a lectern at the Pentagon and vowed to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long” over the people of Iran.

As his cartoonishly violent screed built to a crescendo, Hegseth issued a dramatic announcement: “The leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed. Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

Though Hegseth did not name the figure, an Israeli journalist who functions as one of Netanyahu’s favorite stenographers, Amit Segal, revealed that Israel had assassinated an IRGC official named Rahman Mokadam who was supposedly responsible for directing a plot to kill Trump. But once again, the details of the plot revealed layers of FBI chicanery, confidential informants masked as “co-conspirators,” and a compromised witness.

It was during these remote interviews that Shakeri seemingly claimed he had an IRGC handler who had directed him to kill Trump. But according to the FBI’s criminal complaint against him, that handler’s name was “Majid Soleimani,” not Mokadam.

The FBI agent who interviewed Shakeri clearly recognized his penchant for fabulism, writing that “certain of Shakeri’s statements appear to be true and others appear to be false.” Shakeri had indeed lied throughout his interviews, yet the agent still concluded that “it appears” he was planning to kill Trump. He did not explain why he considered the confession credible, and the allegation about a plot to kill Trump was notably absent from the grand jury indictment filed a month later.

After killing Mokadam on March 4, the Israelis went straight to the president to boast of their supposed achievement – and reignite his anxiety about Iranian assassins.

As Amit Segal noted, “Trump was informed of this in the past few hours by Israel.” In doing so, the Israelis reinforced Trump’s sense that he had been hunted by Iran – and that by fighting their war, he was saving his own skin.

As it had in the past, the White House posted a video on its official Twitter/X account proclaiming Trump’s triumph over Iranian assassins: “I WAS THE HUNTED, AND NOW I’M THE HUNTER.”

Thomas Crooks may have narrowly missed Trump’s cranium in Butler, Pennsylvania, but Israel had found a way into the president’s head.

Original article:  thegrayzone.com

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This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

Young people keep asking me if this was what the Iraq invasion was like. I’ve been telling them “Sort of, but this is way dumber and crazier.”

There were fairly intelligent people who bought into the Iraq war propaganda. Many anti-war folk assumed Saddam probably did have weapons of mass destruction — they just didn’t buy into the narrative that war was the answer. There really were interventionists who sincerely believed the war could do good things for the Iraqi people.

This is nothing like that. Only the most shitbrained of morons sincerely believe the narratives supporting the Trumpanyahu administration’s attack on Iran. Mostly it’s just liars and manipulators cynically pretending to believe the stories about nuclear weapons and massacred protesters and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people, because they want Iran to be bombed.

This time they’re not even pretending to care about the will of the American people. They’re not even pretending to care about humanitarian interests or the future of the people they are bombing. They’re just spouting extremely obvious lies that get fact-checked and debunked by the mainstream media in real time, and then murdering people and bragging about it.

The Iraq invasion was an unforgivable mass atrocity of unfathomable evil, but looking back on it you can understand how a person acting in good faith could have been taken in by the post-9/11 hysteria and the uniform war propaganda of the mass media. There was an argument put forward that Saddam Hussein would be replaced with a government that serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and then the US coalition really did stay in the country and build up a new regime to run things. Compared to what we’re seeing now, it’s almost quaint.

This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of 90 million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world.

They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They’re selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they’re just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying “Yeah we’re thugs. What are you gonna do about it?”

This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au

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The Epstein Coalition (USA and Israel) began a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran on February 28th. The starting shot was the murder of 171 girls in an elementary school (perhaps as a sacrifice to Baal, the Epsteinians’ favorite deity?), followed by the martyrdom of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his own residence.

It was the beginning of an “operation” that the USA expected to see finished in a few hours, then in 3 days. Well, the operation has now exceeded 6 days, and all analysts indicate that the war will last at least a few weeks, with significant losses on both sides.

What led to this operation being initiated? The easy and predictable answer is that the USA wants Iran’s oil and other natural resources.

Usually, those who reason this way also tend to say that the State of Israel represents an enclave of the USA or the “collective West” in the Middle East, whose purpose would be to serve as a trading post to facilitate or enable the occupation of the region, to ensure the exploitation of its natural resources. This is perhaps the inevitable result of looking at the comparative statistics of both countries.

The USA is larger, has a larger GDP, more powerful and numerous armed forces, has more billionaires; in short, it is “superior” in every possible and imaginable aspect, so that the US-Israel relationship can only be perceived as one in which the USA commands and Israel obeys.

Indeed, Marxian and, in general, materialist readings go in this direction. But does the Iran War confirm this assessment?

If Israel is the obedient colony of the USA, then the decision to start the conflict would have been eminently that of the USA, with Israel simply obeying the determination of its “metropole.”

But what is perceived from the official statements of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is exactly the opposite: they made it quite clear in their press conferences that the USA became involved in the conflict only because Israel had already decided to attack Iran, with Washington simply following the Zionist determination.

The pretext of alleging a pre-emptive attack plan by Iran was used, but the pretext was quickly abandoned after being refuted by the Pentagon. In fact, Iran had no plan to attack either the USA or Israel.

In other words, Israel would have made the USA attack Iran. How is that possible?

The solution to the mystery seems to lie in the role of the Jewish community in the USA and its influence over the country’s internal affairs, regardless of whether its members hold Israeli citizenship or not. After all, despite comprising only 2.4% of the US population, 25% of its members have an income equivalent to the top 4% richest among non-Jews.

And if in many countries a large part of the Jewish community is critical or indifferent to Israel, in the USA, 90% of community members support Israel against its enemies. And this support is not merely verbal, expressing itself through the formal organization of lobbies that finance pro-Israel candidates and harm anti-Israel candidates, the most famous of these organizations being AIPAC, which invested almost 130 million dollars to elect its candidates in 2024.

A much more important asset, however, is the fact that, as indicated by income, many members of this community occupy positions of power and influence in the mass media, the banking system, and entertainment. Even though they are only, again, 2.4% of the US population, they constitute 33% of the CEOs of major banks, 40% of the CEOs of major media conglomerates, and 50% of the CEOs of major companies in the entertainment industry.

And these are the sectors that basically control the flow of investments, as well as shape the opinions and tastes of the country’s population.

Years ago, geopolitical analysts John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt released an excellent book on the Zionist lobby in the USA. What they make very clear in that work is that US support for Israel is not linked to any strategic interest of Washington. The cost of supporting Israel is immense, both in money and in the international popularity of the USA. In fact, the USA only harms itself by supporting Israel against its enemies.

So how could one say that the USA controls Israel?

Returning to the current presidential administration, figures like Hegseth and Lindsay Graham openly admit that the main goal of the USA is to facilitate the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem to pave the way for the coming of the Jewish Messiah. Eschatologically, the problem there is that, for Catholics, Orthodox, and traditional Protestants, the Jewish Messiah is the Antichrist.

As much as Israel is dependent on US financial and military aid, Zionism has captured the decision-making and public opinion-forming mechanisms so completely that we could practically compare the unipolar hegemon to a headless golem. In place of “America First,” it is the policy of “Israel First.”

While US bases, radars, planes, and personnel are hit by barrages of missiles and drones, and Washington loses influence and the capacity to project power in the Middle East, it becomes inevitable to reach the conclusion that Israel is the one calling the shots in this relationship, and that Tel Aviv will instrumentalize the USA as long as it serves its own expansionist interests.

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In recent days, a baptism of fake news has been hitting people’s social media timelines which mostly confuses readers about the real situation on the ground when examining the war between Iran and Israel/U.S. Few understand or appreciate just how much of it is being produced by Mossad and the CIA as part of the information war which is necessary, given how unprepared the U.S. was and how subsequently badly the war is going for Donald Trump. Even the messaging is a mess, with at least three versions of why the U.S. entered the war, with the final explanation given by Trump being that Iran is run by religious fanatics – a claim hard to take seriously given that Paula White-Cain, Trump’s spiritual advisor, has broken the internet with her speaking-in-tongues spasm at an evangelistic gathering.

Fake news is creating a lot of confusion and misreporting, yet it is hardly surprising that after six days of war, Trump will be looking for regional partners to help him go ahead with a ground invasion – when it becomes more obvious to him that this is the only way a country can be taken, even though the U.S. has an atrocious record of trying this itself and failing spectacularly.

And so, news of “the Kurds” being ready to fight for the U.S. against Iranian soldiers within Iran has to be seen in the correct light. Whenever you read sloppy western journalists’ copy and such terms as “the Kurds” are used, it’s worth noting that you’re in a grey zone of truthful reporting. The news which emerged on the 6^th of March, of Kurds ready to fight in Iran, is partially true. One particular Kurdish group, an opposition group in exile from Iran, is ready to take up arms but have told journalists only if some of Iran’s weapon dumps can be destroyed first.

But there are two things about the Kurds in the Middle East always worth remembering. One, they are not united, despite being spread across at least four countries – Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. And secondly, they seem to be constantly betrayed by anyone who teams up with them, almost like a curse.

What’s interesting about those who have been quoted from this group living in exile in Iraq is that they have hinted that they take it for granted that America will short-change them. The problem with such an approach to any partnership is that if you believe you are going to be cheated, then there is only one way to prepare for it: to cheat those who you expect are about to cheat you.

It’s hard to know if these reports about this particular Kurdish group being ready to be part of – or be the sole member of – a ground force can be taken seriously. But it is clear to see that other Kurdish groups in the region are not following suit. In fact, the president of the KRG in Iraq has gone as far as to state that his government and its forces will not support Israel and the U.S. in their endeavours in Iran.

This doesn’t bode well for Israel and the U.S. The only real group which could and should sign up to attacking Iran would logically be the Kurds, who have always kept good relations with Israel, and so it could be argued that their geopolitics are aligned with those in Tel Aviv. It is speculated by some analysts that at one point Israel was even promising the Kurdish region of Iraq that it could look forward to becoming an independent country if it were to align itself more fortuitously with Israel. So, for the KRG president to go this far only shows a lack of confidence in the operation.

The truth is that the recent betrayal by Trump of the Kurds in Northern Syria – a disciplined fighting army which chalked up a number of successful battles against ISIS during the height of the Syrian war – has probably put the dampeners on any deal with the majority of Kurds. Trump dropped them and aligned himself with the Syrian leader in Damascus, despite years of the U.S. supporting the YPG. This move not only shows how unreliable and capricious his decisions are, but also that the attack on Iran is something which has not been properly thought through.

For the Iranian Kurds, they see an opportunity to slip over the border and try to take control of some of the Kurdish regions, in line with the U.S. and Israel’s idea of carving up the country into many regions.

Kurds in Iran have a long history of fighting against both the current Islamic Republic and the monarchy that preceded it. Both regimes have marginalised them, in particular during the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It’s often reported that while they share a desire to see the current authorities overthrown, the Kurdish groups have also clashed with other opposition groups — notably the faction led by the former shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, who has accused the Kurds of being separatists aiming to carve up Iran. It would seem that the only group they could arguably align themselves with, as they seem to fight with everyone, is Trump. But how long could this last before this relationship turns sour and they then become an enemy? The Kurds themselves even have a saying which refers to the mountains as their only friends.

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The orgy of violence and war crimes being inflicted on Iran over the past week is truly shocking. Yet it is not surprising. This is what an empire that repeatedly commits genocide does.

The U.S.-backed Israeli genocide that has been going on constantly for more than two years in Gaza is now expanding to Iran. The Trump administration is openly talking about destroying Iran and its people. Tehran and other cities across Iran are enduring carpet bombing.

“It is not only a war against Iran – it is a war against the UN Charter, against all of us, against civilization,” commented the renowned international legal expert Alfred de Zayas. His voice has resonated with the anger and disgust of billions of people around the world, including many citizens in the United States.

This is an abomination, an affront to humanity.

In a detailed legal assessment, Professor De Zayas enumerates that the U.S. and Israeli military attacks on Iran have violated multiple treaties and statutes, including the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

The world is witnessing barbarism on a massive and flagrant scale. Iran is responding defiantly with the legal and moral right of self-defense.

The crimes against peace and humanity perpetrated by the U.S. and Israel are staggering in their brutality and offense against basic human morality. What is even more odious is that the crimes are being committed with an insane religious conviction that American President Donald Trump is “appointed by God.”

More sickening still is that Trump and the Western and Zionist ruling class are representative of the Epstein Class, the global elite that have been implicated in unspeakable sex crimes against children. It is consistent, albeit vile, that the Western capitalist elite who have been raping children with impunity are now massacring them with bombs, as they have been doing in Gaza. It is perverse beyond words.

The aggression against Iran has been going on for decades, with murderous economic warfare – euphemistically called “sanctions”. When the latest episode of aggression started last Saturday, February 28, American and Israeli warplanes deliberately bombed an elementary school, killing 165 children. Multiple precision strikes hit the building. Since then, several other schools have also been destroyed.

Hospitals, residential districts, and cultural sites have been methodically bombed. In six days, the death toll has surpassed 1,200 and is rapidly rising. This is a war of extermination.

Trump and his senior aides, like the maniacal Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, are reveling in the destruction.

Trump speaks like a crazed crime syndicate boss, saying that he wants to “clean out” Iran after assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a cowardly, obscene act of bombing his residence in Tehran last Saturday, murdering the spiritual leader and his family. Trump has subsequently warned that he must personally approve of any new leader acceptable to U.S. interests.

Paradoxically, the display of despicable criminality betrays a desperate weakness that spells doom for the U.S. empire.

The Empire of Lies and corruption is exposed before the eyes of the world. There is growing worldwide contempt and condemnation of the United States and its Western partners. The people of the world, including citizens in the U.S. and other Western countries, realize who the enemy of peace and morality is.

Trump’s shifting claims about why he ordered the attacks on Iran only betray and expose the cynical lies.

All U.S. wars over the decades have been carried out on the pretext of lies. Millions of people from scores of countries on every continent have perished in the charnel house of imperialist violence, their blood sacrificed for the god of capitalist greed. But what is significant now is that the lies are so transparent. The evil is no longer concealed. Even the usual Western media conformity cannot obscure the blatant criminality.

We are seeing the U.S. empire and its vassals engaging in wholesale mass murder and destruction. This was already happening in Gaza. It is now being magnified in Iran and Lebanon.

European politicians like Britain’s Starmer, France’s Macron and Germany’s Merz are acting like lieutenants in America’s fascist blitzkrieg. Their complicity is damning.

Here’s the thing, however. The Western imperialist system has dug its own grave. Trump and Israel’s madman Netanyahu have opened the gates of hell, but they cannot control what is coming. For one thing, Iran’s firepower looks like it will overwhelm the U.S. and Israeli defenses and bring the world economy to a shuddering collapse. The debt-ridden U.S. and Western economies are facing a long-overdue day of reckoning from implosion.

There is no doubt that the U.S. and Israeli military power is inflicting a maelstrom of destruction and suffering. The psychopathic arrogance of its leaders is astounding and a cause of despair for many people. But there is also a foreboding sense that this is a desperate storm before the imperial system finally collapses from its own inherent corruption.

The Zionist fanatics of the empire who fantasize about “bringing the end of times” are facing an end of sorts, but far from the twisted kind they envisage.

Iran has been planning its military strategy for decades. It is exhausting the wildly extravagant death arsenal of the U.S. empire and its Israeli attack dog. All the accumulated evil of wars and genocides that the Western system has perpetrated for decades with impunity is appearing. A day of judgment is here, and the world must decide once and for all to abolish the enemy – the Western imperialist system – and push it into its own grave.

Humanity has to realize, and is realizing, that for the world to survive in peace, the United States and its Empire of Lies must be defeated.

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A Coalizão Epstein (EUA e Israel) iniciou no dia 28 de fevereiro uma guerra contra a República Islâmica do Irã. O tiro de partida foi o assassinato de 171 meninas numa escola primária (talvez como sacrifício a Baal, divindade favorita dos epsteinianos?), seguido pelo martírio do Aiatolá Ali Khamenei, em sua própria residência.

Foi o início de uma “operação” que os EUA esperavam ver terminada em algumas horas, depois em 3 dias. Bem, já passam de 6 dias de operação e todos os analistas indicam que a guerra durará, no mínimo, algumas semanas, com perdas significativas em ambos os lados.

O que levou essa operação a ser iniciada? A resposta fácil e previsível é que os EUA querem o petróleo e outros recursos naturais do Irã.

Usualmente, quem raciocina dessa maneira tende, também, a dizer que o Estado de Israel representa um enclave dos EUA ou do “Ocidente coletivo” no Oriente Médio, cuja finalidade seria servir de entreposto para facilitar ou possibilitar a ocupação da região, para garantir a exploração dos seus recursos naturais. É o resultado inevitável, talvez, de olhar para as estatísticas comparadas de ambos países.

Os EUA são maiores, têm um PIB maior, forças armadas mais poderosas e mais numerosas, possuem mais bilionários, enfim, são “superiores” em todos os quesitos possíveis e imagináveis, de modo que só se pode perceber a relação EUA-Israel como uma na qual os EUA mandam e Israel obedece.

De fato, as leituras marxianas e, em geral, materialistas vão nesse sentido. Mas a Guerra do Irã confirma essa avaliação?

Se é Israel a colônia obediente dos EUA, então a decisão de iniciar o conflito teria sido eminentemente dos EUA, com Israel simplesmente obedecendo à determinação de sua “metrópoles”.

Mas aquilo que se percebe das declarações oficiais do Secretário de Estado Marco Rubio e do Secretário de Guerra Pete Hegseth é exatamente o oposto: eles deixaram bastante claro em suas coletivas de imprensa que os EUA se envolveram no conflito apenas porque Israel já havia decidido atacar o Irã, com Washington simplesmente seguindo a determinação sionista.

Usou-se o artifício de alegar um plano de ataque preventivo por parte do Irã, mas o artifício foi rapidamente abandonado após ter sido refutado pelo Pentágono. De fato, o Irã não tinha qualquer plano de atacar seja os EUA, seja Israel.

Em outras palavras, Israel teria feito os EUA atacarem o Irã. Como isso é possível?

A solução para o mistério parece estar no papel da comunidade judaica dos EUA e sua influência sobre os negócios internos do país, tenham seus membros cidadania israelense ou não. Afinal, apesar de compor apenas 2.4% da população dos EUA, 25% dos seus membros possui renda equivalente ao 4% mais ricos entre os não judeus.

E se em muitos países, boa parte da comunidade judaica é crítica ou indiferente a Israel, nos EUA 90% dos membros da comunidade apoiam Israel contra seus inimigos. E esse apoio não é meramente verbal, expressando-se através da organização formal de lóbis que financiam candidatos pró-Israel e prejudicam candidatos anti-Israel, a mais famosa dessas organizações sendo a AIPAC, a qual investiu quase 130 milhões de dólares para eleger seus candidatos em 2024.

Um ativo muito mais importante, porém, é o fato de que, tal como indicado pela renda, muitos membros dessa comunidade ocupam postos de poder e influência na mídia de massa, no sistema bancário e no entretenimento. Mesmo sendo apenas, novamente, 2.4% da população dos EUA, constituem 33% dos CEOs dos principais bancos, 40% dos CEOs dos principais conglomerados midiáticos e 50% dos CEOs das principais empresas da indústria do entretenimento.

E esses são os setores que, basicamente, controlam o fluxo de investimentos, bem como moldam as opiniões e gostos da população do país.

Anos atrás, os geopolitólogos John Mearsheimer e Stephen Walt lançaram um ótimo livro sobre o lóbi sionista nos EUA. O que eles deixam bem claro naquela obra é que o apoio dos EUA a Israel não está vinculado a qualquer interesse estratégico de Washington. O custo de apoiar Israel é imenso, tanto em dinheiro quanto na popularidade internacional dos EUA. De fato, os EUA apenas se prejudicam ao apoiar Israel contra seus inimigos.

Então como se poderia dizer que os EUA controlam Israel?

Voltando à atual administração presidencial, personagens como Hegseth e Lindsay Graham admitem abertamente que o principal objetivo dos EUA é facilitar a reconstrução do Templo de Jerusalém para abrir o caminho para a vinda do Messias dos judeus. Escatologicamente, o problema aí é que, para católicos, ortodoxos e protestantes tradicionais, o Messias dos judeus é o Anticristo.

Por mais que Israel seja dependente da ajuda financeira e militar dos EUA, o sionismo capturou os mecanismos de decisão e formação da opinião pública de maneira tão total que praticamente poderíamos comparar o hegemon unipolar a um golem acéfalo. No lugar de “America First”, é a política do “Israel First”.

Enquanto bases, radares, aviões e pessoal dos EUA é atingido por chuvas de mísseis e drones, e Washington vai perdendo influência e capacidade de projetar poder no Oriente Médio, torna-se inevitável chegar à conclusão de que é Israel quem dá as cartas nessa relação, e que Tel-Aviv instrumentalizará os EUA enquanto isso servir aos seus próprios interesses expansionistas.

By Michael BRENNER

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Trump’s America is like a rabid dog prowling the globe. It strikes ferociously at whomever gets in its way or encroaches on its deranged mental space or simply is available to satisfy its lusts.

If the Middle East is your neighborhood, you live in dread of the equally depraved, murderous mongrel in Jerusalem.

How can you deal with its menace? Killing it is one theoretical option. That is impossible, though, because of the creature’s abnormal strength; the only instruments up to the job militarily put all parties’ very survival at risk. That strength also precludes capture and confinement.

What that leaves are strategies that aim to induce the monster to destroy itself. That is, its diseased body – the root cause of its demented behavior – might gnaw away at it from within.

In order to accelerate the process, inhabitants of the global commons should put maximum stress on its pathological condition by doing the following: inflicting physical pain in retaliation against every offense.

Rough him up – the way the Taliban did, the way the Iraqis did. Bloody him as the Iranians are doing. Undercut his sense of omnipotence – the way the Chinese did using the leverage of rare earth elements.

Submit him to a barrage of mockery and ridicule. Torment him emotionally via insult and humiliation wherever possible and by any means that can be mustered.

Picador tactics to confuse, to harry, to distract, to disorient. Play on his insecurities and fragile ego. Take surprise initiatives to keep him off-balance.

Be prepared to make sacrifices in defense of national integrity is endangered (the ultimate example being Ayatollah Khamenei‘s supposed choosing de facto suicide so as to inflame Shi’a resistance across the region to the Israeli-American onslaught).

Admittedly, a strategy of confrontation means enduring an inescapable measure of pain and injury yourself. There is no other alternative, though, to avoid being chewed up one at a time by the mad dog.

The approach sketched here also carries a different sort of potential benefit.

It improves the odds, however slim they might be, that the beast’s own immune system would be reset, invigorated enough to generate the anti-bodies that could cure the illness – or, at least, ameliorate the deadly behavioral symptoms.

To Whom It May Concern

This outline of a strategy to check the United States’ increasingly audacious coercive efforts to subordinate other states to Washington’s will and control had no specific government in mind. Just, ‘to whom it may concern’.

When we do address the question of who might buckle on the armor and seize the sword, candidates are few and elusive. The nations of Old Europe?

A laughable proposition given their chosen vassal status to Trump’s America. Meek leaders like Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz. Ursula von der Leyen, and Mark Rutte cannot even muster the courage, when in the presence of “Big Daddy,” to shift their gaze from their own shoes to Trump’s shoes.

India? Prime Minister Narendra Modi has succeeding brilliantly in discrediting India’s claim to great power status by hastening to Jerusalem to embrace Netanyahu on the very eve of Israel’s latest aggression on Iran.

He did so with the aim of currying favor with Bibi’s man in the White House and the Zionist claque in Congress with the futile hope that Washington will ease the terms of its economic extortion racket which Modi hasn’t the courage to resist. A putative great power cannot afford such craven, pandering conduct.

Japan? After 80 years of pursuing a reasoned and reasonable low-profile foreign policy, Tokyo under the current leadership is flexing its growing military muscle with the declared purpose of being an auxiliary to the United States in valiant defense of Taiwan/Formosa now pronounced part of Japan’s vital national security zone.

That leaves us China and Russia who, acting in tandem, could take on the United States following a comprehensive strategy of resistance and competition. So, this is for you President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin.

At the moment, that seems unlikely. The key questions are:

• Do they recognize the Leviathan that the United States has become, the threat that it poses to their well-being as well as to a stable international order, and the intractability of its leaders that makes a diplomatically fostered modus vivendi a near impossibility;
• Are they prepared to make the commitment to an open-ended, comprehensive combat that the challenge dictates? Their answers to date are more implicit than explicit, and liable to modification in light of shifting domestic as well as external circumstances. We can only draw inferences from the soft evidence now available.

On question 1: Xi shows signs of having a clearer understanding of what is driving American actions than does Putin. The latter, although a very rational person who is dispassionate in thought and action, nonetheless possesses an evident strong attachment to the goal of working out more or less cordial relationship with the United States – despite the manifest lack of his interlocutors having a matching accommodating attitude and a record of serial duplicity.

On question 2:  Neither Russia nor China is ready to pick up the cudgels to do battle with a United States bent on imperial adventure and eliminating both of then as serious rivals – for complex and not identical reasons. Ukraine and Taiwan being the only two places where confrontation impels implacable opposition.

There are twin dangers in Moscow and Beijing’s strategy of restraint and patience.

The rapid pace at which Washinton is extending and escalating its campaign of global domination carries the risk that it will come close to realizing its grandiose ambitions before its potential rivals are in a position to mobilize themselves to prevent that outcome.

Second, the recklessness of America’s unstable leadership, emboldened by the former’ passivity, could lead to an acute crisis wherein the inadvertent stake is national integrity – thereby, raising the spectre of cataclysmic war.

Iran already poses the deeply troubling possibility that an Israel, led by apocalyptic fanatics and facing an end to its viability as a state, could resort to nuclear weapons – and then all bets are off for everyone. Or, they might threaten to do so unless the Americans invade Iran on the ground.

Original article: consortiumnews.com

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“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”—Jeremiah 6:13–14

“This is insane. Regime change will result in a bloody civil war… Resist this!”—Charlie Kirk (2025)

The military-industrial complex and the American police state have joined forces.

War abroad and war at home are no longer separate enterprises. They have fused.

This did not happen overnight.

Every modern president has stretched the limits of war-making power. Some have shredded those limits altogether.

Each time that boundary is breached, the Constitution recedes a little further.

This is one of those moments.

In a complete about-face from his claims to being a peace president, Donald Trump has authorized yet another preemptive strike—this time against Iran—without a declaration of war from Congress, without meaningful public debate, and without constitutional clarity.

The gravity of that decision cannot be overstated.

While American troops were being ordered into harm’s way, Trump was hosting a $1 million-a-ticket fundraiser for himself at Mar-a-Lago, trotting out his signature dance moves between curtained war briefings.

That spectacle tells you everything you need to know.

That is how we arrived at Operation Epic Fury.

With its Orwellian proclamations of “peace through strength,” Operation Epic Fury is less strategy than spectacle—an egotistical, muscle-flexing distraction by the Trump administration and an overarching attempt to normalize the use of unilateral force by the executive branch without congressional input or authorization.

This was never about peace. It was always about power.

And the Constitution is clear about how this is supposed to work, even if the White House is not.

Article I, Section 8 grants Congress—not the president—the power to declare war. The president under Article II, Section 2 is designated as commander-in-chief with the power to command the military. He is not commander-of-everything.

Yet here we are.

The Trump administration is advancing a global policing doctrine that mirrors the domestic police state: strike first, ask questions later.

Since January 2025, Trump has carried out more than 600 military strikes on foreign targets that include Iran, Yemen, Nigeria and Venezuela, while threatening forceful military takeovers of Greenland, Colombia and Mexico.

Preemptive force has become policy.

Call it what it is: war.

Despite the word games over its war games—the administration insists its actions in Iran do not constitute a war—members of Trump’s Cabinet use the word “war” freely until congressional authorization is mentioned.

And when the administration is asked to explain themselves, the answer is not constitutional deference but open defiance.

Clearly, they have lost sight of who they answer to—and who funds their war chests: we the taxpayers.

Pete Hegseth—the self-righteous blowhard who brags about lethal weapons and has rebranded the Defense Department as the Department of War—dismissed public accountability outright, expressing in no uncertain terms that it’s none of our business: “Why in the world would we tell you, you, the enemy, anybody what we will or will not do in pursuit of an objective. We fight to win. We fight to achieve the objectives the President of the United States has laid out and we will do so unapologetically.”

The Constitution is the “why.”

The American people have a right to debate war before it begins. We have a right to know how our tax dollars are spent. We have a right to insist our representatives authorize the use of force. We have a right to know why our sons and daughters are sent into harm’s way. We have a right to refuse to have our tax dollars used to kill other people’s daughters and sons.

As Rick Steves, the globetrotting travel writer, put it:

“As an American taxpayer, I believe that every US bomb that falls and every bullet that flies has my name on it. In the last year, our president (who won votes by promising to keep America out of wars and is now famously agitating for a Nobel Peace Prize) has dropped bombs on seven foreign countries—and each of those bombs has your name on it, too…including the one that just recklessly decapitated a nation of 90 million people in a war-torn corner of our world.”

He is right. War is not abstract—it is done with our money, and too often without our consent.

As Cato Institute’s Katherine Thompson explains, “War…costs American blood and treasure. The Founders placed the power to initiate it in Congress precisely to ensure those costs are confronted and debated before the country walks into battle.”

That safeguard is being ignored.

And the damage does not stop at constitutional injury, because war is not only a constitutional problem. It is an economic one.

War fuels defense contracts, reconstruction deals and intelligence budgets. It sustains a vast military-industrial apparatus whose profits depend on instability.

Nothing about Operation Epic Fury puts America first. It pushes us toward a fiscal cliff.

Within days, the costs were staggering: $300 million for three F-15E jets downed by “friendly” fire. $630 million to transport troops, ships and aircraft to the region in advance of the attacks. More than 50,000 troops deployed to the region. $13 million a day just for two aircraft carriers stationed nearby. $43.8 million for 1,250 Kamikaze drones. $2 million each for Tomahawk missiles. $12.8 million each for anti-ballistic missile interceptors.

Forbes estimates that Trump’s military strikes in Iran have already cost American taxpayers over $1 billion, “with a price tag that could approach $100 billion, depending on how long it can stretch on.” The total economic cost of the conflict “could trigger an economic loss for the U.S. of between $50 billion and $210 billion.”

And that is before accounting for the human cost.

Innocent civilians—over a hundred young girls between the ages of 7 and 12—have died because the U.S. and Israel reportedly launched a deadly strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran using outdated maps.

American servicepeople are dying because of one man’s unilateral decision to play at war.

So much for “America First.”

Permanent war places empire first.

And as usual, “we the people” will be forced pay for another unpopular forever war—financially, constitutionally, and domestically—and for the presidential hubris and the greed of the military-industrial complex and Deep State undergirding it all.

Congress anticipated this danger.

The War Powers Act was meant to rein in presidents who bypass Congress. But laws are only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce them.

Without congressional authorization, without meaningful debate, without constitutional clarity, the executive branch claims the unilateral authority to wage war.

This is how dictatorships arise and republics erode.

It happens when a president is allowed to treat constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than restraints.

Trump routinely dismisses unfavorable polls, ignores the courts, sidesteps Congress, shows contempt for the will of the American people, and ignorance about the fact that he works for “we the people.” He behaves not as a public servant but as a potentate.

As John Jay warned in The Federalist No. 4:

“Absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.”

If this were merely a constitutional dispute, it would be grave enough.

But it is not merely constitutional.

The consequences are immediate, political, and profoundly destabilizing.

Trump has a tendency to bulldoze through constitutional and legal restraints, creating a spectacle or a crisis, and then leaving others to clean up the fallout—whether it is a gutted ballroom, an eviscerated federal agency, a chaotic immigration crackdown, or now a widening war in the Middle East.

Long after the headlines move on, the wreckage remains.

And when the crisis involves war, the consequences are not merely bureaucratic or political — they are measured in lives and liberties.

War, in particular, has always been the most convenient tool of presidents facing troubles at home. When approval ratings slide, when economic policy falters, when scandal threatens to consume the headlines, foreign conflict has a way of shifting the narrative.

Trump’s Iran escalation—a deadly, costly, immoral, unpopular distraction from missteps of Trump’s own making—comes amid dismal polling, a faltering economy, escalating immigration crackdowns, eroding constitutional protections, and renewed scrutiny tied to the Epstein files.

Six out of ten Americans disapprove of Trump’s military action against Iran.

And while there is little to defend about Iran—it is a brutal regime—no nation has the right to declare itself judge, jury and executioner of another without lawful authority. To suggest otherwise is the language of strongmen.

Moreover, what happens abroad does not stay abroad.

The same government that claims unilateral authority to bomb foreign nations claims expanded authority to surveil, detain and silence domestically.

The military-industrial complex and the police state operate in tandem.

At home, we are being subjected to many of the same tactics and technologies deployed overseas. This is how America becomes a battlefield.

The pattern is not new. George W. Bush expanded warrantless surveillance. Obama normalized drone warfare. Presidents of both parties have stretched executive power.

Trump inherited the imperial presidency—and leaned into it. He boasts of his authority, derides the courts, dismisses Congress, and treats constitutional limits as inconveniences rather than guardrails.

He governs as though Article II were a royal charter.

Defense contractors may prosper in such a climate. The Constitution does not.

History teaches that war abroad produces blowback at home. Twenty-five years ago, 9/11 was itself blowback—the consequence of decades of military intervention and occupation in the Middle East.

Blowback justifies emergency powers. Emergency powers justify a police state. A police state justifies a permanent national security state.

The “war on terror” did not end terrorism. It institutionalized emergency. And permanent emergency makes constitutional government fragile.

James Madison warned that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We have seen it unfold over the past quarter century: the militarization of police, battlefield tactics in American neighborhoods, expansive surveillance justified by counterterrorism. The same tactics and rationale deployed abroad eventually get used against the American people here at home.

War abroad justifies control at home. That is the pattern.

As legal scholar Aziz Huq, professor of law at the University of Chicago, warns, the same national-security powers used to justify bombing foreign nations can be turned inward—against domestic opponents and even against the electoral process itself.

That is the long game being played right now.

This unprovoked attack on Iran is turning the Middle East into a war zone, in turn laying the groundwork for Trump to act on the fantasies he has long entertained about cancelling the mid-term elections.

It is not far-fetched to imagine he might attempt it. He has repeatedly hinted about it and has already demonstrated how far he is willing to go to overturn an election.

On the very day bombs began falling on Tehran, Huq notes that the White House was reportedly considering a unilateral executive order asserting the power to control how and when Americans vote in the upcoming midterm elections—citing “national security” and alleged foreign meddling as justification.

As Huq explains, the presidency is especially weakly bound by law when “national security” is invoked. The absence of legal authority did not prevent the strikes on Iran—strikes that are unlawful under the Constitution, which assigns Congress alone the power to initiate war.

If national security can be invoked to bypass Congress abroad, it can be invoked to bypass constitutional limits at home.

In other words, if a president can launch a war without congressional authorization, he can claim similar emergency authority to restrict voting, suppress dissent, or silence opposition.

This is not republican governance. It is rule by force.

Even some of Trump’s former allies sense the instability. As Marjorie Taylor Greene bluntly put it, “I think it’s time for America to rip the Band-Aid off and we need to have a serious conversation about what the f— is happening in this country and who in the hell are these decisions being made for and who is making these decisions.”

America’s founders understood this danger. They structured the Constitution to prevent any one man from dragging the nation into war.

In making the case that decisions about war should never be left to one man, legal scholar David French quotes then-Congressman Abraham Lincoln at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1948: “Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

Concludes French: “Those words were true then, and they’re true now. No matter what he thinks, Trump is not a king. But by taking America to war all on his own, he is acting like one.”

If we are to preserve any semblance of constitutional government, Congress must reclaim its war powers. The War Powers Resolution must be enforced. Emergency powers must be narrowed, sunsetted and restrained. Surveillance must be reined in. Domestic military deployment must be limited to the most narrow, exceptional circumstances.

But structural reform alone will not save a republic that has grown comfortable with permanent war. Because once war abroad and war at home fully merge, the Constitution becomes little more than words on paper.

War is not peace. Preemptive war is not strength. And an imperial presidency—no matter how loudly it wraps itself in flags—is not constitutional government.

The Founders understood that the gravest threat to liberty would not come from foreign enemies alone, but from the concentration of power in the hands of one man who believed himself indispensable.

A president who can send bombs abroad without consent can silence opposition at home without hesitation.

A government that governs by the rule of emergency eventually ceases to govern by the rule of law.

And a nation that trades liberty for spectacle will wake up to find that it has neither.

History is a relentless teacher: military empires may rise on the back of war, but they fall just as quickly from being spread too thin. Already, days after the start of this debacle of a war on Iran, U.S. forces are being used to combat drug trafficking in Ecuador.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the question is no longer whether America can police the globe. The question is whether our Republic can survive the weight of the Empire it has become.

We are at the point where we must choose: the spectacle of permanent war, or the survival of the American experiment in freedom.

We cannot have both.

Original article: rutherford.org