On 28 February 2026 Israel and its American marionette embarked on an unprovoked and disastrous campaign of bombing Iran’s military, industrial, commercial and civilian infrastructure. American and Israeli forces destroyed 339 hospitals, 857 schools, 32 universities and 100,000 homes, killing 3,000 Iranian civilians in the process. On the first day of the strikes, a girls elementary school in Minab was targeted with a “double tap” strike that Trump tried to blame on the Iranians but which the Pentagon later claimed responsibility for, waffling on whether it was due to AI targeting system glitches or the “human error” of outdated intelligence.
In retaliation, Iran initiated Operation True Promise 4, launching nearly 100 distinct waves of missile salvos and drone volleys at Israel and US military assets. The American Empire successively suffered unprecedented losses including the destruction of over a dozen military bases, nearly a dozen billion-dollar radar stations, and over 100 military aircraft. Iran successfully neutralized an F-35 stealth fighter, the crown jewel of the US Air Force. Meanwhile, Iranian missiles consistently penetrated Iron Dome air defenses and turned Israeli cities upside down.
Despite claims by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth that Iran’s missile program was “functionally destroyed” American military and intelligence sources estimate that a majority of Tehran’s missile stockpiles and launch capabilities remain intact. While the White House repeatedly declared itself “victorious” Trump also made his dissatisfaction of the results very clear, which is why ground forces were never taken “off the table” of possibilities.
After an attempted uranium heist south of the Isfahan nuclear research facility resulted in staggering aircraft losses, the White House spun the failed operation as a “pilot rescue” story replete with holes and contradictions. Strikes against aircraft carriers forced the American navy to retreat 700 miles from Iranian coastlines, proving that large navies are obsolete in the age of kamikaze drones, hypersonic missiles and computer viruses.
While Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz open to all except hostile nations, the multilateral effects of its closure have caused the UAE to leave OPEC and threaten the stability of the Petrodollar as the world’s reserve currency, with Iran proposing toll systems levied in yuan and bitcoin. Energy suddenly became scarce throughout Eurasia and supply disruptions interrupted industries globally. By the end of April the price of Brent crude skyrocketed above $120 per barrel. Two months of warfare spiked American gas prices. The halting of LNG exports through the Strait threatens to severely debilitate the global food system. Hormuz-related shortages also include cryogenic helium which is necessary for the microchip fabrication that powers the semiconductor industry behind the global AI economy, not to mention medical imaging and fibre-optic cable production.
A tectonic wave of fluctuating justifications for initiating the unnecessary war spewed out of the White House and goal posts kept moving as American officials consistently demonstrated a complete lack of strategic literacy. There was never a declared strategy nor was there ever a casus belli to justify preemptive attack. While the Epstein Coalition (US and Israel) rationalized the preemptive/preventative attack as a necessary evil to counter the perceived threat of Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, American intelligence and IAEA authorities have all concluded that Iran never possessed nuclear weapons and was not in the process of creating them. The Israelis believe, however, that Iran stands in the way of their Greater Israel aspirations, and therefore must be crippled and Balkanized. But efforts toward these ends have backfired given that former Mossad deputy head Ehud Lavi stated that the “war on Iran has strategically failed.”
Meanwhile countless American officials admitted that Iran’s January “protests” were incited by Mossad provocateurs who opened fire on Iranian police stations and torched government buildings in a bid to stir chaos and incite an insurgent uprising. After this strategy failed, the White House and its parrots greatly exaggerated the casualty figures of the skirmishes they had themselves instigated in a desperate bid to legitimize the air strikes by convincing Americans that the regime was “killing its own people” – a familiar lie that’s justified the overthrow of many governments by the CIA. In the end, the Mossad insurgency claimed 3,117 lives. But Iran didn’t flatten Gaza, and if it were slaughtering noncombatants on anywhere near the same scale that Israel does there would be some coverage of it by now. Beyond this, The world is teaming with brutal regimes but, as John Quincy Adams once stated, it is not the job of the U.S. government to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Citing Israeli influence over the president, Joe Kent quit his post as director of counterterrorism while the Pentagon finally admitted there was never an “imminent threat” from Iran. Additional political blowback manifested in many forms, including the 130 veterans and military family members who protested the illegal war at the Capitol rotunda on 20 April 2026, resulting in the arrest of 62 veterans. According to a poll by J Street, 60% of American Jews oppose war with Iran. More than two-thirds of Americans want America’s war with Iran to end whether “victory” can be declared or not, according to a Reuters poll taken on 31 March 2026:
An early March poll by Drop Site News and Zeteo found that a majority of US citizens believe Trump launched the war on Iran to “cover up” the Epstein scandal, with 52 percent agreeing he acted “at least in part to distract” from it. The survey also points to broader distrust, with nearly half of respondents saying Trump is more “responsive” to Israel than to US citizens, and half of independents believing he “prioritizes Israeli interests over Americans’.”
WAR IS HOW GOD TEACHES GEOGRAPHY TO AMERICANS
The city of Tehran is literally ancient, dating back 6,000 years. The Persian Empire has existed for millennia for many reasons, and one is geography. Iran is approximately the size of Alaska and surrounded by high mountains. The Zagros and Alborz mountain rangess create a natural fortress around Tehran that geographically force-funnels would-be invaders through predictable corridors or “pinch points”.
Iranians are highly-educated people whose culture has survived all of written history. The majority of Iran’s 93 million Farsi-speaking residents are not Muslims, and despite a Shi’a plurality Iran is increasingly secular. One of the central detriments plaguing the geopolitical debate involves Americans’ relative ignorance of the difference between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims and Iran’s attitudes toward freedom of religion generally:
Iran is a Shia Muslim country. Most terrorist attacks over the past 20 years have been carried out by Sunni extremist groups or individuals. … If Iran was serious about destroying Israel, then why does Iran let thousands of Jews live unmolested in Iran and have synagogues, schools, butchers, restaurants, and a matzah factory?
Of course, what this really meant is that Washington reserved the right to determine Iran’s foreign policy and to approve the states with which it wished to maintain relationships. Those which did not meet the approval of Washington and also Israel, in turn, were ipso facto terrorist states and Iran thereby became a leading state sponsor of terrorism. Presto. In the cold light of facts that was utter nonsense. If the truth had been told, forces within Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states in the Gulf had done far more by 2001 to support and fund actual terrorist attacks than had Iran, and by more than a country mile, too.
The Ayatollah, who is seen by Shi’a Muslims as a descendant of Muhammad himself (and thus allowed to wear the black turban) was killed during the height of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, thus infuriating 250 million Shi’a Muslims all over the world, and especially in Iraq and Pakistan, spurring massive solidarity protests across the region. Not only were Shi’a Muslims incensed worldwide, but Iraq’s Sunni and Shi’a clerics both called for regional solidarity with the Islamic Republic, leaving Iran holding all of the cards and uniting Sunni and Shi’a like never before.
According to The Epoch Times, the country’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, was “safe” and “leading the country” as of 27 March. The US not only murdered the successor’s 86-year-old father, but also his mother, wife, sister and one of his sons. The supreme leader’s assassination united Iran’s ethnic minorities (whom Khamenei represented as an ethnic Azeri alongside President Pezeshkian and countless other members of Tehran’s elites) prompting massive demonstrations in support of Iran’s new leader. Rather than inciting an uprising against their government, the population of Iran began rallying around the flag in response to America’s bombs.
As was the case in Venezuela, claims of regime change in Iran are demonstrably false. Inaugurated in July 2024, President Masoud Pezeshkian is still the president of Iran, and the Ayatollah’s son took the reins as Iran’s supreme Shi’a cleric. Pezeshkian’s public appearances in Tehran throughout the conflict further prove there never was a “new regime.”
It’s important to keep in mind that Iran only has an Ayatollah in the first place because the CIA overthrew their democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in the August 1953 coup d’état known as Operation Ajax, a joint US-British intelligence operation. Mosaddegh tried to give the Iranian people a better deal than the one they’d been getting from British Petroleum, and moved to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, triggering western leaders to initiate the coup and install their puppet, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who ran a truly brutal regime of terror and torture. It was only when he got sick with cancer in the late 1970’s and his inner circle grew weary of losing their benefits and privileges that the people of Iran were allowed to rise up during the 1978 revolution. The military did not stop the uprising because Iran’s principal personalities were also tired of the Shah, especially if his illness meant an end to the gravy train. Iranians publicly demanded the return of the Ayatollah, who was living in France at the time, and the rest is history.
While economic sanctions have devastated Iran for decades it is also true that the Islamic Republic – like most of the oil monarchies throughout the Middle East – suffers from the inevitable consequences that an oil economy produces, namely, the concentration of wealth among select elites. Historically, countries with large oil reserves don’t need to rely on taxation for government revenue to buy the continued support of their essential coalition members, meaning there are generally fewer incentives to spend treasure on the citizenry. Having said this, Iran still ranks far higher in quality of life for the average citizen than most oil monarchies. Case in point, if Iran didn’t care about its citizens, their population wouldn’t have such high literacy because insecure autocratic governments never spend money educating their citizens since doing so inevitably creates political opposition groups.
Iran is misunderstood by America because it is not a monolithic system in the way it is often portrayed. Underestimating such a civilization seems like a fatal mistake as the Persian people are historically infamous for their resiliency, preparedness and cunning. As stated in Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s open letter to the American people: “Throughout its millennia of proud history, Iran has outlasted many aggressors.”
UNDERESTIMATING PERSIA – THE COMBAT LOSSES
Despite bloviation from the White House, Iran’s armed forces continue to maintain offensive capabilities and have caused unprecedented military losses for the United States including radar sites, military bases and heavy aircraft losses that were characterized as a “disaster for the US Air Force over Iran”. The IRGC asserted it struck the USS Gerald Ford while Pentagon officials claimed it was just a “fire in the laundry room” of the supercarrier – a “laundry fire” that burned for a whopping 30 hours, injured many of the crew, destroyed sleeping quarters and caused damage far greater than initially reported requiring lengthy emergency repairs at its port in Croatia.
Iran has proven that large navies and air forces are obsolete in an age of kamikaze drones, hypersonic missiles and computer viruses. According to Press TV:
“These developments have complicated battlefield calculations and raised the operational cost of the [war]’s major military achievements over the past month include interception and successful strike on an advanced F-35 fighter jet for the first time in history, interception and destruction of a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker for the first time in history, destruction of advanced THAAD and patriot radar systems for the first time in history, strike on the USS Gerald R. Ford rendering it inoperable for at least two years, operational strike on the USS Abraham Lincoln forcing it to withdraw from the battlefield, destruction of more than 140 advanced drones, the first all-out attack on US bases since World Wart Two.”
The US military never declared outright that air superiority was ever achieved, and White House claims of “air superiority” over the skies of Iran proved tragically false. Despite Trump’s repeated claims that Iran lost its anti-aircraft capabilities, the IRGC intercepted and destroyed a total of four F-15E Strike Eagles, two KC-135 Stratotankers, two C-130J Commando II transport planes, four MH-6 Little Bird helicopters, at least one E-3 Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control System) plane, a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, an A-10 Thunderbolt, and at least two dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones.
Just hours before losing an F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter, US “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth insisted that Iran’s air defenses had been ‘flattened’. Using “passive thermal detection” Iran was able to target and intercept the F-35 causing the pilot to suffer “shrapnel wounds”. The successful counter strike on the US Air Force’s most advanced stealth combat aircraft exposes the myth of uncontested American “air superiority” for what it is:
For decades, stealth capability has been central to the narrative of western technological dominance in aerial warfare. The significance of Iran’s reported success lies not only in the physical damage inflicted but in the symbolic rupture it introduces into this narrative. For decades, US air campaigns relied on the assumption that technological superiority could offset geographic and political constraints. Iran’s response challenges that assumption at its core. …
Among Iran’s thermally guided systems is the Majid short-range mobile air defense platform, which uses photoelectric and infrared tracking to counter low-flying targets. Passive systems such as Herz-9 can monitor aircraft without emitting detectable radar signals. Shoulder-launched missiles like Misagh-2, with a range of approximately 6 kilometers, lock onto engine heat signatures with considerable precision. Earlier and upgraded variants, Misagh-1 and Misagh-3, have been refined to improve effectiveness against maneuvering targets. The Sayyad-1A missile incorporates infrared tracking elements to enhance interception accuracy at longer ranges. Together, these systems form part of a layered defensive architecture combining short, medium, and long-range coverage. This multi-tiered network enables Iran to detect and engage hostile aircraft at varying altitudes and distances. By dispersing mobile units and integrating passive detection tools, Iranian planners have sought to deny adversaries the predictable engagement corridors that stealth platforms traditionally exploit.
The Pentagon claimed they deliberately destroyed the C-130s themselves, that the KC-135s were lost in a “mid-air collision”, that the A-10 “crashed”, and that the F-15s were lost due to “friendly fire”. Anything to avoid admitting that Iran could still shoot back irrespective of the damage they’d absorbed. As reported on 26 April by NBC News, Iran caused far greater damage to US bases than the Trump Administration was willing to admit:
Iranian missile and drone attacks have targeted US bases in seven Middle Eastern countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, [Israel], Iraq, Jordan, and Qatar. US officials said that an Iranian F-5 fighter jet was able to bomb the US base at Camp Buehring in Kuwait despite it having air defenses, marking the first time in many years that an enemy fixed-wing aircraft struck a US military installation.
The successful strike by the Iranian F-5 undermined Trump’s claims about the Iranian Air Force being “completely obliterated.” This historic offensive imposed overwhelming damages to American and Israeli command-control-and-logistical hubs throughout the Middle East. US officials told NBC, “The attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems, and dozens of aircraft.” As a result of the retaliatory strikes, the Pentagon lost billions in military assets including “intelligence sites belonging to the CIA and Mossad.”
Iran forced the evacuation of the 5th Fleet “Naval Support Activity” base in Bahrain on 04 April 2026, with 1,500 American sailors withdrawn due to heavy missile activity. Every American base in the region was heavily damaged or destroyed, forcing “many American troops to relocate to hotels and office spaces throughout the region,” according to the New York Times:
Six U.S. service members were killed in a strike on Port Shuaiba that destroyed an Army tactical operations center. Iranian drones and missiles also targeted Ali Al Salem Air Base, damaging aircraft structures and injuring personnel, and Camp Buehring, damaging maintenance and fuel facilities. In Qatar, Iran struck Al Udeid Air Base, the regional air headquarters of U.S. Central Command, damaging an early-warning radar system. In Bahrain, a one-way Iranian attack drone struck communications equipment at the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. At Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, Iranian missiles and drones damaged communications equipment and several refueling tankers.
Anticipating retaliatory counter attacks, Washington purportedly evacuated its gulf bases weeks before Israel fired the opening shots of 28 February 2026. In January the military was calling these troop withdraws a “posture change”; by late February they were rebranded as a “precautionary evacuation”; when the missiles started flying, destroying bases and killing troops, these evacuation efforts were again rebranded as “strategic relocation”. The euphemisms grew softer as the situation became worse. Iranian missile salvos rendered at least 13 of America’s regional bases “uninhabitable” and annihilated numerous billion-dollar radar stations:
The shock of the outcome cannot be understated: Iran is literally blinding the US in the region. And following that, it is launching its most advanced hypersonic Khorramshahr-4—also known as the Kheybar—ballistic missiles at Israel, which are now impervious to interdiction. They are said to release upwards of 80 submunitions in a tight pattern.
China called citizens back from Israel, advising them to evacuate the Middle East “as soon as possible” due to “The scope, frequency, and intensity of missile and drone attacks on Israel”. The Iranians were firing a daily average north of 100 missiles and drones onto Israel and the GCC with salvos said to be turning Israel completely “upside down”.
According to former Pakistani ambassador Asif Durrani, Iran’s retaliatory strikes have successfully “broken the myth” of Israeli military supremacy. Even pro-war propagandists had to admit that Israel’s layered air defense system cannot stop Iranian missiles from raining down, in no small part because Iran destroyed all the regional radar systems used to anticipate and track such attacks. The loss of 10 radar stations effectively disabled the whole air defense network.
General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, warned that “a major operation against Iran would face challenges from a significantly depleted U.S. munitions stockpile due to Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine”. Indeed, during 40 days of engagement, the U.S. exhausted over 53% of its remaining Lockheed THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptors and 45% of Patriot missile interceptors. To add insult to injury, missile interception operations over Israel and the GCC proved a complete failure:
The Israelis fire three Patriot interceptors at an incoming Iranian missile—all of them miss. The Israelis fire a dozen Iron Dome interceptors at an incoming Iranian missile—all of them miss. The anti-missile intercept success rate seems somewhere between 0% and 5%. [MIT Professor] Postol went on to explain that many of the media reports of an 85-90% successful intercept rate had apparently come from the work of a Stanford political scientist named Scott Sagan, whom Postol ridiculed as an academic fraud.
With Israeli missile systems depleted and American regional radars destroyed, Iranian missiles continued to rain down over Israel for six weeks without interruption, demonstrating the strategic folly of relying on ground-based defense systems for modern warfare. Analysis of Iranian military doctrine noted the obvious and devastating strategy:
First, blind US forces by hitting radar and early-warning sites, then saturate air defences with waves of low-cost drones and short-range missiles to deplete expensive interceptor stockpiles, and only once those batteries are strained or exhausted, bring in the larger, more dangerous ballistic or even hypersonic missiles
The limits of America’s military might are now on full display before the entire world with the US unable to protect either its military bases in the Middle East or the countries that host them. Despite claims to the contrary from the White House, Iran consistently fired drones and missiles at the same rate throughout the conflict with later strikes exhibiting greater precision. America’s inability to defend Israel stood out as the single loudest indicator that the empire had bitten off more than it could chew. Indonesian defense publication Airspace Review concluded that America’s outdated air defense doctrine was “obsolete” as missile interceptors and fighter aircraft are orders of magnitude more expensive than the IRGC’s tactically superior layered missile defense systems.
US military bases have encircled Iran for decades
There’s also the inconvenient fact that GCC countries wouldn’t have drawn fire from Iranian missiles if they hadn’t hosted US military bases in the first place, changing the perception of American presence from a shield into a liability. Iranian drones destroyed British-owned oil facilities in Iraq. The Financial Timesreported that an IRGC strike damaged Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure in Bahrain causing “disruptions” of services. Iran then named 18 US companies now considered “legitimate targets” including Cisco, HP, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Dell, Palantir, JPMorgan, Tesla, GE, Spire Solutions, Boeing, and UAE-based artificial intelligence company G42. The Pentagon’s lack of strategic foresight was further revealed when an Oracle data center in Dubai was reportedly targeted by the IRGC as well. According to ABC News, satellite imagery revealed that multiple American bases and at least 10 radar stations in the GCC were destroyed but censorship of the war prevents us from knowing more:
ABC News also reported that Iranian missiles have hit US bases in the Middle East at least 25 times since the latest conflict erupted in February. However, the true impact remains unknown, as the Pentagon has refused to release damage assessments, and satellite imagery that is typically publicly available has been withheld.
For reporters, researchers, and rights monitors, the effect is immediate. Commercial satellite imagery has become one of the few tools that can test official claims in near real time. It can show whether a bridge was hit, whether a fuel depot burned, whether a missile battery moved — and whether a government is lying. When access to that record narrows, public knowledge narrows with it. … Satellite images have helped journalists track bomb damage, verify military claims, and document attacks, such as that on the elementary school in Minab, that might otherwise disappear into propaganda.
Satellite imagery isn’t the only aspect of this war that’s been censored. CENTCOM reported over 200 US servicemen wounded and 13 dead as of 16 March 2026 and the numbers haven’t changed much since then, in part, because US officials are so reticent to discuss them. The Intercept alleged an astounding “casualty cover-up” by the Trump administration in a report outlining how the White House is hiding losses by blurring clarity with vague details:
Almost 750 U.S. troops have been wounded or killed in the Middle East since October 2023, an analysis by The Intercept has found. But the Pentagon won’t acknowledge it. U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, appears to be engaged in what a defense official called a “casualty cover-up,” offering The Intercept low-ball and outdated figures and failing to provide clarifications on military deaths and injuries.
After Hegseth and the Administration publicly expressed frustration that news coverage of the war wasn’t “patriotic enough,” Brenden Carr threatened to pull the FCC licenses of news organizations that reported too accurately. In another truly unprecedented move, the Pentagon is rumored to have designated casualty figures as “classified” information, making it a crime to report them. Most alarmingly, Americans in America are now vulnerable to arrest for criticizing Israel and making jokes about Netanyahu.
Censorship of the war initially threatened American tourists abroad with prison sentences, merely for sharingphotosandvideosof the destruction doled out byIran’sdronestrikesandmissilesalvos. The UAE conducted “widespread” arrests of anyone violating compulsory self-censorship, including 35 British citizens:
The group documented “widespread arrests, detention, and prosecution of residents, tourists, workers, and students of multiple nationalities,” as authorities intensify restrictions on content showing missile and drone attacks. At least 35 British citizens have been detained in Dubai, with a similar number reported in Abu Dhabi, according to Dubai Watch, which is representing eight of those arrested. The grounds for detention are reportedly low, with the group saying that “Forwarding or interacting with content can result in detention, even where the individual did not create it,” adding that “simply receiving an image and failing to delete it has reportedly led to arrest.” … A British airline worker was detained after photographing damage near Dubai International Airport, while a tourist faces up to two years in prison and fines of up to £40,000 (around $52,744) for filming missile strikes despite deleting the footage.
The unprovoked attacks against the people of Iran have resulted in the killing of over 3,000 Iranians as of 12 April 2026 (more than half of whom were civilians) while damaging or destroying 339 hospitals, 857 schools, 32 universities and 100,000 homes as well as desalination plants, energy facilities, police stations and banks. The death toll figures come from the US-based and funded NGO called the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) which is “very critical of the Iranian government.” As of 30 March 2026 the aims of the campaign were clear:
Iranian authorities say the pattern of attacks reflects a deliberate campaign targeting civilian life, with homes, schools, and medical centers having been repeatedly struck, placing millions under sustained pressure as Washington and Tel Aviv expand their assault beyond military targets.
The first casualty in war is always truth, so it’s no surprise that Iranian casualty figures don’t add up, especially when compared against the Pentagon’s reported numbers. Despite the media blackout, reports made their way through the censorship curtain, and as the war marched into its second month the “collateral damage” inside of Iran became so overwhelming that it could only be interpreted as the deliberate targeting of the civilian population:
Israel’s conception of the ‘battlefield’ is fundamentally different. The deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure is not incidental, nor merely ‘collateral damage’; it is central to the strategy itself. … This is not collateral damage. It is the deliberate destruction of a civilian population, an act of genocide that is designed to force mass displacement and remake the political and demographic reality in Israel’s favor. The same logic extends beyond Gaza. It shapes Israel’s wars in Lebanon against Hezbollah and its broader confrontation with Iran.
More civilian infrastructure was targeted as American bombs struck several airports and at least 30 Iranian colleges and universities including Tehran’s Sharif University often referred to as the “MIT of Iran”. By 19 April, the Epstein coalition expanded strikes to include sports stadiums, entertainment complexes and critical civilian infrastructure including the Ebrahim Raisi Bridge (the tallest bridge in the Middle East which linked Tehran to Karaj) as well as the world-famous Pasteur Institute:
The Pasteur Institute of Iran, hit in today’s strikes, is far more than just a building. It is a century-old pillar of global health and the oldest medical research center in West Asia. Founded in 1920 in collaboration with the Pasteur Institute of Paris, it has spent over a hundred years combating outbreaks such as rabies, smallpox, and cholera.
Netanyahu bragged in early April about destroying 70% of Iran’s steel production capacity. By targeting heavy industries like steel, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and transportation, the war further threatens jobs and supply chains within Iran. Iran’s economy was already struggling through massive hyperinflation as evidenced by the introduction of the 10-million Rial note but the American government has poured salt on the wound with the war, tossing literally millions of ordinary Iranian civilians into poverty overnight.
View of Tehran on 08 March 2026 following Israel’s bombing of five Iranian oil facilities
MINAB SCHOOL STRIKE – WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS
Just like Biden claimed that Russia blew up their own pipeline, Trump claimed that Iran hit their own school contradicting his own military and intelligence agencies. Trump even suggested to reporters on Air Force One that Iran did it with one of Raytheon’s American-made Tomahawk missiles. Then a missile fragment emerged from the rubble of the school marked “Made in USA”:
Iran has no Tomahawks, which are not “generic.” Originally developed by General Dynamics and now manufactured by Raytheon, the BGM-109 Tomahawk is a specific long-range cruise missile designed and produced in the United States. Only two other countries – Australia and the United Kingdom—are known to have Tomahawks in their arsenals, although Japan and the Netherlands have also agreed to buy them. … the New York Timespublished photos of fragments purportedly from a missile used in the school strike, which were marked with the names of multiple companies that produce Tomahawk components, a unique Department of Defense contract number, and “Made in USA.”
The Pentagon has since had to admit that the Tomahawk strike on the girl’s school was indeed brought to the world by the US military but waffled on whether it was due to AI targeting software or the human error of “decade old” intelligence. But the fact that Minab girls school massacre was a “double tap” strike confirms this was a deliberate act of state terrorism:
The US’s initial attack targeted, among other things, a girls’ school, killing over 170 children and teachers. When parents arrived to pick up their children, the US sent a second cruise missile at the school. The US admits that it fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at the school but says it was a mistake that resulted from letting an AI select the target for the attack, which based its decision on outdated data. Since many officers in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had their children at the school, which was subjected to two attacks 40 minutes apart, many doubt this explanation.
Many legal experts explained how the Trump Administration’s actions constitute war crimes given that the rhetoric of striking Iran “just for fun” resulted in the double-tap strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, and that only one US Senator apologized for the butchery.
While UN Ambassador Mike Waltz toldMeet the Press that “we never deliberately attack civilians,” more than 430,000 civilians have been killed in over half a dozen countries in US-led wars since9/11, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING STRATEGY
Efforts to destabilize Iran have not achieved their intended effect, causing massive blowback. After two months of warfare US campaign goals remained unachieved. Iranian society became more united, its missile reserves remained “safely underground” and its commitment to nuclear programs endured. Many of Iran’s above-ground missile bunkers and silos damaged by American airstrikes were excavated and repaired within hours.
Unable to achieve the destruction of Iran’s missile or nuclear programs, the Trump Administration seemed to improvise their way through the conflict in a state of “strategic bewilderment” as it continued moving the goal posts of definable objectives. Senior Administration officials contradicted each other as they struggled to articulate coherent goals or sound justifications for the war. The objective shifted from “denuclearization” to “regime change” to “bombing them into the stone age” (“where they belong”) and finally to “opening the Strait of Hormuz” which wasn’t closed until hostilities began (and was never closed to China, Pakistan, India, Russia, South Africa, France, &c.).
Claims of depleted Iranian arsenals turned out to be laughable propaganda as Iran continued launching wave after wave of salvos from stockpiles stored in below-ground “missile cities” carved into the mountains. After weeks of bombing, Washington’s effort to degrade Iran’s capabilities have completely failed:
The active use of decoys by Iran also makes destroying these missile launchers problematic for the US. … The United States’ reluctance to send more aircraft into Iranian airspace further suggests that the US’ claims that Iran’s air defense capabilities have been neutralized are also premature … The US’ attempt to sic Kurdish factions on Iran is tantamount to admission that their airstrike campaign did not produce the desired result
Trump cited a number of grievances to justify the war. The first was to protect Americans from the Iranian “imminent threat.” Another reason was to neutralize a regime that has posed a longstanding threat to American assets and allies in the region. The war is also revenge for Iranian proxy attacks on Americans, including the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 Americans. And, the president added, Iran was “probably involved” in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Trump also said Iranian forces killed Americans in Iraq. And they were guilty of attacking commercial shipping lanes that affect U.S. interests. Iran was allegedly behind Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, which impacted American citizens, Trump pointed out. And, of course, there’s the claim of Iran’s dogged pursuit of nuclear weapons. The president even went as far as to say that Iran was working on building missiles that could reach the American homeland.
The administration was forced to bend itself into pretzels justifying the attack with the “47 years of war” narrative (omitting, of course, the 47 years of economic sanctions waged against Iran) because of how quickly their “imminent threat” narrative evaporated:
By the third day, even Washington’s own briefings could no longer sustain the myth that this was a last-ditch act of self-preservation. In closed-door sessions with members of Congress, Pentagon officials admitted they had no intelligence that Iran planned to attack US forces first, undercutting the administration’s repeated claims about an imminent threat, asReuters and others have reported. Senate Intelligence vice-chair Mark Warner said publicly that he had seen no evidence of an impending Iranian attack and described Trump’s campaign as a war of choice … The Pentagon now concedes there was no imminent attack to forestall.
On 02 March 2026 the Pentagon admitted there was no intelligence indicating Iran planned to attack America. Trump-Appointed Counter-terrorism Director Joe Kent resigned in protest over the war:
Kent declared he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” stating unequivocally that Iran posed “no imminent threat to our nation” and that the conflict was initiated “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
In his first briefing since 19 March, and more than one month into the US-Israeliwar on Iran, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth openly conceded that Iranian ballistic missiles do not pose a threat to the US mainland, undercutting talk of the “imminent threat” repeated by the White House.
But US Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised eyebrows when he told reporters that the “imminent threat” faced by the United States — a key legal threshold as Congress constitutionally has the power to declare war — was that Israel had already decided to attack Iran, which would have then retaliated against US forces.
The “imminent threat” narrative becomes more absurd when we consider the fact that the Pentagon budget is at least three times the size of Iran’s total annual economic output. The prevailing Orwellian “War is Peace” mindset helps explain how Washington can rationalize dropping bombs on civilians in other countries while sanctimoniously claiming its all about “empowering” their citizenry:
But the question should not be if the Iranian regime is evil. The question should be if the imperial American state has the (moral) authority to forcefully initiate a regime change. It does not. The Iranian military had not attacked American soil, not a single Iranian drone had struck an American city, not a single Iranian citizen had attacked the United States, before the first US intervention.
Destroying critical civilian infrastructure can only cause hatred of the west and popular nationalization among Iranians, making regime change impossible. So if the point was really to entice Iranians to “rise up” then why target civilians?
“America is with you. I made a promise to you, and I fulfilled that promise,” Trump said at the outset. But that rhetoric soon hardened into menace. Trump later described Iranians as “a nation of terror and hate” and threatened to strike civilian infrastructure, including bridges and power plants, warning that a “whole civilization” could die, “never to be brought back again.”
The delusional concept of “liberation through bombing” becomes especially problematic because Iranians don’t want a violent regime change and claims to the contrary have turned out to be nothing more than a figment of Washington’s imagination, producing wave after wave of profoundly absurd statements from Washington, such as, “Trump insisted that the people of Iran were begging him to continue bombing until they were free.”
Meanwhile, Washington’s efforts to reimpose a puppet monarchy in Iran with the son of the disgraced Shah have become laughably implausible as evidenced by his complete lack of support. During a visit to Germany on a European tour campaigning to rule a new monarchy in Iran, Reza Pahlavi was snubbed by German officials and met with protesters who splashed him with tomato juice following his public statements denouncing ceasefire with Iran because “diplomacy has been given enough chance.” Pahlavi’s unpopularity doesn’t seem particularly surprising given that he was so public about “cheering on the bombing of his own people safely from the sidelines”.
BIBI BAFFLED BY FAILED COUP
The January “protests” in Iran proved to be the result of Mossad operations to incite uprisings that led to shootouts with police and the torching of government buildings, forcing the Iranian authorities to respond in kind. This was then parlayed by the American corporate media as “Iran killing their own citizens” with made-up casualty figures well beyond the actual reality, even though Israeli newspapers were already admitting responsibility for the insurgency:
Israeli media reported that Mossad had agents on the ground in Iran to organize armed groups and create chaos in advance of the US-Israeli bombing campaign launched weeks later, on 28 February.
Israeli officials convinced Trump that Mossad operations within Iran would create conditions ripe for regime change and Trump took the bait. Now it’s become obvious that Trump and Netanyahu failed to know their enemy before attacking. According to the Times, Mossad chief David Barnea predicted that fomenting rebellion could lead to revolutionary regime change in Iran within days, and Netanyahu became “frustrated” by his inability to deliver:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embraced a Mossad plan to spark a popular uprising at the start of the Iran war and is now “frustrated” that the plan has failed, the New York Times (NYT) reported on 22 March. … US and Israeli intelligence already helped spark protests and violent riots in the Islamic Republic in early January, as a prelude to launching the war in late February. At least 3,000 Iranians were killed in the riots, including civilians and security forces, according to Iranian officials. US President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that Iranian security forces had killed some 32,000 Iranians, citing the number as justification to launch the February war alongside Israel. … US military leaders warned Trump that Iranians would not come out to protest against the government while the US and Israel were dropping bombs.
Because the uprising operation failed so spectacularly, Washington decided to embellish the lie about Iran killing its own citizens into absurd proportions in a bid to legitimize the bombings:
The reasoning behind the motivations for the war has also shifted repeatedly. One of the most prominent has been the alleged killing of tens of thousands of Iranian protesters back in January. Just prior to the war, Trump claimed that 32,000 Iranian protesters were killed. In early March he began claiming the number was really 35,000, before continuing to increase that number up to 45,000. After each contradictory number, the President has consistently insisted that the death toll was “perhaps much more,” leading some MAGA influencers to begin claiming the number was “over 100,000.”
Now Trump insists the number is 45,000. Larger numbers look better when it is the only fabrication that might be used as an excuse for dropping more bombs on Tehran and murdering more innocents in their sleep. … There are several problems with Trump’s preposterous claim. First and foremost, how does a government murder 45,000 people in a few days, or even a few weeks? How does the government dispose of 45,000 bodies without a single photograph or firsthand account? “Think about the logistics: morgues overflowing, mass graves that satellites or locals would spot, families demanding remains, and all under a blackout?” ponders DC Document Reports. “It smells like exaggeration from exile groups or media hype to amp up pressure on the regime.”
These “protests” were not spontaneous or “mostly peaceful” uprisings but Mossad-armed riots that opened fire on police stations and burned government buildings forcing authorities to take lethal action and resulting in 3,117 people dead, according to the Iranian government. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also admitted to the US’ involvement in inciting the uprisings, with theNew York Times corroborating that Iran’s January “protests” were engineered by the Mossad. Nevertheless, American corporate media continued to portray the violent Mossad-incited terrorism as “largely peaceful”:
Western media has ignored a growing trove of video evidence showing terrorist tactics deployed across Iran by protesters described by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as “largely peaceful.” Recent videos published both by Iranian state media and anti-government forces reveal public lynchings of unarmed guards, the torching of mosques, arson attacks on municipal buildings, marketplaces and fire stations, and mobs of armed gunmen opening fire in the heart of Iranian cities. … In Kermanshah, where anti-government rioters shot and killed 3 year-old Melina Asadi, groups of militants were filmed firing automatic weapons at police. In cities from Hamedan to Lorestan, rioters have filmed themselves beating unarmed security guards to death for attempting to impede their rampages.
The genocide in Gaza that’s left 75,000 innocent people dead has not occurred at the hands of the Iranian regime and Israeli accusations of Iran’s “lawbreaking” represent the height of hypocrisy. Ashamed of nothing and offended by everything, every Israeli accusation represents a confession.
When efforts to incite a popular uprising didn’t work out, the Epstein Coalition sought to deputize Kurdish forces for a land invasion of Iran. Trump admitted to this strategy with his quip about how America “sent guns to the protesters – a lot of them.” Western corporate media reported that CIA-armed Kurds were going to mount an attack into Iran in a vain attempt to “start an uprising” but Kurdish forces responded that they had never received any weapons shipments of any kind. Ultimately, the US-Isreali plan to exploit the Kurds to farm out invasion of Iran failed to produce results because they began demanding “political guarantees” rather than just military support.
To say that the Epstein Coalition “miscalculated” on Iran would be an understatement, but the expectation that decapitation strikes could trigger some kind of populist revolution illustrates the disconnect between the White House and the history of revolutions generally, as explained by a former Mossad official:
“People don’t understand what a revolution is,” Igra said. “You need a popular movement – there is no popular movement in Iran. You need local leadership – not [Reza] Pahlavi from Los Angeles,”he added, referring to the exiled son of the last Iranian shah who has positioned himself as an alternative to the country’s current clerical leadership.
Israel has employed numerous efforts toward re-installing the Shah’s muppet-monarchy in Iran. The Gray Zone uncovered an AIPAC-funded NGO that claims to represent Iranians but creates propaganda aimed toward encouraging the return of the US-installed monarchy with the Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, as its King. Israeli and American leaders seem to have fooled themselves into believing that dissatisfaction with the Iranian government would translate into a popular upheaval and institutional overthrow:
Similarly, they convinced themselves that all these protesters were “anti-regime,” assuming that those demanding the return of their bank deposits were necessarily against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In doing so, they lumped together economic protesters, those opposed to religious totalitarianism, and those who aspired to Western-style governance. They are now discovering that one can be ruined by the banking system, resent the mullahs, be captivated by American series broadcast in Persian by some forty Western television channels, and still defend one’s country.
NUMEROUS ONGOING FALSE-FLAG OPERATIONS
On Saturday 21 March 2026, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that Iran has no intention of striking its regional “brothers”, stating that “Only Israel stands to benefit from any confrontation between Iran and its neighboring Muslim countries.”
Iran proudly claims responsibility for and publishes footage of their missile strikes and has repeatedly warned of commensurate retaliations in response to strikes against its infrastructure while limiting its own strikes to US and Israeli targets. In an apparent attempt to lure Kuwait into joining the war against Iran, Israel appears to have targeted Kuwaiti desalination plants and then blamed Iran:
The Iranian military denied on 30 March the recent attack, which hit a desalination plant in Kuwait, labeling the strike a US-Israeli false-flag operation aimed at “destabilizing and destroying the region.” “The brutal aggression by the Zionist regime against the desalination facility in Kuwait, carried out in recent hours under the pretext of accusing the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a sign of the vileness and depravity of the Zionist occupiers,” the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters of the Iranian army said in a statement. …
This is not the first attack Tehran has labeled a false flag. Iran has also denied recent strikes on fuel tankers in Oman and a refinery in Iraq’s Erbil, as well as one that targeted an Aramco facility in Saudi Arabia at the start of the month. US journalist Tucker Carlson reported earlier in March that Mossad agents were detained in Gulf states for planning bombings. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on 15 March that the US has been using its new Lucas drone – modeled after the Iranian Shahed – to carry out false-flag attacks in the region and attribute them to the Islamic Republic.
Attacks on GCC countries and Aramco oil infrastructure were likely the result of Mossad activities as Qatari officials claimed to have arrested two Mossad agents suspected of sabotage. Strikes against Saudi Arabia were likewise largely carried out by Israel to try to lure them into a war against Iran, according to the Saudis themselves and corroborated by the Iranian government:
Iranian officials have accused Israel of carrying out some of the drone strikes on energy and civilian sites in the Arabian Gulf, calling the attacks a calculated bid to spark regional fury and pull Arab states into the war on Tehran. … “This is an Israeli effort to sabotage regional peace and alliances between neighbours,” the source added.
Jennifer Kavanagh, Senior Fellow & Director of Military Analysis at Defense Priorities, told me that “official U.S. Army accounts provide clear evidence that the U.S. has launched PRSM missiles from HIMARS in either Kuwait or Bahrain.” An explosion in Bahrain that injured 32 people that was originally blamed on Iran, has now been shown by an analysis to have been the result of interceptors fired from a U.S.-operated Patriot air defense battery in Bahrain.
Meanwhile in England a different kind of false flag attack took place against the London ambulance service, with contrived manifestos apparently implicating Iran but proving highly suspicious for a number of reasons, first and foremost among them, the fact that Iranians don’t speak Arabic; even if they did, the Arabic scribbling on the image is incorrect gibberish that’s likely AI-generated and includes telling phrases that indicate what prompts were given to the LLM. Case in point, no Islamist has ever referred to Palestine as “The Land of Israel”:
There are some real red flags about its appearance. The first, as eloquently exposed by Lowkey, is that in its manifesto it uses the term “The Land of Israel” to refer to Palestine. No Islamic group, ever, referred to “The Land of Israel” and the phrase in Arabic is not even what complicit Gulf Arab elites use – they use just “Israel” or “The State of Israel”. “The Land of Israel” is unnatural in Arabic and evidently written by a Zionist and translated into Arabic.
URANIUM HEIST TURNED “PILOT RESCUE”
The highly publicized F-15 pilot “rescue mission” was more than likely cover for a uranium theft mission, occurring just south of Isfahan where Iran’s largest nuclear research facility is located. The IRGC accusation that Trump fabricated a successful rescue story to conceal a “heavy defeat” appeared more plausible than the official explanations from Washington as evidence mounted that an attempted uranium confiscation operation was caught in an Iranian trap:
The real objective was to infiltrate and attack one of Iran’s nuclear facilities in Isfahan. … Social media users and observers noted other discrepancies in Washington’s official story, including the fact that the airman had to climb a mountain to transmit his emergency signal. An article published by Substack user SIMPLICIUS also noted the use of two C-130 aircraft – each meant to carry around 100 personnel – to extract one pilot.
We’re told not only that the Weapon Systems Officer (WSO) was a high-ranking Colonel sent on a dangerous mission that might lead to his capture and disclosure of need-to-know information, but we’re also supposed to believe that his F-15 pilot – after ejecting from the aircraft and breaking his leg –walked five miles and then climbed a mountain?
Now here is the kicker… The geolocated wreckage of the C-130s which were apparently using a local “agricultural airstrip” … just happens to be right over a mountain, about 35km (21 miles) away, from Isfahan’s nuclear facility, where Iran’s ‘near-weapons grade’ enriched uranium is alleged to be stored. Was this whole affair a botched raid by US Special Operations forces to seize Iranian uranium [from] the Isfahan facility?
After three decades of repetition, the popular myth that Iran seeks nuclear weapons and is just “days away” from achieving them has become one of the most cliché lies of modern American political life, in part because it appears as the most straightforward justification for military operations.
It’s an open secret in Washington that Iran has formally forbidden the development of nuclear technology into weapons, and widely understood that the 60% enrichment payloads were always a bargaining chip for negotiations with the west. But every time negotiations got underway, America and Israel used the talks as a distraction to inflict more bombing campaigns. After the “12 Day War” in the summer of 2025, the Russian government even floated the idea of gifting nuclear missiles to the Iranian government as a deterrent against the west’s insatiable military abuses, but the Ayatollah declined the gift on the grounds that it was against their religion to do so, having issued a Fatwah against it in 2003.
Iran was a signatory nation to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970. During the Obama Administration a deal was struck in 2015 called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as a direct result of the 2010 StuxNet computer virus attack (Operation Olympic Games) against Iran’s nuclear centrifuge program and the subsequent cyber war that followed. And after the first Trump Administration tore it up in May 2018 resulting in catastrophic backtracking, the second Trump Administration now seeks to restore Iran’s compliance with the conditions of that torn-up agreement following yet another preemptive military attack.
The U.S. intelligence community’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment states plainly that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon,” a judgment echoed by other reporting about intelligence assessments. History is even less convenient for the war pitch. The declassified key judgments of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate concluded, “with high confidence,” that Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program in fall 2003.
More immediately, Trump’s denuclearization claims didn’t hold water simply because of his insistence eight months earlier that the 2025 Midnight Hammer strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, and that “suggestions otherwise are fake news”:
Fast forward just eight months and an administration official was issuing the dire warningthat Iran was ‘probably a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking material’ – deploying thirty-year-old rhetorical shtick so hackneyed that it is a marvel anyone still believes it. Now we are at war with Iran, the cocky ‘one and done’ chatter suddenly thrust down the memory hole.
Given the dubious reality of nuclear weapons, all of the anxious hyperventilating about nuclear war appears to be a giant red herring sold to the world in a bid to sow crippling fear and justify irrational authority. There’s a great deal of evidence to support the claim that nukes were just another well-engineered and brilliant psyop, making continued debate about “containing” Iran supremely ridiculous.
IRAN IS FULL OF SURPRISES
If there is one key takeaway to Iran’s geopolitical strategy, it’s decentralization. Disabling Iran’s hardened power grid is not a one-strike operation because of its wide dispersion and redundant connections. Murdering senior politicians cannot cripple the government because it’s been structured to withstand such an attack. Iran’s key strategy of decentralization means that the regime maintains operational continuity regardless of the “presence or absence of a single individual”.The IRGC is not a conventional military vulnerable to decapitation, but a parallel state with its own economy and fanatic loyalty to the supreme leader that’s kept politically in check by Iran’s other, separate military, the Iranian Armed Forces.
Iran didn’t need a navy or air force to close the Strait of Hormuz and disrupt the entire global economy, and apparently nobody in charge thought the Iranians had the minerals to do it anyway. While Iran suffered the loss of several large capital ships, their navy remains reportedly intact with most assets hidden strategically800 meters underground. The military capabilities of the IRGC and its regional alliances are not well understood and there is no obvious way to immobilize the system they’ve created.
The ability to absorb attacks is necessary to prevail in combat against an adversary with a superior military like the US. In anticipation that their top generals and politicians would be targeted, Iran developed a system characterized by endurance, adaptability and flexibility that can handle sudden leadership changes, and continuity of the regime prevails through organized personnel rotations. In Iran’s military sphere this is known as the Mosaic Defense strategy, created in response to America’s invasion protocols against Iraq and Afghanistan:
The strategy is called Mosaic Defense and was developed by Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari after he witnessed in 2003 how the US managed to completely paralyze Iraq by knocking out its leadership. When Jafari became head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in 2007, he divided Iran into 31 autonomous military districts, each of which is completely self-governing, with its own ammunition depots, independent leadership and predetermined targets. Their orders are to initiate retaliation to the best of their ability without waiting for confirmation from above. In this way, Iran’s defense could go on “autopilot” with each district acting independently but in a coordinated manner.
Iran’s military forces are capable of mobilizing one million soldiers divided into 31 autonomous ground divisions, each designed for operating independently, and each with independent authority over the launch control of missiles, rockets, drones and artillery. This decentralized defense system is “autonomously controlled by each district” meaning the war will go on no matter what kind of damage is sustained to the country as a whole.
In their 2009 publication, Which Path To Persia: Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran, The Brookings Institute revealed another hidden layer of Persia’s geopolitical mosaic:
“It has two complete militaries – the Iranian Armed Forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – which compete for the regime’s favor and are used to watch and balance each other.” (Brookings, 170)
Iran’s ground units are diversified and highly-capable commando brigades that compose multiple layers of defensive capabilities (distinct from the Quds Forces, handling operations outside Iran’s borders):
Local IRGC and Basij elements move first to secure the immediate environment, followed by Saberin-type formations acting as mobile reinforcements. In parallel, if maritime conditions apply, IRGC naval special forces move to control or disrupt sea access, while Artesh units such as NOHED can be introduced as higher-tier reinforcement where escalation demands it.
Iran’s islands in the Strait of Hormuz – Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb – are now being treated as “unsinkable enforcement platforms” by the Islamic Republic. Composed of coastal missile launcher honeycombs, drones, naval mines and fast attack boats carefully folded into a geography that overwhelmingly favors Tehran, the multilayered defense network has proven blue-water navies and carrier-dominated air power obsolete:
Back in the Persian Gulf today, the Navy grasps the reality of the circumstances, recognizing that it simply can’t sail into the strait without risk[ing] getting blown to smithereens by Iran’s missiles. Today, its carriers are stationed well outside the Gulf and the ranges of Iranian missiles. … Simply put, Iran is threatening extremely expensive and manpower-intensive U.S. ships with weapons that are a fraction of the cost in exchange. Moreover, the United States can’t easily replace destroyed or damaged vessels due to the well-documented decline of the shipbuilding industrial base. … There is no decisive military solution to this problem given Iran’s geography and military capabilities.
The 15th Khordad air defense missile system, developed by the Iran Aviation Industries Organization (IAIO), is among Iran’s most advanced domestically-produced systems. It is capable of detecting, tracking, and engaging a range of aerial threats, including stealth aircraft, unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), cruise missiles, and conventional fighter jets. With a detection range of up to 150 km and an engagement range of up to 200 km using Sayyad-3 missiles, the system provides Iran with a substantial boost to its air denial capability. It can engage stealth targets from 45 kilometers and simultaneously track and engage six targets, all with a rapid deployment time of under five minutes.
To improve the accuracy of its missile programs, Iran covertly acquired a Chinese satellite (Earth Eye TEE-01B) launched by China, providing the IRGC with the means to “identify targets ahead of time and check the success of its strikes”. Both China and Russia reportedly began supplying satellite intelligence to Iran as soon as the conflict began, dramatically improving Iran’s already sophisticated anti-access defense architecture. Iran’s technical integration with China’s BeiDou satellite system resulted in improved Iranian missile accuracy and increased resistance to jamming.
Meanwhile Russia provided methods of coordinating drone swarms with ballistic missile volleys perfected during the Ukraine proxy war. Russia’s coordination with the Islamic State is easy to understand given the open hostility that Israel has exhibited toward both. In March, Israeli military spokeswoman Anna Ukolova threatened the “elimination” of Russian officials that “wish Israel ill” and in April Russia arrested 40 Israelis at the Moscow airport, with security personnel informing the detainees that an enemy of Iran “is our enemy as well” and emphasizing that “they were not welcome and should not have come”.
Another key aspect to Iran’s defense apparatus involves their sophisticated cyber warfare division. The Iranian hacker group known as Handala is a direct consequence of the StuxNet cyber attacks that inspired its existence:
Iran has increasingly turned to cyber warfare, particularly after the 2010 Stuxnet attack, attributed to the U.S. and Israel, which damaged Iran’s nuclear program and heightened the nation’s investment in cyber warfare capabilities, according to a report by the Georgetown Security Studies Review. … Iran has built up cyber units within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Over the past decade, Iranian cyber activity has evolved from espionage and influence campaigns to more disruptive attacks, including the 2012 Shamoon malware attack on Saudi Aramco and multiple attacks on U.S. banks.
Handala cyber attacks disrupted operations for Stryker medical equipment whose employees were unable to access company systems and found their remote devices wiped. Iranian hackers also sent mass messages to Israelis urging them to evacuate their towns, notifying them that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been killed, and prompting them to download fraudulent emergency applications designed to harvest data. Reuters initially reported that FBI Director Cash Patel’s email was hacked by Handala though it was later revealed that the information was lifted from Israeli computers meaning Iran merely peeked at something the Israelis had already stolen.
On 02 May Handala struck again, publishing the emails and private chats of former Obama Administration official (and lead JCPOA negotiator) Robert Malley whose sanctions team was responsible for creating significant economic pain in Iran. Two days later Handala published the names of 400 senior US Navy officers deployed with the blockade and sent direct alerts to the secure phones of those officers warning “death and destruction” for aggression against Iran.
Beyond its tactical capabilities, Iran employs a long-term strategy of indirect leverage that achieves results by applying force in unpredictable ways against its adversary’s most vulnerable points. This brings us to the now infamous Strait of Hormuz – a maritime choke point through which twenty percent of the world’s oil passes (along with significant quantities of LNG and cryogenic helium) that few people had ever heard of before it began causing massive economic pain in 2026. Historically, Iran is really just reclaiming the Strait since Persia controlled it until 1763 when the British East-India company muscled its way into Basra.
The Iranians closing the strait was among the least-surprising developments in this war. For decades, they said they would do exactly that if ever attacked. Even in the leadup to the war, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine told the president the Iranians would close the strait if attacked, part of a list of reservations he reportedly had about launching the war. Nevertheless, neither Israel nor the United States had an effective strategy for dealing with it.
The Strait of Hormuzhas not been shut, and that is exactly why what Iran has done matters more. What has emerged around Larak is not a crude blockade but a controlled passage system, a wartime checkpoint laid across one of the most important arteries of the world economy. … That is the part of the story that cuts through the propaganda. A total closure would have been easy to denounce and easy to rally against. A selective corridor is harder to attack because it allows Tehran to say that passage has not ended, only the assumption that ships can move through Iranian waters during an illegal war on Iran without submitting to Iranian conditions. … Calling this a blockade is comfortable for Western officials, but it is wrong.
Blocking Hormuz passage causes undeniable economic pain the world over in part because it threatens global food security that’s now dependent on fertilizer made from natural gas, a large portion of which is trapped in the Middle East. Retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Earl Rasmussen, the former Vice President of the Washington-based Eurasia Center, called the impending food shortage a “global humanitarian crisis,” anticipating severe and multilateral consequences for the Yuxi Circle (which accounts for more than half of the world’s human population) if ongoing energy disruptions persist. Hormuz-related misery begins with unavailable fertilizers that will result in food shortages, price spikes and authoritarian rationing, spelling long-term doom for farmers and the global food system:
Fertilizer is the link between energy and food. Natural gas is not just a fuel; it is the primary feedstock for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers through a process developed over a century ago called the Haber–Bosch method. Natural gas goes in, ammonia comes out, ammonia becomes urea, urea gets spread on cornfields in Iowa and wheat fields in Kansas and rice paddies in Asia. About 80 percent of nitrogen fertilizer production costs are attributable to natural gas.
The Strait of Hormuz is also the choke-point for Qatari cryogenic helium (one of many byproducts created from natural gas extraction) upon which the entireAI datacentereconomy relies because of the semiconductor industry’s dependence on it for microchip fabrication. Medical imaging and fibre-optic cable production are also impacted by helium shortages.
Iran’s vast natural resource wealth enables the self-sufficiency necessary to withstand a protracted stand-off with the west and its society has prepared for this inevitable moment since the military takeover of their neighbors. Persians are prepared for the long haul:
“We are prepared for a long war, possibly lasting up to ten years. Our armed forces operate according to preplanned scenarios and will continue until the US is expelled from the region and forced to retreat,” [IRGC General] Jabari added. … “We have capabilities not yet disclosed.”
As US ground troops mobilized to the Middle East, Iran threatened to make the energy crisis worse by concurrently shutting down the Bab el-Mandeb Strait with their strategic alliances in Yemen, affecting container shipping, industrial supply chains and global trade generally. By early April Yemen’s Houthis entered the war, firing missiles at southern Israel and implicitly threatening to further cut off the vital energy-shipping artery contiguous with the Red Sea.
THE FLEDGLING PETRODOLLAR
The Gulf Cooperation Council is a regional, intergovernmental alliance comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (or UAE, an “artificial construct” carved out of the Sultanate of Oman by the British). Following the 1973 oil panic, the GCC and OPEC agreed to trade oil exclusively in US dollars and these organizations became a key basis underpinning the Petrodollar. Oil exporters recycled profits back into US Treasury bonds and stocks thus reinforcing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
The Petrodollar scheme to back the dollar with something of worth was Henry Kissinger’s idea under Nixon in the early 1970’s when Americans finally realized their currency was no longer backed by gold. Oil-producing nations agreed to transact in dollars and “recycle” oil profits back into American Treasury securities and real estate thereby reinforcing global demand for the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and underpinning America’s weaponization of the world’s oil trade.
The war with the Islamic Republic has threatened the Petrodollar system ever since Iran began imposing tolls on Hormuz traffic and conducting transactions in Chinese Yuan, which cannot be seized by NATO.
However, the ships paying Iranian tolls in Yuan may have been Chinese-flagged vessels, providing China a unique opportunity to claim de-dollarization was already underway. Conversely, Russia signaled a desire to return to the dollar in a move to avoid dependency on the Chinese financial system. Iran also proposed ditching the Petrodollar for a sanction-evadingdigital currency:
Iran plans to require shipping companies to pay transit tolls in Bitcoin for vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, according to a Financial Times report. … For Iran, Bitcoin offers a tool to collect revenue and assert control without reliance on intermediaries. For global shipping, it signals a potential change in how access to key infrastructure could be priced and enforced.
With the United Arab Emiratesmaking their exit from OPEC – citing an inability to fulfill quotas because of the war – questions persist about the continued viability of the cartel. Meanwhile Iran’s “resistance economy” is poised to handle longer-term disruptions because its pain thresholds seem higher than those of their western aggressors:
As with Russia, the Western mainstream media continually reports on the likely implosion of Iran’s economy as sanctions and global isolation intensify as a way to legitimize the war’s continuance. But, if Iran wasn’t going to buckle economically in the years before the war when its oil exports and earnings were sagging, it isn’t going to do so now, with the oil market booming in its favor.
INSIDER TRADING AND THE POLYMARKET CASINO
Steve Bannon called for the military deployment of Netahnayhu’s son and Middle East royals who are currently gambling on the war with insider-trading through PolyMarket from the safety of their Miami estates. “And throw in a couple of Qatar princes” Bannon added. “Throw in the Saudi princes in there, too. Get them out of London. Get them out of the casinos and whore houses in London.”
Oil speculation-fueled insider trading was visibly rampant throughout the conflict and especially during the fourth week of the war. Unknown traders placed cumulative bets amounting to half-a-billion bucks on petroleum markets fifteen minutes before Trump announced his alleged “productive talks” with Iranian leadership:
Traders placed more than $500 million in oil bets just minutes before US President Donald Trump claimed talks were happening with Iran and that he was postponing his planned strikes on the Islamic Republic’s power infrastructure, according to the Financial Times (FT). … “It’s hard to prove causality … but you have to wonder who would have been relatively aggressive at selling futures at that point, 15 minutes before Trump’s post,” a broker strategist told FT.
Hegseth’s alleged “Defense Investments” demonstrate the willingness of cabinet officials to attempt war profiteering through insider trading, suggesting that numerous political insiders are making trades based on Trump’s public announcements:
Someone is making money on Trump’s announcements. Moon of Alabama reports that 20 minutes before Trump’s announcement that the Strait of Hormuz was open, 7,990 Brent crude futures were sold, a bet that the oil price would fall that resulted in huge gains. Was this insider trading? Who knew Trump’s announcement before he made it? Does Trump trade on his own announcements?
An Israeli Air Force major and his civilian partner have been formally charged with using classified military information to place bets on the Polymarket prediction platform. The indictment includes serious national security violations, bribery, and obstruction of justice. … The two reportedly earned more than $162,000 in winnings. The civilian set up a digital wallet to send the cryptocurrency proceeds to the reservist.
In an interview with NBC, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran is “not asking for a ceasefire” and sees no reason to negotiate with the United States.“When we negotiated with them twice, every time they attacked us in the middle of negotiations,” he said.
Iran initially rejected temporary ceasefires as the “normalization of war crimes.” Iranian officials publicly mocked Trump’s assertion that they were willing to negotiate with the US. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf called the claims fake news designed to manipulate oil markets while other Iranian officials called Trump’s negotiation confabulation “false and baseless”. Trump began moving the goal post on “regime change” and desperately insisted that negotiations were underway when they clearly weren’t, alleging that his goal of regime change was already successful because of an imagined “complete turnover at the highest levels of the government and military.”
American media continued to lie about Iran’s requests for a ceasefire when Iran never asked for one since bombing began in February and was never the party seeking an off-ramp to the conflict. Meanwhile, every Iranian spokesperson and official denied that any negotiations were taking place while repeatedly and publicly rejecting Washington’s 15-point proposal, questioning the dubious authenticity of American diplomacy efforts as yet another opportunity for treachery. While Trump insisted that talks were “productive” he failed to mention with whom he was talking. Iran’s army spokesman accused Washington of “negotiating with itself” and advised The White House, “Do not call your defeat an agreement.”
Iranian leadership further clarified that the exchange of messages through mediators does not signify “negotiation” with the US. The White House’s continuous claims about “talks” with Iran were finally answered by IranianForeign Minister Abbas Araghchi who emphasized that the “Strait of Hormuz is closed only for the countries who wage war against Iran.” Iran’s foreign ministry further stated that “Negotiation is in no way compatible with ultimatum, crime, or the threat to commit war crimes.”
IRGC Spokesman Ebrahim Zolfaghari mocked Trump in English with his own Apprentice slogan, “Hey Trump – you are fired! You are familiar with this sentence. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
In a fantastic instance of masking insecurity with strong language, Trump finally resorted to threatening to target Iran’s power plants – starting with “the biggest one first” – before walking the threat back (admitting a “strategic defeat” for America) and posturing as if negotiations were taking place, which Iran fervently denied:
“Our people demand the complete and humiliating punishment of the aggressors. All officials stand firmly behind their Leader and people until this goal is achieved,” [Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher] Ghalibaf wrote on X.
Two hours before his self-declared deadline, Trump announced a “two week” ceasefire (brokered by Pakistan) whereupon Iran claimed “victory” because Washington agreed to their terms ahead of any proposed talks. In a bid to save face, Washington also declared victory:
Both sides have claimed military gains, with Washington saying it achieved its core objectives and Tehran saying it forced the United States to accept the framework of its demands.
If victory were really in his grasp, Trump wouldn’t be begging NATO to deploy naval forces to Hormuz. Tactical successes have led to strategic failure for the Epstein Coalition as the economic consequences spilled over into a self-defeating whirlwind of inflationary oil and food price shocks that caused investor panic and political unrest, whereupon Trump resorted to outright double speak:
In a blatant example of real-life double speak, the President asserts that by starting a war with Iran, he is in fact ending one, a “47-year-long” conflict. The absurdity of this is compounded by the fact that the 2024 Republican “pro-peace ticket” did not seem to care much about it on the campaign trail.
Talks in Islamabad concluded on 11 April 2026 and ultimately resulted in the scheduling of more talks. The history of America’s “negotiation” efforts suggested the talks could just be more delay tactics allowing US forces time to regroup, with 70 American military transport planes landing in the Middle East on the first day of the “ceasefire”.
While the Islamabad talks were widely branded a “failure” such dismissal may be overly simplistic as deliberate pacing exemplifies Persia’s long history of methodical diplomatic strategy. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council stated the Islamic Republic’s demands clearly in their 10-point proposal, but no single round of negotiations could end this particular conflict because the west cannot negotiate with a regime that Washington simultaneously seeks to destroy.
Negotiations were always doomed to fail because Israel isn’t interested in peace and Washington cannot stop Netanyahu’s blood lust. Demonstrating their fervent unwillingness to coexist with regional neighbors, Israel sabotaged potential diplomacy efforts by deliberately targetingmoderates like Kamal Kharazi for allegedly trying to back-channel negotiations with J.D. Vance. Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani was another such pragmatist that may now be replaced by the kind of vengeful belligerent more likely to give the Zionists the war they so desire.
Fundamentally, negotiations can no longer be possible because they’ve been so consistently used as a deceptive pretext for bombing and because the interests of both parties are diametrically opposed with each side interpreting “the central command of the other as a form of strategic deception.” In fact, the February negotiations were held with the explicit intent of getting Iran’s leadership to have a meeting about the proposed conditions – regardless of what kind of concessions they were willing to make – so all the “high value targets” would be in a single room at one time thus enabling the murder of so many top Iranian officials in a single strike:
The Iranians naturally had to think long and hard before agreeing to all our terms. Therefore, they held a full meeting of their top leadership to decide whether to do so. But prompting the Iranians to hold such a high-level meeting had apparently been the underlying goal of our entire negotiating strategy. As the New York Times reported the next day, with so many of Iran’s leaders thus gathered together in one place, they were all killed by an Israeli missile strike, an attack that essentially constituted our official declaration of war
America has been thoroughly humiliated throughout negotiations with Iran due to a lack of a “convincing strategy” to bring to the table. The Iranians can never trust Trump’s “negotiation team” because it’s composed of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, both fanatical Zionists who lack the “necessary technical expertise to understand that Iran had made significant concessions in the talks.” Kushner and Witkoff are almost certainly working for Israel to lie to the president, with ambassadors divulging that, during negotiations, the pair are regarded as “Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.”
Witkoff and Kushner
MODUS OPERANDI
The so-called “Peace President” has, in the last 16 months of his tenure, green-lit more than 600 military strikes in at least four countries while threatening military actions against three more. Instead of halving the military budget as he said he would in early 2025, Trump doubled it to $1.5 Trillion. But in spite of all the other military adventurism occurring under his administration, the Iran war stands as Trump’s ultimate betrayal of the MAGA base who once believed in him:
For Americans, the question remains: why did Donald Trump – who repeatedly campaigned against “endless wars” – allow the US to enter yet another Middle Eastern conflict? During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump famously declared: “We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” Yet nearly a decade later, his administration has plunged Washington into a confrontation whose potential consequences dwarf those of the earlier wars.
According to a consortium of sources, the president contradicted and ignored his own military and intelligence experts after Netanyahu lied about an easy victory against Iran while planning the strikes during a visit to Mar a Lago in December 2025. Trump then took America to war based not on the intelligence recommendations of the Joint Chiefs but from his Zionist son-in-law, and later admitted on 29 March that “Israel was under threat so we had to attack.” This fact was also admitted by Marco Rubio:
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties, and perhaps even higher [numbers] killed.”
That the war is taking place at all is due to Israel’s absolute control over America’s political class, a reality that Netanyahu and his predecessors in office have not been exactly shy about admitting. The US is a hapless giant that has been corrupted by Jewish billionaire money from within, totally committed to the expansion of greater Israel no matter how many have to die in the process.
Former Tennessee Congressman John J. Duncan Jr. said a majority of Americans seem to be aware of the fact that the Iran war only “puts [the interests of] Israel first”:
[…] the great majority realize this war is being fought at the insistence of Israel at tremendous expense for US taxpayers. This is Israel’s war. Iran’s total military budget is only a little over one percent of ours. Iran was no threat to us at all.
Jeffrey Epstein turned the American Congress into Israel’s prostitute and made Trump their bottom-bitch. Bad actors have tried to frame this conflict – and the opposition to it – as a partisan divide, but go silent when asked whether Iran has the “right to defend itself” like Israel does (or when it’s pointed out that Epstein was an equal opportunity blackmailer who nailed politicians of all stripes irregardless of party affiliation). The war was widely interpreted as a transparent attempt to distract away from Trump’s place in the Epstein files, where his name is mentioned thousands of times:
A declassified FBI memo released on 30 January states that the president was “compromised by Israel,” that Epstein was an Israeli intelligence agent, and that a Jewish religious movement, Chabad Lubavitch, had coopted Trump’s presidency.
Countless influential conservative voices expressed outrage and disgust with Trump over the Iran war, including Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Tom Woods, Jeffrey Sachs, Dave Smith, Joe Rogan, Ron Paul, Candace Owens, David Stockman, Alex Jones, Joe Kent, Michael Savage and Marjorie Taylor Greene. But irrespective of the number of republican voters bailing off the Trump Train, there is no “MAGA civil war” within the Republican party because its donor base is composed of Zionist billionaires:
Among the top GOP donors in 2024 were some of the least discriminating supporters of the far-right regime in Israel. The widow of the Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Miriam O. Adelson, donated $148,294,900; hedge fund manager Jeffrey Yass donated $100,322,180; another hedge fund manager, Paul E. Singer, donated $64,795, 800. And on it went.
What about Congress? Aren’t there scores of Rand Paul and Thomas Massie acolytes on the Hill, itching to oppose Trump’s collusion with Netanyahu? Not really. The Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is Brian Mast (R-FL), who routinely outfits himself in an Israeli uniform that he picked up while serving as a civilian volunteer for the IDF. The House Armed Services Committee Chairman is a longtime hawk named Mike Rogers (R-AL), who is as slavishly devoted to Israel as Mast. The Chairmen of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Risch, are likewise lifetime devotees of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The same can be said for Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
The firings began in February 2025, when Hegseth removed [Admiral] Lisa Franchetti, the Navy’s top uniformed officer, and [General] Jim Slife, the No. 2 leader at the Air Force. Trump also fired [General] Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Fiscal conservatives” don’t exist in Washington DC because both parties can always justify borrowing more money to fund more wars and force financially destitute Americans to pay for them. Beneficiaries of the status quo include weapons industry cheerleaders who cynically benefit from this conflict continuing as long as possible and war profiteering think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Hudson Institute, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), the Washington Institute, and the Middle East Forum. These pro-Israel “think tanks” promoted military action against the Islamic Republic eight months before bombing began with the same old lies about the “unacceptable” nature of Iran’s nuclear program and allegations about the regime constituting “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism”.
According to the complaint, the officer told troops that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” … One non-commissioned officer said the rhetoric was “so toxic and over the line” that it shocked troops and “destroy[s] morale and unit cohesion.”
When commanders caused outrage by briefing their troops that the Iran war was “biblically sanctioned,” they were repeating a script “almost verbatim” that was provided to them by CUFI:
Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded by televangelist John Hagee in 2006, claims over 7 million members and has become the largest pro-Israel advocacy organisation in the United States. … CUFI’s theological agenda is crystal clear. The organisation actively encourages Israel to engage militarily with Iran because it believes the Book of Ezekiel 38–39 prophesies that this conflict will “hasten the rapture of the church and the battle of Armageddon.”
Concerned with rising Christian nationalism in the military, one non-commissioned officer told the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) that their commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ”.
Jonathan Larsen broke this story and we learned that “within 48 hours, the MRFF had logged 110 similar complaints from service members across 40 units stationed on 30 military installations”, replacing strategic analysis with eschatological prophecy and transforming the constitutional military into a theocratic menagerie of evangelical zealots waging a holy war; the killing of religious leadership and basing attacks on the false interpretation of a biblical narrative about the so-called “Amalek”. Because this war is grounded in theopolitical irrationality instead of strategic literacy, it cannot be understood in logical terms:
Traditional concepts of rational statecraft, such as geopolitical balance, geoeconomic interdependence, crisis management and regional stability, have been replaced by a different vocabulary: Armageddon, divine missions, “chosen people“, and the notion of fulfilling sacred destinies through force.
War Department Secretary Pete Hegseth is a Christian Zionist whose blasphemies include frequent invocations of “God” during briefings on the Iran war and a book he authored entitled “American Crusade”. After footage surfaced of Hegseth and his Christian Reich praying for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”, Pope Leo XIV said that God rejects the prayers of leaders who start wars. Pope Leo further denounced what he called the “delusion of omnipotence” driving the war by stating that “God doesn’t bless any war, and certainly not those who drop bombs.” Hegseth’s crusade ultimately sought to corrupt America’s military into a theocratic force for the violent enforcement of irrational religious dogma.
Bibi’s Greater Israel map at the UN General Assembly
General Caine’s stated war objectives were branded as “strategically incoherent” because they seemed to prioritize a de-industrialization of Iran meant to cripple the country altogether. This leads many analysts to conclude that Balkanization seems like Israel’s primary goal (pitting Persians, Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Azeris and Baloch against each other) as it is far easier to neutralize a civilization than to try to outright control it. Joe Biden’s former national security adviser Jake Sullivan articulated that “as far as [Israelis are] concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.” Israel seems to be aiming for total regime collapse in the hope that a splintered Persia will no longer be able to stand in the way of the Greater Israel Project.
The prevailing appearance of the “Greater Israel Project” seems to have emboldened Hegseth who officially unveiled the strategic map of the “Greater North America” Technate in imperial solidarity. But this idea is old enough that Hegseth cannot claim responsibility for it, and questions linger about who is really running the Department of War Crimes:
Hegseth seems so totally unqualified for his position and so much given to outrageous remarks and behavior that there are widespread suspicions that he has been kept in his job merely so that he can deflect attention away from Steve Feinberg, the controversial Jewish billionaire who serves as his deputy and may actually be running the department. Feinberg had co-founded Cerberus Capital Management, a buyout firm heavily involved in military contracting, and during his long business career he had been notoriously secretive, even going so far as boasting to his shareholders that he would “kill” any employee who got his picture in the newspapers.
Israeli leaders have desired to conquer southern Lebanon for decades, to capture both its water resources and expand the borders of “Greater Israel,” which they hope will also include the entire West Bank, Gaza, southern Syria, Jordan, and parts of Iraq.
Hezbollah vigilantes fought back and turned southern Lebanon into a “graveyard” for Israeli armor, destroying 10 Merkava tanks in a single ambush. Hezbollah’s use of fiber-optic-guided FPV drones has proven to be absolutely devastating to the IDF and resulted in massive casualties. Hezbollah purportedly sits on a massive munitions stockpile that includes 100,000 missiles.
As Israel’s war chiefs attempted to expand their territorial claim, the IDF was stretched so thin that the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, warned on 25 March that Israel’s military is going to collapse in on itself, specifying, “In a short time, the IDF will not be prepared for its routine mission. The reservists will not last”. The Israeli government wouldn’t have this problem if they simply adhered to international law and became a good neighbor in the Levant. But Israel has proven it’s not interested in peace as Americans understand the term, because the Zionist state has waged war on all of its neighbors ever since it forced its way into the Middle east in 1948:
For many, the claim is inherently contradictory. How can a state initiate war – and in Gaza’s case, sustain a genocide – while insisting that it is merely defending itself from annihilation? Yet within Israeli political discourse, and across much of Western media, this contradiction is rarely interrogated. It is normalized. … This reveals a deeper truth: within Israeli political thinking, the alternative to dominance is not coexistence, but destruction. … Here lies the central irony. Israel’s fears, long framed as hypothetical or exaggerated, are being transformed into tangible risks – not by inevitability, but by Israel’s own actions.
Whether it’s Gaddafi, Hussein, Milošević, Mubarak, Nasrallah, Assad, or Khamenei, it’s just a notch in the belt for the Zionists. Looking back over the last twenty-five years of sand wars started by Bush’s Global War on Terror – that toppled every one of Israel’s neighbors – we can perhaps fully appreciate the now infamous testimony of General Wesley Clark:
Years ago, General Wesley Clark revealed something that, at the time, sounded almost unbelievable. After the attacks of September 11, he visited the Pentagon and spoke with a senior officer. Clark asked whether the United States was going to war with Iraq. The officer replied that it was worse than that. A memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office, he said, laid out a plan to “take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.”
Talking heads in Washington and on corporate media stations hypnotically repeat the lie that American forces have secured “victory” in this conflict when every data point indicates otherwise. Trump claimed victory before the conflict had concluded while the Islamic Republic became stronger just for having survived, with leverage over international shipping it did not enjoy before February’s preemptive attacks against them. Given that the aggressor nations find themselves in a weaker position than when hostilities began, if the outcome can be called “victory” at all it appears to be a Pyrrhic victory because aftermath of the war with Iran has left Tehran as the sole “guardian of the Strait of Hormuz”.
Iran combined military and economic warfare to lure Trump into a trap that has increased their economic advantages at the expense of the US. The circumstances favor Iran as long as it can continue absorbing pain and striking back. The Iranians are definitely accustomed to enduring, exhibiting remarkable defensive resilience in the face of Saddam’s US-backed war against Iran throughout the 1980’s.
Photographic evidence leaked by Israeli technician Mordechai Vanunu in 1986 from which experts estimated a stockpile of 100 to 200 nuclear devices, confirmed that Israel had developed thermonuclear bomb capability. After leaking this information, Vanunu was kidnapped by Mossad and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Israel’s policy of “Amimut” the Hebrew word for ambiguity, combines three elements: The strict secrecy about the program’s existence, refraining from testing, and the managed leakage of evidence to allow Israel threat capabilities without ever making an official admission.
Beyond its policy of ambiguity, what makes Israel’s nuclear posture uniquely alarming is the Samson Option – a last resort retaliation strategy to be deployed in the event of Israel facing an existential defeat. Multiple analysts have described a targeting doctrine that extends to global capitals and major cities, not just Israel’s declared enemies.
This is transparently an effort to avoid admitting what is perhaps the most open “open secret” in international affairs: the State of Israel has a nuclear arsenal. … Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, for example, has spoken openly on the matter, and has even threatened to unleash the arsenal on “the world” if the Israeli state faces an existential threat
Unfortunately for Israel, the circumstances that once made Israeli-American hegemony in the Middle East possible are not only severely outdated, they no longer exist. The dramatic shift in European public support against Israel is worth noting, with nearly half of Poland’s citizens asserting that Israel’s actions in Palestine are “comparable to Nazi Germany” and Polish parliament member Konrad Berkowicz declaring that “Israel is the new Third Reich.”
University of Chicago Political Science Professor Robert A. Pape observed that while Washington believes escalation will restore control, “History suggests the opposite.” Tactical victories won’t accomplish anything unless the strategic outcomes makes sense.Hormuz was always Iran’s ace-in-the-hole as the choke point’s proximity to (and control by) the Islamic State constitutes an enormous leverage over the international economy. No tactical victory could ever change this strategic reality regardless of how many hospitals and schools were bombed or how many bridges and power plants were destroyed. American mainstream reporting has focused on the scale of the damage inflicted on Iran as though civic demolition from abroad would result in popular revolution at home. This begs the question: what constitutes success in war?
Success in war is not measured by who dropped the most bombs or killed the most people. If that were the case, the US would have won the Vietnam war and Germany would have won the war against Soviet Union. The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs dropped in WW2. It killed 3 million military and civilian population. In the end, it lost the war. The litmus test of the Iran war comes down to who can control the Strait of Hormuz. … In war, one’s ability to withstand pain is even more important than one’s ability to inflict pain.
Not including radar site losses, the continued aggression toward Iran has cost America $1 billion per day, with costs soaring above $42 billion after 40 days of attacks. With high dependence on vulnerable support aircraft, insufficient troop numbers, and a lack of nearby support bases to reinforce, resupply or extract entry forces, the US military is tactically unprepared for the drone-warfare reality of the modern battlefield that manifests as flying IEDs. The American Empire has revisited a fatal mistake made by the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago:
Instead of hoping Parthian arrows would run out, Washington is hoping Persian ballistic missiles will run out. History suggests that great powers often deceive themselves into believing that superior force can overcome geography, logistics, and the determination of an entrenched adversary. Crassus learned otherwise. Trajan learned that battlefield success is not the same thing as strategic success. Hadrian understood what statesmen are often the last to admit: sometimes the wisest course is not pressing forward, but recognizing that a position cannot be held at acceptable cost.
Another geopolitical reversal and win for Iran involves the great irony of sanctions. The US pretended to lift sanctions on Iranian oil, but the Islamic Republic quickly refuted the claim, saying their nation “has no floating crude, nor a surplus that’s available for international markets” and that the rhetoric was nothing more than “psychological support to the oil market.” Iran further denied the US claim of “surplus oil” reserves stored at sea as Washington’s psychological ploy “aimed at manipulating global prices”. But then Iran was able to sell oil to India for the first time in seven years, indicating the cessation of sanctions that penalized other nations for doing business with Iran. This marks a strategic victory for both Russia and Iran as American oil sanctions were lifted from both countries:
The sharp rise in world oil prices quickly provoked such desperation in the Trump Administration that they responded by removing all existing sanctions on Russian oil sales. Even more remarkably, Trump also lifted all existing sanctions on Iranian oil sales, thereby hugely boosting the governmental revenues of the country we were attempting to defeat and destroy, something perhaps unique in recorded military history.
Then the Trump Administration chose to reignite the stalemate with a naval blockade of Iranian portson Saturday, 18 April. With the Strait closed again the IRGC asserted it would remain that way until the American blockade ended. In turn, the IDF didn’t respect their “ceasefire” agreement in Lebanon and proceeded with their indiscriminate campaign of demolishing homes and civilian infrastructure unabated.
With American piracy on the high seas becoming more routine, the USS Spruance intercepted, boarded and seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship called the M V Touksa in the Gulf of Oman, kinetically enforcing a self-declared blockade during a ceasefire. In another blatant violation to the ceasefire agreement, the M/T Tifani was seized. The oil tanker M/T Majestic was also interdicted on 23 April.
Despite these operations, many Iranian oil tankers continued to evade and breach the American blockade with covert tactics including signal spoofing, ship-to-ship transfers of cargo, and deactivation of transponders. By 20 April, Lloyd’s Listreported that at least 26 ships associated with the “shadow fleet” doing business with Iran bypassed the US blockade.According to Bloomberg and The Financial Times, 34 Iranian oil tankers had slipped through Trump’s “unraveling” blockade, while the IRGC attacked three container ships in the Strait, immobilizing and seizing two of them – the MSC Francesca and the Greek-owned Euphoria.
The stated goal of Iranian denuclearization seems less likely to be resolved now because Iran has witnessed the consequences of operating without such deterrence. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on 19 April that no justification exists to “deprive Iran of its nuclear rights.” Rather than acknowledging another empty ceasefire, Iran’s new supreme leader demanded a “complete end” to attacks against Persia while affirming his government’s commitment “to continue supporting the Resistance against the Zionist-US enemy.” Ayatollah Khamenei then issued his own ultimatums, including American military withdrawal from the region, an end to economic sanctions and damage reparations.
Trump’s confabulations and bellicosity were largely intended to export delusional fantasies and bamboozle the weak minds of foolish investors with conspicuous market manipulation. But the shenanigans of the so-called “Baboon of Barbaria” instantly transformed former Gulf allies into neutral territories following careless remarks about the Saudi Crown Prince “kissing” his ass, leaving the Gulf Cooperation Council in an awkward situation. The White House then apparently demanded trillions of dollars from the GCC nations, billing them for a war that Washington alleged was fought on their behalf. If America’s Mideast bases were intended to provide security in the GCC, they have failed spectacularly and their perilous vulnerability makes it obvious that the time has come to start the process of closing them down.
In another indication that America is preparing for military withdrawal from the Middle East, US troops fully withdrew from Syria after years of supporting ISIS there:
The US military claimed its occupation of Syrian territory was necessary to contain ISIS, despite Washington’s covert support for the terror group during the war. US troops helped deny Assad’s government the oil resources needed to rebuild the country and to withstand US economic sanctions. Self-appointed Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who came to power in December 2024 in Damascus with US support, is himself a former ISIS commander who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani.
“And that’s where ISIS came from. We worked directly with Al-Qaeda; Hillary Clinton’s emails confirm this.” … The efforts to destroy Syria ultimately resulted in the fall of the Assad government in late 2024 and the Islamist takeover led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebranded Al-Qaeda offshoot. Kent lashed out at the former leader of the HTS and Syrian interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, pointing to his long record of terrorism – which did not prevent the Trump administration from recognizing his government as legitimate.
“We had him in jail; [he] joined ISIS, broke off from ISIS, hand-selected by Bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman Zawahiri, to lead Nusra, and then they rebranded,” Kent said, adding that the “number one way to fool Americans as a jihadist is just put on a suit.”
Part of the reason the American Military-Industrial-Complex funds, arms and trains foreign insurgencies of terrorists has to do with the fact that in the “business” of war, military conflicts are meant to be sustained as long as possible to maximize the myriad of profit-making schemes they generate. In such a situation, neither side can ever be allowed the decisive outcome of either ultimate victory or total defeat. Given that war should only be fought with confidence that victory will follow and that victory serves the interests of the American people, OperationEpic Failstands as yet another abuse of Executive power for the benefit of Israeli Zionist zealots.
Pom-pom waiving partisans may never admit it, but Iran has demonstrated strategic aptitude throughout this conflict. Their decisions reflect decades of careful calculation. After successfully defending themselves from the world’s most powerful military, Iran’s regime, military and nuclear programs remain intact as does the loyalty of the Iranian people to their national identity. Beyond that, Iran now enjoys exclusive control over the Strait of Hormuz while the economic sanctions against their economy have been lifted.
Meanwhile, efforts are underway to impeach Hegseth on grounds of endangering US service members by advancing “military operations lacking defined objectives, lawful authorization, or clear strategic necessity” and overseeing “operations resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iran” specifically the Minab school strike that killed at least 175 people.
Trump is scheduled to travel to China on 14 May for a visit to President Xi Jinping, whose government now refuses to enforce sanctions against Iran. As the conflict passes the 60-day mark that constitutionally obligates Congress to force a vote on the continuation of hostilities or cease them altogether, Trump may seek an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to extend the legally arbitrary War Powers Resolution timeline requirements into another indefinite forever quagmire because Iran is not throwing in the towel any time soon having spent the lastfour decades preparing for this asymmetric war of attrition by decentralizing its entire defense system. However, Trump claimed that deadline became irrelevant when the ceasefire was enacted, with Hegseth echoing that a ceasefire “pauses” the 60-day clock in the same way a “time out” pauses a football game.
With gas prices surging and economic conditions worsening it’s hard to imagine how much more “winning” the American people can take. The incomprehensible amounts of money spent on the unnecessary expenses associated with illegal wars and foreign nation building have paralyzed the American economy for far too long. Optimistically, the American military’s expulsion from the Middle East (and potential evaporation of NATO) may signal the end of the United States wasting national treasure to produce international calamity.
Last month, Missoula local Austin Norman was awarded nearly $26,000 in court costs and legal fees following his lawsuit against the Mountain Line bus system. After nearly two years of litigation, Montana’s Fourth Judicial District Court ruled in favor of Norman after the City of Missoula tried and failed to violate the Montana Constitution by withholding publicly-funded video documentation on their buses for spurious reasons. The City of Missoula further embarrassed itself by failing to follow basic procedures of law and in turn suffered a humiliating legal defeat at the hands of a longtime local citizen.
Mountain Line – also known as the Missoula Urban Transportation District (MUTD) – is Missoula’s free bus service. 38-year-old Norman, who was once the union shop steward for Mountain Line, drove buses for MUTD from 2018 until 2023. During that time, Norman was witness to and critical of poor working conditions, high employee turnover, severe micromanagement practices and a long list of equipment failures and criminal activity on buses including stabbings, assaults, flagrant drug use and indecent exposure.
“There are bigger issues at MUTD like kids getting sexually assaulted on the buses,” says Norman. “There was some guy that I believe started masturbating in front of a minor on the bus, which was really disturbing. And there’s been a whole host of things. I’ve known drivers that have been physically assaulted and all kinds of unsavory behaviors that I don’t think Mountain Line is taking seriously enough.”
Despite union seniority, Austin was working 10-hour shifts without a scheduled lunch break due to staff shortages and high turnover rates. He also complained of severe micromanagement policies on par with those portrayed in Mike Judge’s Office Space.
“The company was absolutely awful to work for,” says Norman. “I think if the Missoula public really realized how MUTD actually operates, they would be appalled.”
Working conditions compelled Norman to file an Unfair Labor Practice complaint with the Board of Personnel Appeals in 2022 alleging that his union authored a threatening memo that was posted on a bulletin board at Mountain Line and intended “to stymie legitimate concerted activity among public employees at Mountain Line,” causing employees to feel threatened. Many of his co-workers openly supported this complaint which ultimately died at the Montana Department of Labor.
Norman says that while he sought to make the bus system better, his efforts were consistently met with resistance from company leadership. After he quit in 2023, Austin created a Facebook page to raise public awareness among Missoulians of the failures and dangers of Missoula’s “free” bus system. The page, Mountain Line, a Call For Transparency and Reform, has hundreds of followers and has succeeded in at least calling attention to problems that local newspapers and City leadership would rather pretend aren’t happening. Part of that ongoing campaign involved obtaining bus videos of unscrupulous behavior.
“I created [the Facebook page] almost as soon as I left,” says Norman. “People in Missoula needed to be aware of just exactly what’s happening, how this transit system works.”
But Missoula officials were less than thrilled whenever these videos surfaced on Austin’s Facebook page, in part because he was exposing their unwillingness to address the inadequacies of their mismanagement. The MUTD Board attempted to put an end to Norman’s citizen dissent of their bus system in February 2024 by attempting to universally prohibit the dissemination of videos captured by Mountain Line buses. At the 14 February 2024 MUTD Board Meeting, the policy on video evidence collected by Mountain Line buses was changed so that “All information acquired from the use of security cameras … is considered security sensitive information and is confidential.”
“And then they adopted this policy that says, ‘Nope – no more videos for anyone’,” Austin says. “And that’s what precipitated the lawsuit because that’s a ridiculous notion. I knew that could not be legally correct.”
Norman correctly asserted that the new MUTD policy was antithetical to the Montana Constitution and filed suit the following month. On 13 March 2024 he filed a Petition to Enforce Constitutional Rights for Disclosure and a Complaint for Declaratory Relief. This filing followed the City’s denial of videos requested by Norman in January 2024:
In MUDT’s February 5, 2024 denial letter, MUTD provides no appeals process for their decision other than they will not give over videos without a “court order”. …MUTD has not shown with facts or details how releasing videos would jeopardize the security of anyone generally within the purview of public viewing, except to say that the release of videos could review blind spots within their camera/security system
Austin recalls the City’s illogical claims with a chuckle. “Their attorney at the time said, ‘Mountain Line will not be giving any more videos without a court order.’ It should not take a court order to make a public entity do what they’re legally supposed to be doing.”
Norman considered this nothing short of a First Amendment issue. “I was basically stymied from exercising my First Amendment right to interact with the public because I’m not able to get information that’s related to what’s going on and interact with the public on this,” he says.
Nevertheless, MUTD’s lawyers imagined every plausible excuse they could think of to deny further public information requests. They pointed to Florida’s laws and a homicide case in Illinois and bent themselves into pretzels trying to justify their immunity to Montana law. Rather than dealing with the consequences of their management practices, Missoula’s City “leaders” have once again chosen to simply ignore the problem.
“If people need any proof of what clowns these people are they just need to look at these documents,” Norman says.
He did his homework and filed his own Summary Judgment with the court in October of 2024. Austin’s filing explains in detail to the poor saps defending MUTD that their illogical attempt to connect Illinois law with Montana law was not going to work in this case:
During depositions it was opined that giving out videos due to a loss of their control and blind spots could cause a major security risk. … [MUTD and their attorneys] handed over a case from an Illinois state appeals case that dealt with denial of security footage. … Illinois law allowed for denial of the video footage that was asked for involving someone being pushed onto the tracks in an attempted homicide investigation. This is a huge difference … According to the theory of MUTD’s policy, videos are only to be seen by “authorized personnel” under the care of MUTD. … Public entities like MUTD should be expected to follow the law, without the need to get a court order to try and compel them to do what they should be doing as a matter of law.”
In October 2024, Missoula’s attorney representing MUTD, Susan Aaberg, responded by alleging that passengers and drivers would be put in “danger” if videos were disclosed to the public:
MUTD believes releasing those videos would jeopardize the safety and security of MUTD, of its passengers and its operators. … that releasing MUTD in bus security videos to the public that show the vulnerabilities of the camera placement and where cameras record would jeopardize the effectiveness of the surveillance cameras and could put passengers and drivers in danger. … All members of the public having knowledge of where cameras record in the bus, creates safety and security concerns for everyone, including passengers and drivers. Passengers want to know they will be safe when riding in public transit.
“If they don’t want to have cameras, they don’t have to have cameras,” says Norman. “But if you’re going to have cameras, then the public must have a reasonable opportunity to request the footage because they’re publicly funded.”
Austin goes on to explain, “Susan Aaberg and Mountain Line were hiding behind this absurd notion that if we release footage, then the public will know where the cameras are in the buses and that somehow became a problem. And the other thing that they’re weighing that against is the quote-unquote ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’. And that was what they tried to hide behind to not disclose videos. Privacy and security. They try to use a security exception, which just doesn’t add up for so many reasons because you’re in public.”
In November 2024 he responded to the City’s Cross Motion for Summary Judgment:
[…] there is a strong precedent against the preclusion of public information unless the public entity can show a right to privacy that clearly outweighs the merits of public disclosure. … The respondent [MUTD] has failed to demonstrate how they are entitled to relief as a matter of law.
Missoula’s attorneys tried another angle to convince the judge of their legal immunity, and that was attempting to conflate Montana’s legal standards to the unique legal framework of Florida, which does not allow public information requests for videos of any kind that are security related. And they were doing it with the tried and true slogan that “it’s all for your safety!” Corrupt bureaucrats making the claim that their lawlessness equals “your safety” is one of the oldest obfuscation tricks in the book. But Austin knew that Mountain Line was nevertheless violating the law unless their attorneys could somehow clearly show how privacy rights outweighed the merits of public disclosure.
“City lawyers were trying to find anything nationally that would back up their unwillingness to disclose public records,” says Austin. “And so one of the other wild, left-field forays that they went safari hunting on was in Florida. … We didn’t have any case law in Montana about videos specifically. They tried to say that because it’s security related, it’s confidential. Though that is, under state law, unconstitutional and unlawful.”
In a separate filing, Norman illustrated why the City’s Hail Mary attempt to deny video evidence based on the laws of the Sunshine State amounts to laughably incoherent desperation:
The respondent [MUTD] seems to try to opine that it is a common practice to refuse all videos from public transit cameras, this is simply not true… This is a question of Montana law, not how the state of Florida expressly has statutes that block access to almost everything even “related to security,” which is largely a moot point in comparison to Montana law. … Their only evidence is essentially conjecture, speculation, and denial based on two cases in other states, for which one of the cases in Illinois does not appear to mean what the respondent opines that it does. … The respondent then goes on to say in their response, “That is the concern in this case, that releasing MUTD in bus security videos to the public that show the vulnerabilities of the camera placement and where cameras record would jeopardize the effectiveness of the surveillance cameras and could put passengers and drivers in danger.” The respondent [Mountain Line] does not provide any evidence as to how this would credibly happen or how there is some profound vulnerability beyond blind spots, nooks, and crannies, nor has the respondent demonstrated how denial of all videos is necessary to preserve security.
In February of 2025, Judge Shane Vannatta granted Norman’s Motion, denying MUTD’s Cross Motion on the grounds that they completely failed to make a compelling case:
MUTD provides no analysis as to how each particular video that Norman requested would so jeopardize that safety and security. … there are tools such as redaction or cutting out certain parts of a video that could be employed by MUTD … if it was concerned about privacy or security regarding certain videos. … MUTD provides no analysis as to how the relevant Florida statutes are similar/distinguished from Mont. Code Ann. § 2-6-1003(2). … MUTD provides no support for how disclosure could reasonably be expected to jeopardize the effectiveness of the video surveillance by disclosing its vulnerabilities like areas captured by the cameras, the clarity and resolution of the images, and blind spots. … MUTD has failed to show that the videos requested by Norman … must be withheld from public scrutiny because release of the information jeopardizes the safety of the public. Therefore, the Court grants Norman’s Motion and denies MUTD’s Cross Motion … there is no actual right to privacy because MUTD gives notice with signage to the public ridership of audio and video recording and the cameras on MUTD buses are in plain view.
“The cameras self-overwrite after a few days unless copied to an external drive,” says Austin. “When I filed my public information request over a year ago they basically just didn’t bother to pull the tapes.”
Once Judge Vannatta made it clear that MUTD was legally required to disclose all requested videos, the City’s attorney attempted to sleaze her way out of this legal obligation by quietly claiming to the judge that Mr. Norman was in “agreement” with them. The semantically ambiguous shield they attempted to hide behind was that Austin “agreed” that, in fact, MUTD was not in possession of the videos that his suit was demanding, that the judge had ordered be released. MUTD’s legal team were apparently hoping that Mr. Norman lacked the capacity to notice this filing. But having experience working as a paralegal, Austin did notice, and pounced immediately.
“We all knew that they don’t have the videos anymore,” says Norman. “They didn’t try to preserve them. And they actually didn’t even reveal that to the court. After that [Susan Aaberg] started filing motions – the rule 60 stuff – the civil procedure about trying to amend the judgment. She tried to make it seem that we were in agreement by twisting the language, by telling the judge, ‘We agree that [MUTD doesn’t] have the video.’ And they try and twist that into, ‘Austin agrees that this is okay that we don’t have the video.’ Yeah. So I kept emailing them saying that’s not what I agreed to!”
“And you know, the comedy of errors just keeps going,” says Norman. “The madness has not ended, by the way, with my lawsuit since even though I won, they don’t have the videos. So she filed a motion with the Court to “amend judgment” to let them out of not having to give videos.”
In April 2025, the City’s attorney filed a Second Motion to Amend Judgment, pleading with the court that since Mountain Line didn’t preserve the videos in question, accessing them constituted an impossibility and that therefore MUTD was entitled to be absolved of the malfeasance:
“It did not occur to Respondent or Respondent’s attorney that the videos had been overwritten prior to the lawsuit being filed and therefore no one notified the Petitioner or this Court that the videos did not exist at the time the lawsuit was filed.”
Austin was dead set against allowing them to absolve themselves so easily. “Basically, it seemed to me that the Susan Aaberg logic was that the court has ordered us to give over the videos, they don’t have them, therefore under rule 60, because it’s an impossibility, [MUTD should be] let off the hook.”
The following month, in May 2025, Norman filed his response:
[…] respondent [MUTD] no longer has the videos requested by the Plaintiff and ordered to be produced by this Court. … Respondent had well over a year for which they could have pleaded to this Court or revealed to the Plaintiff [Norman] that they no longer had the videos from the public records request. … they [MUTD] claim firstly that, the “[r]espondent believed there was no reason to retain the video after denial of the request and the security videos were systematically overwritten as normal procedure”. This indicates the respondent knew the videos were not retained and they negligently allowed them to be overwritten by their own pleading.
The respondent then claims that it did not occur to [them] that the videos had been overwritten prior to the lawsuit being filed and therefore no one notified Petitioner or this Court that the videos did not exist at the time the lawsuit was filed … This statement appears contrarian to their previous statement. If a deliberate decision was made to let the videos overwrite because they believed there was “no reason to retain the video[sic]”, then how could this fact not have occurred to the respondent for over a year of litigation?
Ultimately, Austin’s diligence paid off and the court universally rejected the nincompoopery of the City’s attorney and MUTD. In Judge Vannatta’s 09 June 2025 Order he stated:
[…] MUTD’s request for relief based on mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect is unpersuasive. … The Court further admonishes MUTD for failing to earlier disclose to Norman and the Court that the requested videos do not exist. MUTD knew or should have known that the requested videos had been overwritten on or about January 22, 2024. Indeed, MUTD states that it believed there was no reason to retain the videos after Norman’s request was denied which was February 5, 2024. MUTD did not disclose to Norman that the videos no longer exist until April 1, 2025, almost 14 months later.
“The litigation went on for over a year,” says Norman. “They had an entire year to tell myself and or the Court that they no longer had the videos that were ultimately ordered to be released by the Court. The fact they never revealed this key fact until post judgment is a hard pill to swallow. ”
As MUTD’s lawyers wasted everyone’s time with their back-and-forth court filings, one has to wonder exactly when they understood they were potentially in contempt of court. Not having the court-ordered videos was bad enough, but dragging their heels for over a year to disclose that fact seems to have irritated the judge.
“The judge said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you guys, but this is inadequate’,” says Austin. “This was clown-level arguments from the Missoula Urban Transportation District. Just clown-level stuff. The people that are in charge of MUTD are not doing a good job.”
In the end, the judge granted Austin’s summary judgment and put the City into a tight spot, ordering them to change their video policy while also awarding court costs and lawyers fees to Austin in the amount of $25,952.11.
MUTD General Manager Jordan Hess
“Shane Vannatta told MUTD that the policy is inadequate based on his entire legal and professional background,” says Norman. “Vannatta stated that the key here is the public’s right to know based on Montana’s Constitution. After the judge stated all that I looked over at [MUTD General Manager] Jordan Hess and their attorneys and they looked extremely disappointed from the truth of the law that was given to them by the judge.”
Austin asserts that his efforts to expose Mountain Line aren’t merely the antics of a disgruntled former employee but from legitimate concern on behalf of his fellow citizenry. “I’m not just doing this for me, but I’m trying to stand up for our Montana State Constitutional rights here which, by the way, Shane Vannatta said were violated in his order.”
“It isn’t just me,” he says. “I mean, what if you’re in traffic today and somebody comes out and bashes your windshield in and there’s a Mountain Line bus nearby? Because they have external cameras too. Now they can’t just let that video delete without serious potential legal consequences because the court order stands.”
Austin wonders how local taxpayers who don’t use the service feel about their tax money being so flagrantly wasted by MUTD. At the end of the day Missoula’s “free” bus service is anything but free, garnering over $10 million from local property taxes for a service that most Missoulians do not utilize.
“[MUTD] are allowed to levy through the authority that the legislature is granted transportation districts, and it comes out in property taxes,” says Norman. “I believe that the core of their zero fare is largely funded by your property taxes. So it’s not really free. It’s a very expensive free.”
He goes on to explain how the City has hidden the Mountain Line fee on Missoulians’ property tax bills. “They hide it on there as MSLA URBAN TRANS DIST but a lot of people wouldn’t even know what that means. But then they see, holy crap, I’m paying all this money for a bus system that I’m not really using. They’re just hauling a small amount of transients around – which I think is a lot of it, by the way, is people are using it as a makeshift homeless shelter all day, especially in the winter to keep warm. And I don’t say that in any derogatory way against homeless people, but it’s just a fact and they are not getting the real help they need. I really feel that MUTD is part of the homeless industrial complex.”
This is how Mountain Line fees show up on a Missoulian’s property tax bill
Austin says that he doesn’t use the bus system himself because of his experiences with passengers.
“I would even consider using it if it was more inclined to move people to and from jobs efficiently instead of just becoming another makeshift shelter for homeless people to ride all day.”
Austin’s lawsuit is just one small win in his fight to reform the myriad of problems now plaguing Missoula’s “free” bus system. His Facebook page continues to advocate for reforms to MUTD that will benefit taxpayers and better serve riders and employees. After losing to him in court once already, the City may be more inclined to listen to his legitimate concerns going forward. It also seems likely that MUTD may start taking seriously the numerous issues that Austin has already gone to great lengths to make public. He was even featured on a PBS report regarding a separate lawsuit threat against Mountain Line that also involved the violation of Montanans constitutional rights.
“The crux of it is just sick, unelected bureaucrats thinking they can get away with anything without evidence because it’s self affirmation, or it’s true because I say it’s true,” says Norman. “The thing is it is true when they say something is true only if nobody challenges them like this which they are not used to. It’s symptomatic of a bureaucracy reinforced in the belief that they are autonomous and without any accountability to taxpayers.”
“And they are not used to accountability like this,” Austin smiles. “Jordan Hess is definitely upset about the expense of this and everything but they did this to themselves. It just took someone like me to hold them accountable and catch up with them.”
On 03 January 2026 Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, attorney Cilia Flores, were captured from the Presidential Palace in the capital city of Caracas by Delta Force commandos at 2 AM local time and whisked aboard the USS Iwo Jima to be flown north to the Big Apple where they now await trail for charges of narco-terrorism, cocaine distribution and possession of machine guns. Dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” the raid began with the bombing of seven military centers around the capital and the targeting of electrical infrastructure which left the capital city in a “total blackout” for days. Tactical details remain sketchy and impossible to verify, leaving the American public with little but the corporate media’s “official” narrative supplied by the military.
But Operation Absolute Resolve was not about drugs or machine guns or narco-terrorism or maintaining law and order. It wasn’t even really about Venezuela’s oil reserves. The reasons for the latest round of military adventurism in the Caribbean are obscured behind countless onion layers. And just like an onion, getting close to the core means unleashing an odor that will cause many to cry. Thus we peel back the first layer of this geopolitical onion and address the continuity of government in Venezuela.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE WAS NO REGIME CHANGE?
Despite popular belief, kidnapping Maduro did not result in regime change. The government and military of Venezuela remain intact and the popular support for Maduro by his fellow countrymen only increased. Venezuela’s officials are openly defying Washington’s demands to cease trading with China, Russia, Iran and Cuba. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez (whose father was tortured to death under the old US-backed regime, spent a lifetime enduring US sanctions and was named interim president following Maduro’s capture) swore she would follow Maduro’s policies where he left off, as did the other members of his government:
After Maduro’s capture, his right-hand man and Minister of the Interior, Diosdado Cabello, was on state TV calling on Venezuelans to resist American aggression. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez announced that he had activated and mobilized all of Venezuela’s military capabilities. And Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—who was sworn in as acting president on Monday—made a defiant appearance on state TV in the hours after the American operation, saying Venezuela will “never be the colony of any empire,” and that Maduro remained the country’s legitimate president.”
Nevertheless, the Trump Administration wasted no time threatening acting President Rodríguez, saying she will “pay a very big price” if she fails to “do what we (the American Empire) want.” The White House declared that America will now control Venezuela and “take back” the Venezuelan oil reserves. Trump vowed that the, “U.S. could run Venezuela for years”, pledging an “indefinite” stake in the Latin American country’s energy industry and even posted an image on social media describing himself as the “Acting President of Venezuela”.
Maduro’s capture followed months of Naval blockades and missile strikes against fishing vessels in the name of the war on drugs. In late August 2025, the United States deployed 4,500 sailors and multiple naval vessels to the Gulf, and on 16 December 2025 the White House ordered the “total and complete blockade” of Venezuela, designating it’s government as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
The New York Times admitted way back in September 2025 that regime change in Venezuela was the goal. Another regime-change promised, at the very least, to quell the Jeffrey Epstein rebellion within the MAGA movement, echoing back to James Madison’s postulation that, “Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended.”
No stopping of the boat to search it. No arrests. No grand-jury indictments. No trials in federal district court. None of that. On Trump’s orders, his military drug-war goons dutifully, loyally, and obediently fired military projectiles at the boat knowing full well that they would be killing all of the boat’s occupants. In my opinion, that’s just murder, pure and simple.
Some of the boat strikes were so-called “double taps” meaning that a drone would strike a boat and then circle back to finish off any survivors floundering in the water. But the fact that noncombatants were targeted is simply unacceptable by every metric, and the strikes were thus unlawful:
George D. O’Neill Jr. observed back in October 2025 that the targeting of small boats in the Caribbean was illegal in just about every conceivable jurisdiction, be it American Constitution, the UN charter, Nuremberg Code, International Maritime Law, et cetera.
Using $40 billion carrier battle groups to blow-up cocaine-transiting speed boats is simply the stupidest, most irrational action ever conceived on the banks of the Potomac.
By December, America’s navy began seizing Venezuelan oil tankers in the name of sanctioning alleged involvement in the Iranian oil trade, designating them as “ghost fleets” or “dark fleets”. The US Navy embraced outright piracy with the seizure of oil tankers in international waters. So far, at least seven tankers have been commandeered including the Skipper, the Centuries, the Bella 1 (a Russian-flagged tanker formerly called the Marinera and shadowed by the Russian Navy), the Olina, the M Sophia, the Sagitta and the Bertha. After stealing Venezuela’s oil, the United States then sold it at a discount to China and Israel, as admitted by Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
And, in case you had hopes these fools actually know what they’re doing, Mike Waltz, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, asserted, right in front of the latest emergency U.N. Security Council meet on Venezuela, that the U.S. was hijacking those oil tankers in international waters because selling oil was how Maduro was financing drug trafficking.
The Trump Administration’s complete disregard for the rule of law is a phenomenon built up by decades of American Presidents and their lawyers breaking laws while selectively enforcing them against their adversaries. But the hypocritical double standards bloviated by Team Trump entered the theater of the absurd when President Trump responded to a question regarding the limits on his military adventurism, saying, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
This attitude smacks of the now infamous Unitary Executive Theory popularized by Dick Cheney and William Barr; a legal interpretation perhaps best summarized by Richard Nixon’s sentiment during his post-presidency interviews with David Frost that, “When the President does it, it’s not illegal.”
Following Maduro’s abduction, countless legal experts concluded that, “The attack is illegal under both US law and international law” and that there is “no credible basis” for the interventions despite decades of increasing surgical strikes, accelerated black operations, and an endless array of color revolutions that together establish unfortunate but longstanding legal precedents:
After all, there is no chance whatsoever that Trump’s Justice Department will seek criminal charges against Trump and his military killers. Even if it did, there is no possibility whatsoever that the U.S. Supreme Court would permit the charges to stand, given the extreme deference that the Court has always paid to the U.S. national-security establishment. The International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over U.S. officials and even if it did, there is no doubt that Trump and his military drug-war goons would ignore any criminal proceeding against them anyway.
Marduro’s capture and courtroom spectacle is strikingly reminiscent of how Israelis abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and took him to Israel for trial in the 1960’s, or how Manuel Noriega was similarly captured and prosecuted in the 1980’s:
“Basically, the courts said it was illegal to kidnap him (Eichmann) and bring him here, but now that he’s here, it doesn’t mean we have to stop the trial. The mere fact that he (Maduro) was kidnapped and illegally brought to the US will not prevent the criminal trial from going forward.”
Can the US prosecute a head of state? –“I expect that to be litigated in the federal court, before trial. The Trump administration’s position, obviously, is that he doesn’t have immunity [because they don’t view him as the head of state].” … Brunk said that a legal precedent for Maduro’s case is that of Manuel Noriega, who was an unelected leader of Panama. After the US invaded Panama in 1989, Noriega was brought to the US and indicted for drug smuggling and money laundering, among other charges.
Many Americans purport to be anti-war until it’s their political sports team dropping the bombs and committing the murders. What Americans who get tricked into rooting for one of the two corporate parties tend to forget is that if the US Constitution means nothing then we have no leg to stand on when the crimes of empire are committed against Americans on US soil.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIS ISN’T ABOUT DRUGS?
Maduro’s arrest was predicated upon the presumption that he is a cocaine drug lord responsible for over 300,000 deaths within the United States, a number which doesn’t make any sense since cocaine overdoses are extremely rare and coca doesn’t grow in Venezuela like it does in Columbia or Peru. The claim becomes extra paradoxical when we consider the fact that the United Nations declared that Venezuela was a “state free of drug crops” under his predecessor, Chávez. It’s no secret that America’s drug problems are fueled by Mexico and China because fentanyl is made in Mexican labs with precursors acquired from China. But the 25 page indictment doesn’t make any references to fentanyl whatsoever, a fact documented by both Thomas Massie and Ron Paul:
Further evidence of this web of lies was exposed in the indictment filed against Maduro in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which makes zero references to fentanyl, making the Trump administration’s claims about the drug being trafficked to the US from Venezuela as one of the pertinent reasons for the overthrow of Maduro tantamount to the WMDs the Bush administration claimed were being developed under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
It is a well known fact that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl enters the US from Mexican cartels and is the real killer, claiming the lives of more than 50,000 Americans in 2024 alone. This fact was corroborated by the Drug Enforcement Agency in 2025. If our government were really at war with the Mexican cartels then why did both the FBI and ATF lead an effort to arm Sinaloa Cartels in Mexico with American-made firearms through Operation Fast and Furious? Could it have been merely as a means of countering the sabotage of American-owned oil infrastructure by rival cartels?
But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there, given that in December 2025 Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez who was convicted of trafficking more than 400 metric tons of cocaine into the United States and sentenced to 45 years in prison for doing so. In fact, countless heads of state in Latin America – from General Manuel Noriega in Panama to Pablo Escobar in Columbia – worked with the CIA to bring cocaine into the US and many current US-installed leaderspreside over authentic “narco regimes.” CIA payments to Noriega were handled by BCCI, aka the “Jeffry Epstein bank”. And Sebastián Marroquín (born Juan Pablo Escobar Henao) published two books explicitly stating that his father worked for the CIA, that cocaine was used to finance anti-communist terrorist groups in Central America and that there were corruption networks between his father, the CIA, and the DEA that helped make his father so powerful. The Ecuadorian President’s Noboa Trading Company likewise has been indicted over a dozen times for trafficking cocaine to the US inside of bananas. And the well of irony goes even deeper:
The very Delta Force unit responsible for capturing Maduro is itself a violent cocaine trafficking ring, as journalists documenting JSOC operator’s use of military planes to import millions of dollars worth of cocaine from Colombia to Fort Bragg for both personal use and illicit profit have shown.
What happens when the CIA recruits a general to traffic 22 tons of cocaine into U.S. cities? This 1993 60 Minutes report exposes how the CIA set up a drug smuggling operation with Venezuelan General Ramón Guillén Dávila, and how soon after the infamous Cartel of the Suns vanished into thin air, only to reemerge later to serve U.S. interests in Venezuela.
Furthermore, a declassified CIA document references a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation in the mid-1980s into allegations that Nicaraguan Contras and their American supporters helped smuggle cocaine into the United States and that both the CIA and DEA were implicated in different ways. The document recounts statements from sources claiming the Contra effort involved narcotics financing and that participants claimed CIA involvement.
Throughout the cold war, the CIA used Venezuela to smuggle drugs into the US to prop-up right-wing insurgencies throughout Latin America and these cartels became a powerful lever for political control. Cocaine imported by the CIA into Arkansas is how Bill Clinton came to power helping to use the drug operation to finance the Contras in Nicaragua and Iran.
The informal network of corrupt military officials was in fact established by the CIA under pro-US Venezuelan governments during the 1980’s and ’90’s. … US Customs officials in Miami had intercepted a shipment of 1000 pounds of pure cocaine from Venezuela. But they were soon told by higher-ups in the US government the shipments had been approved by Langley. According to the Times, the CIA sought to allow the cocaine to “enter the United States without being seized, so as to allay all suspicion. The idea was to gather as much intelligence as possible on members of the drug gangs.” …
To organize the shipments from Venezuela, the CIA recruited generals from the Venezuelan National Guard who were trained by the US. Because officers in the National Guard wore patches on their uniforms bearing the symbol of a sun, the informal drug network was branded as “The Cartel of the Suns.”
The indictment initially put forth by the DOJ against Maduro made reference to the Cartel of the Suns dozens of times. The Department of Justice has since had to admit that no such group exists, dropping all but two of the mentions from their edited indictment.
Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped its claim that Venezuela’s “Cartel de los Soles” is a real organisation.
The Cartel of the Suns was created in the 1980’s by the CIA under the Regan Administration and completely unknown to Americans until former Attorney General William Barr (an advocate of and proponent for the Unitary Executive Theory, former CIA officer and legal adviser who wrote the pardons for the Iran Contra felons) finessed the bounty for Maduro and several other Venezuelan figures for drug trafficking.
As Connor O’Keeffe of the Mises Institute points out, “The claim that taking out the Venezuelan regime would help solve the drug overdose crisis was a lie from the beginning—a fake excuse used to justify the escalation, not an actual motivation for it.”
The excuse of “stealing the oil” doesn’t make any sense and is based on the basic feasibility of trying to do anything useful with Venezuela’s “sour” crude that’s described as “superheavy oil as thick as tar”:
It doesn’t just flow; it needs to be melted to reach the surface, and after extraction, it hardens again, requiring diluent: no less than 0.3 barrels of diluent need to be imported for each exported barrel.
Ron Paul expounds on the problem of feasibility, saying, “Venezuelan oil does not easily flow through pipelines unless it is cut with solvents, making it more expensive to transport.” David Stockman further explains how this tar was mistaken for black gold:
The crucial economic point is this: Zuata’s low gravity stems from the loss of lighter hydrocarbons through bacterial degradation in the reservoir, leaving behind heavier molecules rich in asphaltenes and resins. … Likewise, the sulfur content further differentiates these deposits. Zuata oils contain about 2.5% sulfur by weight, earning them the “sour” label due to hydrogen sulfide and other sulfur compounds formed during maturation. … Zuata’s extra-heavy sour nature demands complex refineries with cokers and hydrotreaters to break down heavy residues, costing $12-15 per barrel or more. But that isn’t all. Crucially, the refined product yield from the Zuata heavy crude is far inferior to that of Saudi light crude for the simple reason that every first year petroleum geology student knows, but apparently no one on the Trump administration ever bothered to check out.
“According to Rystad Energy Analysis, it would take no less than 16 years and at least $183 billion for Venezuela to produce a mere 3 million barrels of oil a day. … Converting Venezuela’s Chinese-built oil sector into an American one would take three to five years, minimum.”
Other economists and even Bloomberg concurred that at least $100 billion was required to accomplish the exploitation of Venezuela’s oil. Within days of Maduro’s capture, the Trump White House convened all the major players of all the major oil conglomerates for a giant meeting about how best to carve up Venezuela’s energy resources.
The entire energy sector fam-damily was there, including “Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Continental, Halliburton, HKN, Valero, Marathon, Shell, Trafigura, Vitol Americas, Repsol, Eni, Aspect Holdings, Tallgrass, Raisa Energy and Hilcorp”.
The room full of executives were asked to commit $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s infrastructure while Trump promised oil prices of $50 per barrel. At the moment, the only nearby American refineries equipped to refine the tar are co-owned by the Saudis and Koch Industries along the Gulf Coast – the very refineries slated to process Alberta’s bitumen tar after transport through the infamous Keystone XL Pipeline.
Reality came crashing in when the CEO of Exxon/Mobil, Darren Woods, voiced his concerns that the investment was too steep and too risky, referring to Venezuela as “uninvestible,” much to Trump’s chagrin:
After Exxon/MobilCEO Darren Woods referred to Venezuela as “uninvestable” Trump told reporters he was “inclined” to exclude Exxon from the plunder of Venezuelan oil because, “They’re playing too cute.”
But it’s not just the capital investment that’s driving prospective investors away from Venezuela. Massive methane leaks plague the industry and require fixes that are dangerous, complex and expensive:
President Trump’s push to revive Venezuela’s oil sector is colliding with a major technical obstacle: vast methane leaks from crumbling infrastructure that could scare off large international investors, according to Bloomberg. … Each year Venezuela wastes about 13 billion cubic meters of natural gas through flaring, venting and leaks, roughly $1.4 billion in potential revenue. About a quarter of its total gas output escapes into the atmosphere — the highest rate globally and nearly ten times the world average.
The oil companies claim they’re owed $13 billion by Venezuela under arbitration rulings regarding the nationalization of their oil economy by Chávez. After Exxon and Conoco refused to concede majority control to state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) Venezuela nationalized oil projects in 2007, seizing all oil assets. The corporate lawsuit stands as yet another example of the American Empire’s selective enforcement of the law:
As for the “return of American land, oil and assets”, it should be noted that those were illegally acquired (i.e., stolen) by Washington DC in a blatant (neo)colonial manner during the (First) Cold War and actually belong to the people of Venezuela. The late Hugo Chávez rightfully restored the country’s land and resources to their original owners, something that the US never forgot (or forgave).
And for those who thought that at least stealing Venezuela’s oil would be good for Americans at the pump, think again. As long as the naval blockade remains in the Caribbean, one million barrels of oil per day will be excluded from the market, increasing scarcity and therefore likely causing some kind of price spike. From The Unz Review:
“The last excuse, tossed to the nihilists in the MAGA base as red meat, is that America wants to steal the oil to make gas prices cheaper. During World War II, the United States strong-armed Venezuelan oil into the hands of American businesses to fuel the Allied war effort, but the 30 to 50 million barrels of oil Trump is demanding for America is only enough to last two months.
The Pentagon has overtly pushed for regime change in Venezuela since at least 2002 when American-backed opposition groups began their efforts to oust Hugo Chávez (including a bloodycoup attempt that failed) following Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil industry. Like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, Chávez’s true crime was attempting to sidestep the petro-dollar and in 2008 began selling oil by the Euro, infuriating western oil interests. Recent events are nothing more than a continuation of the status quo.
Under George W. Bush the US government attempted a coup in Venezuela; under Barack Obama, the US government placed economic sanctions on Venezuela; and under Trump, the US government placed a $15 million bounty on Maduro’s head and declared Juan Guaidó the victor of Venezuela’s 2018 election (resulting in a “humiliating failure for Trump”). Under Biden, the US government continued to back Juan Guidó’s failed coup with crippling economic sanctions against Venezuela and increased Trump’s $15 million bounty on Maduro to $25 million. The second Trump Administration doubled the bounty to $50 million and the rest is history.
The fact that Venezuela is one of only four remaining countries left on earth that hasn’t yet capitulated to the Rothschild-owned central banking system helps explain why the ruling class have focused so intensely for so long on its conquest. But Venezuela’s role on the global stage turns out to be even more significant when we understand how the interests of Latin America influence events in the Middle East.
THE ISRAEL CONNECTION
After eight decades, the humanitarian disaster in the Middle East was finally recognized for what it is by a majority of Americans following the 07 October 2023 false-flag attack. In the aftermath of October Seventh, Israel lost the narrative and became a pariah state internationally. Outraged by the genocide in Gaza, Latin American nations like Colombia recalled ambassadors and cut ties with Israel. But Venezuela was even more conspicuously opposed to the Zionist project. Maduro – himself an ethnic Jew – held up his fist in 2025 and declared, “Free Palestine!” Maduro’s anti-Zionism (and unwillingness to sign Venezuela onto the Isaac Accords) seems to be the primary motive for his abduction:
“The remaining outstanding issue, what separates friend-to-all Hungary from Venezuela and is likely real cause of the conflict is Maduro’s militant anti-Zionism, which has been put into practice through Hugo Chávez-era infrastructure of sanctions-busting trade with Iran, who the Zionist hawks in Washington are trying to isolate further. Venezuela has become an outlier in Latin America, where regimes propped up by the US are rapidly embracing the pro-Israel Isaac’s Accords. What exactly the Israelis want in Latin America remains a matter of speculation, but this question is important enough to compel Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado to repeatedly declare her devotion to the Jewish state and openly plan to make Israel a central focus of her potential future government.”
Not far from Venezuela is the country of Argentina, now presided over by one Javier Milei. Milei was shortened from Miliekowsky, the true name of Bibi Netanyahu, to whom he is related. According to genealogical record, Bibi is Javier’s third cousin:
“It must be said that Netanyahu’s real last name is Mileikowsky, and Milei’s real last name is Mileikowsky. They’re family; these things aren’t coincidental,” Salgado said.
To the astonishment of the journalist interviewing him, Salgado clarified that he had studied the genealogy of both families, confirming that Netanyahu and Milei‘s grandparents were cousins.
In June of 2025, Argentinian President Javier Milei became the first non-Jewish head of state to receive the Genesis Prize (during an accelerated implementation of the so-called Andinia Plan, the Zionist plot to establish a Jewish ethnostate in Patagonia). Traveling to Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance, Milei gave an acceptance speech announcing the creation of the so-called Isaac Accords:
Milei donated the entire million dollar prize to establish the American Friends of Isaac Accords, a New York based non-profit designed to institutionalize a pro-Israel bloc throughout Latin America. [… ]
The initiative encourages Latin American nations to relocate embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, designate Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, reverse anti-Israel voting patterns at the United Nations, and establish security cooperation channels to combat Iranian influence in the region. Economic integration centers on Israeli technology transfers in agritech, water management and cyber defense, sectors where Latin American nations face acute capacity gaps. [ … ]
The organizational architecture operates through the American Friends of Isaac Accords rather than traditional diplomatic channels. The non-profit structure allows the initiative to bypass government bureaucracy, directly funding pro-Israel organizations, arranging delegation trips, and facilitating partnerships between Israeli technology firms and Latin American markets. This is the hidden strength of the sprawling NGO–think tank networks that steer much of foreign policy from behind the scenes. This consortium of NGOs advances Zionist objectives regardless of who occupies office, answering only to itself and shrugging off any of the consequences. […]
The initiative operates on a phased approach. Argentina, Costa Rica, Panama and Uruguay form the initial partnership group, with focus on immediate trade deals and security agreements. Phase Two targets Brazil, Chile, Colombia and El Salvador for expansion in 2026 and beyond, aiming to pull these nations back toward Israel despite recent diplomatic tensions.
A major donor to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) could reap billions of dollars from a reshuffle in Venezuela’s oil assets following the US’s abduction of President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday. Maduro’s removal and a pliant government in Caracas could allow Singer to finalise a deal that would see his investment firm, Elliot Investment Management, gain control of a network of US-based oil refineries at a steeply discounted price.
Paul Singer is one of the key players on the world stage today, whose extracurricular activities raise even more eyebrows than the economic shell games of Elliot Investment Management:
“PDV holdings, which owns Citgo in Venezuela, is being sold to Amber Energy, owned by Elliott Investment Management, a hedge fund company founded by president and co-CEO billionaire Paul Singer, a Zionist neocon who donated seven figures to the presidential campaign of Marco Rubio in 2016, who is now the Secretary of State. In 2020 Singer helped fund the Steele dossier which claimed Trump was videotaped with Russian hookers peeing on the current president … Singer has funded the outsourcing of US tech jobs to Israel, the integration of Israeli intelligentsia and military into US technology, and Zionist Christian organizations.”
Implicating Iran in propping up the Maduro regime carries the hallmark of the Zionist influence that has been at the core of American neoconservatism since its inception. This dynamic was highlighted by Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez. During a nationally televised address, Rodríguez claimed, “Venezuela is the victim and target of an attack of this nature, which undoubtedly has Zionist undertones. It is truly shameful.” Rodriguez’s remarks highlighted the continued anti-Zionist position of Venezuelan leadership, which has unabashedly proclaimed since the ascent of Venezuelan revolutionary Hugo Chávez to the country’s presidency in 1999. … In the wake of Operation Absolute Resolve, Netanyahu was one of the first foreign leaders to applaud the Trump administration for the regime change, likely viewing it as a portent of US support for the overthrow of the Iranian government he has made his ultimate aim.
Many postulated that María Corina Machado was slated to be next the puppet president of Venezuela because she is personal friends with Bibi Netanyahu, made a phone call to him following Maduro’s kidnapping to share the “good news,” and cheered on the seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers during her trip to Oslo. Why any native Venezuelan would support the seizure of her own country’s prosperity seems like a confusing question until digging a bit further into Machado’s connections to the CIA and it’s spin-off organizations like the NED and USAID (the same organizations that funneled $40–50 million a year to fund Maduro’s political opposition):
“Educated at Yale, her early career was broadly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy—one of the most important Western tools for co-optation, social engineering, color revolution, and regime change,” … In 2002, Machado launched her NGO Súmate – a so-called “election-monitoring group” – to organize violent US-backed destabilization efforts paid for by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an agency created to carry out political operations formerly executed by the CIA.
Within the context of the military blockade of Venezuela, ordered by President Trump, Maria Machado became the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize which she then dedicated to Donald Trump following his dismay that it wasn’t awarded to him instead:
After Machado said she would like to give Trump the prize, the Nobel Institute said that it “can neither be revoked, shared, nor transferred to others” and “once the announcement has been made, the decision stands for all time.”
Alas, Trump conceded that Machado did not have the popular support of the Venezuelan people. Purportedly now referred to as a “spoiler” at the White House, Machado appears to be another ineffective coup leader like Juan Guidó. In 2024 it was the U.S. government’s official position that Machado had won over 70% of the vote in Venezuela – an assertion that was proved false by a 24 November 2025 poll conducted by a Venezuelan polling firm called Data Analysis, which found that Maria Machado only had 14% of the popular support, with Maduro at 20% and most “undecided” including a plurality of young people.
As Max Blumenthal noted, the population in Venezuela is just as polarized as the United States:
“We can’t just pretend that there isn’t a slice of Venezuelan society that doesn’t want regime change. They do. There is also a substantial slice of Venezuelan society that stands with the Chavista movement, which gets demonized as socialists or communists, and many of the activists within them are because of the history of socialism and communism in Latin America as a resistance block against US Empire. But it is fundamentally a nationalist movement that just simply seeks control over resources in order to lift the standard of living of the poor and working class majority of Venezuela. … But no one ever drew the direct line to US sanctions and how they impoverished the nation all over again. So Venezuela has been the target of the crimes of neoliberal capitalism. That’s produced an effect that is waking people up to the violence and rapaciousness of the US.”
Nevertheless, Venezuela is being strong-armed into accepting the conditions set forth by the American government. Just 12 days after US forces captured Maduro, interim President Delcy Rodríguez was visited by CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The game isn’t over, and won’t be until the global puppet masters complete the consolidation of their technocractic unions.
THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION TECHNOCRACY
Trump’s base didn’t vote for him to annex Greenland, rename the Gulf of Mexico, or turn Canada into the 51st State. But these moves transparently serve an old agenda to merge the US with Canada and Mexico into a single entity like the European Union. Under the George W. Bush Administration it was called the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), proposed in tandem with the NAFTA Intercontinental Highway and financially underpinned by a single currency called the “Amero”:
Canadian economist Herbert Grubel first introduced a potential manifestation of this concept in 1999. The North American Currency — called the “Amero” in select circles — would effectively comingle the Canadian dollar, U.S. dollar and Mexican peso. … We may need to let a two-tier currency gain traction if the dollar meaningfully debases from current levels. If this dynamic plays out — and I’ve got no insight that it will — the global balance of powers would fragment into four primary regions: North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
The agenda to merge the nations of North America together into a single regional superstate goes back to the 1930’s, as revealed by Derrick Broze:
In 1938, Technocracy Incorporated released a publication that outlined its vision for a Technocracy and their plan for merging North America and parts of central America into a single continental unit which they called a “Technate”:
[…] The Technate will encompass the entire American Continent from Panama to the North Pole because the natural resources and the natural boundary of this area make it an independent, self- sustaining geographical unit.
A 1940 map from Technocracy Inc. clearly shows this vision included Canada, the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central American countries—including Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and others.The fact that Panama was envisioned as part of the Technate should not be forgotten in light of Larry Fink’s efforts to purchase ports in the Panama Canal. The Technocrats also imagined controlling parts of Venezuela and even Colombia. The 1940 map shows portions of northern Venezuela and eastern Colombia absorbed by the Technate. …
They aimed to spread their techno-tyranny as far north as Greenland. In a July 1940 issue of Technocracy magazine, Howard Scott and Technocracy Inc. explicitly advocated for acquisition of Greenland:
“The government of the United States should take immediate action to acquire these territories and others, such as Greenland and the Galapagos Islands. The acquisition of these territories should be a mandatory part of the program of Continental defense for immediate achievement—either by purchase, negotiation, or the force of arms.” …
What we are witnessing with Venezuela and Greenland is one more step in the completion of the American Technate and one step closer to the vision of a global government.
The technocracy showed its hand again during a senate briefing in 2013 with a map that portrayed North America as a unified, borderless entity. As documented by James Corbett in his new book, Reportage:
In July 2013, US Senator Dianne Feinstein presented a most unusual map during a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee. … what was peculiar about the map was that it was broken into four regions: Europe, Africa, Asia, and Homeland.
Homeland?
Yes, Homeland. That region of the globe formerly known as “North America and Central America,” a section stretching from Ellesmere Island in Canada’s Arctic all the way down to the tropical beaches of Panama on the equator, is now apparently referred to by the NSA as “Homeland.” … it reveals the desired end goal of a plan that is now being formulated to merge Canada, the US, and Mexico into a united “continental security perimeter.” This merger, should it proceed as envisioned, would include standardized security procedures and information-sharing as part of an even-longer-term plot to ultimately synthesize the three countries into one European Union-like regional government. (Reportage, pages 113-115)
The final steps for institutionalizing the long fabled North American Union lie before us, and will only occur if the American public can be successfully manipulated into supporting the merger. To manipulate the masses into accepting this predetermined outcome, the war industry shifted into an entirely new paradigm of weaponry that transforms the very purpose of warfare.
A FIFTH-GENERATION WAR AGAINST YOU
Venezuela’s Attorney General, Tarek William Saab said that the bombing of Caracas and abduction of Nicolas Maduro constituted an “act of war.” Senator Rand Paul characterized the ongoing conflict involving hundreds of ships and total blockade of Venezuela’s coastline as an “active war.” We would all do well to ask what kind of war this is. More specifically, what happens when America’s concurrent wars on terror and drugs are combined into a grotesque hybrid?
Technological and tactical improvements influenced how wars were fought over the centuries, changing from state-monopoly on force with columns of troops (1st generation) to long-range rifles, trench warfare and guerrilla tactics (2nd generation) to air power, paratroopers, blitzkriegs and bombings behind enemy lines (3rd generation). Suffice it to say that the wars of the first three generations involved clearly defined sides who wore different uniforms and knew they were combatants in a conflagration.
Fourth-generation warfare is characterized by guerrilla fighters or “insurgents” fighting a state. Not only are there no clear ways of identifying the enemy in such a conflict, the lines between civilian and combatant get blurred to the point that it becomes impossible to deliver a single death blow, especially when the state’s declared adversaries use non-violent means to de-legitimize the authority of the state. The movements of both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. illustrate successfully executed campaigns that were forced to navigate the complexities of fourth-generation warfare.
What sets Fifth Generation Warfare apart from the four previous incarnations is the “function of warfare” because it is not able to define adversaries and is fought primarily in the civilian space as a “global war of ideas and narratives”. If the goal of the first four generations of warfare was to eliminate or subdue a declared adversary, the final goal of Fifth Generation Warfare is to steer society’s actions toward predetermined outcomes with military tools and methods.
It is the war of every government against its own population and every international institution against free humanity. … The basic idea behind this term [fifth-generation warfare] is that in the modern era, wars are not fought by armies or guerrillas, but in the minds of common citizens. There are two important things to note about this definition. The first is that fifth-generation warfare is not waged against standing armies of nation-states or guerrilla insurgents but against everyday citizens. The second is that this war is not being fought in a battlefield somewhere, but in the mind. […]
There is a world war happening right now. It is a fifth-generation war (or whatever you want to call it). It is being waged across every domain simultaneously. It is a war for full-spectrum dominance of every battlefield and every terrain, from the farthest reaches of the globe (and beyond) to the inner spaces of your body and even to your innermost thoughts. And it is a war on you.
The state fights a Fifth Generation War with the tactics of tyranny and fear. Writing for the Marine Corps Gazette, Lieutenant Colonel Stanton Coerr identifies fear as the key component of Fifth Generation Warfare:
“The battlefield will be something strange – cyberspace, or the Cleveland water supply, or Wall Street’s banking systems, or YouTube. The mission will be instilling fear, and it will succeed.”
Overt fear strategies like “affective management”, “crisis capitalization” and “terror management theory” are meant to deliberately elicit stress to corral traumatized populations toward dependency on authorities. Meanwhile, more covert fear campaigns include things like “microtargeting” and “hypernudging” to create social media bubbles that reinforce confirmation biases and provoke conflict to divide the population. The road to instilling fear in the population with modern mass media manipulation was paved by CIA operations like Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, MK ULTRA and MK OFTEN.
This fear is also created through a wide array of psychological warfare strategies for societal demoralization and mass confusion; it includes the weaponization of novel technologies for the purposes of neurological and biological warfare in the form of mRNA “vaccines”, GMO foods and geoengineering; it includes economic warfare with lockdowns, taxes, derivatives, interest rate manipulation and CBDCs. It even includes weaponized pornography.
But one of the oldest and most effective methods for manufacturing consent prevails today with the corporate media’s massive Mockingbird propaganda and censorship operation, the goal of which was articulated rather bluntly in the 1980’s by Regan’s CIA Director, William J. Casey:
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
Venezuela’s former Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza rejects claims “that Maduro was betrayed internally, dismissing them as psychological warfare designed to sow division.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence that Maduro was surrounded by Cuban bodyguards at the time of his capture,“alleging that Cuban operatives had been placed in charge of the inner machinations of Venezuela’s national intelligence,” seems like another instance of a state-sponsored disinformation campaign.
Reports of sonic and frequency weapons used by “super soldiers” in the Caracas attack against Maduro’s security forces constitute a similar kind of indiscriminate psychological attack as they are “seemingly designed to intimidate Latin American governments” (as well as American citizens who realize this technology will eventually be used domestically), especially if they’re true:
“We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed… it seemed like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute. We couldn’t do anything. … At one point, they launched something—I don’t know how to describe it… it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.”
For some analysts, the Trump Administration’s embrace of the “Panama Model” to use military might to shock adversaries into submission signals a “new era of U.S. imperialism” that now overtly threatens several other countries, including Cuba which is now experiencing widespread electrical blackouts from lack of fuel because of the embargo and blockade (a blockade that Russia now promises to break):
“[Trump’s] not claiming that there are any goals to promote democracy or human rights or stability,” said Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive. “He is simply saying the United States is the bully on the block, the most powerful country; that might makes right. We want that oil, and we’re just going to take it.” Kornbluh further stated the invasion exhibited “a new era of U.S. imperialism.”
President Donald Trump explained on Wednesday that he had indeed authorized the CIA to operate inside Venezuela to clamp down on illegal flows of migrants and drugs from the South American nation, but stopped short of saying it would have authority to remove current Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro which clearly is also a major policy objective. …
Trump’s statement was remarkable because presidents don’t normally acknowledge directives, the “findings,” that allow spies to accomplish a secret mission.The whole idea of having a CIA is to allow the United States to operate in the shadows and conduct “deniable” operations, which is the key feature of “covert action,” i.e. that it should remain covert.
When news of the kidnapping raid reached the United States, a significant percentage of Americans were incensed by what was done in their name, and many of them were then swiftly arrested on American soil – the very kind of behavior that the US government accuses of Maduro to justify military intervention and without a shred of irony:
Outrage flooded social media after a video showed an activist being arrested mid-interview at a pro-Venezuela protest, fuelling questions about the state of free speech in the United States. … The footage quickly ignited a wave of backlash online, with several social media users pointing out the irony of an arrest unfolding mid-interview at a protest against US intervention in Venezuela, a country frequently cited by American officials as a symbol of authoritarian repression.
Image tweeted out by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
At the time Maduro was being loaded into an airplane for New York, ICE agents working throughout Minnesota killed a woman in her car, executed a man on the street and tear gassed a high school. The very martial law that conservatives used to warn about is slowly forming in major cities throughout the country under a different name, nullifying the Constitution, black-bagging American citizens in unmarked vans with masked “officers” – some of whom are former IDF soldiers now operating on American soil to round up Americans. But the psychological tactics of modern warfare have many of us cheering on our own destruction. Military adventurism abroad creates fear campaigns designed to divide the citizenry at home and a Patriot Pacification Program to render the warrior class docile.
As James Corbett summarizes on page 214 of Reportage: “Yet more insidious by far is the way that the deep state operators, the powers-behind-the-throne of today’s democratic dictatorships, use psychological warfare to convince us that slavery is freedom.”
The so-called influence operations and disinformation campaigns once referred to as Psychological Operations were rebranded by the Pentagon into the acronym MISO (Military Information Support Operations), which is a euphemism to describe special operations divisions tasked with conducting “influence operations” on the American people that now aim to use deepfakes for psy-ops.
Indeed, no psychological war effort would be complete without classic propaganda campaigns, especially those involving the hypnotic repetition of a word or phrase on news media to install it into the societal lexicon in much the same way that one installs a program onto a computer. Described by sycophants as an “energy-security doctrine,” the so-called Donroe Doctrine is really nothing more than a resurgence of Manifest Destiny rather than a statement of law:
Even in its own century, the Monroe Doctrine did not operate as an enforceable rule of international conduct. … The doctrine does not confer a right to strike nations, change regimes, or manage regional politics. … To speak of “reestablishing” the Monroe Doctrine under these conditions is to misunderstand the nature of the document. A presidential message tied to a specific historical moment cannot be revived as a standing policy any more than any other nineteenth-century speech can be treated as binding authority today. The doctrine was not a statute, a treaty, or a constitutional provision. It was a contextual warning issued in response to temporary conditions. Once those conditions disappeared, the doctrine’s operative meaning disappeared with them.
Another obvious psychological attack was endured by the segment of American voters who now are beginning to experience the cognitive dissonance of realizing the depth of Trump’s predictable betrayal of the MAGA movement:
Deposing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro marks the apotheosis of Trump’s transformation from a political iconoclast into another rank-and-file member of the neoconservative establishment. … In less than one year since returning to the White House, the foreign policy of the second Trump administration, shaped by Rubio, stands as the greatest betrayal of everything the president once stood for.
Kurt Metzger articulates what may be the ultimate mindfuck for Americans, that Maduro may have been a CIA asset all along as a modern kind of viceroy:
“Professor Jiang thinks that’s all fluff and nonsense to distract from the fact that Maduro is a CIA asset from the previous CIA faction, Trump is ruining one of their longstanding operations, and Maduro is in on it and wanted to come in. And the way to know is when he goes to court, if he goes, “Yes, me and the Democrats and parts of the CIA conspired to rig the 2020 election through those voting machines, and I want to come clean.” If that happens then you’ll know that’s what this was.”
The combined effect of this myriad of madness amounts to mass social engineering to justify an ever-growing bureaucracy managed by transnational organizations like the WEF that are more powerful than the governments they command. Our rulers are hoping that the cumulative outcome of shocking our nervous systems with a continuous barrage of bullshit will ultimately result in a softening of American nationalism to enable the formation of a supranational technate governed by intergovernmental organizations thus erasing the American ideal of civil liberties that ultimately stands in the way of global hegemonic domination.
James Corbett anticipated the various nuances of this war on all of us and arrived at a very logical conclusion: “Fifth-generation warfare is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
Fighting such a war on the government’s terms surely amounts to a suicide mission because of the vastly superior weapon systems and personnel resources the Blob has developed for it.
The purpose of state terrorism is ultimately to change your behavior, influence your habits and increase paranoia of your neighbors. Their success is civilization’s downfall. The solution lies in refusing to be corralled into a digital-ID dystopia, refusing to be coerced into using programmable digital money, and refusing to get swept up into wars that undermine our own prosperity. We don’t have to hate the technocrats but we do have to stop cooperating with them and that means refusing to change our habits, especially during one of their contrived “emergencies.” Because if we let the government break the law during an emergency, they will – quite predictably – create an emergency to break the law.
When we see yard signs alerting us to “support the schools” the obvious knee-jerk reaction is agreement. After all, who doesn’t want our kids to be smarter? And wouldn’t more school funding achieve this end?
One major problem with this logic is the assumption that making us pay more taxes in the name of promoting education will ever result in more money for the school district. This is not the case, especially in Missoula, Montana.
It’s a common misconception that arguing against a school levy signifies some kind of anti-education sentiment. The exact opposite is true. In fact, one must be economically educated to understand, in the first place, why throwing more of our money at the City government in the name of so-called education cannot actually do any good for our local public schools.
Last year Missoula voters were asked to approve four separate invitations to increase their property taxes with school levies. Three of the four were approved by voters, the combined total of which amounts to more than $2 million annually that many taxpayers foolishly believed would actually find its way to the schools.
It hasn’t.
2024 election results chart as reported by Alex Sakariassen
Apparently no one in Missoula’s illustrious school district has yet seen one penny of the money promised by the school security levies that passed in the spring of 2024. In fact, there might be an internal investigation regarding where that money went, according to sources within the school district. This seems particularly distressing considering that enrollment in Missoula County Public Schools is down, not up, meaning costs should be fewer, not more.
One MCPS employee says that his co-workers often complain about their inability to replace broken equipment for reasons of budgetary shortfalls despite all the new levies passed each and every spring.
“I think the ultimate take away is that levies are getting passed and yet there is no show for it in the schools. There is no show in ways of improvements for the extra money received.”
Citizens might be thinking that taxes approved by special voter levies will end up in a special fund that can only be used for the school district’s needs. But just like the additional money collected from last year’s firefighter levy, all these additional taxes go instead into Missoula’s municipal general fund where they are then distributed at the whim of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, an unelected board of mayoral-appointed bureaucrats who habitually drain our municipal budget with a scheme called Tax Increment Financing (TIF).
Former Missoula City Councilman Jesse Ramos confirms this unfortunate reality:
“If folks live in a TIF district that additional money in their tax bill still gets skimmed off and goes to the MRA.”
Jesse first became motivated to reveal the MRA’s brazen malpractices after witnessing firsthand how Missoula’s retirees are forced to sell their paid-off homes because of ongoing tax abuses. After beginning his career as a wealth management advisor with WestPac Wealth Partners, it’s an understatement to say that Ramos’ understanding of financial matters surpasses that of most nincompoops elected to city council who approve the MRA’s unending litany of unnecessary projects.
The City of Missoula certainly has enough money to fund our schools. Missoulians have done their part and the money was paid to the City by our property taxes. But the MRA takes that money and spends it elsewhere. These malefactors then exhibit the supreme audacity to act surprised that the budget is constantly in the red, whereupon they shame the voters into tightening our belts yet again.
This faith-based taxation system has become a recurring farce in Missoula. The annual tradition of begging cash-strapped Missoulians for more money because “won’t somebody think of the children” is a yearly rite based in logical fallacy.
Levies don’t bolster our schools but they do embolden the MRA as its overall budget grows larger every time a new levy is passed. The general fund is supposed to fund our roads, schools and municipal services, but since MRA constantly loots the slush fund, these common sense needs are all too often ignored for nonsensical priorities like enriching hoteliers and real estate tycoons or building a pedestrian bridge over Reserve Street that nobody ever uses. There are literally hundreds of examples.
When the schools finally reach their financial breaking point, they’re forced to beg for funding from the Missoula Redevelopment Agency. This happened last year when the school district was awarded a “remittance” of more than $2 million from the MRA.
The MRA acknowledged in 2024 that the school district was desperate for money with this remittance, and because the MRA exerts absolute power over Missoula’s financial books, they also wrote the check that made the schools temporarily whole again. But nobody ever asks why Missoula’s budget is presided over by a redevelopment agency that enjoys first dibs on all taxes collected.
The MRA alone decides where the money goes and how it’s divvied out. Not the mayor. Not the city council. Not the county commissioners. The MRA controls Missoula’s finances, and it’s director exists as the true power behind the throne in Zoo Town. Her name is Ellen Buchanan, and despite her commanding influence, most Missoulians have never heard of her.
MRA Director Ellen Buchanan
Empress Ellen is unelected and unaccountable. Mayors come and mayors go but Ellen Buchanan remains in power. She’s been director of the MRA for more than twenty years now. Missoulians cannot vote her, nor any of her MRA colleagues, out of office and their spending policies are never subject to citizen approval. They use our tax money to fund development projects that overwhelmingly benefit those who make significant contributions to the reelection campaigns of the elected officials who tacitly consent to MRA’s fraudulent policies.
Think of it as a bureaucratic circle jerk.
Nobody can demand that MRA spend the general fund responsibly and nobody can stop MRA from introducing new levies or spending money on propaganda campaigns meant to bamboozle locals into supporting their own displacement through skyrocketing property taxes.
The parasites who benefit from public ignorance are able to get away with this grift because they know the public is too lazy to learn about economics. While it is true that many parents lack the time and energy to become economically or politically informed, they’re nevertheless completely susceptible to the emotional manipulation of bureaucratic brainwashing because of their willful ignorance. When naϊve people see a yard sign declaring “support the schools” the obvious knee-jerk is agreement. And no matter how much the public trust is betrayed, voters continue allowing it because they don’t understand how their myopia is regularly exploited by the cynics in power.
This trend exists largely because the school system has made sure that American adults are thoroughly uneducated when it comes to money, finance and economics by failing to even teach these subjects. Taxes and budgets aside, our children do not need more schooling, they need less, according to award-winning educator John Taylor Gatto. This might seem ironic to the uninitiated, considering that test scores are often considered the gold standard for those who believe in compulsory schooling to prove its worth. But the numbers are in. Pumping more money into a failed system will only result in an accelerated failure because schooling makes kids dumb, as intended. And dumb kids inevitably grow up into illiterate adults who are unable to comprehend how malicious institutions are financially exploiting them, and the whole cycle begins again.
If history provides any guide, next spring Missoula voters will again be staring down the barrel of yet another property tax hike in the name of funding municipal services that are already covered by existing property tax revenue. Missoulians will once again be invited to “just think of the children” while forgetting that their taxes were already increased the previous year in the name of education.
So how might taxpayers ever conceivably demand accountability from such a perverted system?
The obvious remedy is to stop voting for the levies. While not yet a majority, there are many Missoulians who have become wary of this trend as evidenced by the votes against the 2025 levy proposals. According to an Email sent out by Superintendent Micah Hill:
The total number of ballots cast and counted is 30,435. With 88,908 registered voters, voter turnout was 34.23%.
High School District General Fund Levy: PASSED. (For: 14,438; Against: 13,502)
High School District Safety Levy: FAILED. (For: 12,952; Against: 14,911)
Elementary District General Fund Levy: PASSED. (For: 10,383; Against: 7,118)
But voting against more tax increases won’t address the MRA’s unaccountable control over the City’s money or the fact that Missoulians are overcharged for institutional support that simply does not exist. Is it possible for Missoulians to deny another penny to the Missoula Redevelopment Agency until our tax kitty is spent more responsibly?
Perhaps a citizen of means could sue the MRA for detailed financial records to prove what is plainly observable: local taxes are not going where our officials allege they are but the MRA somehow always has plenty of money to throw at the pet projects of its favored donors.
Since Missoula’s unelected bureaucrats are positively addicted to public money it’s up to us to deny them the object of their addiction. Their obsession with short-term gains over long-term stability surpasses any potential loyalty that their constituents may erroneously believe is owed to them. Worst of all, none of this is technically illegal under state law and Montana’s clueless legislative bodies have no intentions of reigning in the abuse.
A mass campaign of civil disobedience aimed at refusing to pay another nickel in property taxes until the schools receive the money already available in the general fund seems like the only way to force the MRA’s blatant malfeasance into the light of day. This would require the participation of many property owners to support each other in the courts while also forcing the issue legislatively and making as much noise as possible through citizen initiatives and independent media. Such an action only seems like a pipe-dream because the pathologically obedient masses are mostly cowards who justify their cowardice by conflating it with pacifism. However, as more citizens are taxed out of their homes, perhaps the threat of poverty and homelessness will inspire the necessary urgency required to reform our crooked local government.
If Missoulians really desire to support their public schools it is paramount to demand budgetary accountability instead of further fueling the dumpster fire by approving more tax increases. Until we deal with the MRA, approving levies because we think we’re supporting the schools only further screws our neighbors with higher property taxes. The phrase “support our schools” is already nothing but a meaningless platitude based in misconceptions that contradict its intended sentiment. The schools exist at the pleasure of the MRA and the money our schools receive no longer bears any relationship to the will of the taxpayers.
Regardless of what the yard signs might allege, voting for school levies does not benefit the schools. It only benefits Empress Ellen and her cabal of corrupt cohorts.
Missoula local Phil Atkins passed away on the morning of Wednesday 23 April 2025 at the age of 87. Phil was a dedicated outdoorsman and poet who published several books including Free in the Sapphire Mountains (2003), Mountain Water Mountain Air (2010), Lost Water Canyon (2013), and When the Earth is New (2020).
Born in Munising, Michigan in August of 1937 to Lyle and Ethel Atkins, Philip Anton Atkins grew up in a small cabin near the Pictured Rocks along Lake Superior on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The family spent a lot of time at this cabin fishing, hunting and camping. His father Lyle was a musician renowned for his ability to play literally any instrument who taught music at Carthage College in Illinois near the shores of Lake Michigan.
After a tragic boating accident on Lake Superior resulted in the drowning deaths of Lyle and several other family members, Phil’s mother abandoned the cabin. Today, the area where Phil spent his childhood is a national park.
Phil also grew up on a farm where everything was done in the old ways by hand and with horses. The family eventually sold their farm and put the money in a trust. Despite the fact that they lived a life of extreme frugality, the Atkins family moved to Mexico for a spell where they thrived by the generosity of others and spent a lot of time walking the railroad lines.
When he was 19 years old Phil joined the military for a four year stint of active duty with the United States Navy. Enlisting in September of 1956, Phil spent six months in California at the Navy’s communications school in 1957 and was trained as a radio repairman. Back in those days radios were big and heavy and still used vacuum tubes that had to be changed out and very carefully handled. When his training was complete, Phil was assigned to a Destroyer (or “tin can” in sailor parlance) called the USS Kidd.
USS Kidd (DD-661)
Phil left active duty in August of 1960 but he remained in the Navy as a reservist. Then Nikita Khrushchev deployed nuclear weapons to Cuba and thus began the notorious Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962. Because the Navy was desperately scrambling every available sailor and ship it could find, Phil was activated and sent to the front line. The U.S. Naval blockade that encircled Cuba with warships included the USS Kidd, providing Phil with a front-row seat to the historic standoff infamous for nearly sparking thermonuclear World War Three.
Following the two week ordeal in the gulf, Navy ships and personnel returned to their ports and Phil served out the remaining four months of his reserve contract. He was awarded the Navy’s Good Conduct Medal and honorably discharged from service in February of 1963.
Following his military career, Phil came to Missoula and attended the University of Montana on the G.I. Bill to study writing under the great Leslie Fiedler. It was during this era that Phil fell while rock climbing and sustained injuries serious enough to necessitate a four month stay in the hospital. When Phil learned that tuition was free in California, he left the UM for UC San Francisco.
After he was done with college, Phil lived all over the American West, hitchhiking everywhere he went and relying upon his many connections that kept him well fed and out of trouble. He lived a Jack Kerouac kind of life a la the 1957 best seller, On The Road. When he lived in Bellingham, Washington he spent his days in the shipyards as a dockworker. He also spent a lot of time in New Mexico.
Phil eventually returned to Montana and became a social worker assigned to Great Falls as well as parts of Wyoming. During this time he was dispatched to “Hill 57” outside of Great Falls, named after a billboard advertising Heinz 57 Sauce. Near this billboard sat a shantytown sporting an array of old abandoned campers, buses and trucks, many of which were occupied by individuals and families who were actively living in them. These were the so-called “Landless Indians” forgotten by treaties and never granted formal reservations, and it was Phil’s job to try to improve their lives.
Throughout most of his life Phil spent a great deal of his time fishing and talking about fishing. Some of his fondest memories surround his time living near Vermilion Creek in Montana’s Thompson River Valley. Having spent much of his life hitchhiking from one fishing destination to another, Phil seemed to have lived in just about every corner of Montana. If you pointed to a random spot on a map the chances were good that Phil could tell a story about it and demonstrate specific knowledge of the area.
Known for being quite rowdy in his younger days, Phil was a frequent patron of the saloons for many years when he wasn’t spending time in the woods. Back when Charlie’s Bar was still called Eddie’s Club in downtown Missoula many regulars referred to him as “Forestry Phil”. Though he gave up alcohol some years ago, Phil never lost his taste for beer and would often crack open a non-alcoholic Clausthaler, sipping it through his ever-present grin.
When he later returned to Missoula, Phil ended up living with Michael Fiedler, son of the literary legend Leslie Fiedler. Phil was a widely read man who could exhibit familiarity with any book you could think to mention. In his later years he could fill hours referencing the great literature he had spent decades reading and absorbing. He was particularly fond of Edward Abbey (author of Desert Solitaire) and Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian).
Phil also lived for many years on the “richest hill on earth” in Butte, Montana, and it was through a foundation there that he got his books published. Phil’s poetry could paint a musical mosaic and light a fire within the imagination. Take this poem from his 2003 book, Free in the Sapphire Mountains:
July at Fawn Springs
Wandering up on Strawberry Mountain Where the tiniest wild flowers in The world flourish white and red and blue, We’re idling where the breezes whisper Among big pines in The grassy glades of loafer’s heaven Where the springs are tinkling down in Streams of purest silver and Wild strawberry gardens Hide among the grasses with The fruit of paradise.
But Phil didn’t only yarn on about the ineffable beauty of the natural world. He was also intensely critical of war profiteering and government corruption. One of Phil’s most powerful poems appears near the end of his 2013 book, Lost Water Canyon:
Double-talk Snake-walk
While pretending to care About the common people And blowing hot air, It takes but a slight breeze in the night To float Obama like a feather Far to the right On the wrong side of the class war fight. Change or chump change, He’s burned his campaign platform Down to the ground, And if the bold lies he told Were nuggets of gold, The president of sneak and peek Would be rich as Midas. But back then he looked tall As he talked big in the hall And now he’s on the hill Throwing nothing but spitballs, Screwballs and sliders. Secretive, sinister, servile and sly, He rode to the White House On the back of a lie And stabbed us in the back in the wink of an eye, While suffering in common with the super rich And a congress of corruptionists from A severe case of spiritual malnutrition On and on they’re bound to toil For Wall Street and Israel, The pentagon and big oil.
Phil refused to use computers of any kind, and drafted his poems by hand in small notebooks before hammering them out with an old typewriter. He left behind several unpublished poems, and of the dozens of pages he left behind, the following works stand out.
Mother Nature’s Sounding Drum
Tell me who has never seen A little woodpecker hard at work And stood astonished, Riveted by the sight, the sounding drum Of Mother Nature’s unmatched power Profoundly active in so small a bird- Rat a tat tat, rat a tat tat tat- As with a will he works his way Rat a tat tat relentlessly With whatever wood there be- The toughest tree And he with but A wee little bill, you see, Hard as a diamond drill To gather up tree bugs His hungry chicks will fill Where they hide away with mother bird In a secret somewhere South of Wildrose Hill.
Many of the best poems are without titles and Phil seems to emerge right off the page:
Since you ask me where I’ve been, For forty years I wandered This World of great wonders, learned a million things, Been all over and done my best, But I’m still a damn fool, A pauper in a rich man’s country, Who just ain’t made for Creditcard ratrace or TV civilization American style. And so you see That’s how I came to be A Hillbilly poet of The vast U.S. underclass, Just because I couldn’t be A bee in the big money tree. For God made Man to be In Nature ever free, Not a prisoner of wage slavery. And those who study Nature know Why Man’s machines have to go; Quietude is good food for the Soul.
This other untitled work speaks as a kind of self portrait:
Hillbilly farmboy, child of the thirties, By day pumping water, pitching hay, Nights by lamplight-hooked on books and already traveling thereby, I was born restless I guess, Without Ambition American style, Yet with tireless legs Always eager to go somewhere, The ancient urge to ramble and roam, To wander at random see Earth’s beauty And see the infinite wonders of Mother Nature’s wealth in person. For when but a child I could see pretty far, Yet could see no place for me In fossil fuel or Corporate civilization’s assembly line Timeclock workaholic machine age ratrace That so shrivels the soul And shrinks the Spirit of Man. Corporate kings USA Likewise poison the Earth, The air and the seas With endless oil wars And unchecked industrial pollution American style and so you see, It came to me naturally To play no part in this uncivilized civilization. Whereas when a child in The big North woods by Lake Superior I found myself at home in the peaceful forest With the blessing of birdsong, Waters, wildflowers and whispering winds.
Finally there’s this lovely little gem:
NO CELLPHONE
Wide awake in the morning To the favorable fortunes of fate, I caught sight of beauty rare In the USA today, A dusky rose I see, A lightfoot lass with No smartphone in her hand. In dark eyes little fires flame With the mesmerizing power Of kindly regard in The fearless light of An open heart’s love of life. Naturally a riot of ringlets sprightly Are curling all down her back Twining and shining raven black. Herself be supple and small, a Strong and magnetic Spirit. She is Mother Nature’s reminder of True health made manifest In this hightech USA of Sick and heavy eaters. And so I say, May she not be forgotten!
Phil is survived by children whom he did not know and was never able to reconnect with. What remains are his books, which are all cataloged in the Library of Congress.
An avid bird watcher who often carried books on bird identification, Phil was known for taking long walks through Missoula on a daily basis. Even after breaking both femurs in his late 70’s, Phil continued his nature walks well into his 80’s. In his later years, Phil’s favorite activity was philosophizing and reminiscing with old friends over a cup of coffee at Butterfly Herbs in downtown Missoula. Imparting his life experiences and disdain for irrational government authority often and proudly, Phil Atkins was fiercely independent in every way.
In 2019, a man named Nathan White ran for mayor of Choteau, Montana in a special election. He garnered 6% of the vote without campaigning and earned the support of several prominent figures including a judge and a city councilman. He planned to run again in the 2021 mayoral race with a full campaign effort and many locals were behind him. But in the spring of 2021 Nate was arrested on spurious charges and transported 99 miles away to a detention center in Fort Benton. After missing the 2021 filing deadline White was forced to abandon his campaign to clear his name.
Nestled on the eastern prairies of the Rocky Mountain Front sits the small town of Choteau, Montana. With a population of 1,787, everybody knows everybody else in this rural ranching community. Originally a trading post, Choteau was incorporated in 1913 and named after a French fur trader by the name of Pierre Chouteau, Jr. The locale got a shout-out in the original Jurassic Park movie because of its proximity to a world-famous paleontology site called Egg Mountain. There is even an occasional appearance by former late-night host David Letterman who owns a nearby vacation ranch he purchased back in 1999.
Choteau is also a town that daily announces 12 o’clock noon by blaring an air-raid siren from the “duck-and-cover” era that locals refer to as the “noon whistle”.
It certainly feels like eastern Montana with the rolling plains and constant wind but one look west yields the epic eastern ridgeline of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Glacier Park and Great Falls are also both just a quick pony ride away. This is the slice of the Rocky Mountain West that Nathan fell in love with nearly two decades ago.
Nate’s old home address at 204 Sixth Avenue NE sits a stone’s throw away from both Choteau City Hall and the historic Teton County Courthouse building. Nate and his wife bought their house in 2010 after moving up from Helena the year prior. During the winter months both worked as ski instructors on local slopes throughout the state. During the summer months Nate worked as a construction contractor to finance his increasingly full-time side career as a writer/researcher.
White became a regular at local government meetings as a matter of civic duty and his criticisms were numerous. But perhaps the most universally volatile issue Nate helped expose was the creation of a local port authority that conflicted with the will of local voters who overwhelmingly rejected it at the polls.
When the idea of a port authority was pitched to the voters of Teton County in 2016, they voted against it “in all five of the county’s voter precincts”. But popular will didn’t stop its formation. In the spring of 2017 the four members of the Choteau City Council voted unanimously to create a port authority anyway for reasons of “economic development”. They called it the Choteau Area Port Authority (CAPA) andit has attracted fierce criticism from many locals ever since.
“The port authority, as one proponent puts it, is a funny name for an economic development tool that the state Legislature created for counties and cities to use. Toole, Pondera and Cascade counties as well as the city of Great Falls presently use their own port authorities to leverage grants for economic development, to provide assistance to business start-ups, to recruit potential businesses to their communities, and to help businesses cut through red tape … The way we see it, the establishment and stable funding for a Teton County Port Authority is an investment in the future of our county that we cannot afford to pass up. We have to plant this crop, folks, and we have to do everything possible to make sure that it yields a harvest of jobs and economic opportunities.”
As evidence of the so-called “economic development” created by a port authority in neighboring Toole County, proponents emphasized the job creation catalyzed by the private prison in Shelby, Montana. Doing business with the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) might seem completely acceptable if “increasing taxable value” is the primary motivation, but such Faustian contracts seem like a dismal excuse for increasing revenue if sacrificing our humanity is the price. The ACLU described CCA prisons as inhumane and unsafe, and undercover journalist Shane Bauer exposed how destructive they are to both inmates and guards during his “four months as a private prison guard”. In any event, more prisons are evidence of society’s decay, not its health. That private prisons are touted as “economic development” serves a useful reminder that not all growth is good; some growth is cancerous.
Whether it’s good for the gander or not, Nate asserts that the problem centers around the fact that Teton County citizens voted “no” on the proposed port authority but local bureaucrats ended up establishing it anyway. Consequently, local taxes were levied to pay for it.
“Mary Sexton helped create this port authority and appointed herself as the head of it,”says White. “Before the vote had even taken place, she was saying that if it doesn’t get voted in by the people, we’ll install it anyway. So people refer to her as Queen Mary because she was once a Rodeo Queen in Montana, and because that’s her attitude – that she knows better than the locals do because she has a degree from Stanford.”
“Mary Sexton of Choteau was elected the chairwoman of the Montana Democratic Party on Aug. 12 … Sexton served as director of Natural Resources and Conservation from 2006 to 2013 under then-Gov. Brian Schweitzer and is a former Teton County Commissioner. She presently serves on the Choteau Area Port Authority and is active in economic development in Choteau and Teton County.”
Sexton’s career as a bureaucrat seems to have reached an apex with her appointment to CAPA as board chairwoman. The question of who exactly benefits from this nebulous “economic development” remains a mystery to most of the public, however, especially when certain operations are grant funded.
Since it can be notoriously difficult to find a place to eat in Choteau before 11 a.m., we asked some of the locals where this economic development was supposedly occurring.
“The port authority is an incredible joke,” says former City Councilman Jim Anderson.
Jim Anderson
Jim served on the Choteau City Council for eight years, representing Ward 1 from January of 2006 until December of 2013. During our visit to his office at Grizzly Auto Repair in Choteau, he told us that instead of bolstering the local economy, as the port authority promised, the City issued his auto shop a cease-and-desist order for normal operating practices.
“The port authority has not done anything to promote business in Choteau,” says Anderson. “It was supposed to promote business. It’s a total waste of time and the county voted it down. And the grant money always goes to engineers while the taxpayers pay through the nose.”
Nate contends that the grants are part of the problem. “These grants come in but where is this so-called economic development occurring?” he asks. “Who is benefiting from it? Mary Sexton received a $60,000 grant for Grizzly bear habitat.”
Mary Sexton, photo by the Acantha
We asked Mary Sexton if she had received such a grant, and if so, how this money would impact Grizzly populations. She gave us the following response, “I did a conservation easement through Vital Ground which precludes any further development/subdivision, must remain in agriculture, with parameters for dealing with bears.”
As the person responsible for generating economic development in her capacity with CAPA, it seems contradictory that Sexton received a grant that explicitly prohibits development from occurring, at least as far as the Glen Willow Ranch is concerned. Sexton did not elaborate and she declined to tell us anything about her involvement with the port authority or her affiliation with the Democrat Party. As such, we were deprived of the chance to ask her whether she agrees with our assessment that it seems tragically ironic that an anti-democratic decision (such as the creation of an unelected body against popular will) was made with the blessing of the Montana Democrat Party’s Chairwoman.
White says that the common locals do not benefit from CAPA grant monies. “Career bureaucrats at the port authority have subverted local government and are leading us off a cliff while they endlessly grab for grants attached to big government strings,” he says. “Choteau has become a federal colony that’s addicted to government cheese.”
THE SPECIAL ELECTION
After John “Jack” Conatser succeeded Jay Dunckel as mayor of Choteau in 2013, he won a second term in 2017. Not long after this second victory Conatser was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and his untimely illness threw quite a wrench into the proverbial works of the rotation sequence. Mayoral terms are 4 years long and the ongoing term wasn’t up until 2021. So after Conatser’s resignation, Dan Lannen was sworn in as the interim mayor in June of 2018 until the position could go up for a special election in 2019. That’s when Nathan first decided it was time to put his hat in the ring for mayor of Choteau.
Candidate White, photo by Choteau Acantha
Candidate Nate White platformed on cleaning up the local government which he described as running rampant with dysfunction and conflicts of interest at the expense of residents. At the Choteau Mayoral Candidate Forum on 24 September 2019, he championed restorative justice practices as a means of allowing communities to invent creative solutions and solve their own problems.
It seemed clear that the undemocratic implementation of the port authority had strongly motivated Nate’s run for office. As he told the audience that evening, “While we do talk about economic development quite a bit I don’t think we need to have an outcome in mind and then try to control everyone to arrive at that desired outcome. … We need to establish facts, not fictions. Now is time.”
“You know what I see as positive? Living in a community where we can actually afford to live here,” said White. “Mary Sexton, she wants to talk about economic development, and we don’t want this place to turn into Whitefish. How are we going to achieve that? I don’t want this place to turn into a toxified garbage dump run by Nazis.”
Former councilman Jim Anderson was encouraged by Nate’s mayoral run. “I have known Nate a long time,” he says. “I did support him.”
IT DOESN’T TAKE A BIG PERSON TO CARRY A GRUDGE
Come November 2019 the seasons had changed and Chris Hindoien emerged as the victor for Choteau’s Mayor. The headline in the paper didn’t surprise Nate. But as he read on he was indeed surprised to see that more people had voted against Hindoien than had voted for him. In a race with three candidates, 6.5% of voters chose Nathan White for mayor. With another election just two years away, Nate recognized the potential and became serious about running again in 2021 with a full campaign. He even rented out an office in historic downtown Choteau for the occasion and stocked it with signs, stickers and buttons.
Then the Covid-19 nightmare began. Just four months after the election, global customs changed for the worse. Nate was among the earliest critics of the corporate narrative being forced at the time, which made him an unrepentant “grandma killer” in the eyes of the herd of hyperbolic hypochondriacs who were hypnotized by St. Fauci’s needle cult.
Most routines were disrupted as the world succumbed to the paranoid global-shutdown panic of 2020. The custom of Choteau’s “noon whistle” prevailed, however, and on the fateful afternoon of 14 September 2020 it happened to go off as Nate was walking past the City office. After purportedly stepping inside to complain about the siren’s long duration he was asked to leave and then law enforcement was called.
Officers responded to this alleged “disturbance” and left something priceless behind.
Bodycam footage captured by the Teton County Sheriff’s Office exhibits a bizarre conversation between Mayor Chris Hindoien and Deputy Jeff Kraft concerning future dealings with Nathan White. When the deputy arrives he first speaks with Nate outside. Nate tells the deputy that City Finance Officer Jodi Rogers escalated the situation and prompted him to leave the building. Though the noon whistle is often referred to as “teeth rattling” by locals, Nate maintains that his dispute with city officials had little to do with that.
“I don’t want to come in here and yell at Jodi,” says Nate. “I also don’t want Jodi to yell at me. But it’s like, Jodi you’re frickin’ screaming at me. As soon as I started talking about that financial audit she got real nervous because she’s running the books.”
After Nate says this, Deputy Kraft bids him farewell and steps into city hall to follow up with the people who called him down there. Upon entering the room, Deputy Kraft says to them, “I’ve got to admit I’m struggling on what exactly we’re gonna be able to do. I mean, we can always fall back on like a disorderly conduct but, I don’t know if that’s going to – is it going to make it better or worse? I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like we can arrest on it. You can’t even arrest on it anymore. I mean, it’s a cite. And going to court I don’t know what to do with him.”
Mayor Hindoien replies, “But to be honest, he [Nate] owns no property inside the city limits of Choteau. He pays no taxes inside the city limits of Choteau. He has no business inside of this building. He doesn’t have to pay garbage, he doesn’t have to pay sewer, he doesn’t have to pay water.”
Kraft says, “I don’t know if we can do that though. I mean, if–”
Hindoien repeats, “He has no reason to be in this building.”
Deputy Kraft sighs, “But the problem is it’s a government building.”
The mayor nods and says, “I am well aware of that.”
Deputy Kraft says, “If there is something that you can pursue as far as, like, a safety issue to exclude him or something, that’s one thing. But I can’t tell him – I couldn’t tell him not to go to the courthouse either. I just, I can’t. … Now as far as an order of protection or something, that’s a different matter. And that’s something that you might need to investigate.”
Mayor Hindoien says, “And we’re looking into that. … Tomorrow night’s city council meeting will be very, very entertaining because you know he’ll be there.
Kraft says, “I thought he was excluded from those.”
“Nope,” Hindoien shakes his head. “We never got in a point where we could do it. Jen was waiting for one more blow up. And again, he’s not a citizen of Choteau.”
Mayor Chris Hindoien
Deputy Kraft thinks for a moment and says, “Um, let me, let me try to do a little brainstorming on this. I’m kind of at a loss of what legally we can bring against him other than, like I said, there’s a disorderly conduct issue because he’s yelling profanities. But it’s going to have to get down to a point where we look at a protection order kind of thing. You know. A restraining order or something of that nature. By law I just don’t know what else I can do right now. … We’ll figure something out. I just, I’ve got to be honest with you, right now I don’t know what it is.”
“I’m with you,” replies Hindoien. “If I thought there was a magic button or a magic key–”
Deputy Jeff Kraft
Kraft interjects, “I would encourage you guys, no matter what we can do, to pursue that order of protection. I don’t know what the legalities of it are, um, but I would think that would be one of the few ways we could actually get him excluded from the building, if – if it were legal to grant an order under those circumstances. … And that’s the key right there is we’re excluding him from you guys, not from the building. And so maybe that is a way that we can work around this and still be – because you know he’s about the constitution right? And he is a lot of stuff but he’s not dumb. So they’re going to have to do things the right way on this one. So we’ll see what we can do. Um, there’ll be something out there it’s just sometimes we have to think a little harder and come up with some different solutions.”
It’s at this point that City Finance Officer Jodi Rogers perks up and says, “Do you want me to tell you what Denny Blauer did once with Lisa? He went over there and let her punch him. Anyway, I’m just suggesting– ”
As laughter fills the room, Rogers continues, “We could haul off after a pounding and ask him for it.”
Deputy Kraft immediately steps away and says, “La-la-la-la-la. See you guys.”
Kraft finally makes his exit, and while fiddling with the camera he can be heard saying under his breath, “I’m going to turn this thing off before you say anything else.” The video ends there.
Hindoien and Rogers talk with Deputy Kraft
This bodycam video captured public officials apparently joking about entrapment through deliberate provocation. City Finance Officer Jodi Rogers described an occasion where a local woman named Lisa Knox-Seith was coerced through intimidation into striking a law enforcement officer and then involuntarily committed to the state mental hospital in Warm Springs for doing so. As reported by the Choteau Acantha on 27 October 2010:
“Lisa Knox-Seith, 50, 128 Second Ave. S.W. Choteau, participated in a court hearing in Choteau via the VisionNet interactive video service from Warm Springs, on Oct. 19. Her public defender, Dan Minnis of Cut Bank, was present in the courtroom. Knox-Seith pleaded innocent to assault with a weapon and assault on a peace officer, both felonies. Knox-Seith is accused of striking a Choteau man on the head with a shovel during a confrontation in their neighborhood on Sept. 25, 2010. She is also accused of striking Undersheriff Denny Blauer as he secured her in a patrol car after the altercation. She pleaded innocent to both charges.”
Beyond that, the mayor’s justifications are based on the fallacy that only those who pay local taxes are eligible for admittance into local government buildings. Throughout the video, Hindoien repeatedly attempts to convince Deputy Kraft that Nate had abandoned his property and was living elsewhere.
“He’s not even a citizen of the city of Choteau anymore,” says Hindoien, “He lives out in Farmington. He has no business being in this building whatsoever.”
“Really?” says Kraft. “When did he move?”
“The well at his place collapsed and they couldn’t get water over there,” says Hindoien.
But Nate did, in fact, live in the city limits in a house that he owned, and the records indicate that Hindoien was aware of this fact. In official letters sent to Nate’s home address from the mayor’s office in 2020 – that are even signed in ink by Hindoien himself – Nate’s address appears right next to his name on the letterhead.
“Our well never collapsed,” says White. “It is true that there was a lot of sediment that clogged those lines and that eventually blew up our pump. So we installed a hand pump. But we never stopped living in that house until we sold it in 2022.”
The mayor’s claim that Nate wasn’t local enough to enter a City building also seemed strangely contradictory given how he then directed the deputy’s attention to Nate’s downtown office. “[Nate’s] got an office above the insurance agency here too,” says Hindoien. “Upstairs.”
“For what?” asks Deputy Kraft, “His campaign?”
AN UPHILL CAMPAIGN
On 04 October 2020 Kathleen Williams held a rally in Choteau for her statewide campaign that was attended by White. As documented by court records, there was a physical altercation between White and a retired officer of the Choteau Police named Wade McKay. According to witness statements, McKay escalated the situation by shoving Nate.
“Wade McKay’s first words upon interacting with me were, ‘Where’s your mask?’” says White. “Then he gave me a chest bump so I said, ‘Get out of my face, partner.’ So he responded by saying, ‘I’m not your partner.’ And that’s when he pushed me down and stood over me with his fists clenched.”
Nate recalls the incident with a chuckle, “Kathleen Williams didn’t have a mask on and he didn’t yell at her or shove her to the ground. So what’s so triggering about me when I’m just there to speak with her?”
Deputy Devin Cichosz wrote in his statement that, “McKay told [Nate’s wife] to take White and go back to where they came from. [She] told Mckay that they live in Choteau, and then Mckay said not for long.” According to Deputy Cichosz, when McKay was later questioned at his home about the “incident,” he admitted that the shoving was due to the fact that he, “McKay did not like him being that close because he didn’t have a mask on.”
In fact, the primary complaint cited that day was the concern that “Mr. White wasn’t wearing a mask”. Debates over mask efficacy notwithstanding, failure to mask at an outdoor public setting fails to meet the qualifications for a crime as defined by law. Shoving another person, however, does. But no charges were brought against McKay, whose wife happened to work as the sheriff’s dispatcher at the time. Instead it was Nate who was later approached by law enforcement, even though witnesses confirmed to deputies that it was McKay who escalated the situation by shoving Nate, not the other way around.
THE THREAT THAT WASN’T
On 28 October 2020, while standing outside of the local post office, Nate White and Mayor Chris Hindoien were discussing the governor’s mask policy when Mary Sexton showed up to collect her mail. According to sheriff reports a man named Jeff Curtis began shouting at Nate from across the street. Curtis then called the sheriff’s office alleging that Nate had threatened him. Even though this apparent threat was never corroborated by the other witnesses present, including the mayor, Nate was later cited by law enforcement. While investigating this so-called “disturbance,” Deputy Shane Dean contacted Mary Sexton who “went on to say that what bothered her is that White did not have a mask on.”
In a recorded phone call regarding the post office encounter, Mary Sexton told Deputy Shane Dean, “You know, I believe in public places you wear a mask. And when you talk to people that you haven’t seen for a while, you wear a mask. And I have not seen him [Nate] wear a mask.”
Nate wasn’t charged for failure to mask because it’s not illegal, beliefs aside. Instead, he was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct; one for “making loud noises by yelling” and another for “challenging someone to a fist fight”.
“I never challenged anyone to a fight,” says White.
ACCUSATIONS OF VOTER INTERFERENCE
On 30 October 2020 Nate was scheduled to meet with Judge Pete Rasmussen to discuss the charges that followed his interactions at the post office. Justice Rasmussen was absent from the courthouse upon Nate’s arrival. So Nate began searching the building to find the judge and happened upon County Commissioner Jim Hodgkiss. The men began to talk, but as soon as their conversation began, Teton County Clerk Paula Joconetty entered the hallway to tell Nate their discussion was unwelcome. Law enforcement were called and more frivolous citations were filed, this time for allegedly disrupting voters. Hodgkiss was never visited by law enforcement for this apparent “disruption” or questioned about it like Nate was. And while the claim of voter intimidation was simply never supported by evidence, deputies were tasked with a fishing expedition nonetheless.
After speaking with one local voter who was present in the building at the time of the supposed incident, Deputy Jonathan Gilliland acknowledged in his report that, “She said that [Nate] wasn’t distracting her. … She also told me that she was surprised that I was calling her about the situation and didn’t want to fill out a statement.”
Teton County Clerk Paula Joconetty likewise admits in her own statement that, “Nate has been in the courthouse at least three times this week and has not been confrontational but he was asked to leave when he spent excess time with the election judge that is manning the ballot drop box.”
It makes absolutely no sense that law enforcement were called about this. But as the sheriff reports indicate, some public servants were ultimately triggered by the fact that Nathan White was not wearing a mask. That included Teton County Clerk Sandra Dogiakos who stated to authorities, “Nate White entered the second floor of the Courthouse from the North stairwell. Nate was not wearing a mask.” She went on to say, “This week, Nate has on several occasions stood inside the East Entrance of the courthouse while refusing to wear a mask.” County Clerk Paula Jaconetty’s testimony similarly states that, “Nate White, unmasked, was in the courthouse to see Justice of the Peace Pete Rasmussen.”
Contrary to popular assumption, failure to wear a mask never became a legitimate legal gripe for enforcers to act on. And since no citizens were willing to attest that Nate interfered with their ability to vote, the pending charges hinged on the testimony of county clerks who were employed by the same court already pursuing legal action against Nate. This is how a polite conversation with a county commissioner resulted in an additional disorderly conduct charge for “disturbing a lawful assembly”.
Nate wouldn’t find out about this until the next day, when he was arrested at home.
A VERY SCARY HALLOWEEN
While walking through town on 31 October 2020 Nate made an inquiry regarding a sign at the courthouse that read, “social distance saves lives.” He says he couldn’t believe that his tax dollars were funding Covid propaganda. Because Nate is a man who speaks his mind, he stuck his head into the office and was met by Sandra Dogiakos. He asked who was responsible for “posting signs with fallacious information”. She asked him to leave and he immediately left. But for asking this question Nate was arrested at home later that day – while brushing his teeth – on yet another count of disorderly conduct for “disrupting a lawful assembly”.
A deputy was dispatched to Nate’s home to “talk about what happened” and shortly thereafter Nate was placed under arrest and taken to the local crowbar hotel. This encounter certainly begs the question: If Nate didn’t live in town, as the mayor frequently asserted to law enforcement, then how were deputies able to apprehend him at his home address?
Former City Councilman Jim Anderson bailed Nate out of jail later that evening.
“Nate made himself a target,” says Anderson. “They had to stop him because he was openly opposing their agendas. They had to stop him from spouting off like that.”
IF YOU CLIMB IN THE SADDLE BE READY FOR THE RIDE
The day before Nate was scheduled to appear in court for his disorderly charges, Deputy Kraft showed up at his residence on 03 MARCH 2021. Kraft served White a temporary order of protection on behalf of City Councilman Steve Dogiakos and his wife Sandra, the county clerk. The paperwork references Steve’s need to be protected from Nate, alleging he had “persistently harassed a public official” with intent to seek their home address.
Steve wasn’t just a councilman but also a board member of the port authority whom Nate wished to address, citizen to representative. Since Dogiakos wasn’t answering Nate’s Emails, Nate decided to send his inquiries via certified snail mail. But when he asked for a mailing address the councilman hit the ceiling. Instead of engaging with a constituent, Dogiakos applied for a restraining order.
Two weeks after this Nate was served with more criminal charges, this time from a six-month-old allegation stemming from his complaint about the noon whistle the previous autumn. Nate was summoned to appear on 17 March 2021 for remarks exchanged six months earlier on 14 September 2020 and charged with two counts of assault and another disorderly conduct. Added to the four charges of disorderly conduct from October, Nate now faced a total of seven formal lawbreaking allegations.
When Nate questioned why nobody informed him that criminal charges were pending for six months, officials alleged that it took that long to get the papers sent off to the county attorney’s office. But this was provably false since the relevant paperwork was all stamped by the county attorney’s office in October of the previous year. As outlined by Case Report # 220CR0001422, these forms were “Sent to County Attorney” and dated “10/3/20”.
Why did officials sit on these charges for half a year? Why litigate over an innocuous interaction from six months before, when Deputy Kraft affirmed to Mayor Hindoien that there was no offense he could arrest on?
A BREAK IN THE STORM
On 24 March 2021 Nate appeared in court for Steve Dogiakos’ protection order hearing. Dogiakos presumed that constituents have no business knowing where their elected officials live. But the restraining order was ultimately denied by the judge because elected officials are actually required to disclose their home addresses to the public. As it turns out, seeking a public official’s home address is a completely lawful act, and one upheld by the courts as constitutional under the First Amendment.
Steve Dogiakos
Judge Pete Rasmussen declared that this protection order constituted an unreasonable violation of Nate’s rights. Recalling his own career in city council, the judge told Dogiakos that angry constituents would often confront him in the grocery store and suggested that Mr. Dogiakos needed to “toughen up” because when you go into politics enduring criticism is part of the package. The attempt to impose a permanent restraining order against Nate was further deemed unlawful for failure to meet the legal requirement of eligibility, namely, a reasonable apprehension of bodily injury.
Nate’s rebuttal motion stated that:
“Mr. Dogiakos has maintained that Mr. White was violent toward Mr. Dogiakos because Mr. White asked City of Choteau employees for Mr. Dogiakos’ address. … Even if Mr. Dogiakos’ claims against Mr. White were accurate, the issuance of any Protective Order against Mr. White would serve to further the illegal harassment of Mr. White . There has been no fact presented to this Court that even suggests Mr. Dogiakos’ “fear” is anything other than feigned and/or irrational. Mr. White has never harmed nor threatened Mr. Dogiakos. … Furthermore, Mr. Dogiakos is attempting to use a False Protective Order to both impact the decision of a current and/or pending case(s) in the legal system, and to restrict Mr. White’s ability to take part in the local government. … Mr. White has spoken publicly regarding the political malfeasance of local public officials. Mr. White’s speech is protected and Mr. Dogiakos’ retaliation is unlawful [per] MCA 2-2-145.”
Nate won this battle and the restraining order was ultimately dismissed, but it added more pages to his jacket that helped continue to build a case against him. And the worst was yet to come.
CHECKMATE
On 10 May 2021 Nate White visited the office of Teton County Deputy Attorney Jennifer Stutz to address the cases she was prosecuting against him. Stutz had refused to talk with White, instructing him to correspond only in writing due to his “behavior in my office on previous occasions.”
Stutz continues, “He had been told many times not to come to our building as he is disruptive and keeps repeatedly raising the same grievances.” Since Nate was representing himself pro se, this inability to communicate directly with prosecutors posed a major problem for negotiating his cases.
Nate tells us, “I was raising the same grievances over and over because they were still unresolved and I was trying to resolve them.”
When Nate showed up at Stutz’s office on the Tenth of May to obtain documents related to his case, all hell broke loose.
White says, “Her husband Jeff was off duty when he showed up and said to me, ‘You can’t go in or I’m going to take you out!’ I went inside and told the clerk to call the cops and Jen responded by saying ‘Just leave!’ So I left, but as I was leaving the building, plain-clothes Jeff pushes me to the pavement, leaps on top of me and begins mauling me. Jeff said he was very upset that I’ve been mother-fuckering him all around town”.
Kraft’s report from that day reads, “The elements of this offense were established when the Suspect, Nathan White, stepped into the Teton County Courthouse Annex and began yelling at Deputy County Attorney Jennifer Stutz, causing herself and others in the building to be apprehensive for their safety.”
Kraft was off duty when he shackled Nate, and Undersheriff Ellsworth also responded to the call at the County Attorney’s Office. In his report, Ellsworth recounts a circular logic of Kafkaesque proportions: “On the way to the detention facility jail door White was informed he was under arrest for resisting arrest. White expressed dismay for this.”
Nate was genuinely surprised to find himself in handcuffs again. His trip to the annex netted him five new charges including criminal trespass, resisting arrest, another disorderly, and two counts of felony witness tampering.
Authorities determined that, while traveling in his truck, “Nate honked and waved at a known witness” named Jodi Rogers with his “evil grin” in an attempt to induce a change in her testimony, presumably for his charges back in September. But does honking a horn and waving while smiling really qualify as “witness tampering”? The deputy’s report deduces that because White and Rogers are not friends, “There is no reason for his behavior other than to intimidate Rogers.” Nate’s actions were similarly characterized by Stutz as “the conscious objective to induce fear for [Rogers’] personal safety.”
The second count of alleged witness tampering occurred the same day. Deputy Kraft wrote himself into his own report, alleging that Nate had, “made contact with Teton County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeff Kraft with the conscious objective to induce Deputy Kraft to amend his report and thereby testify or inform falsely.”
“The elements of this offense were established when the Suspect, Nathan White, knowing that I had investigated several cases in which he was the Suspect (and charged into court) approached me and told me that the statements I had attributed to him were lies, and that we needed to discuss them and change them. White clearly had the purpose of getting me, the investigating Deputy, to change my official report, and subsequently, my testimony.” ~Deputy Jeff Kraft TCSO 31-6
Nate tells us, “What I actually said was that you [Jeff] made untrue statements. Because he did. He lied in his report. And after I said that to him he assaulted me and threw me in jail.”
Having undergone a heart surgery two years prior, the overwhelming injustice of this arrest and subsequent detention drove Nate into a panic attack while in custody. Video evidence reveals that after Nate repeatedly insisted on medical attention, his limbs were bound to a restraining chair. He was then wheeled before a desk to call his lawyer by speakerphone.
The lawyer asked, “So, who are you on speakerphone with?”
Nate told him, “I’m tied up in a chair right now because I was repeatedly asking for medical treatment. Now I’m tied up in a chair.”
The lawyer responded, “Yeah, it’s probably better not to be talking, you know, on speakerphone.”
When Nate commented about his placement in the restraining chair as punishment, a jail staffer told him, “That chair is by no means punishment. I’m sorry you see it that way.”
Nate said, “Oh, it’s to keep me safe? Yeah.”
The jailer replied, “To keep you from injuring yourself.”
Nate shook his head and said, “No. Bullshit.”
Following this arrest, the authorities could have transported Nate to the nearby jail in Conrad which happened to be under capacity at the time. Instead, he was shipped 99 miles away to the jail on the Fort Benton Indian Reservation. He was then held on a $40,000 bond. To put that into perspective, this same detention facility was hosting another inmate at the time who was on the hook for blowing up the Gunther Motel Apartments with a propane bomb, and his bail was set at only $25,000.
This May 10th arrest spelled certain doom for Nate’s second mayoral run. With the 2021 filing deadline approaching in June, he was forced to abandon his campaign. Since cities can actually cancel elections if no challengers emerge, Choteau did not hold a mayoral election in 2021 and Chris Hindoien was elected by acclamation.
Mayor Chris Hindoien, photo by KRTV Great Falls
REBUTTING THE CHARGES
Taken individually, the law enforcement reports characterize Nathan White as an unhinged lunatic. But when observed together as a whole, the evidence begins to resemble something else. Of the twelve total charges levied against Nate, half of them were for something called “disorderly conduct”.
First and foremost, the disorderly conduct statute is not only an “unconstitutionally vague” allegation, but one that was actually born from a joke question on a final exam meant to help Missoula’s law students identify unconstitutional language. Whether the utterance of strange and unusual noises can be construed as unlawful seems uncompromisingly subjective. And Montana case law appears to have settled this debate in 1985 with Whitefish v. O’Shaughnessy:
“Many courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have held that an act constitutes a disturbance of the peace or breach of the peace only if it poses an immediate threat of violence or would tend to provoke violence from others. … The primary concern here is whether the statutes and ordinances are unconstitutionally vague… Also … whether the statutes and ordinances were used or could be used as a vehicle to punish or prohibit protected free speech or chill the right of free speech.” ~City of Whitefish v. O’Shaughnessy (1985) 216 Mont. 433, 704 P.2d 1021]
All six disorderly charges would later be dismissed by the court. In fact, all twelve of Nate’s charges were dismissed over the following 18 months. His two counts of assault from the September exchange were dismissed. His criminal trespass from the annex building was dismissed, as was the charge of resisting arrest from that same day. And when push came to shove, both of the felony witness tampering charges were also dismissed.
As Nate told the deputies during his booking in May, “It ain’t normal to get a witness tampering ticket for honking a horn. It’s abnormal!”
Jennifer Stutz
Deputy Kraft certainly had reasons to personally dislike Mr. White on account of the fact that Nate often spoke at public meetings about the “corporal punishment of teenage girls” that occurred at Kraft’s direction. But more critically, Nate publicly raised awareness of the fact that Teton County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeff Kraft’s marriage to City/County Attorney Jennifer Stutz constituted an ongoing conflict of interest.
Prosecutors fraternizing with law enforcement officers isn’t a new phenomenon in the State of Montana, but Stutz’s employment agreement for Choteau City Attorney, effective 01 July 2020, nonetheless contains a clause that requires she recuse herself whenever any case involves “a member of Jen Stutz’s immediate family.” Nate had announced this fact at the candidates forum in 2019 and at several other public gatherings as well.
In fact, when the City renewed Stutz’s contract in the summer of 2020, Nathan asked if she would be required to recuse herself from any cases that involved conflicts of interest. As reported by the Acantha:
In cases where Stutz has a conflict of interest, the contract stipulates that she will seek substitute counsel, including Teton County Attorney Joe Coble for criminal matters.
Beyond that, it is not illegal for citizens to raise grievances with public officials. In fact, public officials are required to bear public criticism so long as the First Amendment exists and there’s not a damn thing they’re supposed to be able to do about it. Popular culture’s recent obsession with the false notion of “political civility” is nothing more than a transparent means of attempting to control speech.
YEARS PASS
Nate and his wife eventually sold their Choteau home in 2022 and moved to an adjacent county to raise horses. As the months passed the deferred criminal charges were all eventually dismissed. With his name finally cleared, Nate publicly addressed his disappearance from political life for the first time in the summer of 2024 at a Choteau city council meeting on 18 June. It was the first time Nate had confronted Mayor Hindoien since his arrest three years earlier.
“I have only recently begun to speak publicly again after my wife and I suffered substantial damages. … False claims were made by the city to law enforcement who claimed that I had no reason to be in the City office because I did not even live in Choteau or pay city taxes. I did pay city taxes and the Mayor knew that I lived in Choteau. What transpired was nothing short of a conspiracy to violate my civil rights. … Rather than recognizing what was a blatant conflict of interest outlined in her employment agreement and immediately seeking a substitute counsel, the city attorney sought to retaliate against me instead.…They interfered in your 2021 election.”
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
Nate White wasn’t the only Choteau local who felt antagonized by Mayor Hindoien. After several firefighters quit the Choteau Volunteer Fire Department in the autumn of 2024 there was a definite tipping point of resentment. Months of infighting among fire department personnel led to the mayor’s involvement which worsened organizational squabbles. Several firefighters stated they felt “bullied” by the mayor, especially after receiving letters of intent from the mayor’s office demanding their compliance to a strict set of rules.
At the 17 December 2024 Choteau City Council meeting Fire Warden Ben Rhodes stood up and said:
“These guys are volunteers. Remember that. They are not a paid department. If you treat them like a paid department you’re going to lose them. …So if we are aren’t involved in retaliation, what do you call these pieces of paper that showed up after the fact that eleven members resigned? I would call that retaliation from somebody. … Please have your mayor back off of these guys and let them do their job.”
Then the mayor sent a list of the names of the firefighters who quit to the newspaper but forgot to redact their personal information from the message.
Choteau local Edward Bumgarner told the Outer Limits: “[Hindoien] really screwed up royal on how he handled firemen’s personal information. He sent the unredacted personal information, whether it was bank account numbers, social security numbers, birth dates or whatever they had on file with the city that is absolutely personal and is protected. Hindoien sent it all to the Choteau Acantha to Melody Martinsen on an unsecured Email. And you cannot do that. That is a felony. … Why he would send it to her is beyond me. There’s a lot of people up there scratching their heads wondering why he did that. But there are a whole lot of firemen who are really pissed.”
In the wake of this multifaceted battle with the fire department, the Choteau Acantha’s building burned in an early-morning irony on 07 January 2025. The Missoulian reported that “a Montana state fire marshal was en route to determine how the fire started”:
“The Choteau Volunteer Fire Department responded at 2:34 a.m. Jan. 7 to a structure fire at the weekly newspaper’s office at 216 First Ave. N., editor Melody Martinsen said in a posting on the newspaper’s website.”
Mayoral squabbles with fire departments have become a hot issue in 2025, but the coincidences surrounding this fire were so numerous and troublesome that the town began to buzz with rumors about what happened that night. Recognizing the optics for what they were, Fire Marshal Ben Rhodes sought an outside investigation from objective third parties. Deputy State Fire Marshal Doug Ulsh and the Teton County Sheriff’s Office stepped in and determined that the fire was indeed accidental, announcing that it was caused by a faulty space heater.
But the fire department wasn’t the only factor that contributed to this winter of discontent. The Sheriff’s Office was also experiencing significant problems with the mayor.
Choteau dissolved its police department in 1998 and has since farmed out law enforcement to the Teton County Sheriff’s Office. Because Choteau is the seat of Teton County, this relationship seems to make sense but has become increasingly volatile in recent months with questions concerning who should pay for it. Mayor Hindoien frequently reasoned that the sheriff’s office was billing the City for services they never ordered. The sheriff’s office says its not being compensated for services performed within the city limits. Locked in a stalemate, the mayor purportedly stonewalled the sheriff.
Teton County Sheriff Keith Van Setten
Van Setten summed it up by saying, “Choteau was paying 26% [of the sheriff’s budget] with the contract, and they were using up 56% of our time and energy and resources.” Van Setten says that the increased costs are partially due to inflationary reasons as well as an increase in internet crime.
Hindoien’s alleged refusal to renew the City’s contract with the Teton County Sheriff’s Office resulted in its expiration last September, which technically left Choteau without any law enforcement to the chagrin of many locals. The sheriff affirmed that he wouldn’t let Choteau go to the wolves over budget issues. But when it was time to renegotiate the contract, Mayor Hindoien appears to have given Sheriff Van Setten the cold shoulder. As reported by the Acantha:
VanSetten [sic] said the city told him at the June 27 meeting that it would provide him with a list of city ordinances that it would need the Sheriff’s Office to enforce under a new contract, and the city did not do that. He accused the city of failing to negotiate in good faith. … He said Choteau is receiving the lion’s share of law enforcement services, has become accustomed to that and expects more than he can provide based on the old contract.
The Sheriff’s office took most the blame, with Mayor Hindoien characterizing the expiration of the annual contract as “retaliation”:
Hindoien said he thought the county terminated the contract rather than renegotiating because of his actions in regard to the disgruntled neighbor situation. “It’s a retaliation,” he said, adding, “What the commissioners did, what Keith VanSetten [sic] did, what Joe Coble did, is they told the residents of Choteau that they don’t matter. The citizens of Choteau are still residents of Teton County and they are entitled to the same services as all residents of the county.”
In the middle of this multifaceted public relations circus, Nate returned to the city council one last time on 17 December 2024:
“I’m hearing from a City Council member, well we just have to get the mayor out of this process, and really because he’s so toxic. …Some of these issues are coming up with the firefighters and you’re saying ‘well, we didn’t have any hand in this.’ I’m not saying that you’re lying, butdo something about it.Remove him from office.”
Nate offered up a way to accomplish such a task:
“When [it is said that] the city council can’t do anything about [the mayor] because they’re a legislative branch, that is untrue. If you look at 7-4-4111 that’s MCA code, determination of vacancy in municipal office, this would be a reason … it says the incumbent’s conviction of a felony or of any offense involving moral turpitude or violation of official duties; the video I have demonstrates moral turpitude. It demonstrates the mayor conspiring against me; conspiring to violate my civil rights.”
THE PETITION TO RECALL MAYOR HINDOIEN
In the beginning of 2025, an outraged local named Edward Bumgarner stepped up and tried something that hadn’t been attempted in Choteau before.
In an exclusive interview last month, Bumgarner told the Outer Limits about how he had endured years of litigation with the City and Mayor Hindoien over trees on his property and the maintenance of Choteau’s urban forest. Bumgarner says that Choteau City officials repeatedly scheduled meetings without informing the citizens directly affected by their decisions. And when the City decided to make dramatic alterations to Bumgarner’s property during meetings he couldn’t attend, he fought back and sued the City of Choteau for their failure to follow the law. When the City further reneged on its responsibilities, Bumgarner resorted to filing a writ of mandamus and brought the issue before the Montana Supreme Court.
Bumgarner also told us that Mayor Hindoien instructed him to purchase an $2 million dollar insurance policy to cover the City in case somebody fell on his driveway, because it was built over they City’s sidewalk right of way. Since Chris Hindoien is the marketing coordinator for Rocky Mountain Insurance Services, an “independent producer for” Volunteer Fireman’s Insurance Services (VFIS), this proposed policy seemed suspicious to Ed:
“So then he wanted me to buy this indemnity policy. … I went to three different big insurance companies. They all looked at me with crossed eyes and said, “You can’t do that. We’ve never heard of that. I don’t think that’s possible.” … I opened up the Montana Code Annotated… It says that the only one who can buy an indemnity policy is an employee of the municipality. Well, Hindoien could buy it. I couldn’t though because I wasn’t an employee.”
Bumgarner described the ordeal as “fraud to the Nth degree. … He misrepresented himself and his office,” says Ed. “Because what he tried to make me do was a fraudulent move. … The whole issue of trying to get me to do something fraudulently I think is something that needs to be known.”
After years of litigation, the two-pronged scandal with the Sheriff’s Office and the Fire Department compelled Bumgarner to file a petition to recall the mayor.
“So, I began to work on a petition to recall,” says Bumgarner. “And to recall an elected official, I mean the requirements of the law to do that are almost mind boggling. I slogged through them and I had to redo it about five times. … But I finally got the thing done. And it had been approved by the County Attorney, so it was good to go. … Well the paper got a hold of it. And the paper then called Hindoien and told him there was a recall petition that was being circulated. And that’s when he came in and gave his resignation, the next Tuesday at the council meeting, and said he’s going to step down.”
Jim Anderson confirms the chronology. “The day the county attorney declared that petition legal, Hindoien quit.”
MARCH FORTH, MAYOR HINDOIEN
Selling his house and resigning his office, Chris Hindoien says he plans to relocate to Helena where his older brother Jeff is the chief legal council for Montana Fish and Wildlife. In describing why he left office, Chris proclaimed that, “I cannot continue to fight full-time battles in a part-time position.”
Hindoein says, “When I came on, I didn’t come on to be adored, but I also didn’t come on thinking that people I considered to be friends would all of a sudden become enemies.”… Rather than go through the recall process, Hindoien submitted his resignation to the city council on Tuesday night, effective March 4th.
The final year of Hindoien’s term is to be carried out by City Council President Stewart Merja who has served the City of Choteau for the past 15 years on the council. At his last meeting as Mayor of Choteau, Chris Hindoien made his final comments before resigning:
“As I wrap it up, it’s been 1,889 days. It’s been a blast. And I would do it again in a heartbeat. The cost of serving, as you guys all know, takes its toll. And if I was younger and dumber I’d probably stick around.” Chris’s eyes began to well with tears.
Turning to interim mayor Stewart Merja, Hindoien said, “ You will be fine, Stewart. Godspeed as you take over tomorrow morning. Lead with your heart. Don’t do what others would do – do what you’re going to do. Roll with the flow.” Hindoien closed by saying, “I’m going to leave this job very proud of the fact that I came in here to support and uphold the constitution of Montana and the United States and the laws of the State of Montana.”
Stewart Merja takes the reigns from Chris Hindoien
In the month since Hindoien’s resignation, negotiations with the sheriff’s office have resumed and the fire department has begun recovering its numbers.
“The Choteau Fire Department is growing and is very strong now,” reports Fire Marshal Rhodes. He says that some of the firemen who quit ended up returning to the department after the mayor’s departure. “Once we got rid of a few bad apples things are actually working out.”
FINDING AN HONEST POLITICIAN IS LIKE TRYING TO MILK A BULL
Similar to the case of Brandon Bryant and the terrorism allegations waged against him by Missoula officials in 2020, Nate White’s situation stands as another case of protected political speech coming under attack in the state of Montana. It seems perfectly obvious that Choteau officials knowingly applied a persistent lawfare strategy of attrition to prevent an inconvenient dialogue from occurring at a time when authorities the world over prioritized mask mandates and social distancing protocols as an explicit means of silencing critics of the state. The irrational health edicts of the Covidian Cancel Cult have not aged well but hysteria and fear prevailed over logic and reason nonetheless.
Though it’s always existed to one degree or another, the electoral stunt known as Ballot Cleansing became a more overt strategy in recent years, especially as the 2024 elections were concerned. After years of lawfare were waged against Donald Trump, dozens of officials threatened to weaponize a creative interpretation of the 14th Amendment to prohibit him from setting foot inside the Oval Office for a second term. Then the cancel cult sought the disqualification of anyone deemed an “insurrectionist” including 126 members of Congress. There are many ways to go about it but the object is always the same: prevent the challenger from winning by any means available.
Nathan White could have arguably navigated the lawfare efforts against him differently. But it also seems obvious that his frustrations were deliberately weaponized against him and then greatly exaggerated on paper to maximize the legal damage. And as Nate learned firsthand, the most effective lawfare campaigns exploit the psychological warfare tactic of overwhelming the target with as many frivolous filings as possible to break the will of their opponents and induce surrender. White asserts that the conspiracy to violate his civil rights constituted malicious prosecution, abuse of process and selective enforcement. In this case, the provocation efforts could also be interpreted as a premeditated collusion to commit election interference.
With Hindoien stepping down ten months before the end of his term, 2025 is once again an election year for the position of Choteau’s Mayor. Jim Anderson tells us, “I think Nate could easily win an election at this point.”
But Nate doesn’t live in the city limits anymore and doesn’t plan on going back. After selling his Choteau home in 2022 he has spent his days on horseback among the animals on his ranch.
“I can barely walk down the street without running into someone that’s saying, hey would you move back here and run for mayor?” Nate tells us, “No, I’m not going to do that.”
Outer Limits Radio Show 