Christian nationalist theocracy rising

“The appointment of Erika Kirk goes hand in hand with 

Christian nationalist incursions into our armed forces. More than 

anything, the appointment of Kirk to the board demonstrates the 

ongoing politicization of the service academies.”

Elite white Christian nationalist (CN) theocrats are now out in the open about their theocratic intent and goals for American government, society and law. White Christian nationalism no longer hints at theocracy. CN elites leaders now say out loud that their key goals are (1) to seize the machinery of the state and impose their version of Christianity on everyone else, and (2) write the laws and rulebooks that would empower them do it. Former Trump official William Wolfe is arrogant and in-your-face about it. He blithely threatens (promises?) this: 

“This is how we should order our lives together. And frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards, and I am going to enforce my morality on you in as much as our morality is God’s morality. You should always check yourselves. Do I believe what God believes? Am I defending what God says is good?  And if it is, then you should have the courage to say, ‘This is how we’re going to run our town, this is how we’re going to run our county, this is how we’re going to run our state, and this is how we should run the United States of America by legislating the morality that we can find in the Bible.’” 

 

Wolfe tells dissenters to get out of America if they don’t like his vision of America. Wolfe isn’t just freelancing on his own. He’s summarizing the explicit intolerant, cruel CN spirit behind Project 2025, the Center for Renewing America, and CN’s broader push to concentrate power in a white, reactionary, Christian minority that treats equality and pluralism as existential threats. Link 1

Wolfe: Arrogant, cruel, corrupt, authoritarian

Look at what this movement says and does about race and identity. Research documents CN “Adherents” and “Sympathizers” as far more likely than other Americans to endorse authoritarian ideas, view Donald Trump as a “strong leader” rather than a dangerous dictator, and support political violence as a tool to “save” the nation. About 79% of CN Adherents score high on right‑wing authoritarianism. Americans United has spelled out the tight nexus between Christian nationalism and racism, from “replacement” rhetoric to a wave of attacks on communities of color and religious minorities committed in the name of defending a supposedly white Christian America. Black ministers have explicitly denounced Project 2025 as rooted in white Christian nationalism and warned that large segments of the white evangelical church are “drunk on the religion of White Christian Nationalism,” trading the gospel for a political project that tolerates poverty, voter suppression, and state violence so long as it preserves white, conservative dominance. And as researchers have noted, constant claims of “anti‑Christian bias” and “persecution” function as racialized dog whistles, signaling to white conservative voters that they, not Black, brown, or non‑Christian communities, are the “real” victims whose power must be restored. Link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5

White Christians are the real victims?? Not by a long shot. CN elites are empowered, cruel aggressors.

The cruelty and bigotry at the heart of the project are clearest where CN ideology meets policy. Project 2025 is an explicit blueprint to crush LGBTQ equality, reproductive freedom, racial equity, and church–state separation. CN elites cynically justify their bigotry and intolerance as constitutionally protected “religious liberty”. Importantly, the six MAGA judges on the USSC clearly agree. CN's bigoted theocracy invites government workers and taxpayer‑funded entities to refuse services to women, non-heterosexuals, religious minorities, and anyone else who doesn’t fit the approved Biblical mold. The same network behind Project 2025 includes outfits like Alliance Defending Freedom, which has already helped overturn Roe v. Wade and carve out broad rights to discriminate in employment, health care, and even adoption—one of their clients refused to place a child with a Jewish couple purely on religious grounds. At the same time, global and domestic watchdogs stress that this agenda is pro‑corruption by design: it calls for firing inspectors general, gutting voting‑rights enforcement, weakening campaign‑finance rules, and empowering the president to shut down public‑corruption probes into allies while weaponizing the FBI and DOJ against opponents, an anti‑democratic kleptocratic wish list dressed up as “efficiency” and “draining the swamp”. Link 6, link 7, link 8

Put together, the picture is not of pious reformers but of an arrogant, bigoted, racist, kleptocratic political project that uses Christian language as a shield for authoritarian power, corruption, and social hierarchy. PRRI’s state‑by‑state mapping shows that roughly a third of Americans lean toward Christian nationalist ideas, and where those views are strongest, you find the harshest hostility to LGBTQ people, immigrants, racial justice, and democracy itself. Groups tracking extremism warn that Christian nationalist organizations that range from dominionist churches to legal outfits and think tanks are explicitly working to overthrow our democratic republic and replace it a strict theocracy. Project 2025 is their closest thing to a published coup plan. CN aggression is out in the open. The question now is whether the rest of us treat their own words and documents as the huge flashing red light warnings they are and act to oppose it. Link 9, link 10, link 11

Source: Global Project Against Hate And Extremism

Project 2025 March 18th Update

I am sick to my stomach and royally fed up with liberals and Democrats.

 Sorry for venting.

BUT........

I was reading comments on another forum this morning about who liberals and Democrats should promote for the 2028 elections with a chance to win.

A LOT OF VOTES came in for Kamala Harris. WTF?

Here are some of the OTHER arguments I saw, made by mostly liberals:

Buttigieg can't win because he is gay.

Shapiro is too pro-Israel.

Newsom is too smooth and polished and just talks like another politician.

AOC is too radical.

Hell, I saw recommendations for.......................... get this....................... BERNIE SANDERS!!

WTF indeed.

Thankfully there was SOME sanity among the comments I read because Andy Beshear seemed to be the favorite among those commenting.

I would take Beshear, Buttigieg, Shapiro, Newsom, or AOC over anyone running for the Republicans.

BUT..........

In typical liberal thinking, everyone suggested is flawed, but Kamala Harris is acceptable?

And the put down of anyone not viewed as LEFT ENOUGH, like Shapiro or Newsom, really irked me. 

AOC is too radical, and Buttigieg too gay? So, the badmouthing of possible candidates has already begun, for the left a candidate needs to pass the leftist smell test and if someone is too far left they are too radical for the middle? 

Yup, liberals and Democrats, keep eating your own going into 2028.

Can I be blunt here and just say...............

FUCK!!

My ideal ticket would be Beshear and ................ AOC. A centralist and a leftist. Nice balance.

An American War: How Operation Epic Fury Began, What It Has Become and What It Reveals

 

---

On the morning of February 27, 2026, Vice President JD Vance told the Washington Post that the United States preferred the diplomatic track with Iran. "It really depends," he said, "on what the Iranians do or say." The Iranians had not done or said anything. Twenty-four hours later, nearly 900 American and Israeli strikes hit Iran in the opening wave of Operation Epic Fury — the largest U.S. military action in the Middle East in a generation.

That gap — between Vance's statement and the bombs — is where this story begins.

The Deal That Was There

To understand what happened, you need to know what was on the table the week the war started.

Since early February, indirect talks between the United States and Iran had been proceeding through an Omani channel, mediated by Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi. The final round — held in Geneva, February 24–26, at the Omani ambassador's residence in Cologny — was attended by nuclear experts and Jonathan Powell, a senior British diplomat best known for brokering the Good Friday Agreement, participating in a personal expert capacity. By all accounts from those present, it produced something extraordinary: a framework that reportedly went further than the 2015 JCPOA, including "anytime, anywhere" inspections and a permanent cap on enrichment in exchange for phased sanctions relief. Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, one of the most careful Iran analysts in Washington, described it as historically unprecedented. The parties had agreed to reconvene in Vienna on March 2 to finalize terms.

On February 27, Albusaidi flew to Washington and briefed Vance personally. That same day, he appeared on CBS Face the Nation and declared: "Peace is now within reach." Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed the talks had been "one of the best, most serious, and longest to date."

The following morning, while Iran was preparing for the Vienna meeting, the strikes began.

The Threat That No One Can Find

The administration's stated rationale was that Iran posed an imminent threat — that it was one to two weeks away from a usable nuclear weapon, and that the United States had no choice but to act immediately. That claim has never been corroborated by a single institution inside or outside the U.S. government. The Pentagon briefed Congressional staff in the days following the strikes and confirmed there was no sign Iran had been planning to attack the United States. The UK, whose diplomat had been present in Geneva, stated it saw no evidence of an imminent threat. France and Germany were caught off guard by the strikes entirely.

A detailed account of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that followed is available in a companion post on this blog. For the purposes of this history, the essential record is this: Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center — the official whose professional responsibility was to assess exactly this question — resigned and stated in writing that "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation." That is not an opinion or a policy disagreement. It is a forensic knowledge claim of the same order as physical evidence, grounded in the presence or absence of intercepted communications, verified troop movements, and confirmed changes in weapons posture. No one in the Intelligence Community has contradicted it on the merits.

What followed at the Senate hearing was more consequential than a non-answer. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, pressed by Senator Ossoff for a yes-or-no on whether Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat, replied that determining imminence is "not the responsibility of the intelligence community" — that only the president makes that determination. This should not be confused with the separate and legitimate point that IC assessments are non-binding on the president. What Gabbard eliminated was something more fundamental: the IC's professional, evidence-based finding itself. In practice, she handed the president's personal judgment the same institutional standing as verified intelligence. That claim — made under oath, unchallenged by the committee majority, now on the permanent record — is not a degraded Intelligence Community. It is an Intelligence Community that has voluntarily abolished its own advisory function.

LindseyGraham, Netanyahu, and the Case for War

While the formal institutional channels were being bypassed, a parallel and informal lobbying operation had been working on the president for months. These are two distinct tracks that must not be conflated: the operational planning of the war, which was a U.S.-Israeli military enterprise running through professional channels since December 2025, and the political persuasion campaign, which ran through personal relationships and was principally orchestrated by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

A detailed account published by the Wall Street Journal on March 6 described how Graham spent months pressing the case for military action, traveling multiple times to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu and members of Israeli intelligence who, he said, "will tell me things our own government won't tell me." By his own account, Graham coached Netanyahu on how to lobby Trump directly for military action, and worked in concert with retired Army General Jack Keane, a Fox News contributor, and Marc Thiessen, former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush, the three of them taking turns calling the president and comparing notes. Graham was explicit about his goal: regime change. He kept showing up at Trump's Florida clubs until White House aides described him as an "annoying crazy uncle." He likened Iran's leadership to Hitler, told Trump that Iran was in a historically weak position, reminded him of the 2024 assassination attempt, and framed the moment as his chance to make history. "Second-term Trump has different instincts than first-term Trump," Graham told the Journal.

Netanyahu's role in the final decision may have been significant and direct. According to Graham, the Israeli prime minister showed Trump specific intelligence that proved decisive. This account is consistent with Joe Kent's allegation, made to Tucker Carlson after his resignation, that Israel had brought what he described as faulty intelligence into the process — an account that Mearsheimer, speaking on Breaking Points on March 19, said he found entirely credible, noting that Rubio and Johnson had themselves acknowledged it was Israel that took the initiative and, in effect, drew the United States in.

The picture that emerges is of a president whose formal institutional channels — the IC, the Pentagon, the diplomatic track — were producing findings that pointed away from war, while an informal network of outside advocates, operating through personal relationships and Israeli intelligence briefings, pointed toward it. Trump resolved that tension in favor of the informal network. That choice is, in itself, the story.

When the Strike Was Actually Planned

The clearest explanation for why the war began when it did — rather than when the "imminent threat" timeline suggested — was published by the Wall Street Journal on February 28, the day the strikes began, and confirmed by Axios reporter Barak Ravid on March 1.

The operation had been planned since December 2025, jointly with Israel. The original strike date was February 21. It was delayed by bad weather. The February 28 date was chosen because Israeli intelligence had located a rare window: Supreme Leader Khamenei and top officials would all be convened in one place at the same time, offering an opportunity to decapitate the entire leadership in a single wave. The underlying theory — that killing the regime's leadership would cause its rapid collapse and pave the way for a friendly successor government — was the animating premise of the entire operation. As Rory Stewart observed on Sky News on March 22, there is no historical precedent for the proposition that simply killing leadership spontaneously generates a revolution. Trump himself, according to multiple accounts, has since acknowledged the problem in terms that are their own verdict on the strategy: "we can't find anybody to talk to because we've killed them all."

One Israeli official, speaking to Axios on background, went further regarding the Geneva talks: they were intended, he said, "to let time pass until the new strike date — keeping the Iranians believing diplomacy was still Trump's primary path." Two American officials pushed back on that characterization, saying the talks were genuine and that an acceptable offer might have prevented the strike. But the architecture — a December plan, a weather delay, a strike timed to a leadership convening — does not fit the "imminent threat" narrative. It fits a premeditated operation that used diplomacy as cover.

Vance told the Washington Post the morning before the strikes that diplomacy was preferred, contingent on Iran doing or saying something to change the calculation. Iran did and said nothing. Whether Vance was kept out of the final decision loop entirely, or was present for deliberations without knowledge that the strike date had been fixed weeks earlier by the operational planning, the outcome was the same: he disappeared from public life for approximately 72 hours after the bombs fell, returned with the minimum required statement of support, and has since confirmed his governing philosophy in terms that left no ambiguity. "When the president of the United States makes a decision," he said at a press availability in Michigan on March 21, "it's your job to help make that decision as effective and successful as possible." He was asked directly about Kent's resignation and the fractures it represented. That was his answer.

What the Strait of Hormuz Revealed

Four weeks in, the strategic picture has deteriorated in ways the administration did not anticipate and cannot easily reverse.

Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes — and has demonstrated it can keep it closed without maintaining conventional naval superiority. The disruption is not primarily a matter of Iranian naval power, which has been substantially degraded by U.S. and Israeli strikes. It is a matter of drones — Iran entered the conflict with tens of thousands of them, which it can continue to produce under wartime conditions, as Ukraine has demonstrated on a different front. Shippers, crews, and insurers have concluded that no American naval escort guarantee is worth the risk. As Ian Bremmer noted in a detailed analysis this past week, nearly all U.S. naval capability in the Gulf is currently committed to defending American bases and Gulf energy infrastructure, leaving nothing available for convoy escort even if the will were there.

Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute has made a distinction largely absent from Western coverage that belongs in any honest account of the strategic situation: Iran has not actually closed the Strait. The threat of closure has been sufficient to reduce commercial traffic to a trickle, while China, India, France, and Italy have negotiated safe passage directly with Tehran rather than Washington. That is not a navigational detail. It is a signal about who exercises effective sovereign authority over the world's most important maritime chokepoint — and the answer, functionally, is no longer the United States.

The economic consequences extend well beyond oil, which closed at around $112 a barrel on Friday after the Treasury Department issued emergency licenses for Russian and Iranian oil already at sea — meaning the United States is now enriching an adversary at war with an American ally and an adversary at war with the United States in order to calm its own energy markets. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was only 60 percent full when the war began, reflecting an absence of planning for the scenario now unfolding. Goldman Sachs warned this week that prices could remain elevated into 2027 if shipping reluctance persists. Iran has meanwhile shifted its military strategy from mass missile salvos to persistent lower-intensity attacks designed, in Parsi's analysis, to raise oil above $150 and make the conflict "too expensive for everyone" — not to win militarily, but to make the war politically unsustainable for the administration before Iran loses it. Parsi notes this is going "better for them than they thought."

But oil is not the whole of it. The Strait carries roughly one-third of the world's fertilizer supply, and the disruption is arriving during planting season. If ports are not receiving fertilizer by May or June, less food gets planted, and less food planted means higher food prices globally — with the heaviest burden falling on the poorest populations in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Add petrochemicals, synthetic fabrics, auto parts, and packaging for consumer goods — all of which transit the Gulf — and what Bremmer has described as a supply chain shock comparable in its cascading second and third-order effects to the early weeks of the pandemic comes into focus. These are not speculative futures. They are processes already in motion whose consequences will arrive over the coming months regardless of when or how the war ends.

The military campaign has been extensive: U.S. Central Command reports striking more than 8,000 targets, and more than 2,000 people have been killed since February 28. Khamenei was killed in the opening wave; his son Mojtaba was appointed supreme leader on March 8 and has demanded the closure of all U.S. bases in the Middle East. Israel launched a ground operation into southern Lebanon on March 17, displacing over a million people, and appears to be targeting potential Iranian interlocutors systematically — replacing moderates with hardliners and making a negotiated settlement structurally harder to reach. On March 21, Iran fired its first known long-range ballistic missiles — with a range of 4,000 kilometers — at Diego Garcia, the U.S.-British Indian Ocean military base, demonstrating both willingness and capacity to expand the conflict beyond the Middle East theater entirely.

American allies have declined to join a coalition to patrol the Strait. The New York Times, in a news analysis published on March 21, noted that Trump has quietly dropped "unconditional surrender" from his messaging, omitted any mention of defeating the IRGC — which remains in power — and abandoned the promise to help Iranians "take over your government." What he described three weeks ago as a decisive military operation he now calls, with notable delicacy, an "excursion." Richard Haass summarized the strategic position in a phrase that has circulated widely: "We broke it, but you own it."

On the night of March 21, Iranian missiles struck the Israeli towns of Arad and Dimona, injuring scores of people. One strike landed approximately 13 kilometers from Israel's nuclear reactor. Within roughly 90 minutes, Trump posted on Truth Social — at 11:44 PM EDT, in capital letters — that if Iran did not "FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz" within 48 hours, the United States would "hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST." Iran's largest power plant appears to be the Bushehr nuclear facility. Striking a nuclear power plant has been considered categorically off-limits in every conflict since the dawn of the nuclear age, because the environmental consequences are not a side effect but the immediate and foreseeable first result.

This ultimatum crosses a categorical threshold — from military targeting to total infrastructure war — that the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter's Article 2(4), and the entire post-1945 rules-based order were constructed to prevent. Targeting the national power grid of a nation of 90 million people is not a military operation in the conventional sense. Gulf states consume roughly five times more electricity per capita than Iran, and nearly all of their drinking water comes from sea desalination powered by that grid. "This is not legitimate warfare," Rory Stewart said on Sky News the following morning. Iran's response has confirmed the logic: the IRGC announced that the Strait would be "completely closed and will not be opened until our destroyed power plants are rebuilt," and that any strike on Iranian infrastructure would trigger the "irreversible destruction" of energy and desalination facilities across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last week found that 59 percent of Americans disapprove of U.S. strikes against Iran.

Parsi identifies the deepest structural problem with the ultimatum's logic: it is demanding the one thing Iran cannot give. A regime can survive losing a war. It cannot survive a formal surrender before its own base — that would be regime suicide by a different means. The ultimatum therefore does not present Iran with a choice between compliance and destruction. It presents Iran with a choice between two forms of destruction. That asymmetry was either not understood by those who designed the strategy, or was understood and set aside.

One Man, Uncontradicted

On March 5, the House voted 219 to 212 to reject a war powers resolution that would have required Trump to seek Congressional authorization to continue military operations. The Senate had blocked a similar measure the day before, with only Rand Paul crossing party lines in support. The Republican caucus was nearly unanimous in voting to leave the president unconstrained. A clear majority of the American public — 59 percent — disapproves of the war those votes enabled.

The next day, Trump announced he was demanding Iran's "unconditional surrender" and that he would play a role in selecting the country's next leader. Having been handed a free hand on Thursday, he expanded the war's stated aims on Friday.

The sequence matters. Congress did not simply fail to constrain this war — it voted, by deliberate choice, to remove the mechanism by which it could have done so. Senators who had described a bounded, limited conflict used their votes to ensure they had no way to enforce that description. They are now constitutionally complicit in a war that is expanding in ways none of them formally authorized — and politically exposed to constituents whose gas prices, food costs, and retirement accounts are absorbing the consequences. Trump then compounded the bind by threatening to veto all legislation reaching his desk unless Congress passes the SAVE Act — using the compliance he extracted on war powers as leverage on an entirely unrelated front. Meanwhile, Senator Graham — who by his own account coached Netanyahu on how to persuade Trump, worked for months with Israeli intelligence to build the case for the war, and told the Wall Street Journal he was already pitching Trump on a follow-on operation in Lebanon he has named "Operation Semper Fi" — spent this past week in a private Senate lunch arguing against colleagues who wanted more information.

Step back and count what has been subtracted. The Intelligence Community did not support the imminent threat claim — and its director declared under oath that establishing whether any such threat exists is not the IC's responsibility. The Pentagon said Iran had no plans to attack. The Vice President was either excluded from or uninformed about the final decision, and confirmed this week that once the president decides, dissent ends. The UK saw no imminent threat. France and Germany were surprised. Congress voted to give away its leverage and was rewarded with immediate escalation. The MAGA influencer ecosystem — Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly — publicly called the strikes "disgusting" and "evil." Their audiences did not revolt.

What remains when you subtract all of that is one man's determination — shaped by months of informal lobbying from a senator, a Fox News  contributor and retired General Jack Keane (per Grahams own account) ,  and Netanyahu's carefully curated intelligence briefing; resistant to the findings of his own intelligence community; indifferent to the warnings of his Pentagon; and unconstrained by his Vice President, his cabinet, his Congress, or his allies. That appears to be the main operative input into a decision that has now killed thousands, closed a global waterway, disrupted the food supply of the developing world, and set in motion a cascading supply chain shock whose full consequences will arrive over months regardless of how the war ends.

There are constraints remaining, but they are not political. Markets, fuel prices, military logistics, and the physical geography of the Strait impose friction that requires no organized constituency to generate. The constraints that were supposed to come from democratic institutions — from the IC, from Congress, from the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs, from the Vice President, from allied governments — were bypassed, declared irrelevant, or voted away.

What this record documents is not the presidency the Constitution designed — it is precisely what the Constitution was designed to prevent. In each of the decisions examined here, authority flowed not from institutional process but from a single person's will, unchecked by the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the Vice President, Congress, or allied governments. What that reveals is a presidency from which the functional constraints that distinguish constitutional democracy from authoritarian rule have been removed. What remains, in practice, is authoritarian rule.

The question that verdict raises is what kind. Not the bureaucratic authoritarianism of a one-party state, not the ideological totalitarianism of a revolutionary regime. Something more personal and, in its own way, more legible: a system in which the fate of nations, the stability of the global economy, and the lives of thousands now hang on what one man decides to post on social media — at 11:44 PM, in capital letters, with a 48-hour countdown — with no institutional filter remaining to slow, question, or constrain him. What checks that power? What is left, in this government, in this nation, to stop a president who governs by executive order and conducts military policy via Truth Social posts?

Trump answered that question himself, in an Oval Office interview with the New York Times in January 2026, weeks before the bombs fell on Tehran:

"Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me."

---

Sources

Lieber, Dion, Warren Strobel, and Michael R. Gordon. "U.S. and Israel Planned Iran Strike for Months, Awaiting Window." Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2026.

Ravid, Barak. "Inside the Planning of Operation Epic Fury." Axios, March 1, 2026.

Dawsey, Josh. "Lindsey Graham's Quest to Sell Trump on Striking Iran." Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2026.

Sanger, David E. "Trump Is Finally Eyeing an Exit From Iran. But Will He Take It?" New York Times, March 21, 2026.

Sanger, David E., Tyler Pager, Katie Rogers, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. "Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by 'My Own Morality.'" New York Times, January 8, 2026.

Stewart, Phil, and Idrees Ali et al. "Iran Threatens to Retaliate Against Gulf Energy and Water After Trump Ultimatum." Reuters, March 22, 2026.

Bremmer, Ian. "Week 3 of the US-Israel War on Iran: Where We Are." GZERO Media / YouTube, March 16, 2026.

Mearsheimer, John. Interview on Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar, March 19, 2026.

Stewart, Rory. Interview on Sky News, March 22, 2026.

Parsi, Trita. Analysis cited in summary briefing, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, March 2026.

Vance, JD. Press availability, Michigan, March 21, 2026.

Trump, Donald. Truth Social post on Strait of Hormuz 48-hour ultimatum, March 21, 2026. Reported by BBC News and Reuters.

Trump's Iran war non-explanation to the UN

Our wartime commander-in-chief, the best 13-star general ever,

on full-blown war footing --

he inspires great confidence and 

he sees clearly through the dense fog of war

The US ambassador to the UN submitted this letter to the UN Security Council to explain why Trump attacked Iran. Short story shorter, the rationale is insulting drivel. For example, the March 10 letter (dated March 11?) claims Trump attacked Iran in part to ensure the free flow of maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz. Of course before Trump started his war, maritime commerce was flowing freely through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump changed that.

In synch with Trump's usual amateur style, the letter letter sloppily argues after the fact excuses. It is not a professional Article 51 report. Like a hastily written report of an unread book, the letter asserts superficial excuses such as self-defense, collective self-defense, necessity, proportionality, and threat imminence. Little to no factual or legal explanation (and this) ties the excuses to Trump's actual use of force. And, the bombast is right out of a pompous blowhard's lecture.  Phrases like "religious war of annihilation", "cynical lawfare strategy", and "uniquely dangerous actor" make it sound important, but they fail to satisfy the Charter’s reporting function.

Finally, his letter says the strikes were "necessary and proportionate", but it does not show why force was necessary or proportionate instead of continued diplomacy, containment, or any other measures. It also relies heavily on Iran’s past conduct and rhetoric, but a thorough Article 51 analysis needs to show a tighter connection between the specific threatened attack and the specific defensive response. The letter also leaves out evidence that matters most, namely what exact Iranian actions provoked the attack, what non-force options were attempted, and how the scale of Trump's response was limited to necessity and proportionality.

This homework gets an F.

Getting in the mind of America's monster

Available evidence strongly argues that Trump’s personality matters, but not in a way that is easy to use for analysis. Calling him greedy, vindictive or mendacious often feels (or is) true, but those labels do not reliably predict what he will do next. Not surprisingly, a better approach is to watch his behavior. The evidence shows that what he says, what he posts, and how he acts when he thinks there will be no pushback is what to focus on. Link 1, link 2

The example of Greenland clearly shows this. If you say that "Trump is greedy", that explains why he might want Greenland, but not whether he will actually try to act on it. By contrast, concrete signals such as public humiliation of allies, his symbolic social media posts, and changes in tone after market reactions, all give significant clues about his intentions. The point is that these visible actions are more useful than guessing about hidden traits. Link 3, link 4

Based on his behaviors, one can argue that his base is not a significant source of constraint. Instead of limiting him, Trump uses supporters as a kind of permission structure where their loyalty makes his actions feel acceptable and energizes his image. For the most part, his supporters do not direct or limit him. Even well-known MAGA figures like MTG get pushed aside when Trump decides to redefine the movement around himself. 

In short, support flows from his supporters to Trump, but he does not support them. Instead, as discussed here before, the overwhelming majority of Trump and MAGA elites' significant observable actions in government have attacked or weakened the legal and constitutional protections. Those protections used to shield and defend ordinary people from kleptocratic abuses and authoritarian oppression. Now our protections are fading away. Trump supporters in no way are preventing the rise of Trump's corrupt dictatorship. Knowingly or not, they encourage it. Link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9

MAGA's war continues wearing down democracy and the rule of law

The experts at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg keep tabs on global democracy. Its annual 2026 report (full report here), Unraveling The Democratic Era?, assess the US situation to be a major deterioration of democracy in the last year. The report asserts that the US Liberal Democracy Index score fell 24% in one year. The US dropped from rank 20 to 51 out of 179 countries. The V-Dem report refers to the rate of cratering of US democracy as "unprecedented". US democracy is currently deteriorating much faster deterioration than any other democracy in modern times.

The report also notes that democratic backsliding is happening in all well-established democracies. But US democracy is deteriorating at unprecedented speed. The American collapse includes authoritarian attacks on what is left of independent media and journalists. That is also happening worldwide.  

In addition to the backsliding into tyranny and corruption by the US and democracies that emerged from authoritarianism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, countries that were autocratic or authoritarian are experiencing a deepening of autocracy into more brutal forms of tyranny.

Despite that trend of rising global tyranny, the annual analysis indicates that 18 nations are currently democratizing. That includes Brazil and Poland continuing their democratization processes despite efforts to sabotage and reverse democratization by tyrants like Trump and Putin. In most of these countries, media freedom has improved. 

"Not My Job": What Tulsi Gabbard Just Put on the Record

On March 17, Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. His resignation letter said many things — it expressed moral opposition to the war, questioned Israel's role in drawing the United States into the conflict, and appealed to the president to reconsider. Those passages generated enormous attention, and enormous pushback. The White House called his claims false. Speaker Johnson said he was weak on security. The letter's politics, its tone, its characterization of American foreign policy — all of it became fodder for the kind of partisan combat that reliably buries the thing that actually matters.

The thing that actually matters is one sentence.

"Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation."

Everything else in Kent's letter is argument — strategic, moral, political, all of it legitimately disputable. That sentence is different. It is a statement of fact. It was made by the sitting director of the National Counterterrorism Center — the senior official whose professional responsibility was to assess exactly that question. It either accurately describes what the intelligence showed, or it does not. It has a truth value, independent of Kent's views on Israel, independent of his political associations, independent of whether you find him sympathetic or not.

The Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 18 was, in substantial part, an opportunity to establish that truth value. Did the intelligence show an imminent threat from Iran, or did it not?

No intelligence official who testified said Kent was wrong.

Before examining what they said instead, it helps to remember where we were just two decades ago. In 2002 and 2003, CIA Director George Tenet privately told President Bush that the case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk." Two words. Spoken informally. Later leaked. That phrase generated years of congressional hearings, multiple investigations, books, documentaries, and a lasting institutional reckoning. The entire weight of democratic accountability came down on what Tenet meant, in private, about confidence in an intelligence assessment — because the country understood that the legitimacy of going to war depended on facts that could be examined, questioned, and held to account.

What Joe Kent did was categorically more significant. He made a formal, signed, public statement of fact — not a confidence characterization but a direct finding, from the official responsible for making it — and resigned rather than contradict it by staying. In 2003, we tortured ourselves over two words spoken in a private meeting. In 2026, the top counterterrorism official stated his finding in writing, on the record, and the institutional response was to attack his character and change the subject.

What Ratcliffe actually said

CIA Director John Ratcliffe offered the closest thing to a rebuttal. He said, in general terms, that he disagreed with Kent. But when he explained the substance of that disagreement, something important happened — or rather, something important did not happen.

Ratcliffe said Iran had been a hostile power for 47 years, had built missiles, had supported regional proxies, and therefore posed what he called an "immediate threat at this time."

He did not say "imminent."

That distinction is not a semantic quibble. It is the entire legal basis for the use of preemptive military force.

"Imminent" is the threshold — in American war powers doctrine, in international law, in the Caroline test that has governed anticipatory self-defense since the nineteenth century. An imminent threat requires specific, credible evidence of capability and intent on a recognizable timeline. It means something is about to happen, and analysts can point to why they believe so: intercepted communications, troop movements, specific operational planning. It is a legal standard with defined evidentiary requirements.

"Immediate" is not that. Operationally it means something happening right now — a gunman in the room, a bomb about to detonate. In Ratcliffe's usage it meant something else entirely: a country that has been hostile for nearly half a century. That is a chronic condition, not a threshold. Chronic hostility, however real, has never legally justified preemptive war. If it did, the existence of any longstanding adversary would constitute a permanent license for military action, and the word "imminent" would mean nothing at all.

What Ratcliffe did was produce the appearance of a rebuttal — "I disagree with Kent" — while declining to use the word that would have constituted an actual one. If he believed the intelligence showed an imminent threat in the legally defined sense, he had every reason and every opportunity to say so plainly, under oath, before the committee. He did not.

What Gabbard actually did

DNI Tulsi Gabbard took a different approach — and it is the one with the longest consequences.

Senator Jon Ossoff pressed her directly: was there an imminent nuclear threat posed by Iran? "Yes or no?"

Her answer: "It is not a responsibility of the intelligence community to determine what is or is not an imminent threat."

Ossoff replied: "It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States."

He is right. The intelligence community exists, in substantial part, to perform exactly this function — to give decision-makers an independent, expert assessment of whether a threat is real, specific, and urgent, so that the decision to use military force rests on something more than presidential intuition. The National Intelligence University, which trains the IC's future leaders, maintains an extensive body of scholarship on how analysts distinguish imminent from chronic, credible from speculative, a genuine threshold from a permanent condition. It is not a peripheral function. It is close to the central one.

Gabbard has ordered that university merged with another institution.

Most coverage has treated her statement as a clever deflection — a way of staying loyal to the president without technically lying under oath. That reading is not wrong. But it stops short of what she actually placed on the record.

By declaring that the IC has no responsibility to determine imminence, she did not merely avoid a hard question. She formally reassigned it. She removed Kent's professional finding from the category of judgments the IC is competent to make. She did not say he was wrong. She said the question was never his to answer — or hers, or any analyst's. Only the president determines whether a threat is imminent. 

This is not the familiar debate about whether IC assessments are binding on the president — they never were. What Gabbard eliminated is something more fundamental: the IC's professional, evidence-based finding itself. An imminence determination is not a loose judgment call. It is a structured knowledge claim of the same order as forensic evidence — grounded in intercepted communications, verified troop movements, confirmed changes in weapons posture, analyzed against standardized professional thresholds. The president has always been free to act against such a finding. What is new is that Gabbard has declared, under oath, that producing the finding is no longer the IC's responsibility. They may gather facts. They may not render the conclusion those facts support. The judgment has been formally severed from the fact-finding — and that severance is what no prior DNI has placed on the record.

Notice what she did not then say: that there was any intelligence corroborating the president's determination. She provided the presidential authority without filling it with any supporting substance. The president determined there was a threat. Per his own intelligence director's sworn testimony, whether that determination has any basis in evidence is not the IC's job to establish.

Think about what that means in practice. The president said he acted because he "felt strongly" that Iran was about to attack American interests. Ratcliffe offered 47 years of historical hostility as corroboration. And the Director of National Intelligence swore, before the Senate, that the IC has no responsibility to say whether either of those things meets the legal threshold for imminent threat.

If that holds, the factual predicate for going to war is whatever the president says it is.

Why this matters beyond this particular war

Presidential power in America has always expanded the same way: not through dramatic constitutional rupture, but through assertions that survive in the record because no one with the authority to challenge them chose to do so. Jefferson bought Louisiana without constitutional authorization and the precedent held. Post-9/11 war authorizations stretched across decades to justify operations their original authors never imagined. Power grows through statements that go unchallenged by those formally empowered to challenge them.

The crucial difference between that history and what happened on March 18 is this: every prior expansion of executive war-making power — however contested, however legally dubious — operated on the shared assumption that facts had to exist and had to be presented. LBJ needed Gulf of Tonkin, however fabricated. Bush needed Tenet's slam dunk, however pressured. Reagan pointed to intercepted cables. In every case, the underlying premise held: the legitimacy of force depends on a factual predicate that others can examine, question, and contest.

What Gabbard put on the record dissolves that premise in this specific domain. She did not manipulate the factual record. She declared the factual record irrelevant to the determination at issue. You can challenge a bad intelligence assessment — investigate how it was reached, whether it was pressured, whether the analysts were honest. What you cannot easily challenge is a sworn statement by the Director of National Intelligence that the assessment was never required in the first place.

Ossoff challenged that statement correctly and precisely. The Republican majority controlling the committee did not. No resolution formally repudiating it has been introduced. The press noted it, mostly with irony. And the statement is now in the record — unchallenged by the people with the formal power to challenge it — which is exactly how informal assertions become the floor for the next expansion.

A future president, of either party, may cite this testimony. The Director of National Intelligence established, under oath, that the IC has no responsibility to determine whether a threat is imminent. The president determines that. The evidence is, formally and on the record, beside the point.

That is not a story about one official's careful navigation of a difficult hearing. It is a story about what just got put on the record — and what, so far, nobody with the power to remove it has chosen to do.

---

A note on corroboration

Kent's factual claim has been attacked on personal and political grounds. What follows is not a defense of Kent. It is a note that his finding was not his alone.

• The United Kingdom — America's closest intelligence partner, a member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance — reached the same conclusion: there was no imminent threat from Iran.

• Jonathan Powell, a senior British diplomat with direct knowledge of the diplomatic track, confirmed that negotiations were producing serious results and that a significant offer was on the table at the time the strikes began. Powell, who attended the talks, judged that a deal was within reach.

• Vice President JD Vance met in person with Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi on Friday, February 27 — the same day Abulsaidi described the zero-stockpiling offer on CBS Face the Nation as historic and potentially decisive. The day before, aboard Air Force Two, Vance had told the Washington Post: "I think we all prefer the diplomatic option. But it really depends on what the Iranians do and what they say." The article notes that talks had continued that Thursday in Geneva with no resolution, and that mediators had confirmed negotiations would resume the following week. Iran had done and said nothing in the intervening hours. The strikes began Saturday morning.

• The Wall Street Journal and Axios both reported, based on sourced accounts, that the operation had been planned since December and was structured around an intelligence window showing Iranian leadership convened in one place — a decapitation opportunity — not around any specific intelligence of an impending Iranian attack on American interests. The Axios report additionally noted that the strike was delayed specifically in order to convey that no attack was imminent, allowing Iranian leadership to feel secure enough to remain in place.

None of these sources have been contradicted. None were addressed by Gabbard or Ratcliffe in their testimony.

Kent said there was no imminent threat. The allied assessment, the diplomatic record, the inside-administration dissent, and the reporting on operational planning all point in the same direction. The IC's director swore before Congress that establishing whether any of that matters is not her office's job.

The president felt strongly. That, it turns out, is enough.

---

References

1. Lieber, Dov, Alexander Ward, and Laurence Norman. "Why the U.S. and Israel Struck When They Did: A Chance to Kill Iran's Leaders." The Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2026.
   https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/why-the-u-s-and-israel-struck-iran-when-they-did-a-chance-to-kill-its-leaders-b0dbbc88

2. Ravid, Barak. "U.S. and Israel Delayed Original Iran Strike by a Week, Officials Say." Axios, March 1, 2026.
   https://www.axios.com/2026/03/02/iran-war-strike-israel-delay-trump

3. Allison, Natalie. "Vance: 'No Chance' U.S. Will Be in Drawn-Out War in Middle East." The Washington Post, February 26, 2026.
   https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/26/vance-no-chance-us-will-be-drawn-out-war-middle-east/

4. Swanson, Ian. "Oman Foreign Minister Expresses Dismay at US Strikes on Iran: 'This Is Not Your War.'" The Hill, February 28, 2026.
   https://thehill.com/policy/international/5759623-iran-nuclear-deal-stockpiling/
   [Confirms Abulsaidi met with Vice President Vance on February 27 and described the zero-stockpiling offer on CBS Face the Nation the same day.]

5. Wintour, Patrick, and Julian Borger. "UK Security Adviser Attended US-Iran Talks and Judged Deal Was Within Reach." The Guardian, March 17, 2026.
   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/17/uk-security-adviser-attended-us-iran-talks-and-judged-deal-was-within-reach

6. Barnes, Julian E. "Joe Kent, a Top Counterterrorism Official for the Trump Administration, Resigns, Citing Iran War." The New York Times, March 17, 2026.
   https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/us/politics/joe-kent-counterterrorism-resigns-iran-war.html

7. "Read Joe Kent's Resignation Letter." The New York Times, March 17, 2026.
   https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/17/us/joe-kent-resignation-letter-iran.html

8. Sanger, David E., and Julian E. Barnes. "On Iran, Gabbard Turned Intelligence Duties Over to Trump." The New York Times, March 18, 2026.
   https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-iran-trump.html

9. Parsi, Trita, interviewed by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose Global Conversations, March 2026.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whMm3zRURHs
   [Parsi details Abulsaidi's CBS interview describing the zero-stockpiling offer and characterizes it as historically unprecedented relative to the 2015 JCPOA framework. He also confirms Trump expected the operation to conclude within four days.]

 

 

Y'all know about that there meteor that hit Ohio?

 AI Overview

Following the loud boom and fireball reported across Northeast Ohio on March 17, 2026—identified by NASA as a 7-ton asteroid exploding in the atmosphere—various conspiracy theories and speculations emerged on social media. 

Top Conspiracy Theories and Speculations:

• Alien Spaceship/Base: Some social media users speculated that the object was not a meteor but a spaceship, with claims that an "alien base" exists in Ohio.
• Government/Military Cover-up: Because there was no official warning before the meteor entered the atmosphere, many questioned why NASA or other agencies did not warn the public, suggesting a cover-up.
• Secret Military Strike or Missile: Some individuals hypothesized that the blast was actually an Iranian missile strike or a covert military operation, rather than a natural occurrence.
• "Space Junk" or Failed Satellite: Before official confirmation, some suggested the object was artificial space debris rather than a natural, 6-foot diameter rock.
• Failed Warning by AI: Commenters on social media jokingly or cynically suggested that AI technology should have predicted the event, using the incident to comment on technological limitations.

Many heard it and maybe even felt it felt around the lake area and mid-Missouri with a pretty good idea but still wondering none the less.

What was originally reported as a sonic boom is now being explained, instead, as being caused by a meteor strike over northern Ohio.

It didn’t take long for the Camden County Emergency Management Agency to confirm the loud blast reported a little before 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday across the region as a sonic boom caused by low flying aircraft based on information the EMA could “confirm”.

Since then, the National Weather Service has confirmed satellite imagery suggests confirmed reports by NASA that a 7 ton meteor broke apart over northern Ohio with its effects felt as far away as in New York

The timing of that occurrence, however, doesn’t match up with a loud boom and shaking felt in the lake are right around 11:00 in the morning.

Logically there were two incidents but for the conspiracy theorists, stay tuned for more updates.

https://www.krmsradio.com/camden-ema-no-cause-for-alarm/

Maybe it weren't no meteor. 

Regarding the power and science of lies in politics

The power

There is significant political power in lying to the public. That is especially true for a public that is polarized with a significant number of people conditioned to accepting or excusing lies from the leaders they support and are loyal to. The old adage, "Meh, all politicians lie. It's no big deal", is not only a democracy killer, it's also a tyranny builder. Tyrants and kleptocrats in a lies-accepting society love lies. They use them ruthlessly, fact-checkers be damned. Not lying to a lies-conditioned public wastes political power.

From a moral philosophy point of view, the power of lies and deceit in a democracy is that the liars and deceivers take from deceived people their power to think, choose and act on the basis of facts and truths. In short, lying and deceit are inherently anti-democratic and pro-tyranny, and rather powerful. 

The science

A Raw Story article, 'That is not true': Trump hit with blunt fact check after spreading Supreme Court lie, exemplifies how a major source of power for Trump and MAGA elites works in practice. First a liar tells their lie, or an ignorant person tells a falsehood. Then fact checkers check and expose the lie/falsehood as false. In partisan politics, the net effect of fact checking on the public is modest at most. Many hard core Trump supporters will reject the fact-checkers as liars or idiots, or accept Trump's lie as just Trump speaking his mind being "honest", no big deal.

The Raw Story article reports that Trump falsely claimed the Supreme Court endorsed his policies. That was immediately contradicted by legal experts and factual records showing no such ruling(s) exists or says what he claims. It was an easily debunked lie, plain and simple.

Experiments where people were exposed to Trump's lies and then corrections show that both Democrats and Republicans generally reduce their belief in the specific falsehood after a fact check, including some Trump supporters. But his lie is likely to do more to reinforce and spread misperceptions than the fact check does to correct them among Trump’s core supporters. Research indicates that the fact check mainly limits damage among non-supporters and the less engaged. For strong Trump supporters, research shows they are more likely to accept Trump's false claims because they come from him. For some supporters, even when they know they are being lied to, Trump's lies are treated as as credible "facts". That is a manifestation of partisan moral flexibility. In general, Trump's lies increase false beliefs and reduce trust in institutions he targets such as courts, news media, Democrats, elections, etc. 

Among Trump skeptics, fact-checks tend to work as intended. That increases their confidence in democratic processes and slightly reduces support for anti-democratic actions and policies. Among committed Trump partisans, corrections generally have limited effect because of motivated reasoning. They ignore or dismiss the fact check, and in some cases double down on the original claim or shift to narratives about "biased media" or a "weaponized" judiciary.

At the aggregate level, a single lie plus a single fact check probably produces an entrenchment or slight radicalization of Trump's base, and (a) a modest corrective effect among non-supporters, and (b) a small net increase in polarization and institutional mistrust. Trump's lies generally help him more than it hurts. So why not lie?

The danger to democracy and the rule of law is cumulative. Repeated, uncorrected or partially corrected lies about the Supreme Court and other institutions gradually normalize the idea that legal reality is whatever a lying leader says it is. Over time anti-democracy lies meaningfully weakens overall public acceptance of rule-of-law limits and even support for democracy and the civil liberties the liar targets, e.g., abortion, voting rights, inconvenient free speech, etc.

Q: Given the gravity of Trump's and elite MAGA's threats to democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and the public interest, is it morally justifiable for political opposition and elite Democrats to resort to constant lying just like Trump and MAGA elites?