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This is a report on what is most likely to happen in Iran, as early as this weekend, according to Israeli insiders and American officials I’ve relied upon for decades. It will entail heavy American bombing. I have vetted this report with a longtime US official in Washington, who told me that all will be “under control” if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “departs.” Just how that might happen, short of his assassination, is not known. There has been a great deal of talk about American firepower and targets inside Iran, but little practical thinking, as far I can tell, about how to remove a revered religious leader with an enormous following.

I have reported from afar on the nuclear and foreign policy of Israel for decades. My 1991 book The Samson Option told the story of the making of the Israeli nuclear bomb and America’s willingness to keep the project secret. The most important unanswered question about the current situation will be the response of the world, including that of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who has been an ally of Iran’s leaders.

The United States remains Israel’s most important ally, although many here and around the world abhor Israel’s continuing murderous war in Gaza. The Trump administration is in full support of Israel’s current plan to rid Iran of any trace of a nuclear weapons program while hoping the ayatollah-led government in Tehran will be overthrown.

I have been told that the White House has signed off on an all-out bombing campaign in Iran, but the ultimate targets, the centrifuges buried at least eighty meters below the surface at Fordow, will, as of this writing, not be struck until the weekend. The delay has come at Trump’s insistence because the president wants the shock of the bombing to be diminished as much as possible by the opening of Wall Street trading on Monday. (Trump took issue on social media this morning with a Wall Street Journal report that said he had decided on the attack on Iran, writing that he had yet to decide on a path forward.)

Fordow is home to the remaining majority of Iran’s most advanced centrifuges that have produced, according to recent reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to which Iran is a signatory, nine hundred pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent, a short step from weapons-grade levels.

The most recent Israeli bombing attacks on Iran have made no attempts to destroy the centrifuges at Fordow, which are stored at least eighty meters underground. It has been agreed, as of Wednesday, that US bombers carrying bunker bombs capable of penetrating to that depth, will begin attacking the Fordow facility this weekend.

The delay will give US military assets throughout the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean—there are more than two dozen US Air Force bases and Navy ports in the region—a chance to prepare for possible Iranian retaliation. The assumption is that Iran still has some missile and air force capability that will be on US bombing lists. “This is a chance to do away with this regime once and for all,” an informed official told me today, “and so we might as well go big.” He said, however, “that it will not be carpet bombing.”

The planned weekend bombing will also have new targets: the bases of the Republican Guards, which have countered those campaigning against the revolutionary leadership since the violent overthrow of the shah of Iran in early 1979.

The Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes that the bombings will provide “the means of creating an uprising” against Iran’s current regime, which has shown little tolerance for those who defy the religious leadership and its edicts. Iranian police stations will be struck. Government offices that house files on suspected dissenters in Iran will also be attacked.

The Israelis apparently also hope, so I gather, that Khamenei will flee the country and not make a stand until the end. I was told that his personal plane left Tehran airport headed for Oman early Wednesday morning, accompanied by two fighter planes, but it is not known whether he was aboard.

Only two thirds of Iran’s population of 90 million are Persians. The largest minority groups include Azeris, many of whom have long-standing covert ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis. Jews make up a small minority group there, too. (Azerbaijan is the site of a large secret CIA base for operations in Iran.)

Bringing back the shah’s son, now living in exile in near Washington, has never been considered by the American and Israeli planners, I was told. But there has been talk among the White House planning group that includes Vice President J.D. Vance, of installing a moderate religious leader to run the country if Khamenei is deposed. The Israelis bitterly objected to the idea. “They don’t give a shit on the religious issue, but demand a political puppet to control,” the longtime US official said. “We are split with the Izzies on this. Result would be permanent hostility and future conflict in perpetuity, Bibi desperately trying to draw US in as their ally against all things Muslim, using the plight of the citizens as propaganda bait.”

There is the hope in the American and Israeli intelligence communities, I was told, that elements of the Azeri community will join in a popular revolt against the ruling regime, should one develop during the continued Israeli bombing. There also is the thought that some members of the Revolutionary Guard would join in what I was told might be “a democratic uprising against the ayatollahs”—a long-held aspiration of the US government. The sudden and successful overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was cited as a potential model, although Assad’s demise came after a long civil war.

It is possible that the result of the massive Israeli and US bombing attack could leave Iran in a state of permanent failure, as happened after the Western intervention in Libya in 2011. That revolt resulted in the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi, who had kept the disparate tribes there under control. The futures of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, all victims of repeated outside attacks, are far from settled.

Donald Trump clearly wants an international win he can market. To accomplish that, he and Netanyahu are taking America to places it has never been.

This article was originally published on SeymourHersh.substack.com.

The post What I Have Been Told Is Coming in Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article first appeared as an exclusive to Ron Paul Institute subscribers. Subscribe here for free.

As of this writing, the United States military appears to have all of its assets in place for a major attack on Iran. Over the past several days we have seen unprecedented re-orientation of US vast military might from the coast of California to Qatar and everything in-between.

President Trump is set to take the United States into a “pre-emptive” war against a country that has not attacked us nor has it threatened us. He is doing so while explicitly denigrating his own entire Intelligence Community, which continues to maintain that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon nor does it already possess WMDs.

(Remember we went to war just over 20 years ago on the neocon lie that Iraq possessed WMDs?)

This exchange happened just this afternoon:

Reporter: “Your intelligence community says Iran isn’t building a nuke.”
Trump: “They’re wrong. Who said that?”
Reporter: “Your DNI, Tulsi Gabbard.”
Trump: “She is wrong.”

The President’s spokesperson yesterday again made the claim, refuted by the entire US Intelligence Community, that Iran was just “a couple of weeks” away from a nuclear bomb.

Journalist Saagar Enjeti questioned that assertion from the Trump Press Secretary and the response was astonishing. As he recently wrote:

So President Trump has tossed aside the collective judgement of the entire US Intelligence Community in favor of the “assessment” of a foreign intelligence service whose motto is literally, “By way of deception you shall engage in war.”

It’s even worse than that. According to Sean Davis, the CEO of the ultra pro-MAGA publication, The Federalist:

I have also been told by current and former senior national security officials that CIA claims about Iran’s nuclear progress come directly from Mossad—verbatim talking points was one phrase I heard—and don’t include U.S. intelligence on the matter.

This is in reference to CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s bizarre recent claim that Iran is “on the one yard line” of getting a nuclear weapon and would for sure want to score a touchdown.

Ratcliffe’s CIA should have taken out a footnote on the Intelligence Community’s March assessment if he did not agree that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon, but he chose to repeat the talking points of a foreign intelligence service to undermine his own country’s intelligence services. Instead he joined in on Trump’s kneecapping of Gabbard.

[Note: Since this article first appeared, Gabbard seems to have “gotten in line” with Ratcliffe, Trump, and the Mossad.]

Folks this is going to be the biggest war in generations if Trump decides to pull the trigger. No wonder the Framers of our Constitution were determined to not convey such awesome power in the hands of one man, but rather granted it to The People (the ones who would be doing the fighting and dying) through their elected representatives.

Something is very wrong in our country right now and all patriots and men and women of goodwill are duty-bound to do something about it.

But what can we do? One thing you can do is “vote with your feet” and join us in August for the ninth annual Ron Paul Institute DC Conference (at the Dulles Airport).

All eyes are on us, and if CSPAN again chooses to cover our conference, what will the neocons say when the camera pans to show an empty room? They will smirk and smile, believing all the gas has run out of the anti-war and non-interventionist movement.

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Will Trump Attack Iran? appeared first on LewRockwell.

“In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes an entrepreneur by seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy.”—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Fox Business reported in 2016 that more than 2,000 colleges and universities in the US offer a course in entrepreneurship. And why not? Fifty-four percent of Millennials want to start a business. Twenty years ago, fewer than 50 universities offered degrees in entrepreneurship. In 2023, there are 150 entrepreneurship programs, including most of the top business schools in the country. The top ten schools for entrepreneurship include prestigious universities like MIT, University of California, Berkeley, Penn, University of Utah, Babson College, University of Michigan, Baylor, and North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

While querying Google “What is an entrepreneur?” pictures of these individuals appeared: Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Oprah Winfrey. Branson has dyslexia, did poorly in school, never went to college, and reportedly started his first business at 16. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after one semester. Bill Gates left Harvard after two years. Elon Musk earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics from Penn, but dropped out of Stanford after two days. Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. Oprah Winfrey said in a commencement address, “So I got my degree from Tennessee State, right around the time I got my third Emmy.” That same year she was also in the beginning stages of launching her own production company Harpo Studios.

While all are (or were) great entrepreneurs, few earned college degrees and none were schooled in entrepreneurship. Media mogul Ted Turner studied the classics at Brown but was expelled before graduating. Kirk Kerkorian dropped out of the eighth grade. Sheldon Adelson attended City College of New York but did not graduate. For sure, none of these famous entrepreneurs took inane courses with titles such as: “Business Model Development,” “Corporate Entrepreneurship: Initiating and Sustaining Innovations,” “Business Problem Formulation and Solving,” or “Social Entrepreneurship in Action.”

Dina Dwyer-Owens—CEO of The Dwyer Group who informally teaches entrepreneurship courses at Baylor University—told Fox Business, “I actually spend a good 30 minutes in my presentation talking about the importance of getting clear about what your values are in operating your business and how you can attract the types of team members that are like minded,” she says. “You certainly want team members that have strengths and weaknesses that complement yours, but having the same values in mind is key in building a business.” “Values” and “team members” doesn’t sound like entrepreneurship but instead, political correctness.

In a utterly laughable statement, Ms. Dwyer-Owens claims students can learn how to identify and establish a strategic planning process for a future business through their coursework. The country should have successful entrepreneurs popping up like dandelions anytime now.

According to Ludwig von Mises,

What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way.

A college degree is certification that the student has learned what was and is. Success at university is not formulating opinions about the future but to learn and memorize the opinions of professors, who learned from their professors, who learned from their professors, and so on.

Frank Knight distinguished entrepreneurs from other businesspeople by their willingness to act in the face of uncertainty. Entrepreneurs often don’t know whether their product will work, how it will be manufactured, who the customers will be, or how they can be reached. For Knight, in the face of uncertainty entrepreneurs act while others dither. Spending four or more years working toward a college degree is dithering, if nothing else.

For Israel Kirzner the entrepreneur is a person who, “upon seeing a $10 bill in front of his nose, is alert to the existence of the money and leaps to grab it. The alert man will grab the $10 note rapidly; the less alert man will take longer to see his opportunity and to take advantage of it.” But action by the entrepreneur alone is insufficient, others must be convinced and motivated.

University courses cannot teach what these three economists describe: innate qualities that the very few possess. Or, as Investopedia offers, “Entrepreneurship can be seen as the secret sauce that combines all the other factors of production into a product or service for the consumer market” (emphasis added).

Early Apple employees describe Steve Jobs as being able to “convince anyone of practically anything.” Andy Hertzfeld—an engineer for Apple—said Jobs had a “reality distortion field, a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”

Entrepreneurs must be able to persuade investors, lenders, vendors, employees, landlords and many others to suspend disbelief. To, as writers for the Harvard Business Review write, “see the opportunity the entrepreneur sees: a world that could be but is not now” (emphasis in original).

The entrepreneur must have an enormous appetite for risk. The 18th-century economist Richard Cantillon called entrepreneurs a “special, risk-bearing group of people.” And with risk comes conflicts of interest and the opportunity to bend the truth.

While some may have the talent, they may not be able to, in a word, lie—and lie with conviction to the point they believe the lies themselves. Entrepreneurs are constantly trying to convince others so the opportunities to stretch the truth are many, and they have a lot on the line. There is the asymmetric information problem. The entrepreneur is not starting or running a transparent company. He or she possesses information no one has and, thus, can easily exaggerate, or just plain distort the facts to suit their needs.

The HBR writers cite a 2018 Entrepreneur magazine interview with Stonyfield Farm founder Gary Hirshberg. The yogurt vendor rationalized any untruths he told along the way as, “I think lying, if we want to call it that, which I guess is what it should be called, for the common good, because in the end it didn’t help the vendors for me to go under either, is OK as long as you ultimately do deliver.”

The utilitarian ends justify the means, if everything works out OK. “[I]t is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,” Jeremy Bentham wrote.

Hirshberg saw himself as the champion not only for those involved in his business, but friends and family. “We were fighting for employees’ jobs and our mothers’ and mothers-in-laws’ and friends’ investments. Fighting for our lives. And I think anything goes, as long as you’re not injuring anybody.”

After all, it’s just business, right?

He wasn’t doing anything that any other business person was doing. Hirshberg said of his vendors, “It’s not like they haven’t seen it before.”

The entrepreneur must stretch the truth to convince others he or she can predict the future when, in fact, that’s impossible, but not radically impossible. Stephan Kinsella writes, “My view is the Misesian-Rothbardian-Hoppean one, which I understand to be that the future is uncertain, but not radically so; that knowledge of economics laws can help, ceteris paribus—but that usually other factors are dominant.”

Kinsella goes on to mention a conversation with an economist specializing in entrepreneurship, Peter Klein, who told Kinsella, “the question of why or how someone has the better skill at forecasting is really meta-economics—more of a psychological field, which is studied at Effectuation, from a Kirznerian perspective.”

Murray Rothbard explained that,

…the forecaster attempts to predict the events of the future on the basis of present and past events already known. He uses all his nomothetic knowledge, economic, political, military, psychological, and technological; but at best his work is an art rather than an exact science.

Hans-Herrman Hoppe echos Rothbard’s view, writing, “while economic forecasting will indeed always be a systematically unteachable art, it is at the same time true that all economic forecasts must be thought of as being constrained by the existence of a priori knowledge about actions as such.”

As an example, the quantity theory of money, writes Hoppe, is not an empirical theory but a praxeological theory which would act as a logical constraint on prediction-making. “It means that in the long run the praxeological enlightened forecaster would average better than the enlightened ones.”

However, for the entrepreneur, the long run means little to nothing. There is money to raise, rent to pay, payrolls to make, and dozens of other pressing issues. The praxeologically-enlightened entrepreneur could go bankrupt waiting to be right in the long run.

What Rothbard and Hoppe call art, Ludwig von Mises called speculation.

Like every acting man, the entrepreneur is always a speculator. He deals with the uncertain conditions of the future. His success or failure depends on the correctness of his anticipation of uncertain events. If he fails in his understanding of things to come, he is doomed. The only source from which an entrepreneur’s profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.

It should be remembered, much of the foundational work on entrepreneurship and uncertainty was written while the US and many other countries were on a gold standard—a system which kept prices steady and, in many ways, decreased the number of financial market manias and panics viz-à-vis today’s fiat money standard, or (as Jim Grant terms it) the PHd standard. Liquidity episodes are now common and banking panics come every decade or so. This environment creates more uncertainty for today’s entrepreneurs. The other change is the amount of regulation has exploded from all levels of government from when Knight and Mises theorized. Peter Klein wrote in his book The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur, “When an industry is regulated, deregulated, or re-regulated, economic calculation becomes more difficult, and entrepreneurial activity is hampered. It should not be surprising that poor long-term performance is more likely under those conditions.”

One of the entrepreneurs mentioned above, Elon Musk, by some accounts is less an entrepreneur than a rent seeker, building his fortune on government subsidies. In a 2014 Bloomberg article, Barry Ritholtz wrote, “almost all of Musk’s companies rely in some form on government subsidies or tax breaks. Tesla’s earnings, according to Forbes, aren’t derived from selling automobiles, but from selling ‘emissions credits mandated by the state of California’s electric vehicle requirements.’”

The financial press desperately wants fresh, young entrepreneurial geniuses to report on. But the current, heavily-regulated, fragile financial system environment makes it more difficult for young entrepreneurs to blossom. Two of the most celebrated young entrepreneurs of the past decade—Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried—are both serving prison time. Not so long ago, Holmes graced the cover of Inc. magazine which touted her as “The Next Steve Jobs.” Fortune featured a 30-year old Bankman-Fried on its cover asking if he was “The Next Warren Buffett?”

In his 2023 book Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions In The New Age Of Crisis, Scott Patterson chronicles the stories of Mark Spitznagel and Nassim Taleb whose threefold trading strategy assumes; the future is impossible to predict, extreme events are now more devastating than many people assume, and drawdowns (failures) mean more than wins.

While it’s clear entrepreneurship cannot be learned, the covid recession served to accelerate the number of entrepreneurship programs. Timothy Mescon wrote for aacsb.edu,

…in March 2020—perhaps the most disruptive time of the pandemic—demand for entrepreneurship education was up 66 percent year-on-year. This is a strong indication that, during times of great crisis, students perceive new business creation as a catalyst for helping them overcome challenges and find opportunities.

Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi—dean and president of ESSEC Business School in France—noted, “Students increasingly consider entrepreneurship an efficient way to impact the world,” he said. “They realize that creating their own businesses or joining young and agile companies can provide significant opportunities to shape the world and solve environmental and social problems.” Again, this is not entrepreneurship but political correctness.

Descriptions of entrepreneurship programs do not mention risk-taking, acting in the face of uncertainty, forecasting, and speculation. These university programs are simply attempting to attract would-be lawyers or engineers with heady pronouncements that an entrepreneurship degree will allow them to make the world a better place, not by creating new products or services, but by saving the environment and solving society’s ills.

Many entrepreneurs created through these covid-fueled programs will likely be failures, wasting not only the cost of the education but any capital used to start their world-saving dreams. Thankfully for these entrepreneurial failures, a routine job awaits.

The title of this essay is, of course, a play on Walter Block’s monumental book Defending the Undefendable. Murray Rothbard’s comment about Defending, that “many of ‘our people’ are not ready for this exciting and shocking adventure” comes to mind as “our people” (Austrians) make their living teaching what can’t be taught—entrepreneurship.

The post Entrepreneurship Can’t Be Taught in a College Classroom appeared first on LewRockwell.

War with Iran is the biggest news story of 2025 so far, and it is also one of the biggest events of this entire period in human history.  Decisions that global leaders will be making in the weeks and months to come will have very serious implications for all of us.  Right now, we are waiting to see if President Trump will give the green light for U.S. air strikes in Iran.  Earlier today, we were informed that Trump will make this decision “within the next two weeks”…

President Donald Trump said there was a “substantial chance” of U.S. negotiations with Iran and that he would decide within two weeks whether diplomacy keeps America out of the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict.

The statement took down the temperature as the world waited for news of whether he would commit U.S. forces to Israel’s campaign against Tehran’s nuclear program.

“Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, quoting Trump.

That doesn’t mean that President Trump will make his decision two weeks from now.

“Within the next two weeks” means that a decision could come at any point within that time frame.

According to one anonymous U.S. official, Trump “wants to keep his options open until the very last moment”…

Trump remained hesitant to commit, wary of a prolonged foreign conflict he has long vowed to avoid, on Thursday. “There are a lot of things in motion,” a US official said, “but the President wants to keep his options open until the very last moment.” Trump’s top priority, according to insiders, is to avoid a drawn-out military entanglement.

While he is open to arguments from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that only American power can cripple Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the president has so far resisted calls for immediate intervention.

Trump seemed to personally confirm this when he told reporters in the Oval Office that he prefers “to make the final decision one second before it’s due”…

Speaking from the Oval Office, Trump confirmed: “I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due. Especially with war, things change with war. It can go from one extreme to the other.”

I think that Trump would prefer to make a deal with Iran if that is still possible.

But the Iranians have given no indication that they are willing to give in to Trump’s demands.

Ultimately, Trump is still determined to bring Iran’s nuclear program to an end one way or another.

Either the Iranians will agree to destroy it, or the U.S. and Israel will destroy it.

In order for the U.S. and Israel to destroy it, the underground nuclear facility at Fordow will have to be taken out, and that will not be easy…

President Trump has been briefed on both the risks and the benefits of bombing Fordo, Iran’s most secure nuclear site, and his mindset is that disabling it is necessary because of the risk of weapons being produced in a relatively short period of time, multiple sources told CBS News.

“He believes there’s not much choice,” one source said. “Finishing the job means destroying Fordo.”

Israel cannot destroy Fordow by air, because it has no way to deliver 30,000 pound bunker-buster bombs.

That is why we would have to drop those bombs.

But even some U.S. officials have doubts that those bombs would be enough to destroy the facility at Fordow…

Donald Trump has suggested to defense officials it would make sense for the US to launch strikes against Iran only if the so-called “bunker buster” bomb was guaranteed to destroy the critical uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

Trump was told that dropping the GBU-57s, a 13.6-tonne (30,000lb) bomb would effectively eliminate Fordow but he does not appear to be fully convinced, the people said, and has held off authorizing strikes as he also awaits the possibility that the threat of US involvement would lead Iran to talks.

The effectiveness of GBU-57s has been a topic of deep contention at the Pentagon since the start of Trump’s term, according to two defense officials who were briefed that perhaps only a tactical nuclear weapon could be capable of destroying Fordow because of how deeply it is located.

President Trump doesn’t want to launch a mission that is going to fail.

If those giant bombs don’t work, he will look quite foolish, and he very much wants to avoid that.

But Fordow is the key to this entire conflict.

If Fordow is still operating when this is all over, it will be a major victory for Iran.

The Israelis are absolutely determined to keep that from happening.

If President Trump decides not to give the green light for air strikes on Iran, the Israelis have already indicated that they will send commandos in to take Fordow out…

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ambassador to Washington Yechiel Leiter hinted in recent interviews that the Israel Defense Forces have options beyond just airstrikes.
• One could be a risky commando raid. Israeli special forces conducted such an operation last September, albeit on a smaller scale, when they destroyed an underground missile factory in Syria by planting and detonating explosives.
• Now that Israel has full control of Iran’s air space and has dealt a heavy blow to Iran’s military, that option appears less extreme than it otherwise would.
• A U.S. official said the Israelis told the Trump administration that while they may not be able to reach deep enough into the mountain with bombs, they may “do it with humans.”

It would be an extremely risky operation.

But the IDF demonstrated that they could pull off such an operation when they took out the underground missile factory in Syria last September…

Shoshani added that the nighttime raid was ‘one of the more complex operations the IDF has done in recent years’. Accompanied by airstrikes, it involved dozens of aircraft and around 100 helicopter-borne troops, he said.

‘At the end of the raid, the troops dismantled the facility, including the machines and the manufacturing equipment, themselves,’ he claimed.

Of course destroying Fordow would be much more difficult.

And there are so many ways that an operation of such complexity could go horribly wrong.

But if Trump doesn’t decide to use bunker-buster bombs, this may be the only way that Israeli leaders can achieve their goals.

We shall see what happens.

Meanwhile, missiles continue to fly back and forth between Israel and Iran.

Just hours ago, an Iranian missile hit one of Israel’s most important hospitals…

Black smoke was still billowing from the middle of the Soroka Medical Center when we arrived, several hours after Iran’s attack on the building.

Pieces of twisted metal shrapnel – some of it apparently from the missile itself – scattered across a 200m (656ft) area in and around the hospital complex.

Vehicles carrying medical staff lined the road outside – an emergency response to a situation that many had feared would be worse.

Needless to say, Israeli leaders are extremely angry, and they are vowing to get revenge…

Iran said the primary target of the attack that hit the Soroka Hospital was an Israeli military intelligence site, not the health facility, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack and vowed a response, saying: “We will exact the full price from the tyrants in Tehran.”

Israel Katz, the country’s Minister of Defense, accused Iran of “war crimes of the most serious kind” and said Ayatollah Khamenei “will be held accountable for his crimes.”

The IDF continues to hammer high value targets inside Iran as well.  Last night dozens of targets were hit, and this included a strike on Iran’s Arak heavy water reactor.  The following is an excerpt from an official statement by the IDF…

Overnight (Thursday), 40 IAF fighter jets, with the precise intelligence direction of the IDF Intelligence Directorate, struck dozens of military targets in Tehran and additional areas throughout Iran, using over 100 munitions.

As part of the strikes, and as part of the broad effort to prevent the Iranian regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon, the nuclear reactor in the area of Arak in Iran was targeted, including the structure of the reactor’s core seal, which is a key component in plutonium production.

Construction of the reactor began in 1997 but was not completed due to international community intervention.

The reactor was originally intended for the production of weapons-grade plutonium, capable of enabling the development of nuclear weapons. In light of various agreements, in recent years the Iranian regime advanced its conversion to produce low-grade plutonium, which is not suitable for the production of nuclear weapons. However, the regime deliberately ordered not to complete the conversion that would have prevented its use for nuclear weapons — in order to exert pressure on the West.

The strike targeted the component intended for plutonium production, in order to prevent the reactor from being restored and used for nuclear weapons development.

We are seeing so much death and destruction on both sides.

And unless Iran surrenders and gives up all nuclear enrichment, it will continue for the foreseeable future.

Ominously, a third U.S. aircraft carrier is now being moved into the region…

The USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, will set sail for the Mediterranean as the Israel-Iran conflict continues to escalate.

The ship is expected to sail to Europe possibly next week, making it the third US aircraft carrier group in the region, the New York Post reported. The voyage is part of a regularly scheduled deployment.

The ship will join the USS Carl Vinson and the USS Nimitz in the region.

In April, I warned my readers about this exact scenario.

Now it is playing out right in front of our eyes.

This conflict is a “spark” that is going to change so much in our world.

We enjoyed so many years of peace and stability in the post-World War II era, but now those times are gone.

The dogs of war have been unleashed, and the days ahead are going to be absolutely insane.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post Guess What Israel Is Going To Do if Trump Doesn’t Give The Green Light for U.S. Air Strikes In Iran? appeared first on LewRockwell.

You must have noticed by now how this Fourth Turning bidness disorders the collective mind. The churning zeitgeist is hard on the nerves, while something strange is birthed by mankind, the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. Everybody’s got a story, and most of them are pretty spooky — A-I Globalist hell. . . de-pop and neo-slavery. . . chemtrail death. . . lizard people. . . caliphate on-the-march across Western Civ. . . World War Three. . . escape to Mars. . . . Mercy!

The last thing you might imagine is a tranquil evening in the town square among happy and prosperous neighbors, the dogs frisking and the children chasing each other as lights begin to twinkle against the lovely violet sky. Rather, you have to wonder just when is that hard rain a’gonna fall? When will some obdurate enemy try to bust a cap in your country’s ass? And at the center of this psychic maelstrom, the provocative visage of Mr. Trump.

So, let’s stipulate that it’s natural to be alarmed by events. But must you lose your mind? Many did during the Covid set-up, and they have not recovered. Most particularly the political Left. The Covid operation was supposed to rid the world of DJ Trump for good, and it flopped. What it accomplished politically for four years was to demonstrate that the Left cannot be trusted to run our national affairs. That, and the cumulative failures of lawfare, have made the Left crazier than ever — while the Democratic Party goes broke and bleeds out support-wise.

Meanwhile, the political Right struggles to hold things together, especially the morale of the people. The great national megaphones — CNN, The New York Times, et al. — are no help at all. They only multiply the mental disorder. And they will do everything possible to undermine the efforts of MAGA to reform a system that foundered under corruption and delusion. Where there is not gridlock these days, chaos breaks out. . . violence of action and opinion.

The focus of all this angst for the moment is Israel. Suspicion runs deep that Israel “owns” America, bends us to its will, treats us like a mere lackey in its quest to dominate the world. It does this, they say, through AIPAC, its chief lobbyist, stuffing money into every pocket and every campaign treasure-chest in DC. In reality, political payoff-wise, AIPAC, at $3.3-million (according to OpenSecrets.org) doesn’t hold a candle to the National Association of Realtors at $63.5-million, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, at $30-million, and the US Chamber of Commerce, at $29.6-million.

Of course, the AIPAC suspicion tends to redound upon plain-old, age-old hatin’ on the Jews. (Full disclosure, yours truly is one.) It’s true enough, for such a low percentage of the US population, Jews seem to run an awful lot of things here: Wall Street firms, Ivy League universities, medical research, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Broadway, the news media. How to account for that? Well. . . it is said that in the shtetls of old Europe, the richest fathers married off their daughters to the smartest young men in the village. Hence, their offspring sailed into Ellis Island with a certain advantage. It could be as simple as that. What else might it be? Luciferian magic, some seem to think.

So now, obviously, Israel is engaged in trying to beat the crap out of Iran in order to persuade them to discontinue that country’s quest for deliverable nukes. Every other means of persuasion has failed, you understand, while Iran has never ceased to advertise its wish to “wipe Israel off the map” — a leitmotif not subject to disambiguation. Strange to relate, this has utterly inflamed the political Left against Israel and the Jews. Strange especially because until the day-before-yesterday the political Left in America was dominated by Jewish orgs, Jewish money, and Jewish individuals.

As we speak, Jewish Democratic Party lawyers run the Lawfare endeavor: Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Benjamin Wittes, Michael Bromwich, Brooke Goldstein (Exec Director of The Lawfare Project org). Marc Elias has served as the Left’s chief election law finagler through three national elections, while Norm Eisen coached Special Counsel Jack Smith, New York AG Letitia James and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg in mounting their cases against Donald Trump.

Now, ironically-to-the-max, The Lawfare project is battling against the wild outbreak of antisemitism on Ivy League campuses (surprise, surprise) — Harvard, in particular, where the antisemitic frolics are presided over by the university’s Jewish president, Alan Garber. So, now it’s Jew-on-Jew, which is just another angle on the political Left eating itself alive. In case you’re wondering, I consider the Jewish lawfare ninjas a disgrace to my ethnic group, for the simple reason that their years’ long exploits against Mr. Trump have been altogether garishly dishonest. The lawfare gang has done much more damage to our country than AIPAC ever has.

And also now, at this inflection point in the Fourth Turning, Mr. Trump stands by in Israel’s campaign to put Iran’s nuke project out-of-business. This dilemma has inflamed both ends of the political spectrum. Looks like Mr. Trump is very reluctant to commit the US to an act of war. He is apparently unconvinced that our bunker-buster MOABs can successfully penetrate Iran’s nuclear Fordo mountain stronghold. For the moment, he is playing for time, probably hoping that Israel alone can “finish the job” (de-nuke Iran) somehow without US intervention. There is even some reasonable hope that Iran’s mullah theocracy can be tossed out, at best by the Iranian’s themselves.

Israel is much-resented for beating up on its enemies. It left Gaza for dead after the horrific Oct 7, 2023, rape, murder, and hostage attack. The American Left has labeled Israel “Hitler 2.0” for that. The American Left is insane of course. The news media is working the story hard that Israel is now hated by everybody in the world, even Ol’ Tucker Carlson. The Jewish lawfare ninjas are just layin’ low on this one, which seems a bit churlish for such otherwise combative punks. Only Alan Dershowitz dares speak up for Israel, and he’s not associated with the Left anymore. It remains for Mr. Trump to keep a clear head about this while everybody else runs around with his and her hair on fire.

I will make a bold prediction: Iran will be successfully de-nuked. The world will be better for it. Eventually, world opinion about Israel will shift. The world will be grateful that Israel dared to take on this problem. Eventually, too, the lawfare ninjas will find themselves in court — but, this time, sitting at the defendant’s table on a seditious conspiracy rap. That will toast my bagel.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Anxiety Attack appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the course of three hundred years, the vaccine enterprise developed into the SCIENTISTIC religion that it is today. By scientistic, I mean the shallow, unexamined faith that all things in the world—including human health and disease—can be measured and manipulated by scientists.

The scientism of the vaccine enterprise has created a paradoxical state of affairs. While critical analysts of vaccines are constrained by the scientific method, many pro-vaccine advocates possess an unshakable faith in the beneficence of their enterprise that resists critical evaluation.

Since 2021, critics of the new generation of mRNA “vaccines” have been bewildered by the immunity of this enterprise to empirical data showing that the products are neither safe nor effective. These critics don’t seem to realize that they are challenging beliefs that are not rooted in scientific evaluation, but in faith.

The following is an excerpt from Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality, which will be published by SKYHORSE/Children’s Health Defense on July 29, 2025. The excerpt amounts to approximately one half of Chapter 25. If you enjoy reading it, please consider ordering a copy of the book and sharing this post with your family and friends.

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CHAPTER 25: In Vaccines We Trust

After being locked down and systematically terrorized by the mass media for most of 2020, most of humanity anxiously awaited the vaccine that was heralded as their savior and liberator. As vaccine investor and enthusiast Bill Gates repeatedly stated in the spring, the world would only be able to go back to normal “when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.” This was an uncanny thing for anyone to say, but especially for the man who had, just twenty-two years earlier, been widely considered the most ruthless monopolist since John D. Rockefeller. The proclamation that “almost every person on the planet” needed to be injected with a novel substance about which they knew nothing seemed like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel.

When the emergency-authorized mRNA vaccines were rolled out in December 2020, most of humanity was apparently unaware that they were not vaccines in the traditional sense of inactivated or attenuated pathogens that would induce an immune response. The new injections were the genetic code for instructing the body to create a foreign, toxic protein. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg understood this, and he starkly contrasted with the public when, during an internal meeting with company executives on July 16, 2020, he stated:

I do just want to make sure that I share some caution on this because we just don’t know the long-term side effects of basically modifying people’s DNA and RNA to directly code in a person’s DNA and RNA. Basically, the ability to produce those antibodies and whether that causes other mutations or other risks downstream. So, there’s work on both paths of vaccine development.

Molecular biologists had been tinkering with messenger RNA since 1961, when Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and François Gros at the Institut Pasteur in Paris presented a paper about it for which they later won the Nobel Prize. BioNTech was founded in 2008 and Moderna was founded in 2010 to create methods for using mRNA to intervene in disease processes such as cancer. Creating cancer therapies was the original concept of the founders of BioNTech.

A major difference between natural mRNA—which is broken down by the body’s enzymes soon after it performs its function—and the “modified” mRNA produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, is that the latter has been chemically altered with methods created by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2023 for their work on these modifications. Both use N1-methyl- pseudouridine-modified mRNA encoding the SARS-COVID-19 spike protein delivered with a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulation. These novel and highly experimental products were repeatedly injected into billions of people in 2021. We believe this was the largest and most ambitious experiment ever conducted on humanity.

Because most of humanity did not understand what they were being injected with, the creators of this injection apparently perceived it necessary to erect something akin to a religion that deified the vaccines. This came naturally to them because many perceived that, with their new messenger RNA vaccines, they were using God’s language to direct the cellular machinery of the human body to do their bidding. In his 2006 book, The Language of God, NIH director Francis Collins begins by quoting President Bill Clinton when he announced in early 2000 that the human genome had been sequenced. In fact, about 88 percent had been sequenced at that time, but as the leader of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Collins was apparently keen to make the big announcement sooner rather than later. At a press conference in the East Room of the White House, with Dr. Collins standing next to him, President Clinton announced,

Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.

Here it is worth recalling the archetypal “Scientist Playing God” whose lineage traces back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus about a Swiss German doctor named Victor Frankenstein who applies his understanding of chemistry and electricity to create a living creature out of the dead. While this aspiration sounded interesting in theory, Frankenstein’s creation is monstrous, and when he is rejected by society, he becomes a vengeful serial killer. Already in 1818, Shelley intuitively understood that no matter how clever a scientist may be, he cannot mimic nature with accuracy. Nowadays we often see examples of this in older men and women who have undergone cosmetic surgery. Even the most skilled of plastic surgeons cannot mimic the bloom of youth that only nature can bestow.

An apt example of the “Scientist Playing God” is the already mentioned Eldon Tyrrell in the 1982 science fiction film, Blade Runner. Risa Peoples, the daughter of screenwriter David Webb Peoples, was studying microbiology and taught her father about DNA replication. Tyrrell, whom the lead android playfully calls “Maker” and “Father,” references this in his explanation of how the lead android, Roy Batty, was created. The code of life consists of the trinity of replication, transcription, and translation. Replication creates identical DNA strands; transcription converts DNA into messenger RNA (mRNA); translation decodes mRNA into amino acids, forming proteins essential for life functions. While this is an endlessly fascinating field, the practical applications of it are still in their infancy. Anyone who claims that all potential outcomes of this experiment were understood is either delusional or lying or both.

Read the Whole Article

The post ‘In Vaccines We Trust’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the defining aspects of Ukraine’s strategy in the war against Russia is escalation – Not so much in terms of damage to Russia, but in terms of western involvement. Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky has made it his primary mission to convince western allies that their direct intervention in the war is absolutely necessary. Why?  He asserts that Ukraine is the “guardian at the gate” supposedly preventing Russia from steamrolling through Europe.

The claim is absurd for a few reasons.

First, NATO officials and the establishment media have spent the better part of the last three years claiming that Russia was on the ropes and their military was crippled. Now, suddenly, as it becomes clear that Ukraine is losing the war badly (a result I predicted at the beginning of the conflict), those same people are asserting that Russia has the ability to invade multiple countries and rampage through the EU.

Second, we’ve heard the “domino effect” argument before. The public was fooled by the same idea during the Vietnam War. The notion that Americans MUST play world police in every fight or face a series of toppling catastrophes is a lie that has plagued our society for generations. The fact of the matter is, most wars have nothing to do with us.

Third, Ukraine is already a proxy nation; the real conflict has always been between NATO and Russia. The Ukrainians would have been overrun within the first year of the war without NATO intel and NATO weaponry. But what Zelensky and his handlers from globalist think-tanks want is US boots on the ground, and they will say or do ANYTHING to make that end result a reality.  They WANT world war.

The play for Ukraine during the Biden Administration was to assert that they are the vital buffer, the shield protecting the US and EU from harm.  The Trump Administration appears to be far less inclined to embrace or promote this narrative. In fact, Trump’s disgust for Zelensky has been made rather evident.

This leaves Europe to fill the gap, and if they do attempt deployments in the region a world war is assured. Whether or not the US gets involved at that point is hard to say, but the Europeans clearly seem to think they can lure America into the fray.

A similar scenario is developing in the Middle East right now. It’s an issue I have written about and warned about for many years, but this time it appears the escalation is entrenched and irreversible. Not to mention, unlike Ukraine, Donald Trump’s affinity for Israel is far more of a factor.

In April of 2024 in my article ‘World War III Is Now Inevitable – Here’s Why It Can’t Be Avoided’ published on April 5th I noted that:

“I warned months ago…that the war in Gaza would expand into a multi-front conflict that would probably include Iran. I also warned that it would be to Israel’s benefit if Iran entered the war because this would eventually force the US to become directly involved…”

Tensions ultimately diminished at the time as US elections approached and the world waited to see which way America would go in terms of domestic and foreign policy. Now that the White House has changed hands and the US stance is more evident, the situation has exploded again.  Everything that is happening in the Middle East revolves around Israel, and Israel’s activities are limited by how much or how little the US is willing to support them.

In my article ‘Iran vs Israel: What Happens Next Now That Shots Have Been Fired?’, published in April of 2024, I predicted:

“I have little doubt that Israel will commit to extensive aerial strikes on Iran this year or early in 2025, and we’ll see very quickly if Russian air defense technology sold to the Iranians is effective or ineffective…

The Israeli public position will be that their strikes are focused on taking down any existing Iranian nuclear labs. There is no solid evidence that Iran has made much headway in developing nukes (they might have dirty bombs), but the notion of nukes is more than enough in terms of public relations and justification for the war…”

Trump has always been the wild card, and he still is to some extent.  His comments on the nuclear negotiations suggest that he is continuing to push for a peace agreement, but Israel put the kibosh on any diplomatic plan when they assassinated multiple Iranian military leaders (Mohammad Bagheri, Hossein Salami, Gholamali Rashid, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Fereydoon Abbasi). There’s no going back after the direct targeting of so many high ranking officials, and that may have been Israel’s intention.

This is the same strategy Israel used against Lebanon in the now infamous “pager bombings”. To be sure, Israel’s ability to infiltrate enemy governments and gain strike ready knowledge on their leadership is impressive, but in some ways it’s also desperate. These are guerrilla tactics, not the tactics of a country confident in its ability to win a conventional war.

The regime change in Syria and the decapitation strikes in Lebanon are part of an obvious long term guerrilla-style war on the part of Israel designed to weaken Iranian allies in preparation for the final conflict with Iran itself.  The idea that Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon and this is the trigger for the most recent bloodshed is nonsense.  The staging for war with Iran has been ongoing for the past several years.

Iran’s active duty military is composed of at least 610,000 troops along with 310,000 reservists, and they do have ample conventional weaponry, hypersonic missiles and drones.  Israel only has 170,000 active duty personnel; their technological advantage is not going to be enough to balance the scales.  Unless there is a domestic breakdown in Iran that leads to an internal rebellion, there is no chance that Israel will be able to fight them on the ground.

The reality is, just like Ukraine, Israel cannot win a protracted war without aid from the US. In order for them to execute an actual ground invasion of Iran (not to mention Lebanon and a host of other regions throughout the Middle East) they will need US weapons and troops.

As I’ve mentioned over and over again, I really don’t care about either side. I don’t care about Gaza, I don’t care about Iran, I don’t care if Israel succeeds or fails. I also find Islamic fundamentalism to be authoritarian, degenerate and parasitic to the west, but if they stay in the Middle East then it’s not really my concern.  I don’t care about ancient tribal vendettas.

I find people with an overt hatred of Israel politically suspicious, and I find people who worship Israel as if their government is devoid of corruption politically suspicious.  I find anyone that demands I pick a side politically suspicious.  I find leftist activists that hijack Muslim causes suspicious and reprehensible.   I don’t care what goes on in the Middle East, and I think most conservatives agree with me.

What I do care about is America and Americans. It’s clear that Israel NEEDS the US deeply involved in any long term war with Iran, and this is where I have a problem. Everyone wants the US to fight their wars for them and the scheming is growing tiresome.

The nuclear question is the angle Israel is exploiting to appeal to Trump and it may very well work. Trump has said the US will not involve itself in the conflict, but he has also said that Iran “cannot be allowed to have a nuke”. Where is the evidence of Iran developing nukes? It’s nowhere to be found. Maybe it exists, but the American public certainly hasn’t seen it.  The claims are starting to sound familiar – “WMDs in Iraq” anyone?

If the problem was simply Iranian nuclear weapons then limited precision strikes on such facilities would have sufficed. However, that’s not what happened. Instead, Israel attacked a multitude of targets outside of possible nuclear labs and assassinated half a dozen military leaders. That’s an action designed to start a wider war, not stop the creation of a nuke.

One group that I believe is key in the attempt to get Trump onboard with a full spectrum war in Ukraine and Iran is The Atlantic Council. In my article ‘The Atlantic Council Has Big Plans For A War Between The US And Iran’, published in October of 2024, I noted that they had been pushing the narrative that Iran was behind at least one assassination plan against Trump and that the Iranians were behind a hacking attack on Trump’s election campaign in an effort to give his data over to Democrats.

It’s the same narrative that Benjamin Netanyahu and Neo-Cons pushed this past week, and again, there’s no tangible evidence to support the accusations so far.  Every narrative is carefully crafted to get MAGA voters to back a wider war.

In the article I noted:

“I believe the Atlantic Council is a root instigator behind every globalist scheme to trigger a larger war between the East and the West. Their ideal scenario seems to be the creation of a proxy conflict that acts as a first domino in a chain that leads to world war, a bit like DARPA’s “Linchpin Theory”…

To be clear, the council is not only interested in Ukraine and Russia. They’re happy to embroil Americans in a larger war wherever they can. This past week, the Atlantic Council published another war scenario report dealing with Iran titled ‘The Future of US Strategy Toward Iran: A Bipartisan Roadmap For The Next Administration’. The goal of the report is to influence a new defense doctrine with a mission to insert the US directly in the middle of the burgeoning war between Iran and Israel.”

They need conservatives to commit to boots on the ground in the near future (this has been Lindsey Graham’s sales pitch for the past several days).  I continued:

“The establishment media reports that Iran hacked the Trump campaign’s election strategies and gave them to the Harris camp. There are also rumors spread by US intelligence agencies that Iran was working to have Trump assassinated. Are these claims true? There’s little public evidence available to prove it.

Maybe Iran really wants to take Trump down. Or, maybe this is part of a plot to ensure that Trump backs a full blown war with Iran should he win the election. Trump has said repeatedly that he intends to end the war in Ukraine upon his return to the White House. This would ruin over a decade of planning by the Atlantic Council. But what if they can sink the US into a different conflict with the same potential for a world war? That’s what Iran is – Another linchpin…”

The Atlantic Council is a globalist institution and they’re relatively open about their intentions.  Their goal is regime change in Iran and their reasoning is that Iran is a primary obstacle to bringing the Middle East into the globalist fold.  It’s not about nukes.  It’s not about assassination threats to Trump.  These are mere justifications for a final war that will usher in a new era of global centralization.

Keep in mind that the US and UK engineered the overthrow of the democratically elected leadership of Iran in 1953 through Operation Ajax and put the Islamic fundamentalists in power.  The fact that the Atlantic Council pretends like this never happened tells us all we need to know about them.

What we have is a revolving dynamic of foreign governments and globalist think tanks working both sides of a con game designed to lure Americans into combat. They are trying to influence Trump through the typical pathways: Making him fear for his personal safety while painting a picture of nuclear catastrophe.

There is also the problem of skyrocketing oil prices, which Trump is deeply concerned about. Wider war will mean the Strait of Hormuz will become impassable and around 20% of global oil shipping will be delayed or obstructed. Oil prices will skyrocket. There may be nothing that can prevent that outcome now.

The problem is that everything Trump says he fears is more likely to come to pass if America gets involved in Israel’s war.

Iran is, at the very least, a perfect proxy for Russia and perhaps China. A place where the US could be trapped in a quagmire for years (just as Russia is trudging through the mud and blood in Ukraine).  The Neo-Cons are pretending as if the conflict can be won overnight, but this is delusional.  Israel is STILL trying to remove Hamas from Gaza with minimal success.  Think about how difficult it will be to invade Iran?  Using air strikes is not going to be enough.

Iran will receive ample weaponry and intel from Russian sources, prolonging the conflict. Iran will also be compelled to secure nuclear weapons if they have the ability. Why not? If they’re going to be destroyed over seeking nukes, they might as well get their hands on some nukes.  Chinese energy interests are tied to Iran’s oil exports.  Pakistan and other Muslim nations are invested in Iran’s survival.  War in Iran has the potential to spread far beyond the region.

On the political front there will be a deep divide between pro-Israel conservatives and anti-war conservatives. Trump will lose a large percentage of his base if the US deploys troops.  Americans might hate leftists enough that this won’t matter in 2026, but we’re not going to give Neo-Cons a free pass, either.  There will be an aggressive movement to get rid of warhawks in the next elections.  And if escalation leads to world war, Neo-Con politicians will suffer direct consequences.

Finally, I can’t help but smell another potential false flag event on the horizon. I simply can’t see how the elites are going to be able to convince Americans to rally around another ambiguous war in the Middle East without an attack on a US target blamed on Iran (or an Iranian proxy group). There’s no way the public will agree to support troop deployments or conscription unless something catastrophic occurs.

My point is, be vigilant. The best case scenario is that the US provides material support for Israel including anti-missile defense, but we stay out of the fighting. Worst case scenario? A calamitous attack is tied to Iran and in a haze of vengeance Americans rally around an ill conceived plan that will lead to global disaster.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post The Iran Trap: Everyone Wants Americans To Fight Their Wars For Them appeared first on LewRockwell.

This is as serious as it gets. Let’s survey the chessboard – from micro to macro…

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Israel’s shock’n’awe on Iran – straight from the trademark US playbook – essentially failed, despite the initial combination of speed, meticulous military planning and the element of surprise, including hacking the Iranian electronic communications within the military grid; decapitation of the vertical IRGC nomenklatura; the spiderweb drone attack playbook; and bombing – ultimately ineffectual – of key nodes of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

It took hours for top Iranian technicians to get their grid back. And once that happened, the tide began to turn, to the point that after surgical missile volleys deep in the night on Sunday, the IRGC announced its capability to seriously disrupt Israel’s command and control systems using “enhanced intelligence”, thus breaching Iron – or Paper – Dome.

Absolutely key infrastructure nodes in Tel Aviv and Haifa have been destroyed – from the Rafael weapons complex (specialized in missiles, drones, cyber warfare and Iron Dome components) to the power plant and oil refinery in Haifa. This is historic in more ways than one.

Compound the cries of joy all across the lands of Islam to the massive psychological trauma inflicted on Israel. The myth of Israeli invincibility has been definitely shattered. Unleashing hell from above, killing women and children and spinning like there’s no tomorrow does not win a war against a real opponent.

The tweaked IRGC strategy – applied by an instantly revamped leadership – is being fine-tuned day by day in a calculated, surgical manner. It’s not that hard for the IRGC to totally paralyze Israel’s economy. Israel has only one oil refinery (already bombed); three ports, of which one is already bankrupt (Eilat) and another is on fire (Haifa); and one airport (already in dire straits).

The blowback on Tel Aviv’s desperate, indeed suicidal move – no chess involved – is in effect. Tehran is proving that every Zionist axis calculation that Iran could – and was – bled dry in a matter of hours was, predictably, false.

The POTUS, for his part, fell into a voracious trap. His MAGA base is already fractured – in depth. Non-Zionist MAGA is the overwhelming majority. He admitted in a stunning infantilist post that he knew everything about the Israeli shock’n awe all along.

Less than 10 days ago, in a meeting in New York packed with billionaire usual suspects, Steve Witkoff himself – Trump’s Talleyrand – explicitly noted that Iranian ballistic missiles are “a threat to America”. Considering their performance in the last 48 hours, everything points to Washington de facto entering the Hot War.

Diplomatic sources in Tehran point out that the leadership is working under this scenario. That’s why they are essentially still holding their capabilities – and carefully calibrating the next big steps in the escalatory ladder. Once again: Iranian strategic patience on display.

The question then is, in a scenario of the US de facto at war, what will it take for Russia and China, in concertation, to lose their own strategic patience.

Persian pride – and trust in their own capabilities, as I observed last month in Iran – rules that they consider to have all the necessary resources to outlast the Zionist axis, US included. After all they are only now starting to use their really advanced missiles – from the Kheybar-Shekan 2 and the Fattah-1 to the Haji Qassem.

So, in a nutshell, the Iranian response turned the chessboard completely upside down. The Circus Ringmaster – complete with hosting a pathetic military parade in Washington – is naked. And unmasked.

He now owns not one but two proxy wars: against Russia, and against Iran, with neo-nazis in Kiev and genocidals in Tel Aviv on the frontlines. All part of the Big Picture War: against BRICS.

By now it’s clear even for the deaf, dumb and blind that this was never about the Iranian nuclear program, or the “effort” to construct a Trump-owned JCPOA 2.0. It is about the lifelong Zionist axis obsession: regime change in Tehran.

That is the Holy Grail, dreamed of since the late 1990s, capable of opening the door for the deeply troubled Empire of Chaos of Iran’s immense wealth in natural resources – from energy to rare earth deposits, thus prolonging the life of the multi-trillion-dollar-indebted Empire.

The extra bonuses are even more seductive: cutting off China from a matter of national security – energy imports – and from crucial New Silk Road connectivity corridors, in tandem with opening a monster abscess in Russia’s underbelly. A definitive trifecta blow, in one swoop, to three top BRICS – Iran, Russia, China; to Eurasia integration; and to the drive towards a multi-nodal (italics mine), multipolar system of international relations.

Even as top civilization-states are doing somersaults to outlast the Empire of Chaos and its masters’ drive to unleash WWIII, there are no illusions in Moscow and Beijing that to confront this scenario it’s imperative to act asymmetrically – with supreme cunning, instead of merely responding to provocations (which has been the predominant Russian playbook in the proxy war in Ukraine).

Russian intel, meanwhile, has already done the math on the mirror effect of Israel’s own Operation Spiderweb, which employed exactly the same modus operandi of what Ukraine’s SBU – fronting for MI6 and Mossad – unleashed against Russian strategic bombers that are part of the nuclear triad.

Serious questions are being asked about Tel Aviv being directly involved in sabotaging Moscow. Just as serious questions are now popping up regarding the Ukrainian track. Intel information silos in Moscow consider that the Trump “ceasefire” process walks and talks like a crude camouflage to force Russia to back off for a while, as NATO chihuahuas on the beck and call of the deep state prepare a first strike (at least in their warped dreams).

So sooner rather than later, we may see Russia actually expanding on the current Iranian strategy: a massive infrastructural war, plunging Ukraine into complete blackout, metaphorical and otherwise – just like the bombing of a power plant in Haifa plunged the city into a complete blackout.

Why Iran Must Not be Allowed to Fail

Of course the current, insane escalatory ladder would be non-existent if Trump had been mature enough to accept the offer by Ali Shamkhani – later assassinated by Israel: Iran could get rid of its highly enriched uranium and sign a new nuclear deal if sanctions were lifted. Tehran would then only enrich uranium at low levels for its civilian program.

In parallel, Tehran had also even suggested a joint nuclear enrichment project with US investment plus Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi personally outlined it to US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff in Oman – before the talks broke down.

The Global South, meanwhile, watches the horrendously deadly ping-pong between Israel and Iran – with increasing awareness that the cornered West is an even more dangerous animal day after day, waging Total War under the mask of peace.

Tel Aviv burning is the beginning of a new era. In their rage, they now threaten the “Beirut” model on Tehran: wanton destruction of civilian neighborhoods. Once again, what they do best: terrorism.

And yet, there will be no impunity for a genocidal system anymore. Consequences will be inevitably discussed this week at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, all the way to Putin’s address at the plenary session on Friday, and all the way to the BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro in early July.

Taking the pulse of the Global South, the feeling is that Iran de facto is in the process of restoring ethics and geopolitical authority all across West Asia, as the Persian empire exercised it for centuries. That’s what civilization-states do: their role as privileged guardians of their sphere of influence is always essential.

It’s unlikely – under the Brazilian presidency; but BRICS sooner or later will have to make the strategic transition from a hyper-polite declaration machine to become the true, solid, unbreakable spine of the Global South and the Global Axis of Resistance.

Because the enraged, discombobulated West is not in hybrid war mode anymore; it has gone Totalen Krieg – as hot as it comes. Hence, the Global South’s got to switch on to a post-hybrid, Rebels with a Cause mode.

From Nigeria to Indonesia to Vietnam – BRICS members and BRICS partners – there’s a growing consensus that Iran must not be allowed to fall. It’s that serious. The spell of unrestricted Western diktat has finally been broken: all that will survive is “the loud lament of the disconsolate chimera”. It takes a – failed – shock’n awe to break the camel’s back.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

The post Iran Now First Line of Defense for BRICS & The Global South appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the things that has long fascinated me about the JFK assassination has been the extreme reluctance of the mainstream press to aggressively investigate the assassination. Let me provide just one example of this phenomenon. It involves the autopsy that the military conducted on the body of President Kennedy on the very evening of the assassination.

Beginning in the 1970s, a team of Navy enlisted men began telling a remarkable story. They said that on the evening of the autopsy, they had carried President Kennedy’s body into the Bethesda Navy Hospital morgue in a cheap shipping casket.

Why was this a problem? The president’s body had been carried into the morgue at 8 p.m. by a military color guard consisting of members of the various armed forces, not by a team of sailors. Moreover, at the 8 p.m. entry, the body was inside the heavy, ornate casket into which the president’s body had been placed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The autopsy officially began at 8:15 p.m.

Moreover, one of the sailors stated that he had gone to next floor up in the Bethesda facility and witnessed Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy entering through the front door. Why was that significant? Because the vehicle in which they had just arrived at 6:55 p.m. contained the Dallas casket. That sailor knew that the Dallas casket had to be empty because he knew that the president’s body was downstairs in the morgue.

That team of Navy sailors stated that they had been forced by high military officials to sign sworn secrecy oaths as to what they had witnessed. They were threatened with severe sanctions if they ever revealed what they had seen or done.

Wouldn’t you think that this would be something worth investigating? After all, sneaking the president’s body into a morgue in a shipping casket and then later bringing it back in inside the heavy ornate Dallas casket would not ordinarily be considered something normal. I would think that any reasonable person would conclude that this is rather unusual — something worth investigating.

After all, let’s assume that that team of Navy soldiers was lying. Wouldn’t that be a story in and of itself? Why would they lie about something like that? What would motivate them to make up this fantastical story? When would they have gotten together to jointly concoct the tale? Why didn’t the Pentagon or the officials involved in the autopsy openly and publicly condemn them for supposedly making up the story?

Wouldn’t you think that some mainstream newspaper would say to its investigative reporter: “Go out and interview these guys. Let’s get to the bottom of this”?

Nope. Nothing. Just passivity and silence.

In the 1990s, a Marine sergeant named Roger Boyajian told the Assassination Records Review Board that he been in charge of a Marine detail that provided security at the Bethesda morgue on the evening of the autopsy. He stated that the shipping casket had been brought into the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 p.m.

Why was that time important? Two reasons: (1) The vehicle carrying the (empty) Dallas casket, Mrs. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy didn’t arrive at the front of the facility until 6:55 p.m., while the shipping casket containing the president’s body had been secretly carried into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. (2) Boyajian’s statement corroborated the statements of that Navy team that had carried the president’s body into the morgue in a shipping casket.

There was something significant about what Boyajian stated: He had retained a copy of his written after-action report that he had delivered to his superiors during the week following the autopsy. The military had kept that report secret. Boyajian gave a copy of his report to the ARRB.

So, wouldn’t you think that this was now something the mainstream press would deem worthy of investigation? Even if they assumed that former Marine Sgt. Boyajian was lying and had made the whole thing up, wouldn’t that be worth investigating, especially since that would have necessarily have meant that he would have been conspiring with that Navy team to concoct this false story?

Nope. Nothing but passivity and silence.

In the late 1960s, one of the military pathologists who participated in the autopsy, Dr. Pierre Finck, gave sworn testimony in the trial of a man named Clay Shaw, who was charged with having participated in the assassination of President Kennedy. Finck testified under oath that he had received a telephone call at 8 p.m. from Dr. James Humes, one of the military pathologists who was conducting the Kennedy autopsy. Finck testified that during that 8 p.m. telephone conversation, Humes told him that they already had x-rays of the president’s head.

Why is that a problem? Because the official entry time of the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue was 8 p.m. How could they already have x-rays of the president’s head, given that that telephone conversation took place at 8 p.m.? The only way they could already have such x-rays if the body had been bought in earlier than the official 8 p.m. entry time. Thus, Finck’s sworn testimony corroborated the statements of that team of Navy soldiers and Marine Sgt. Boyajian that established that the president’s body had been secretly brought into the Bethesda morgue in a shipping casket earlier — i.e., 6:35 p.m. — than the official entry time of 8 p.m. in the Dallas casket.

Now, given that Finck’s sworn testimony establishes beyond any reasonable doubt the secret earlier introduction of the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue, wouldn’t you think that this would now be something that the mainstream press would want to investigate?

Nope. Just continued passivity and silence.

Why? Why the passivity and silence in the face of something that screams out for investigation?

There are at least three possibilities.

One possibility is Operation Mockingbird, the secret operation of the CIA to infiltrate the mainstream media and acquire assets. The CIA was clearly successful in this endeavor with respect to commentary writers. But there is also the possibility that they were just as successful in acquiring assets within the part of the newspapers that determined what was gong to be investigated. For that matter, Operation Mockingbird could have also extended to newspaper publishers who were in charge of the overall operations of the newspaper.

Another possibility is fear. The mainstream press had to know that the early introduction of the president’s body into the morgue clearly meant that something dark or criminal was taking place. After all, there would be no innocent explanation for the early secret introduction of the president’s body into the morgue. The press had to know that it would obviously be extremely dangerous to aggressively investigate any force within the government that was sufficiently powerful to assassinate the president and get away with it.

A third possibility is simply the reluctance to investigate an event that would prove that the United States had experienced a national-security coup, much like the coup that the U.S. national-security establishment fomented and supported in Chile ten years later. The press might well have concluded that the Kennedy assassination was now a fait accompli and that no investigation was going to bring the president back. Therefore, better to let sleeping dogs lie and let the American people maintain the innocent impression that this was just a lone-nut assassination rather than a coup d’état based on the principles of national security.

I submit that the widespread distrust among the American people of the mainstream media began on November 22, 1963. It is a distrust that is well-deserved.

For more on the fraudulent nature of the Kennedy autopsy, see my book The Kennedy Autopsy, which is a synopsis of Douglas Horne’s watershed 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Wisdom of the Day: “But America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…. America well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” John Quincy Adams.

Founding Fathers Favored Non-Intervention

• Long before Ike’s military industrial complex speech in 1961, Washington warned us with the very first Farewell Address.
• When the wolves of war howled for blood, Washington refused, with the unanimous assent of the brightest lights amongst our founders in the first and foremost declaration of American foreign policy: the Neutrality Proclamation. The American public, after robust public debate, agreed and Congress codified it into law. George Washington’s 1796 farewell address established it as the foundation of American foreign policy from our founding, warning against the “foreign alliances, attachments and intrigues” that inevitably “embitter.”
• Indeed, “the jealousy of a free people out to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” Hence, “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded…The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave.”
• Washington explained how undue foreign allegiances and attachments undermine American liberty: “Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification…As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot.” Thus, Washington warned us to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
• Thereafter, Washington declared the foreign policy of our Founding Fathers: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
• Washington was right. Unless and until directly attacked, or imminent risk thereof, let’s leave foreign wars to foreign nations.

The post VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.Com – Has Trump Destroyed the MAGA Coalition? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Boots on the ground? Nah, never! Oh…never mind.

The post That Was Quick: Now Trump Calls for Regime Change in Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

The United States and Israel have launched a brutal and unprovoked war against Iran. The United States tricked Iran by engaging Iran in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear energy program for civilian purposes in order to lower Iran’s guard against an attack. So far, the United States and Israel have murdered Iranian scientists, government officials, military officers, and civilians in the massive bombing campaign that Israel is carrying out with support from the United States.

Since the early 1990s, Israeli Prime Minister and de-facto United States President Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that Iran is on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon. There is no credible evidence to back the allegations that Iran, which is a signatory of the The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), has ever sought nuclear weapons. Instead, Iran has a civilian nuclear program for energy purposes. Furthermore, Iran’s leader, Ali Khamenei, has issued a religious decree against the acquisition, development, and use of nuclear weapons on religious grounds.

On the other hand, the United States dropped two atomic weapons on civilian populations in Japan in 1945 and possesses thousands of nuclear weapons. Israel with the assistance of the United States has about 100 nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the NPT.

Yesterday, Israel’s puppet Donald Trump directly attacked Iranian nuclear sites in violation of domestic and international law. How is waging war on Iran on behalf of Israel putting “America first?” We should remember that the “America first” movement recognized that World War I was a catastrophe of epic proportions that was waged for the benefit of big government and big business.  The “America first” movement wanted to avoid the mistake of involvement in another catastrophic World War.

We are being neo-conned again into another illegal war of aggression based on lies. It is time to demand the immediate removal from office of the treasonous Netanyahu/Trump administration.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez correctly stated, “The President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers. He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”

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David Martin wrote:

What a big expenditure for the DOGE folks to overlook!

Apparently, our Bombs and Propaganda foreign policy will continue into the foreseeable future.

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Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

Scheerpost

The post Rogue States: The Illegality of the U.S.-Backed Israeli Attacks on Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Brian Dunaway. 

Gee, no kidding.

The post Van Hollen: Bibi Attacked Iran Deal, Got Them Closer to Nuke, to Drag U.S. into War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

The post Minnesotan Murderer Says Gov. Tim Walz Ordered The Political Assassinations, Trained by US Military appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks David Krall.

See here.

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Trump lies, cheats, manipulates at home and abroad, and violates domestic and international law, because he can.  He surrounds himself with lackeys, and he stands for America First as a unipolar power, not for putting America, or Americans first.  He gets to decide all, because he is the glorious commander, the anointed emperor.  How kind and thoughtful of him to spend a good part of his announcement last night to thanking Bibi Netanyahu, and thanking Israel for its role in an unprovoked attack, its “helpful” intelligence, and its unholy level of suffering, less than 1% of what we and Israel have ensured, paid for, and delivered to 2 million Gazans recently.  As Gazans starve, the emperor bows to his tiny alliance, gracious and generous in his otherwise nervous-looking address to the nation.  He may know, or maybe he has no idea, that the battle to preserve and extend the American empire is already lost.

The post Our Gracious Emperor appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

The post Minnesotan Murderer Says Gov. Tim Walz Ordered The Political Assassinations, Trained by US Military appeared first on LewRockwell.

After promising to end forever wars, Trump starts a new one by bombing Iran.

The post Trump Starts Another Forever War appeared first on LewRockwell.