You already know about the doctrine if you read my exposee’. You watched NATO describe, in its own words, an operation designed to “activate the subconscious processes” in the brains of civilians inside its own member states (thats YOU). You already know about the laws. The case files in my article: a Swiss colonel whose friends carry groceries to his door, a Berlin journalist who cannot legally be fed by a friend, a Swiss-Cameroonian commentator banned from her own continent. You know that when somebody refuses to comply, the bank account closes.

What was missing was the production layer. The part of the operation that reaches into your living room.

The Guardian found it.

In May, the paper revealed that NATO has been quietly running closed-door meetings with the screenwriters, directors, and producers of the films and television shows you watch and love. Three meetings so far. Los Angeles. Brussels. Paris. A fourth in London this month. The 2024 precursor was hosted at NATO headquarters by a Washington think tank and attended by the writers of Friends, Law & Order, and one of the comedies you probably had on in the background last weekend. They met the then-Secretary General. Three projects are already in development.

The military alliance that wrote the doctrine your subconscious is now operating under has begun briefing the people whose work shapes how you see the world. Privately. Under Chatham House rules. With its Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Hybrid Threats in the room.

My new article walks through what we know — every claim sourced, every meeting dated, every name on the record where the record permits it. It is the cultural-production layer of a war architecture you already have begun to understand.

Read it next week on my Substack.

She told it the way you tell a story you have rehearsed. On a podcast this spring, Ivanka Trump described how she and Jared Kushner came upon Sazan: a friend’s boat, a pause to swim, a captivation that would not let go. “We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”

Hold that image, because everything that follows depends on it. A woman rising from the sea, walking unshod to a summit, moved by nothing but beauty. It is a clean image, a pure one, and it is doing an enormous amount of work.

Now look at the ground she says she crossed. One stretch of Sazan’s coast is so forbidding that seafarers gave it a name: Gryka e Xhehenemit, the Gorge of Hell. The slopes she describes climbing barefoot are studded with roughly 3,600 concrete bunkers, most of them one-man domes built to survive a nuclear blast, laced together by more than sixteen kilometres of reinforced tunnels and a buried command center. In the water around the island, Albanian military records describe artillery shells, anti-submarine mines, and tonnes of undetonated ordnance still resting on the seabed.

Nobody walks barefoot up that. The detail is not a slip of memory. It is the entire enterprise in miniature: take a fortress and dress it as a beach.

A purity story for an impure deal

There is a reason the barefoot image keeps being told, and it is not that anyone went barefoot. Ivanka Trump is the soft face of a hard transaction. She is photogenic, she is composed, she is reputed to be the one who reads the room better than the rest of the family, and she has been sent out to give a geostrategic acquisition the texture of a honeymoon. Sea, sun, bare feet, captivation: the vocabulary of innocence, deployed around a project that has almost none. The performance casts her as a kind of secular Nymph of the coastline, communing with untouched nature, when the thing being touched is one of the most militarised pieces of rock in the Mediterranean.

Watch how the framing launders the facts, because the cover story has already cracked. The island was not stumbled upon during an idle swim. Kushner himself, on a different podcast, gave a version with no barefoot summit in it at all: “We were on a friend’s boat, Nat Rothschild’s, on vacation.” The friend, it turns out, is a member of the Rothschild banking family, and the vacation was not quite a vacation. On that same yacht, by Kushner’s account, he held a private meetingwith the Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama. A separate telling has Rama boarding the boat in 2021 for a meeting, with investment talks following within a year.

So there are two creation myths, told by two spouses. In one, a barefoot nymph is captivated by beauty. In the other, a financier’s heir and a head of government do business on a billionaire’s deck. Only the first is offered to the public. The second is what actually happened.

This is why the purity story is worth dwelling on rather than dismissing. A false detail, offered casually and repeatedly in the warm register of personal memory, is not a harmless flourish. It is evidence of intent. Someone decided this project required a creation myth, and selected one engineered to disarm. The lie is small. What it is built to protect is not.

What the map says that the brochure does not

Strip away the swim and read the coordinates. The island guards the entrance to the Bay of Vlorë, Albania’s only deep-water bay capable of sheltering large naval vessels, at the precise seam where the Adriatic meets the Ionian. Beyond it lies the Strait of Otranto, the seventy-two-kilometre passage between Albania and Italy that is the sole maritime exit from the Adriatic into the wider Mediterranean.

The men who held this rock before never pretended it was about the view. Mussolini’s Italy fortified it to control access to the Adriatic. Enver Hoxha boasted that Albania possessed the “keys to the Otranto Channel.” When Nikita Khrushchev visited the neighbouring submarine base in 1958, he said outright that from there he could “control the Mediterranean to Gibraltar.” For five centuries the island was coveted in turn by Romans, Venetians, Ottomans, Italians and Soviets, and not one of them wanted it for the swimming.

A chokepoint is a place where a small force can watch, slow, or close a sea lane on which everyone else depends. Analysts measuring Otranto put its narrowest crossing at around seventy-five kilometres, comparable to Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, the two most contested straits on the planet. Whoever holds sway over the positions inside it can monitor and potentially interdict the shipping and naval traffic that passes through. This is not a resort amenity. It is the reason the island was sealed to civilians from 1946 until 1991, and the reason its quiet declassification ought to be the headline rather than the footnote.

The choreography of access

The sequence is the tell, and it runs in the buyers’ favour at every step. In February 2024, Albania’s parliament approved a law removing the ban on construction in protected areas. In December 2024, the government declassified Sazan for civilian use. Until then the island had sat inside the strictly protected Karaburun–Sazan Marine National Park, where large-scale development was forbidden. The legal walls came down, in order, just ahead of the people who needed them gone.

Then came the designation. Rama’s government granted “strategic investor” status to Atlantic Incubation Partners, a vehicle linked to Kushner’s private-equity firm Affinity Partners, unlocking expedited permits and incentives with the Albanian state itself acting as partner and landlord. The country’s leading conservation group says it saw no public consultation and no published permit; one day, its director recounts, there were simply bulldozers cutting roads, felling trees and tearing up the dunes. “From start to finish there has been a total lack of transparency,” he told reporters.

The Albanians did not miss the pattern. By June 2026 the country’s special anti-corruption prosecutors, SPAK, had opened an investigation into the 2024 laws and the plans to build inside the protected park. Prosecutors briefly froze the bank accounts of a landholding company tied to the project, reportedly holding some $195 million transferred for land purchases and owned by the Qatari investors Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat, before the freeze was lifted days later. None of this is the conduct of an ordinary beach development. It is the friction generated when strategic ground changes hands faster than the law was written to allow.

The man who lives on Billionaire Bunker

There is a reason none of this reads as out of character. Jared Kushner already lives on a private island. His home sits on Indian Creek, a man-made, police-patrolled enclave off Miami known, without irony, as “Billionaire Bunker,” where a single guarded bridge connects roughly forty waterfront lots to the mainland and the residents fund their own force of officers patrolling by land and sea. Kushner sits on the village council. His neighbours are Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady, Carl Icahn, and, since this year, Mark Zuckerberg, who bought in for somewhere between $150 and $200 million. The same class of people now assembling private security perimeters and acquiring fortified ground.

That is the context the brochure most wants buried. Across the past decade the very wealthy have been quietly buying hardened refuges, and the figures most associated with the doomsday-bunker market are precisely the technologists who built the world they now seem to fear. Most of their refuges are cabins, silos and New Zealand boltholes. Sazan is something of another order entirely: an island engineered to withstand a nuclear attack, with thousands of blast bunkers, kilometres of tunnel, a deep-water harbour, and a position no navy in history has dismissed.

Read the development plan with that in mind. The “restoration and adaptive reuse of Cold War–era military structures“ appears as a charming heritage touch. Read it the other way and it is an inventory of what stays: the hardening, the bunkers, the tunnels, all retained while a presidential family holds the deed.

A note on what this is not about

This argument needs no position on Russia or Ukraine, and takes none. It does not matter here who should command the Adriatic, or how the war in the east should end. The question is narrower and far older than any current alignment: what happens when strategically decisive ground inside a sovereign NATO member passes into the private hands of a sitting president’s family, through a process that member’s own prosecutors are now investigating for fraud? One can hold any view of the war and still find that disturbing. The danger is not a foreign flag flying over the island. It is the privatisation of geopolitics itself, the conversion of a national chokepoint into a family asset.

And the precedent is not hypothetical. Only last December, Affinity Partners walked away from a luxury hotel deal in Serbia hours after four government officials were charged with abuse of office and forgery tied to the project. The same firm, the same template: a politically connected investor, a state eager to please the Trump administration, protected ground rezoned, and corruption charges trailing close behind. In Albania the bulldozers have already moved, and a youth-led movement that calls itself the Flamingo Revolution has filled the streets of Tirana, carrying inflatable pink birds and placards reading “Albania is not for sale,” demanding the deal’s cancellation and, increasingly, Rama’s resignation.

The bunkers were the point all along

Set the two pictures side by side. In the first, a beautiful woman walks barefoot out of the sea, captivated by an unspoiled coast, eager only to protect its beauty. In the second, a fortress sits at the mouth of a contested sea, its nuclear shelters intact, changing hands inside a NATO state through laws rewritten in sequence and permits no one was allowed to see, brokered on a Rothschild yacht, financed in part by Gulf money, and pursued by a man whose own home is a guarded island bunker.

The first picture is the packaging. The second is the product. The purity of the barefoot Nymph exists to keep your eyes off the hardened ground beneath her feet. And the longer the public stares at those bare feet, the fewer people will ask the only questions that matter: who now controls the gate to the Adriatic, why a family that helps decide the fate of Europe wanted this particular island out of all the islands in the Mediterranean, and what, exactly, they are preparing it to be.

Alex Karp once wrote the instruction manual for how free societies talk themselves into doing terrible things in his PhD thesis. Now he sells the software that does exactly that. One could think this is a paradox, but it’s not, it is a warning, and it is addressed to you.

Consider what is already known about you, somewhere, right now. Where you slept last night, traced through your phone. What you earn, what you owe, what you searched at three in the morning. Your face, captured and indexed. Your medical history. The people you call most often, and the people they call. None of it, on its own, is sinister. Each fragment was surrendered for some small convenience or extracted by some agency with a reason that sounded fine at the time. But the fragments are no longer scattered. They are being stitched together, by machines, into a single legible portrait of a single human life — yours — and the company doing more of that stitching for the United States government than almost any other was built by a man who understands, better than almost anyone alive, exactly what such a portrait can be used for.

He understands because he wrote his doctorate on it.

What the young scholar knew

In 2002, Alexander Karp took a doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. His dissertation asked a question that should haunt anyone living through this decade: how do decent, ordinary people in a functioning society come to take part in cruelty without ever once feeling cruel?

His answer, built on the philosopher Theodor Adorno, was a thing he called “jargon.” Jargon is the elevated, morally flattering language that lets people act on their ugliest impulses while believing they are doing something noble. It does not announce aggression; it dresses it. Karp wrote that jargon “solidifies integration processes” — it binds the in-group together — by making the present “promising and therefore acceptable.” Strip the academic varnish and the claim is brutal: give people the right words, and they will applaud the very things they would otherwise be ashamed of. They will feel like protectors while behaving like predators. Karp even noted the perpetrator’s central self-deception — that his hostility is merely “a reasonable response to something” the targeted person has done. The cruelty, from the inside, always feels like defense.

He had, in other words, mapped the precise machinery by which a civilization turns on a portion of its own and calls it virtue. He could name every gear.

And he knew what stops the machine. Leaning on the German thinker Helmuth Plessner, Karp argued that the modern nation — bound by a written constitution and the rule of law — is the firewall against fascism, precisely because it guarantees that everyone stands equal before the same rules, regardless of blood or origin or the moment they happened to arrive. The young Karp wrote that firewall into his thesis as the one reliable thing standing between civilization and barbarism. Remember it. We are about to watch its author help dismantle it.

What the older man built

Palantir Technologies, the company Karp co-founded in 2003 with the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel and seed money from the CIA’s venture arm, does not make a product you can hold. It makes the connective tissue of the surveillance state: software that takes the scattered fragments of a population’s data and fuses them into something searchable, sortable, and actionable.

Begin with the most visible case, because it is the proof of concept. Since January 2025, Palantir has signed over $81 million in new contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, on top of a relationship dating back to 2008. The centerpiece is a $30 million no-bid system named, without apparent irony, ImmigrationOS — built to “identify, track, and deport“ people using artificial intelligence. A companion tool reportedly draws on data from the Department of Health and Human Services — the agency that holds medical and refugee records — to map locations and assemble dossiers on those marked for removal.

Now hold the immigration case at arm’s length and ask the question the headlines rarely ask. Civil-liberties lawyers have warned that nobody can explain how a system like this would ever stay limited to the people it currently hunts. That is the point. A machine built to fuse health records, location data, and personal histories into deportation targets is not, at the level of its engineering, a deportation machine. It is a population machine. The category it searches for is a setting, not a structure. Change the setting and the same software finds tax debtors, or protesters, or the readers of a particular newspaper, or you. The immigrant is simply the first person it was pointed at — the test subject for a capability that, once it exists, does not un-exist when the political weather changes.

This is who the company has always been. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018 over the harvesting of up to 87 million Facebook profiles for political targeting, Palantir first denied any link to the firm, then admitted the next day that one of its employees had worked with it — by the company's account, freelancing on his own, with no wrongdoing ever established against Palantir itself. The target then was voters, not migrants; the technique — fusing scattered personal data into a tool for moving people — was the same one now wired into the machinery of the state.

This is the part that should reach past the people who feel safely outside the current target. The infrastructure does not care who you are. It is built to be retargetable, and the only thing standing between its present use and its next one is the restraint of whoever holds power on a given morning — the very firewall Karp once said was the only thing that mattered.

And the retargeting is no longer hypothetical. In 2025, the administration began spreading a Palantir product called Foundry across the federal government, putting it into at least four agencies and laying the groundwork, according to officials, to merge records held separately across the state into unified portraits of ordinary citizens. The data points reportedly sought include bank account numbers, the size of a person’s student debt, medical claims, and disability status — the intimate ledger of an ordinary life, pulled from the agencies that hold it and stitched into one view. The company has earned more than $113 million in federal spending since the term began. Even former Palantir employees balked: data collected for one reason, one told reporters, should not be repurposed for another, because combining it all — however noble the stated intent — vastly multiplies the risk of misuse. That is not a warning about immigrants. That is a warning about everyone whose life leaves a record, which is to say everyone.

What they say, and what is happening

There is a gap here, and it is worth naming, because closing that gap is the whole game.

What Palantir says is that it is democracy’s shield. In his 2025 bestseller The Technological Republic, Karp argues that Silicon Valley has gone soft, squandering its genius on trivial apps while ducking its patriotic duty, and that technologists must re-engage with national defense or surrender the future to authoritarian regimes. The company, in this telling, exists to protect free societies from tyranny.

What is happening is that the same software is already being used to kill. A United Nations investigator reported in 2025 that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Palantir had supplied predictive-policing and real-time targeting technology used in the war in Gaza, and Karp himself acknowledged that Israeli forces had used Palantir tools. The distance between a system that decides who gets deported and a system that decides who gets killed is a distance the same company sells across.

When critics point this out, Karp does not argue. He sneers. He has called those who describe his company as a surveillance apparatus “parasitic,” insisting they understand neither the product nor the country, and he has told audiences that “not only is patriotism right, patriotism will make you rich.” Set that sentence beside his own dissertation and the effect is vertiginous. It is jargon, by his exact 2002 definition: language that costumes self-interest as virtue, that splits the world into patriots and parasites, that makes an uncomfortable and profitable enterprise feel like a sacred calling. The man who diagnosed the disease has become its most fluent carrier — and he is too intelligent not to know it.

In April 2026 the subtext became text. Palantir published a 22-point manifesto, and scholars across several countries recognized it on sight. Mark Coeckelbergh, a philosopher of technology at the University of Vienna, called it a clear example of “technofascism.” The economist Yanis Varoufakis warned of the danger of fusing advanced artificial intelligence with militarized state power. The document railed against “vacant and hollow pluralism” and declared certain cultures “dysfunctional and regressive” — the vocabulary of civilizational superiority that every previous authoritarian movement has used to justify what came next. Coeckelbergh’s deeper warning is the one to keep: the real danger is not the jackboot but the normalization of surveillance, the handing of human judgment to machines no one can inspect, the quiet concentration of power among the few who build them.

This is not (only) an American story

It would be a comfort to file all this under American politics and turn the page. That comfort is not available.

The condition Karp’s machinery serves is global, and it is worsening on every continent. For the first time in more than twenty years, the world now holds more autocracies than democracies — ninety-one to eighty-eight — and liberal democracies have become the rarest form of government on Earth. The rot has reached the wealthy nations once thought immune. A 2026 study found the United States deteriorating at “unprecedented speed,” with six of the ten newest backsliding countries located in Europe and North America. We are living through the worst stretch for self-government in half a century, and we are living through it everywhere at once.

Into that current, American firms are shipping the tools. A surveillance platform perfected on the bodies and records of one population — funded by taxpayers, refined on the vulnerable, sold by a company headquartered in the United States — does not stay where it was built. It becomes a product. Other governments watch, and some of them buy. The genius of this new authoritarianism is that it never arrives looking like the thing your grandparents were warned about. There is no torchlit rally. There is a procurement contract, a software update, a press release about efficiency and safety. By the time the system is pointed at people who look and vote and pray like you, it has been ordinary for years.

That is the warning, and it is not abstract. The data that would feed such a turn already exists, gathered in a thousand transactions none of which felt like surrender. The machine that would read it already exists, sold by men who speak the language of freedom while building the architecture of oppression. And the firewall — the rule of law, the principle that no algorithm and no agency may dissolve a person’s equality before the same rules as everyone else — is the one thing being worn away in real time, in dozens of countries at once, by the very people who profit from its absence.

Alex Karp knew all of this once. He wrote it down, in careful prose, and earned a doctorate for understanding it. The most damning witness against the man he became is the young scholar he used to be. His thesis is still there, waiting to be read. The only open question is whether the rest of us read it before the machine he built is turned, at last, toward you.

Note on the dissertation: Alexander C. Karp, “Aggression in the Living Environment: The Extension of Parsons’ Concept of Aggression by Describing the Context of Jargon, Aggression and Culture” (Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, 2002). Quotations come from the English rendering of the German original.

Twenty-one months ago, Tucker Carlson stood before the 2024 Republican National Convention and told the country that Donald Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt was “divine intervention” — that God had spared Trump because He had a plan for him to lead. That’s the same argument Hitler used when he narrowly survived a bomb attack on 20 July 1944 at his “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia.

By April 2026, Carlson was on his own show intimating that Trump might be the antichrist. He suggested the president had deliberately bombed an Iranian elementary school, urged the people around Trump to hide the nuclear codes from him, and read the absence of a hand on the Bible at the inauguration as proof that Trump “affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book.” Trump, for his part, called Carlson “a low-IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on.”

The whiplash is the story — but not in the way Carlson would like you to read it. The break is real, and it has fractured the political right in measurable ways. Yet treating it as a conversion, an awakening, or even a principled stand requires forgetting almost everything that is documented about how this man operates. The more useful question is not whether Carlson has finally seen the light, but what the rupture reveals about a career built on the serial, profitable reinvention of conviction — and about the media and political machinery that rewarded it at every turn.

“I hate him passionately”

Begin with the inconvenient receipts. We do not have to speculate about Carlson’s sincerity, because his private words have already been entered into the public record. During the discovery phase of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox News, internal messages surfaced showing that the man who defended Trump nightly on air privately wrote, “I hate him passionately,” called the prospect of being able to ignore Trump something he “truly can’t wait” for, and judged that there “really isn’t an upside to Trump.” He dismissed the first term as a bust. When the texts became public, Carlson didn’t reckon with the contradiction; he told a radio host he was “enraged” his private messages had been “pulled.”

This is the pattern that should frame everything else: a sharp, durable gap between the performed conviction and the private calculation. So when Carlson told his audience in April 2026 that he would be forever “tormented” by his role in returning Trump to power and apologized “for misleading people,” the more parsimonious reading is not that he has changed. It is that he has changed his bet. CNN’s own analysis noted that the alliance “has long been an apparent marriage of convenience.”

The man who has been everything

The Trump reversal looks less like an aberration once you trace the whole arc, because reinvention is the through-line of Carlson’s career, not an exception to it. He began as the bow-tied conservative foil on CNN’s Crossfire, the prime-time shouting program he co-hosted from 2001 to 2005. That incarnation collapsed in October 2004, when Jon Stewart appeared on the show and told Carlson and Paul Begala to their faces that they were “partisan hacks“ who were “hurting America” with their two-sided political theater. CNN’s incoming president agreed with the assessment, cancelled Crossfire, and declined to renew Carlson’s contract.

What followed was a decade in the wilderness that almost no one remembers now. He reinvented himself for MSNBC, ditching the bow tie and vowing that his new show would never feature guests “debating each other” — the very format he’d just spent years performing. Tucker never found an audience and was cancelled in 2008. A PBS show ran about a year. A CBS pilot lost out to a karaoke game show hosted by a former member of NSYNC. In the wreckage, he retreated to founding The Daily Caller in 2010, a site he promised would be “thoughtful, responsible, researched,” bankrolled by the conservative donor Foster Friess.

The most telling fact of all is buried in the biographical record: Carlson was a registered Democrat from 2006 to 2020, and only re-registered as a Republican the year Trump first lost the White House. The flannel-shirted populist now railing against the establishment spent his prime years as a credentialed Washington insider — a “media gatekeeper,” as one writer who dined with him in the Bush years put it. Each persona was sincere-sounding while it lasted, and each was abandoned the moment it stopped paying. The Trump romance and the Trump excommunication are simply the two most recent entries in a much longer ledger.

The candidate who says he isn’t one

Carlson insists he has no presidential ambitions. Asked directly by The Economist whether he would run in 2028, he laughed and said “of course not,” adding that he’d been “so slandered as a bigot” that even his endorsement would be worthless. To Piers Morgan, however, he conspicuously refused to rule it out, musing that the chance to debate and dismantle Senator Ted Cruz might be reason enough to jump in.

The denial sits awkwardly against everything happening around him. Marjorie Taylor Greene floated “Tucker 2028” outright, declaring that Carlson “would beat Trump if he ran.” The marketing professor and podcaster Scott Galloway predicted Carlson was “the most likely GOP nominee for president in 2028,” reading the apology as nothing more than campaign prep. By May 2026, Carlson had climbed to roughly 7 percent on Polymarket’s 2028 Republican nomination market — a trivial number on Wall Street, an extraordinary one for a man with no campaign, no committee, and no party apparatus.

The structural logic of a Carlson candidacy is real enough to take seriously. Since Fox fired him in 2023, he has rebuilt one of the largest unmediated audiences on the American right, with hundreds of millions of views across YouTube and X. He can address millions at dinnertime without asking permission from a network, a donor, or a pollster. He helped get JD Vance onto the 2024 ticket. And he benefits enormously from the perpetual will-he-won’t-he speculation regardless of whether he ever files paperwork: every cycle of “is Tucker running?” is free promotion for the brand, and a non-candidate who is treated as a kingmaker wields influence without ever having to defend a record at a debate or a ballot box.

The machine that built him

None of this happened in a vacuum. Carlson is, in a precise sense, a product of the cable-outrage business model — and of one corporation in particular. Fox News monetized grievance through his prime-time hour for years, including his promotion of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, the racist idea that white people are being deliberately replaced by people of color, which prompted the Anti-Defamation League to call for his firing.

What finally severed the relationship was not principle but liability. Fox settled the Dominion suit for $787.5 million over its on-air amplification of false 2020 election-fraud claims — claims its own hosts privately disbelieved. Days later, Carlson was gone. Reporting indicated that Fox’s board had been unsettled by a discovered text in which Carlson described watching a group of Trump supporters beat a protester and wrote that ganging up that way was “not how white men fight.” The same trove revealed Carlson pressing a producer to identify and punish a Fox journalist whose accurate, Trump-critical reporting he feared would damage “the brand.” The network that made him rich kept him until the cost of keeping him exceeded his value, then dropped him without public explanation. That is not a morality tale about a renegade truth-teller; it is a story about a business and its most lucrative asset.

Freed from the editors

The post-Fox Carlson is the most revealing Carlson, because for the first time no one was checking his work. Relaunched on X and then through his own Tucker Carlson Network, his content drifted into UFOs, false-flag theories, and — most consequentially — 9/11 trutherism.

The 9/11 turn is a near-perfect case study in opportunism. In September 2025 he launched a five-part series, “The 9/11 Files,” promising to prove that “what you have been told about 9/11 is not true.” As the conservative City Journal noted in its review, the series mostly recycled familiar insinuations in a glossy package, interviewing no firsthand witnesses and producing no physical evidence, while preserving Carlson’s signature “just-asking-questions” pose of deniability. By March 2026 he was telling audiences that text messages had warned Israel of the attacks in advance — “All true, by the way,” he said. The underlying episode is real: five Israeli men were detained on 9/11 after being seen filming and reportedly celebrating as the towers burned, and questions about their possible intelligence ties have never been fully resolved. But the specific claim Carlson revived — that Israel had advance knowledge of the attacks — is precisely what the FBI’s counterterrorism investigators examined and rejected, in part because timeline and radar records placed the men at their vantage point only after the first plane had already struck. Reviving two-decades-cold conspiracy theories cost him nothing and bought him a fresh, highly engaged audience. That is the tell. The topics change — UFOs, vaccines, the Capitol footage, 9/11 — but the underlying product is constant: escalating, attention-maximizing content engineered for an algorithm that rewards outrage and certainty.

The same engine drove his rehabilitation of figures the mainstream right had quarantined. In October 2025 he hosted the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, then dismissed the backlash as “hysterical,” describing Fuentes as “a kid” with “no power except his words” who merely says “naughty things.” Reminded that Fuentes denies the Holocaust, Carlson responded: “OK, but is that worse than killing kids?” Whatever else that is, it is a man who has learned that there is a market for normalizing what was once unspeakable, and who has decided to serve it.

Follow the money

The break with Trump is officially about foreign policy — specifically Carlson’s opposition to the 2026 U.S.–Israel war on Iran, which he called “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Here the critical reader should pause over a complicating detail. Carlson’s anti-Israel turn did not happen all at once, and according to one investigation of his output, his editorial direction came — per filings made with the U.S. Department of Justice — to align with the strategic communications objectives of the State of Qatar, a country whose interests run counter to Israel’s and whose government Carlson has produced favorable content about. Carlson has visited much of the Arab world, produced what critics call propaganda films, and reportedly floated buying a house in Qatar.

This thread should be handled carefully — it rests on reporting and disclosure filings rather than a confession — but it reframes the “principled antiwar dissident” narrative in an uncomfortable light. At minimum, it suggests that on the very issue Carlson presents as his deepest conviction, the line between belief and business may be blurrier than his audience is told. A man whose private contempt for Trump was hidden behind years of on-air loyalty has not earned the benefit of the doubt about where his sincerity ends and his incentives begin.

What the break actually reveals

Whether or not Carlson ever runs, the rupture has already done real work. It has split the Republican coalition along the fault line of Israel and foreign policy, pitting Carlson and Vance’s isolationist wing against hawks like Ted Cruz, who has called Carlson “bat-crap crazy” and accused him of injecting antisemitism into the movement while positioning himself for his own 2028 bid. It has measurably eroded evangelical support for Israel. And it has confirmed Carlson as a power broker who can move the party’s center of gravity without holding — or seeking — any office at all.

That is the genuine danger, and it is more interesting than a hypothetical President Carlson. The man has spent a career being cast out — by CNN, by MSNBC, by Fox, and now, he says, betrayed by Trump. He has built a brand on that betrayal itself, presenting himself perpetually as the honest outsider expelled by corrupt institutions, even as he spent his prime years as a registered Democrat and one of the most richly compensated insiders in American media. He told The Wall Street Journal in April 2026 that he doesn’t “hate” Trump but feels “betrayed.” It is the word he always reaches for, and it always casts him as the wronged party.

So when he intimates that the president might be the antichrist, the safest assumption is not that Tucker Carlson has finally found a conviction he won’t trade. It is that he has found his next, most lucrative role — and that the question of whether he’ll run for president flatters him precisely as he intends it to. That may be the whole point.

A note on sourcing: factual claims are linked inline to the reporting that supports them. The Qatar/Department-of-Justice-filings thread rests on investigative reporting and disclosure filings rather than any admission by Carlson, and is presented as such in the text. Readers should weigh it accordingly.

There is a young woman in Berlin, or Amsterdam, or Valencia — pick the city; she lives in all of them — who has not held a banknote in eleven months. She is twenty-five. Her rent leaves her account on the second of each month through a standing order she set up in her first week of university and has not thought about since. Her groceries are tapped through a phone. Her freelance income arrives on a Friday from a platform headquartered in California, is converted from dollars to euros by an algorithm she does not see, and is spent by Sunday on a subscription to a yoga app, a subscription to a streaming service, and a subscription to the productivity tool she uses to manage her other subscriptions. She donates €15 a month to a journalist she likes on Substack, €10 to a Palestinian medical charity, and €5 to a friend’s ill cat. She has, in other words, the financial life of an ordinary young European, which is to say she is observed continuously, scored continuously, and entirely dependent on the goodwill of seven or eight private companies, none of which are accountable to her, and most of which are not even European.

She is the person on whose behalf the digital euro is being built. Or so we are told.

In a courtroom in The Hague last August, a French judge named Nicolas Guillou discovered, more or less by accident, what life looks like when the goodwill is withdrawn. He had co-signed an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. The Trump administration responded by adding him to the same sanctions list that names cartel chiefs and Hezbollah financiers. Within hours his Visa was revoked, his Mastercard stopped working, Amazon would not take his orders, and a hotel he had booked inside France, in his own currency, through a company called Expedia, cancelled his reservation when the algorithm noticed who he was. He is fifty years old. He survived. “If sanctions were to hit young people today,” he told a French television audience in March, “who are 25 and have their entire lives online, the sanctions I’m experiencing would be a true civil death for them.”

Civil death. It is a phrase from medieval canon law, originally describing a person who had been formally cast out of the community of the faithful — alive, but legally extinct. The interesting question is not whether Judge Guillou knew he was quoting the Inquisition. The interesting question is why a sitting magistrate of an international court reached for that particular phrase, in 2026, when describing what happens to a citizen of a European democracy who can no longer use a credit card.

He is not, of course, the only one. Eleven judges at the ICC are now in his position. So is Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, sanctioned in July 2025 for her work on Gaza. Her family has now sued the Trump administration in a Washington court, arguing — touchingly — that the First Amendment protects a UN lawyer from being financially erased for her opinions. President Macron, by the count of France TV, has written seven letters to the White House requesting that Guillou’s sanctions be lifted. None has been answered.

The European response to all of this — the response of the Commission, the European Central Bank, and a coalition of seventy economists led by Thomas Piketty — is a new currency. They call it the digital euro. Guillou himself, on the same day he described his blocked accounts, called for the EU to build a “true European sovereignty shield.” Piketty and his co-signatories, in an open letter published on 11 January 2026, called a robust public digital euro Europe’s “only defence.” Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel told a Brussels audience in March that “it is not wise to outsource our sovereignty.” The European Council has told the ECB to accelerate. The legislation is expected to clear the European Parliament by the end of this year, with first issuance scheduled for 2029.

This is, on the surface, a satisfying story. Europe has watched an American president freeze the credit cards of a French judge for upholding international law, and Europe has decided to do something about it. The thing it has decided to do, however, is to build a centralised payments architecture, run by an unelected central bank, that is in many respects a tighter and more granular version of the system that just failed Guillou. The case being made is that this is a sovereignty shield. It is more accurate to call it a permission system, in which the permission has been moved from Washington to Brussels, with very few intermediate stops in any building where Europeans actually vote.

To see why this matters, it is necessary to look at what the digital euro is, and — more importantly — at what it does to the person using it.

The digital euro is a retail central bank digital currency. The ECB will issue it, licensed payment service providers (your bank, mostly) will distribute it, and citizens will hold up to €3,000 of it in a wallet linked to their existing bank account. There will be an online mode and an offline mode. Merchants will be required to accept it under a legal tender status that they cannot, in most cases, refuse. The build cost is about €1.3 billion; the running cost will be roughly €320 million a year. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone, who runs the project, has called concerns about surveillance “fake news”.

Reasonable people will note, at this point, that “fake news” is rarely the response of someone whose architecture withstands inspection. So let us inspect.

The ECB does not propose anonymity. It proposes pseudonymisation, which is a different thing and is the source of most of the confusion. Under the design, the central bank holds codes representing payer, payee, and amount. The PSPs hold the mapping between those codes and the real human beings. The two halves of the picture exist in different buildings; combining them requires a request, a justification, and a signature. The ECB calls this a privacy feature. It is, more accurately, a compliance feature dressed up as one. The data exists. The link exists. What changes between a privacy regime and a surveillance regime is not the architecture but the rules governing access to it, and rules can be amended.

This is not a hypothetical worry. In October 2023 the European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor issued a joint opinion on the proposed regulation. They called for pseudonymisation of all transaction data to be a binding obligation written into the operative text, not a design promise. They asked the ECB to demonstrate the necessity of its proposed Fraud Detection and Prevention Mechanism, an automated system whose contours the EDPB found “not foreseeable” — meaning the legal text did not specify what triggered it, what it did, who controlled it, or what data flowed through it. They asked for a privacy threshold below which low-value transactions would not be traced for anti-money-laundering purposes. The current draft has incorporated some of these recommendations cosmetically and most of them not at all.

The point is not that the ECB is malicious. The point is that the ECB is building an instrument whose capabilities, once they exist, will be governed by whoever happens to be in charge of them, under whatever political pressures happen to be loud at the time. This is not a controversial observation. It is the foundational principle of constitutional design, which is why constitutions exist. The digital euro, as currently legislated, has no constitutional safeguards of comparable weight; it has design promises, supervisory opinions, and a rulebook the Governing Council can amend.

The ECB is not, in any meaningful sense, accountable for these decisions. It is accountable for monetary policy to the European Parliament in the sense that its president shows up four times a year and answers questions, but Parliament cannot sanction the ECB if it disapproves. The Court of Justice can review ECB acts but rarely does. As the legal scholar Seraina Grünewald has pointed out, the digital euro requires the ECB to make decisions about privacy, civil liberties, financial inclusion, and identity verification — areas in which it has neither expertise nor democratic mandate. On the first day of this year, Bulgaria joined the eurozone and its central bank governor acquired a vote on the Governing Council, including on the digital euro rulebook. There has been no Bulgarian referendum on the digital euro. There has been no parliamentary debate on it. Most Bulgarians, like most Europeans, have heard of it only vaguely, as a thing the technocrats are building and the newspapers occasionally describe in admiring terms.

Now to behaviour.

The single most important fact about the digital euro is not its holding limit, or its offline mode, or its build cost, or even its rules on AML. The single most important fact about the digital euro is that it produces, by design and at scale, behavioural data that does not currently exist in any consolidated form. Every transaction will be tagged, timed, located, categorised, and linked — through the PSP — to an identified human being. The ECB will hold the pseudonymised half. The PSPs will hold the identified half. The fraud-detection mechanism will sit across both. The system will know, for every European who uses it, what they buy, where they buy it, when, how often, from whom, and in what sequence.

This is the part the architects do not enjoy discussing, and where the language of “privacy by design” tends to do most of its work. Behavioural data, as anyone who has worked in advertising or insurance underwriting or counter-terrorism finance knows, is not neutral. It is predictive. It is the substance from which scores are made, and scores, once they exist, organise the world. They decide who gets credit, who gets insurance, who gets a flat, who gets flagged, who gets the visit. The Dutch government discovered this when its tax authority used an algorithmic risk system to accuse tens of thousands of families — disproportionately families with non-Dutch surnames — of childcare benefit fraud, ruined their lives, and brought down a government in 2021. The same architectural logic, applied to the entire population, is what the digital euro produces by default.

The defenders will say none of this is intended. They will say the rulebook forbids it. They will say the ECB has no interest in your weekend purchases. All of this is probably true, and beside the point. What matters is not the intent of the architects but the affordances of the architecture. A system that can identify dissidents might be used to identify dissidents. A system that can throttle a transaction migh be used to throttle one. A system that can freeze a wallet might be used to freeze one. The question is who decides, and on what authority, and with what recourse. The answers, in the current legislative draft, are: the ECB decides through the PSPs, on the authority of a rulebook the Governing Council can rewrite, with recourse through court systems whose average case takes seven years.

To understand what such a system does to ordinary people, it is sufficient to look at what the existing, looser, more chaotic, less centralised system has been doing for the past three years.

Since October 2023, journalists covering Israel’s war on Gaza have lived under a kind of low-grade financial harassment that does not, individually, make headlines but that, collectively, has reshaped the field. Independent reporters describe being warned by Stripe and PayPal that their accounts are “under review.” Substack writers covering the war find their payment processors making unilateral decisions about what kinds of fundraising appeals are permissible. Donations to Palestinian medical funds are reversed, delayed, or returned without explanation. The German government, which has staked its post-1945 identity on unconditional support for the Israeli state, has been particularly aggressive: in early 2026 the foreign ministers of Austria, the Czech Republic, France, and Germany jointly called for Albanese’s removal from her UN post. Yanis Varoufakis was banned from speaking in Germany; the Berlin police shut down a Palestine Congress at which he was scheduled to appear. The fundraising apparatus of the people doing the most documented work on the war has been the soft target throughout. The bombs are dropped in Gaza. The accounts are frozen in Frankfurt and Berlin and London.

The mirror image is Russia. Since February 2022, ordinary Russian-passport holders living legally in EU member states — including dissidents and journalists who fled Putin specifically because they refused to participate in his regime — have had accounts at Citibank, Revolut, Wise, and Deutsche Bank closed without explanation. Russian-language independent media operating in Riga and Amsterdam have lost donation channels. The mechanism is what Guillou calls over-compliance: banks refusing transactions to anyone in the vicinity of a sanctioned name to avoid being themselves penalised. The architecture cannot tell the difference between a Putin oligarch and a Putin critic. It does not need to. It distinguishes by passport, name, and transaction pattern, which is what algorithms do, and which is what scaled compliance was always going to do once the tools were good enough.

The pattern that connects these two cases is the one the digital euro will inherit, and amplify, and operationalise. A government decides that a class of speech, or a class of speakers, or a class of donations, is incompatible with public order. It does not need to ban the speech, because banning speech is constitutionally awkward. It needs only to instruct the financial system to treat the speakers and the donors as compliance risks. The financial system, which has no constitutional duties and which lives in mortal terror of regulatory penalties, complies enthusiastically. The journalists are not arrested. They are debanked. The dissidents are not deported. Their cards stop working. The donors are not prosecuted. They receive a polite email about a reservation that has been cancelled.

This is not a future scenario. This is the system as it currently functions, in May 2026, on the rails Europeans use today. The honest argument for the digital euro would acknowledge that the new system inherits every one of these capabilities and gives them, for the first time, a single point of administration inside the eurozone. The argument actually being made — by Cipollone, by Lagarde, by Piketty, by the Commission — is that the digital euro will free Europe from American payments dominance. This is, narrowly, true. It will also concentrate, in one institution, the ability to identify, profile, score, throttle, and disconnect any European whose behaviour has been deemed undesirable by whoever happens to be deciding what undesirable means in any given decade. The institution doing the deciding will be the European Central Bank, which is independent in the sense that nobody can fire it.

Cash, the only payment instrument in human history that does not require permission, was 50% of euro-area transactions in 2010 and 24% by value in 2024. Twelve per cent of euro-area retailers no longer accept it. The Commission has proposed a parallel regulation reinforcing the right to pay with cash. It has not proposed, and cannot propose, a regulation reinforcing the right of merchants to be set up to take it. Cash will remain legal. It will become, first slowly and then quickly, unusable. The digital euro will arrive into the vacuum thus created, and our 25-year-old will discover that the question of who controls the switches is no longer a question she can opt out of by carrying a fifty-euro note, because there will be nowhere left to spend the note.

She will not, in all probability, ever be sanctioned. She will not be a French judge or a UN Special Rapporteur or a Russian dissident or a Gaza fundraiser. She will be a graphic designer who donates a small amount each month to causes she has thought about more than her bank has. The system will not punish her. It will only watch her, and remember, and produce, as a by-product of its operations, a complete behavioural map of her existence — a map that exists nowhere now, that did not exist in any prior form of European money, and that will exist for the rest of her life as a thing that can be looked at, queried, searched, scored, and acted upon, by institutions she will never meet, under rules she will not be invited to write.

Judge Guillou called this a civil death. He was thinking of his own. The interesting thing about civil deaths is that they are administered, not declared. The architecture under construction in Frankfurt is the most efficient instrument for administering them that any European government has ever been offered. It is being sold as a sovereignty shield. It is, in a stricter sense, an instrument of the sovereign — and the sovereign, in this case, is not the demos.

It rarely is.

Source list

1. Euronews — “US sanctions turn International Criminal Court judge’s daily life into a nightmare” (18 Feb 2026): https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/18/us-sanctions-turn-international-criminal-court-judges-daily-life-into-a-nightmare

2. Anadolu Agency — “ICC judge sanctioned by US for warrant against Netanyahu says he can no longer use credit cards…” (23 Mar 2026): https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/icc-judge-sanctioned-by-us-for-warrant-against-netanyahu-says-he-can-no-longer-use-credit-cards-order-things-online/3875305

3. Al Jazeera — “US sanctions UN expert Francesca Albanese over Israel criticism” (9 Jul 2025): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/9/us-sanctions-un-expert-albanese-over-israel-criticism

4. Al Jazeera — “Family of UN rapporteur Albanese sues Trump administration over sanctions” (26 Feb 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/family-of-un-rapporteur-albanese-sues-trump-administration-over-sanctions

5. FStech — “Digital Euro backers urge parliament to resist bank pressure” (12 Jan 2026): https://www.fstech.co.uk/fst/Digital_Euro_Backers_Urge_Parliament_To_Resist_Bank_Pressure.php

6. Deutsche Bundesbank — “The digital euro and European sovereignty” (Nagel speech, 2026): https://www.bundesbank.de/en/tasks/topics/-the-digital-euro-and-european-sovereignty-994276

7. ECB — “The digital euro: preparing for a potential launch” (Cipollone, 24 Mar 2026): https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2026/html/ecb.sp260324~66f71f7577.en.html

8. ECB — “Progress on the digital euro” project page: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/progress/html/index.en.html

9. Bruegel — “On the digital euro holding limits” (Demertzis & Mejino-López, 2024): https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/digital-euro-holding-limits

10. European Commission — “Frequently asked questions on the digital euro and the legal tender of cash”: https://finance.ec.europa.eu/digital-finance/digital-euro/frequently-asked-questions-digital-euro-and-legal-tender-cash_en

11. ECB press release — “Eurosystem moving to next phase of digital euro project” (30 Oct 2025): https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr251030~8c5b5beef0.en.html

12. Crypto Valley Journal — “ECB estimates digital euro costs for banks at up to 6 billion euros” (20 Feb 2026, contains Cipollone “fake news” quote): https://cryptovalleyjournal.com/hot-topics/news/ecb-estimates-digital-euro-costs-for-banks-at-up-to-6-billion-euros/

13. EDPB — “Digital euro: ensuring the highest data protection and privacy standards” (joint opinion with EDPS, 18 Oct 2023): https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/digital-euro-ensuring-highest-data-protection-and-privacy-standards_en

14. A&O Shearman — summary of EDPB/EDPS joint opinion: https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/ao-shearman-on-data/eu-privacy-regulators-adopt-opinion-on-the-proposed-regulation-on-the-digital-euro

15. Privacy First — “How we are sleepwalking into the digital euro” (Nov 2025): https://privacyfirst.nl/en/articles/how-we-are-sleepwalking-into-the-digital-euro-debate-urgently-needed/

16. Seraina Grünewald — “Digital euro and accountability of the European Central Bank,” Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law (2023): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1023263X231224733

17. IMF — Kristalina Georgieva, “Bulgaria’s Eurozone Accession” (4 Nov 2025): https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2025/11/04/sp110425-md-bulgaria-eurozone-accession

18. Entgleiste Vernunft — “ECB: How the digital euro redistributes power” (Nov 2025): https://www.entgleistevernunft.com/en/post/ecb-how-the-digital-euro-redistributes-power

19. Wikipedia — “Dutch childcare benefits scandal” (toeslagenaffaire, used as analytical reference for algorithmic financial scoring): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal

20. Wikipedia — Yanis Varoufakis (Berlin Palestine Congress 2024 reference): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis

None of this has required a single court victory. No licence has been revoked. No editor has been arrested. No law has been broken. That is precisely the point — and it is what makes this moment more dangerous than the cruder attacks on press freedom that history more readily recognises.

What this piece argues — and documents, source by source — is that Trump’s war on the media is not an aberration. It is the most visible expression of something being built across Western governments simultaneously: a formal architecture for controlling information ecosystems, constructed in NATO military doctrine, in European Union foreign policy law, and in domestic counterterrorism frameworks, by administrations that agree on nothing else but have independently arrived at the same conclusion about who should decide what the public is allowed to believe.

The mechanisms differ. The logic is identical. And none of it requires a single journalist to be arrested to work.

On December 23, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced visa restrictions against five Europeans he called “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.”¹ The most prominent target: Thierry Breton, French businessman and former European Commissioner for the Internal Market, whom Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers described as “the mastermind” of the EU’s Digital Services Act.² The other four — Imran Ahmed of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, and HateAid co-leaders Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg — were accused of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”³

Rubio said the State Department “stands ready and willing to expand” the list.⁴ European capitals erupted in condemnation. The usual machinery of geopolitical theater lurched into motion.

Lost in the spectacle was a question neither Washington nor Brussels had any interest in answering: When two governments fight over who gets to control the information environment, who exactly is defending free speech?

The EU’s Speech Regime

The Digital Services Act deserves every ounce of criticism it receives. Enacted in 2022, it imposes content moderation requirements on “Very Large Online Platforms” — those with 45 million or more monthly EU users — and backs those requirements with fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue.⁵ On December 5, 2025, the European Commission issued its first penalty under the DSA: a €120 million fine against Elon Musk’s X, formally for transparency violations related to its paid blue checkmark system, its advertising repository, and researcher data access.⁶ The fine landed the same day the Trump administration released a National Security Strategy accusing the EU of censoring free speech.⁷ Coincidence is the word diplomats use when timing is too convenient to explain.

The DSA’s architecture extends well beyond fines. It empowers an ecosystem of “trusted flaggers” — NGOs and digital services coordinators empowered to identify content for removal.⁸ Among those sanctioned by Rubio, HateAid’s Ballon and von Hodenberg serve precisely this function under the DSA’s framework.⁹ Ahmed’s Centre for Countering Digital Hate produced a 2022 “Disinformation Dozen” report that targeted, among others, now-HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.¹⁰ Melford’s Global Disinformation Index was accused by Rogers of using U.S. taxpayer money “to exhort censorship and blacklisting of American speech and press.”¹¹

What makes the DSA especially dangerous is a phenomenon known as the “Brussels effect.” Because major platforms maintain global content policies rather than region-specific ones, DSA compliance effectively exports European censorship standards worldwide. A recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation,” examined internal documents from platforms like TikTok showing that DSA compliance was “the primary motivation” for updating global community guidelines.¹² When Brussels tells a platform to suppress a category of speech, the suppression does not stop at the EU’s borders. It cascades across every user on the platform, including Americans whose speech the First Amendment ostensibly protects.

The R Street Institute, in a February 2026 analysis, described the Brussels effect as creating “a race to the bottom” in which “American companies are forced to comply with the most restrictive global standards to maintain market access.”¹³ The DSA’s definition of “illegal content” compounds the problem: it defers to whatever any EU member state deems illegal, now or in the future.¹⁴ This is a blank check drawn on the account of European political discretion, payable in the currency of anyone’s speech.

Breton’s own record illustrates the point. In August 2024, he sent Musk a letter ahead of a planned Trump interview on X, reminding him of the platform’s “legal obligations” under the DSA — a move Rogers specifically cited as evidence of censorious intent.¹⁵ The letter amounted to a sitting European Commissioner publicly warning a platform owner that hosting an interview with a presidential candidate might carry regulatory consequences. That this was considered normal within EU institutional culture tells you everything you need to know about how Brussels understands the relationship between state power and public discourse.

Rubio’s Visa Bans as Geopolitical Theater

Having established that the DSA is a censorship regime, we must now ask a harder question: Is the Rubio State Department doing anything to dismantle it?

A visa ban does not protect a single American’s speech rights. It does not repeal the DSA. It does not prevent the European Commission from fining American platforms. It does not even prevent the five sanctioned individuals from continuing their work. Breton can still advocate for content moderation requirements from Paris. Ahmed can still publish reports from London. HateAid can still flag content from Berlin. What a visa ban does is punish specific individuals through immigration enforcement — a tool of state coercion deployed in service of a geopolitical message, not a principle.

The timing makes the message transparent. The visa bans arrived weeks after the EU’s €120 million fine against X.⁷ X responded to that fine by shutting down the European Commission’s advertising account on the platform.¹⁶ Musk called the fine profane.¹⁷ Rubio called it “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people.”¹⁸ The sequence — EU fine, platform retaliation, government sanction — describes an alliance between a tech oligarch and the state apparatus that surrounds him. This is a commercial dispute elevated to the level of foreign policy, conducted in the language of constitutional principle.

The Musk factor alone should give any honest free-speech advocate pause. In May 2022, Musk met with Breton at a Tesla plant in Austin and told him the DSA was “exactly aligned with my thinking.”¹⁹ He gushed publicly: “I really think I agree with everything you say.”²⁰ By December 2025, he called the same law profane and demanded the EU’s abolition.²¹ The reversal tracks precisely with the moment the DSA shifted from being someone else’s problem to being his. Principles that evaporate on contact with self-interest were never principles.

The Trump administration’s own record on speech makes its posture still harder to take at face value. The R Street Institute, in the same analysis that criticized the Brussels effect, observed that “the current Trump administration has also engaged in forms of censorship and jawboning via various methods.”²² JD Vance used the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 to lecture Europeans about censorship while the administration was simultaneously pressuring platforms and threatening media organizations domestically.²³ And the Biden administration’s domestic censorship infrastructure — the Global Engagement Center, the government-flagged content revealed in the Twitter Files and explored in Missouri v. Biden — is the direct American precursor to the EU’s approach.²⁴ Senator Eric Schmitt’s December 2025 letter to Rogers acknowledged this openly, noting the State Department had partnered with NGOs to circumvent the First Amendment.²⁵

Rubio’s framing was deliberately populist: “radical activists,” “weaponized NGOs,” the “global censorship-industrial complex.”¹ The language is calibrated to resonate with Americans who rightly fear government control of speech. But a visa ban wielded by the Secretary of State is government control of speech — applied to foreigners, enforced through immigration law, and designed to punish people for their regulatory and advocacy activities abroad. Rubio’s open promise to “expand this list” amounts to a standing threat against any foreign researcher, journalist, or civil society figure whose work displeases Washington.⁴ How, precisely, is this different in kind from what Brussels does?

The European Backlash and the Sovereignty Smokescreen

European officials responded with the righteous fury of governments caught between genuine grievance and self-serving hypocrisy.

The European Commission “strongly condemned” the visa bans and said it would “respond swiftly and decisively to defend our regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures.”²⁶ Macron called the bans “intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty.”²⁷ German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul declared them “not acceptable.”²⁸ Breton compared the situation to McCarthyism: “Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?”²⁹

These responses deserve scrutiny rather than sympathy. European officials invoke “sovereignty” and “democracy” to defend a law that empowers unelected commissioners to fine platforms billions for hosting speech that regulators deem harmful. The DSA was voted through the European Parliament and Council — 90 percent support, all 27 member states, as Breton himself repeatedly notes.²⁹ But a democratically enacted gag order remains a gag order. The same democratic processes that produced the DSA could produce speech restrictions far more sweeping, and the DSA’s deferral to national definitions of “illegal content” ensures that they will.¹⁴

The “sovereignty” argument is a red herring in both directions. European sovereignty does not legitimate European censorship. American sovereignty does not legitimate American retaliation against Europeans for exercising European regulatory authority. Sovereignty is a description of where power resides, not a justification for how it is used. When Macron says the EU’s “digital space” should not have its rules “determined outside Europe,” he is defending the EU’s right to censor — and nothing more.²⁷

A Plague on Both Houses

The libertarian position on this dispute is straightforward, and it offers no comfort to either side.

The censorship-industrial complex is real, and it is transatlantic. Michael Shellenberger defined it in 2023 congressional testimony as “a network of ideologically-aligned government, NGO, and academic institutions that discovered over the last few years the power of censorship to protect their own interests against the volatility and risks of the democratic process.”³⁰ That description fits Brussels and Washington with equal precision. The EU codified the international version through the DSA. The Biden administration built the domestic version through government-NGO partnerships, flagging operations, and the Global Engagement Center. The Trump administration now fights the foreign version while maintaining domestic variants of its own.²²

Both the EU and the U.S. government are wielding state power to control information flows. They differ in method — the EU uses regulatory fines; Washington uses visa bans, sanctions, and jawboning — but the underlying impulse is identical: governments that do not trust individuals to evaluate information for themselves. Both invoke the language of protection. Brussels says it protects citizens from “harmful content.” Washington says it protects Americans from “extraterritorial censorship.” Neither is fighting for the individual’s right to speak freely. Both are fighting for control over who decides what the public is permitted to hear.

Rubio’s visa bans do not dismantle this complex. They add another layer of government coercion on top of it. The correct response to the EU’s speech codes is constitutional resistance: strengthening First Amendment protections, reinforcing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and refusing to let any government — foreign or domestic — dictate the terms of online discourse.¹³ The answer to state censorship abroad is not state punishment of the censors. It is the creation of a legal environment in which censorship, wherever it originates, cannot gain purchase over the speech of free people.

The Mises Institute put the matter bluntly in a 2024 analysis: the censorship-industrial complex, whether operated from Brussels or Washington, “exposes the kleptocracy’s true intentions” — the determination of governing institutions to insulate themselves from the democratic accountability that free expression makes possible.³¹

The Skirmish Nobody Wins

The Rubio visa bans are a skirmish in a turf war between rival censors. Americans who care about the First Amendment should not cheer when their government weaponizes immigration law against European bureaucrats; they should ask why their government needs to wield any tool of coercion in the name of free expression. The DSA is a censorship regime that exports European speech restrictions worldwide. Rubio’s response is retaliatory theater that protects no one’s rights while expanding the state’s coercive toolkit. And individuals on both sides of the Atlantic — the ones trying to speak, to publish, to dissent — remain trapped between two governments, each claiming to defend freedom while reaching for the levers of control.

The speech that needs protecting is never the speech that governments want to protect. That has always been the point.

Sources

1. U.S. Department of State, Secretary Rubio statement on visa restrictions, December 23, 2025; Rubio post on X, December 23, 2025.

2. Sarah B. Rogers, posts on X identifying sanctioned individuals and describing Breton as “mastermind,” December 23–24, 2025. Reported in Al Jazeera, December 28, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/24/us-bars-five-europeans-over-efforts-to-censor-american-viewpoints

3. Marco Rubio, statement on X, December 23, 2025. Reported in CNBC, December 24, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/24/us-bans-visas-for-ex-eu-commissioner-over-alleged-censorship.html

4. Axios, “Trump admin bars 5 Europeans it says pressed tech platforms to ‘censor’ U.S. views,” December 24, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/12/24/trump-immigration-us-state-department-visa-ban-european-tech

5. European Commission, “The Digital Services Act,” official overview. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-services-act-package

6. European Commission press release, “Commission fines X €120 million under the Digital Services Act,” December 5, 2025. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-fines-x-eu120-million-under-digital-services-act

7. Axios, December 24, 2025. Fine and National Security Strategy released same day; X shut down EC’s ad account. https://www.axios.com/2025/12/24/trump-immigration-us-state-department-visa-ban-european-tech

8. ADF International, “Unpacking the EU Digital Services Act (DSA).” https://adfinternational.org/article/digital-services-act-unpacked

9. TRT World, “US imposes visa bans on five individuals accused of censoring ‘American viewpoints,’” December 24, 2025. https://www.trtworld.com/article/273a9cf05226

10. CNN, “State Department imposes sanctions on former EU official, disinformation group leaders for ‘censorship,’” December 24, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/sanctions-censorship-state-rubio

11. Sarah B. Rogers, post on X regarding Clare Melford / Global Disinformation Index, December 23, 2025. Reported in NBC News, December 26, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/europeans-push-back-trumps-authoritarian-sanctions-anti-disinformation-rcna250791

12. R Street Institute, “How the ‘Brussels effect’ harms the U.S. tech sector,” February 6, 2026; citing House Judiciary hearing and TikTok internal documents. https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/how-the-brussels-effect-harms-the-u-s-tech-sector/

13. R Street Institute, February 6, 2026. https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/how-the-brussels-effect-harms-the-u-s-tech-sector/

14. ADF International, “Unpacking the EU Digital Services Act (DSA).” https://adfinternational.org/article/digital-services-act-unpacked

15. Euronews, “US visa ban targets former EU Commissioner Breton over alleged social media censorship,” December 24, 2025. Rogers cited Breton’s August 2024 letter to Musk. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/12/24/us-visa-ban-targets-former-eu-commissioner-breton-over-alleged-social-media-censorship

16. Axios, December 24, 2025. X shut down EC’s ad account following fine. https://www.axios.com/2025/12/24/trump-immigration-us-state-department-visa-ban-european-tech

17. CNBC, “Elon Musk calls for abolition of European Union after X fined $140 million,” December 8, 2025. Musk called fine “Bulls---.” https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/elon-musk-eu-should-be-abolished-after-x-fined-140-million.html

18. Fox Business, “Musk, Trump admin shred $140M fine lodged by EU against X social media platform,” December 6, 2025. Rubio quote on X. https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/elon-musk-trump-admin-go-scorched-earth-eu-x-hit-140m-fine

19. Fortune Europe, “Elon Musk backs new EU digital content law that risks Twitter free speech,” May 11, 2022. Musk told Breton DSA was “exactly aligned with my thinking.” https://fortune.com/europe/2022/05/11/elon-musk-twitter-europe-digital-services-act-free-speech-breton/

20. Fortune Europe, May 11, 2022. Musk’s public response to Breton’s tweet: “Great meeting! We are very much on the same page.” https://fortune.com/europe/2022/05/11/elon-musk-twitter-europe-digital-services-act-free-speech-breton/

21. CNBC, December 8, 2025. Musk: “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries.” https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/elon-musk-eu-should-be-abolished-after-x-fined-140-million.html

22. R Street Institute, February 6, 2026. “The current Trump administration has also engaged in forms of censorship and jawboning via various methods.” https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/how-the-brussels-effect-harms-the-u-s-tech-sector/

23. CNN, December 24, 2025. Vance Munich Security Conference speech cited. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/sanctions-censorship-state-rubio

24. Missouri v. Biden, 680 F. Supp. 3d 630 (W.D. La. 2023). Findings on government-NGO censorship partnerships.

25. Sen. Eric Schmitt, Letter to Under Secretary Sarah B. Rogers, December 18, 2025. https://www.schmitt.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/12.18.2025-Rogers-Letter-UPDATED-FINAL.pdf

26. Courthouse News Service, “EU ‘strongly condemns’ US sanctions against five Europeans,” December 24, 2025. https://www.courthousenews.com/eu-strongly-condemns-us-sanctions-against-five-europeans/

27. Emmanuel Macron, post on X, December 24, 2025. Reported in CBC, December 24, 2025. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/europe-france-united-states-visa-ban-9.7027301

28. Johann Wadephul, post on X, December 25, 2025. Reported in Courthouse News Service, December 24, 2025. https://www.courthousenews.com/eu-strongly-condemns-us-sanctions-against-five-europeans/

29. Thierry Breton, post on X, December 23, 2025. Reported in Al Jazeera, December 28, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/24/us-bars-five-europeans-over-efforts-to-censor-american-viewpoints

30. Michael Shellenberger, Testimony before House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, “The Censorship Industrial Complex,” March 2023. https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/shellenberger-testimony.pdf

31. Mises Institute, “The Censorship Industrial Complex Exposes the Kleptocracy’s True Intentions,” February 2024. https://mises.org/mises-wire/censorship-industrial-complex-exposes-kleptocracys-true-intentions

A defense conglomerate whose revenues depend on government contracts owns the newspaper that shapes how millions of French citizens think about defense policy.

The Tripling of Power

In March 2004, Serge Dassault — arms dealer, sitting senator, and heir to France’s most powerful aerospace dynasty — completed his acquisition of Socpresse, the publisher of Le Figaro, raising the Dassault family’s stake from 30 percent to approximately 82 percent for around 230 million euros. Figaro acquisition He did not attempt to conceal his motive. In 1999, five years before the deal closed, he told the French television channel LCI: “For me, it is important to be owner of a newspaper to express my opinion, but also to respond to journalists who have written nonsense.” Figaro acquisition

The acquisition made Dassault simultaneously France’s leading private aviation and defense manufacturer, a conservative UMP senator (a post he assumed that same year), and the proprietor of Le Figaro, one of France’s oldest and most-read national dailies. Globe obituary Rarely, in a modern democracy, does so much concentrated power reside in a single family’s hands so nakedly. Public choice theory has a term for what happens when actors in a political economy wear this many hats simultaneously: capture. The question worth pressing is what exactly was being captured, and who bears the cost.

The answer, under any honest analysis, is the French reading public.

A Business Model Built on Political Favor

Dassault Aviation is not a normal industrial company. Its flagship product — the Rafale multirole fighter jet — exists only because governments decide to buy it, and those decisions are saturated with political calculation. By late 2025, 533 firm Rafale orders had been placed, including 80 for the UAE in a $16 billion deal, 36 for India, 55 for Egypt, 36 for Qatar, 24 for Greece, and 42 for Indonesia. Rafale orders France’s arms exports rose by 47 percent between 2014–18 and 2019–23, making it the world’s second-largest arms exporter behind the United States, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. SIPRI France exports

Each of those export deals was brokered with the active involvement of the French state. French presidents fly to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and New Delhi not merely as heads of government but as salesmen for Dassault. When Emmanuel Macron visited the UAE in December 2021, the 80-Rafale deal — announced as “the largest ever obtained by the French combat aeronautics industry” — was signed on the same trip. UAE Rafale deal The company’s fortunes are thus inextricably linked to French foreign policy narratives: whether France is seen as a credible power, whether NATO spending debates resolve in favor of European sovereign defense, whether the Rafale’s combat record is framed as decisive rather than marginal. These are not abstract policy questions. They are, for Dassault, existential commercial ones — and Le Figaro covers all of them.

The Spiked Article and the “Healthy Ideas” Doctrine

The mechanism of editorial capture rarely announces itself. It operates through omission, through a particular sensitivity to which stories get assigned, which angles get developed, which sources get called. But occasionally the machinery becomes visible.

In 2004, shortly after Dassault completed his acquisition of Le Figaro, French media reported that a controversial article concerning the Rafale fighter jet deal was killed before publication. Nieman Lab report Independent watchdog organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, expressed concern about the implications for press freedom. Nieman Lab report At the time of the acquisition, the journalists’ union USJ-CFDT issued a public statement: “We are genuinely concerned about the threat to editorial independence.” Campaign Live

Their concern was not hypothetical. Serge Dassault had telegraphed his editorial philosophy explicitly. In November 2002, as he began consolidating his stake in Socpresse, he declared that his newspapers “must promulgate sound ideas,” and added that “left-wing ideas are not sound ideas.” Wikipedia Censorship France He had said something similar in the magazine Entreprendre, using the possessive that most reveals an owner’s real attitude toward editorial independence: “my papers.” Lutte Ouvrière

This is the doctrine of a man who treats journalism as a branch of his public relations department. In most industries, a vendor who also controls the review publication covering his industry would face regulatory action. In French media law, it produced a senator.

Senator, Arms Dealer, Press Baron: The Revolving Door as Identity

The concept of the revolving door typically describes officials who rotate between regulatory agencies and the industries they oversee. Serge Dassault collapsed that distance entirely: the roles were not sequential but simultaneous. He was a senator for the Essonne department from 2004 to 2017, an outspoken advocate of conservative economic and fiscal positions, a champion of defense spending, and — throughout — the controlling owner of France’s most prominent right-of-center newspaper and the chairman of its leading arms manufacturer. Wikipedia Serge Dassault

His son, Olivier Dassault, served as a deputy in the National Assembly. Wikipedia Serge Dassault The family was not merely embedded in French conservative politics; it constituted a significant node of it — funding the conversations, setting the ideological parameters, and supplying the aircraft.

What makes this arrangement particularly corrosive from a libertarian standpoint is not that a wealthy man holds political views and funds institutions reflecting them. That is, in isolation, unobjectionable. The problem is the circularity: Dassault Aviation’s revenues depend on government contracts secured by political relationships cultivated in part through a media operation that shapes public opinion and political debate about the very defense policies that generate those contracts. Public choice economists from James Buchanan onward have documented how concentrated interests reliably exploit diffuse publics in exactly this fashion. The Dassault model is that theory illustrated in a single family tree.

The biographical record contains further revelations. In December 1998, a Belgian court handed Serge Dassault a two-year suspended sentence for bribing politicians in the Agusta-Dassault scandal, in which Belgian officials were paid to secure helicopter contracts. Globe obituary In June 2009, a French civil court stripped him of his mayoral position after finding him guilty of making cash payments to voters in Corbeil-Essonnes. Globe obituary This is the man who simultaneously owned France’s most-read conservative newspaper and sat in its upper legislative chamber. The accountability mechanisms that should govern the relationship between arms dealers, politicians, and the press were absent — because in this case, those roles were all inhabited by the same person.

The State Subsidy That Closes the Loop

There is one detail that makes the arrangement even more structurally perverse: Le Figaro receives substantial direct funding from the French state. The Figaro group received more than 16 million euros in public press subsidies in 2021 alone. Heinrich Böll Foundation The French state is, simultaneously, Dassault Aviation’s primary domestic customer, the source of political cover for its export deals, and a direct financial contributor to the newspaper the Dassault family uses to shape how those deals are received by the public.

This is not a market. It is a closed loop of mutual subsidy, in which citizens pay taxes that fund both fighter jet contracts and the newspaper that tells them those contracts are wise. The Heinrich Böll Foundation’s analysis of French media concentration put it plainly: approximately ten billionaires now own 80 percent of France’s national daily newspapers, with Dassault controlling Le Figaro as France’s leading conservative daily. Heinrich Böll Foundation Reporters Without Borders has flagged that French mechanisms to combat conflicts of interest in the media are “insufficient, inadequate, and outdated.” RSF France

This Is Not a French Anomaly

Those inclined to treat this as a peculiarity of French political culture should consider the parallels elsewhere.

General Electric, one of the largest defense contractors in the United States for decades, owned NBC and MSNBC from 1986 until 2011. Media critics documented how NBC was notably slow to cover GE’s environmental record and defense-contractor controversies — a pattern one analyst attributed to an implicit “corporate zeitgeist” rather than direct editorial dictates. GE NBC Jack Welch, GE’s CEO, reportedly told NBC News leadership directly that they worked for GE and should be mindful of coverage that affected share prices. GE NBC

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon — whose cloud computing division pursues multi-billion-dollar Pentagon contracts — purchased The Washington Post in 2013. NPR Washington Post Amazon contested a $10 billion Department of Defense JEDI cloud contract in court, alleging that the Trump administration improperly steered the award away from Amazon partly due to Trump’s hostility toward Bezos as the Post’s owner. Amazon JEDI ABC The intertwining of the Post’s editorial independence with Amazon’s Pentagon ambitions created precisely the structural conflict that critics had warned about.

In each case, the mechanism is the same: a company whose revenues depend on government favor acquires a media platform that shapes public understanding of the policies generating that favor. The transaction need never be explicit. The owner need not call the editor to kill a story. The editors simply understand, over time, which stories generate friction and which generate none.

What French Citizens Are Actually Reading

When a French citizen picks up Le Figaro and reads its coverage of NATO spending debates, of Rafale export announcements, of Egypt’s or India’s or the UAE’s strategic relationship with Paris, they are consuming journalism produced within an institutional structure in which the owner of the newspaper is the manufacturer of the aircraft being discussed, and was simultaneously a member of the legislature that approves defense budgets.

That is not journalism. It is, at minimum, a profound structural conflict. At worst, it is something more deliberate — what the editors of Le Figaro’s journalists’ union feared from the beginning: a media platform instrumentalized to manufacture consent for the commercial and political interests of a single industrial dynasty.

The libertarian critique of state power traditionally focuses on government censorship. But the Dassault-Figaro arrangement illustrates a complementary and equally dangerous mechanism: the capture of nominally private information infrastructure by interests whose revenues flow from state contracts. The result is not a free press. It is a subsidized one — subsidized by defense spending, by public press grants, and by the accumulated political capital of a family that has made itself indispensable to French military prestige. The individual citizen, reading about the latest Rafale deal in a newspaper owned by Rafale’s manufacturer, has no obvious way of knowing that the editorial chain above their morning paper leads back to the Champs-Élysées offices of Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault.

That, in the end, is the most precise definition of concentrated, unaccountable power: power that is invisible to those it affects.

Sources

1. Figaro acquisition — “L’industriel Serge Dassault réalise son rêve en devenant propriétaire du «Figaro»,” Le Temps, January 7, 2016. https://www.letemps.ch/economie/lindustriel-serge-dassault-realise-reve-devenant-proprietaire-figaro

2. Globe obituary — “French billionaire Serge Dassault ran an aviation empire,” The Globe and Mail, May 30, 2018. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-business/european-business/article-french-billionaire-serge-dassault-ran-an-aviation-empire/

3. Wikipedia Serge Dassault — Serge Dassault, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Dassault

4. Wikipedia Groupe Figaro — Groupe Figaro, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Figaro

5. Rafale orders — “Rafale Orders Explode! India Eyes Becoming Production Hub,” Air Power Asia, December 2, 2025. https://airpowerasia.com/2025/12/02/rafale-orders-explode-india-eyes-becoming-production-hub-for-french-jets-after-biggest-ever-iaf-deal/

6. SIPRI France exports — “France Is Boosting Rafale Fighter Production,” Eurasian Times, March 16, 2025. https://www.eurasiantimes.com/nfrance-is-looking-to-increase-arms-sale-by-banking-on-rafale/

7. UAE Rafale deal — “France’s Macron heads to UAE aiming to secure major Rafale fighter jet sale,” France 24, December 3, 2021. https://www.france24.com/en/diplomacy/20211203-france-s-macron-heads-to-uae-aiming-to-secure-major-rafale-fighter-jet-sale

8. Nieman Lab report — “The Rendell Inquirer? The specter of the instrumentalization of American news media,” Nieman Journalism Lab, February 2012. https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/02/the-rendell-inquirer-the-specter-of-the-instrumentalization-of-american-news-media/

9. Campaign Live — “Figaro asserts independence as Dassault acquires control,” Campaign Live. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/world-media-analysis-figaro-asserts-independence-dassault-acquires-control/209713

10. Wikipedia Censorship France — “Censorship in France,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_France

11. Lutte Ouvrière — “Dassault s’achète Le Figaro,” Lutte Ouvrière, March 18, 2004. https://www.lutte-ouvriere.org/journal/article/2004-03-18-dassault-sachete-le-figaro-la-presse-aux-mains-des-industriels-et-des-banquiers_8288.html

12. Heinrich Böll Foundation — “Press freedom in France is threatened by crisis, concentration, and a lack of independence,” Heinrich Böll Stiftung Brussels, April 25, 2024. https://eu.boell.org/en/2024/04/25/press-freedom-france

13. RSF France — France country page, Reporters Without Borders. https://rsf.org/en/country/france

14. GE NBC — “General Electric and NBC,” Business-Managed Democracy / Heritage Institute. https://www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/environment/media/GE.html

15. NPR Washington Post — “’Washington Post’ journalists plea to Bezos: Don’t gut our newsroom,” NPR, January 30, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/30/nx-s1-5692923/washington-post-bezos-layoffs

16. Amazon JEDI ABC — “Amazon lost $10B Pentagon contract because of Trump’s ‘personal vendetta,’ lawsuit argues,” ABC News, December 10, 2019. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/amazon-lost-10b-pentagon-contract-trumps-personal-vendetta/story?id=67606505

Editor’s note: The 2004 Rafale article spiking allegation originates with Nieman Lab’s February 2012 report, citing French media accounts from the period. Independent verification of the specific article and editorial decision chain was not available at time of publication.

That sentence alone should disturb people more than it probably will.

Because by May 2026, Gaza is no longer simply a war zone. War zones still imply limits, frontlines, military objectives, pauses, infrastructure, functioning institutions, some remaining distinction between civilian and combat space. Gaza has moved beyond that vocabulary. Entire districts have disappeared. Universities have been flattened. More than 270 Journalists have been systematically killed. Families have been erased so completely that there is sometimes nobody left to report their deaths. And yet somewhere inside this landscape, young Palestinians are still studying languages, translating documents, debating politics, making coffee, charging phones, trying to maintain some fragment of ordinary human existence.

That contradiction sits at the center of this interview.

Mohammed Al-Turk does not speak like the caricature many Western audiences subconsciously expect. He does not sound primitive, fanatical, irrational, or incoherent. In fact, one of the most revealing aspects of this conversation has almost nothing to do with bombs. It has to do with language itself.

For decades, Western media audiences have been conditioned — often unconsciously — to associate fluent English with intelligence, credibility, legitimacy, even humanity itself. Accents matter. Vocabulary matters. Composure matters. The messenger shapes whether suffering is perceived as tragic, threatening, civilized, or disposable.

And this is precisely why voices like Mohammed’s are so dangerous to established narratives.

Because once somebody from Gaza speaks calmly, analytically, fluently, and in detail about what daily life actually looks like under these conditions, the psychological distance starts collapsing. The abstraction disappears. Gaza stops being a map location or a headline. It becomes a human being speaking directly into your living room from a place where survival itself has become uncertain from one hour to the next.

What also struck me throughout this conversation was something deeper and frankly more unsettling.

Human beings are adapting to horror at terrifying speed.

The images coming out of Gaza over the past years would once have permanently traumatized entire societies. Today they vanish into algorithmic timelines between advertisements, memes, influencer clips, and political outrage cycles that reset every 24 hours. There is something historically unprecedented about watching an entire population document its own destruction in real time while much of the outside world gradually absorbs it as background noise.

And perhaps future generations will study that phenomenon more than the war itself.

Because history repeatedly shows that civilizations rarely recognize the moral significance of what they are witnessing while it is unfolding. Only later do people look back and ask the obvious question:

“How did so many normal people convince themselves this was acceptable?”

That question may eventually haunt this era.

This interview is not simply about Gaza.

It is also about us.

NATO built a doctrine for a war fought inside the minds of its own citizens. The European Union built the law that enforces it. This is a report on what both have already done, to four specific people in five specific cities, before the reader finishes this paragraph.

On an evening at the end of December 2025, a woman in Switzerland opened a grocery-delivery app on her phone. She filled a basket with bread, cheese, vegetables, a bottle of wine, and typed in a delivery address in Brussels — a flat she had visited many times, whose owner, a friend of thirty years, could no longer leave Belgium and could no longer pay for anything from within it. She reached the checkout page and entered her Swiss card. The payment declined. She tried again. It declined again.

The man waiting for the groceries is Jacques Baud, seventy years old, a retired colonel of the Swiss Army and a former officer of the Federal Intelligence Service who, in an earlier career, had worked in Brussels for NATO, monitoring the flow of small arms into Ukraine. On 15 December 2025, fifteen days before the blocked delivery, the Council of the European Union had placed him on a list. He was now, in the language of the Official Journal, a person “responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation.” The practical meaning was that his accounts had been frozen across the twenty-seven member states, that his travel across the Schengen area was forbidden, that his French publisher could not pay him the royalties owed on his last three books, and that any EU resident who sent him money — for rent, for medicine, for a sandwich — was committing a criminal offence. A friend in Bern trying to pay a Belgian delivery service for groceries ran the payment through the European payment network. The network blocked it. She called Baud and told him. Friends in Brussels began walking food to his door.

Baud had not been charged with a crime. He had never seen a judge. He had not been asked to account for his views by any authority with the power to hear him. What he had done was write and speak — in books published in Paris, in podcasts recorded with American journalists — about the war in Ukraine in terms that diverged from the Council’s preferred account. He had argued, among other things, that the Ukrainian government’s pursuit of NATO membership had helped precipitate the 2022 invasion; an argument he had drawn, with attribution, from a 2019 interview given by Oleksiy Arestovych, then one of President Zelensky’s senior advisers. For this he had become, in the sense the word once meant in medieval Europe, an outlaw. A person placed outside the law’s protection. Removed from commerce. Left to the kindness of neighbours who could still physically carry groceries to his door.

The law that produced this condition is the enforcement arm of a military programme most Europeans have not heard of. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has been running the programme since 2020, in Norfolk, Virginia, out of a unit called the Innovation Hub. The programme’s name is Cognitive Warfare. Its founding paper, now five years old, describes the target terrain in a phrase borrowed from the vocabulary of counter-subversion: “an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors.” Baud is a member of the fifth column, as the programme defines one. So is Hüseyin Doğru, a German journalist in Berlin whose wife’s bank account was frozen while she was pregnant, because she had married a man the Council had placed on the same kind of list seven months earlier. So is Nathalie Yamb, a Swiss-Cameroonian activist who spent August 2025 in Niamey being received by the Nigerien president, because she could no longer travel through Europe. What follows is a report on the programme that defined the category, and on the law that has begun to act on it.

On the afternoon of 5 October 2021, a retired French Army lieutenant-colonel named François du Cluzel logged into a videoconferencing system from his office in Norfolk and appeared on the screens of about two hundred viewers of a panel hosted by the NATO Association of Canada. The panel was moderated by Garrick Ngai, a marketing executive in the Canadian defence industry who served as an adviser to Canada’s Department of National Defence. It was introduced by the Association’s president, Robert Baines, who opened with the observation that participants would discuss “cognitive warfare and new domain of competition, where state and non-state actors aim to influence what people think and how they act.” Alongside du Cluzel on the panel sat Andy Bonvie, a commanding officer at the Canadian Special Operations Training Centre; Marie-Pierre Raymond, representing the Canadian Armed Forces’ Innovation Network; and Kristina Soukupova, a Czech researcher running a NATO project called DefSec at the Virtual Academy in Prague.

Du Cluzel had built the thing they were there to discuss. Between June and November of 2020 he had conducted a study for NATO’s Allied Command Transformation that had produced, in January 2021, a forty-five-page report on what it called the sixth domain of military operations. The first five were land, sea, air, cyber, and space. The sixth was the human mind. “Developing capabilities to harm the cognitive abilities of opponents will be a necessity,” the report stated. “Its field of action is global and aim[s] to seize control of the human being, civilian as well as military.” The report closed on a phrase its author labelled “ominous” — the fifth-column passage — and with a line that du Cluzel was fond of quoting: “The modern concept of war is not about weapons but about influence.”

On that October afternoon, the panel ran for about an hour, most of it consisting of slides and commentary on adversaries — Russian reflexive-control doctrine, Chinese investments in brain-machine interface research, the weaponisation of social media by state and non-state actors. Bonvie, the Canadian Special Operations officer, praised the report and said his command was already working cognitive warfare techniques into its routine combat training. Then the moderator opened the floor for questions from the online audience. An unnamed viewer typed in the question that mattered. It appears in the Innovation Hub’s own proceedings of the event: “If it is mandatory for a NATO member, not only pertaining to the United States, to protect our service members cognitively or does that extend to our populations?”

Du Cluzel’s answer, as recorded in those same proceedings, began with the word “population.” He said he thought it was a problem society would face as a whole. He said the cognitive domain went “way beyond our service members” and that NATO would “need to protect our population.” He did not say against whom. That part of the answer was implicit in the rest of the panel’s discussion and in the report he had written the year before: against the covert cognitive operations of foreign adversaries, chiefly Russia and China, whose effects on Western publics he and his colleagues believed were already detectable. In 2022 du Cluzel co-authored a second paper, with Professor Bernard Claverie of the École Nationale Supérieure de Cognitique in Bordeaux, that refined the concept. Cognitive warfare, the paper defined, combined “traditional and emerging technologies as well as measures above and below the threshold of war to achieve cognitive effects in an adversary’s population, as well as in their political and military leaders.” The phrase “adversary’s population” was not further defined.

In December 2025 — the same month Baud was sanctioned — the NATO Chief Scientist, Dr Bryan Wells, published the most authoritative public doctrinal statement the programme has produced, describing cognitive warfare as a cross-cutting dimension of all military domains, operating “below the threshold of armed conflict,” targeting “education, media, technology platforms, and public trust in institutions.” It arrived at the end of a five-year institutional build-out: the Innovation Hub in Norfolk, the Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, the Virtual Academy in Prague, a Community of Interest that meets continuously, chairs at ENSC Bordeaux, contractor relationships with Thales and IBM, and a pipeline of annual symposia in Bordeaux, Madrid, and elsewhere. A scholarly analysis of the NATO Allied Command Transformation concept, peer-reviewed in 2024, quotes NATO’s own 2023 framing documents identifying “a surge in anti-establishment populism” as a possible indicator of successful adversary cognitive operations in Western societies. Domestic political dissent, in this framing, appears in the evidence column for foreign manipulation.

What the NATO Association of Canada panel did, on 5 October 2021, was put the programme’s civilian reach on the public record. The architect of the programme confirmed it in answer to a direct question. No major North American or European news outlet reported the exchange. It was left to the Grayzone, the Canadian Patriot, MR Online, and Project Censored, outlets that most newsrooms treat with scepticism, to cover what had happened. In the four years since, no NATO body has walked the answer back.

Six months before du Cluzel’s panel answer, a more consequential thing had already been done in the country that hosted the panel. On 8 April 2020, two weeks after the Canadian Armed Forces had deployed twenty-four thousand personnel to assist civilian authorities with the pandemic response, the Canadian Joint Operations Command launched what it called an information operation. The operation’s stated purpose was to “shape” and “exploit” the information flowing to the Canadian public, to “head off civil disobedience” during the lockdowns, and to bolster the government’s public-health messaging. The techniques it planned to use had been developed by the Canadian Armed Forces during its counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan. The federal cabinet had not asked for the operation and had not authorised it. The commanding general of CJOC, Lieutenant-General Mike Rouleau, and his staff believed they did not need to ask.

The chief of staff at CJOC was Rear Admiral Brian Santarpia. In an internal memorandum that later became part of the Canadian Forces’ investigation into what his command had done, Santarpia summed up his view of what the pandemic represented for the techniques his people had spent the previous decade refining in Kandahar. He wrote: “This is really a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance to start getting information operations into our (CAF-DND) routine.” The Canadian Joint Operations Command, the memo made plain, saw the pandemic — a civil emergency in which the country had asked its army for help — as an opportunity to rehearse on the Canadian public the information-shaping techniques it had developed against an Afghan insurgency. “A mindset,” the investigating officer later wrote, “that permeated the thinking at many levels of CJOC.”

On 13 April 2020, Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance, having been briefed by staff officers who had raised concerns about the legality and ethics of the operation, verbally suspended the campaign. He formalised the suspension on 2 May. He ordered retired Major-General Daniel Gosselin to investigate how CJOC had come to launch a domestic information operation without authorisation. The Gosselin Report was completed on 2 December 2020. It was not released. David Pugliese, the defence correspondent of the Ottawa Citizen, obtained a copy under the federal Access to Information Act and published its findings in September 2021.

What Pugliese revealed — and what CBC News subsequently confirmed through its own access-to-information reporting in June 2021 and again, in further detail, in March 2026 — was that Vance’s verbal suspension had not taken effect in all quarters of the Canadian military. Some elements of the campaign continued for another six months, particularly inside a unit called Joint Task Force Central, which kept running public-affairs, civil-military-cooperation, and influence activities on the Canadian public until Vance issued a written edict in November 2020. A separate intelligence-gathering project, not controlled by CJOC, was quietly harvesting social-media data on Black Lives Matter organisers in Ontario. A third unit, within CJOC, wrote more than fifty reports on political discourse around COVID-19. The soldiers running that unit were told to create anonymous social-media accounts to monitor “key regional actors” in Canadian politics; some of them, rather than go through the trouble of setting up cover accounts, used their personal Facebook and Twitter profiles. No one was disciplined. Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and one of Canada’s most respected intelligence scholars, told CBC that the operation had taken place “in a kind of legal vacuum,” and that the vacuum “still fundamentally exists.”

The Canadian case is the clearest documented example of what the NATO doctrine was being written to support, and what some NATO-member militaries had already quietly begun to do. A peacetime civil emergency. A military asked to help. A military command that treated the emergency as a field exercise in techniques honed against a foreign insurgency. An internal investigation kept confidential until a journalist pried it loose. No prosecutions. No firings. By the time du Cluzel took questions in October 2021, Santarpia’s memo had been written, Vance’s order had been issued and partly ignored, and Gosselin’s report was sitting classified in a drawer. The doctrine being drafted in Norfolk gave conceptual coherence to something Western militaries had already started doing.

The law that would make the doctrine enforceable in the civil sphere was drafted in Brussels in the second half of 2024. On 8 October 2024, the Council of the European Union adopted Decision (CFSP) 2024/2643, establishing a sanctions framework against Russia’s so-called hybrid threats. The framework’s language was extraordinarily broad. It authorised the Council to designate, for asset freeze and travel ban, any person “responsible for, implementing or supporting” actions attributable to the Russian government that “undermine or threaten democracy, the rule of law, stability or security in the Union, in one of its Member States, or in a third country.” One of the grounds for designation was participation in “coordinated information manipulation and interference,” a phrase the body of the decision did not define in operational terms. The designation required no criminal conviction. It required no indictment. It required no judicial finding. It required a proposal drafted by the European External Action Service, adopted by the Council in closed session under Article 29 of the Treaty on European Union, and published the following morning in the Official Journal. The freeze took effect on publication.

In May 2025, the Council broadened the framework’s scope. The same day, under Decision 2025/966, it added twenty-one individuals and six entities to the list. Two of the listed individuals were German citizens living in Russia — Alina Lipp and Thomas Röper, who operated pro-Kremlin blogs of the old RT/Sputnik type. A third, living in Germany, was a journalist named Hüseyin Doğru.

Doğru was thirty-six years old, born in Berlin to Turkish parents. He was the founder of an online news platform called red.media and of its parent company, AFA Medya, registered in Istanbul. Red had launched in early 2024 and had built an audience through its reporting on Germany’s Palestine solidarity movement. Its cameras had been inside the pro-Palestine encampment at Humboldt University in May 2024; its interviewers had spoken to Greta Thunberg; its footage had documented the German police’s forcible clearance of protest spaces. The outlet was small and left-wing. It drew its staff from a generation of Berlin journalists whose political sympathies placed them to the left of the German mainstream and outside the editorial tolerance of most of the country’s established media. The taz, an old Berlin daily of the soft-liberal left, had begun accusing red of serving Russian interests a few months earlier, citing the Russia-adjacent CVs of some of red’s staff. The EEAS Strategic Communications Division’s annual FIMI threat report, published in March 2025, had named red. Two months after that listing, the Council placed Doğru on the sanctions roster.

Red.media closed the day the sanctions were published. Doğru’s bank account was frozen within hours. So was his pregnant wife’s, though she had not been named on any list. He was given fifteen days to surrender his German identity card and barred from leaving Germany. He was placed on a €506 monthly subsistence allowance, released through the Bundesbank after a multi-week approval process. The average rent for a one-bedroom flat in Berlin is over a thousand euros a month.

In the months that followed, the German state completed the practical logic of the designation. In October 2025, the Berlin daily junge Welt — a left-wing paper that had taken an interest in Doğru’s case — enquired at the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs whether it could hire him as an editor. The ministry replied that to do so would breach the EU’s “prohibition on making funds available to a sanctioned person” and would constitute a criminal offence. Doğru was, in effect, banned from his profession. Anyone who sent him money, bought him a coffee, or let him sleep on their couch risked prosecution under German criminal law. In the first months of 2026, Doğru told Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada, “I’m not allowed to exist anymore. I’m not allowed to provide my children with the basic necessities.” The sanctions dossier his lawyers had been permitted to see, he said, consisted overwhelmingly of his own reporting and of his social-media posts. In May 2025, a member of the European Parliament filed a written question asking the Council to confirm whether any member state had produced evidence of financial or organisational links between Doğru and Russian state media. The Council did not publicly answer. On 3 July 2025, Doğru and AFA Medya filed suit for annulment in the General Court of the European Union, Case T-429/25.

No major German newspaper reported the Doğru case at length. Der Spiegel did not cover it. FAZ did not cover it. The Süddeutsche Zeitung did not cover it. The coverage, Doğru told Abunimah, had come almost exclusively from smaller left-wing outlets. The speaker of the German Foreign Ministry, asked about the case at a press briefing in February 2026, described the EU sanctions regime as a useful tool and thanked a reporter for making its application known. The newspaper the journalist represented, the Berliner Zeitung, was among the handful that had covered the case. The silence of the mainstream German press on the sanctioning of a German journalist in his own country was the atmosphere in which the policy had become possible.

Nathalie Yamb was sanctioned on 26 June 2025, four weeks after Doğru. She is fifty-six years old, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura, a dual citizen of Switzerland and Cameroon, and one of the most recognisable pan-African commentators in the francophone world. Her politics belong to the Alliance of Sahel States — the successor governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger that have, over the past four years, expelled French troops from their territories, renounced the CFA franc monetary zone, and begun reorganising themselves on a sovereigntist footing. In the French political imagination, Yamb is one of the most articulate public faces of that turn. In the European sanctions file, the same facts appeared as evidence of her being a “vector of Russian influence” in Africa — through her alleged ties to an organisation called AFRIC, which the Council said was linked to a Russian private military company. No financial evidence was published. The designation rested on an alignment of political aims.

Her Swiss bank accounts were frozen within a day. Her travel through Europe was blocked. She was in Switzerland when the listing came through, which meant she was in Switzerland still. She could not leave to see her mother turn eighty, in August. She could not fly to meet her first grandchild, a baby boy born to her son. On 11 August 2025, however, she was received in Niamey by General Abdourahamane Tiani, the Nigerien transitional president, who named her a special adviser to his office and issued her a Nigerien diplomatic passport. The passport did not make her travel through Europe any easier. It did make a point.

“An African woman who talks about sovereignty?” Yamb wrote on her Telegram channel the week her sanctions were published. “Obviously a puppet. A Black woman who denounces exploitation? Naturally remote-controlled.” She has taken her case to the Court of Justice of the European Union. She has continued to broadcast from Lomé, from Ouagadougou, from Bamako. The EU still imports Russian gas and Russian fertiliser, she observed in one of her statements after the designation. A political analyst in Switzerland, she said, was easier to freeze than a pipeline.

On 15 December 2025 — the day Baud was listed — the Council added to its roster Xavier Moreau, a French former military officer based in Moscow who runs a commentary platform there, and five experts associated with the Russia-based Valdai Club. Moreau is a thinner case than Baud, Doğru, or Yamb: he is based in the country whose interests he is accused of serving, and his audience is chiefly Russian-speaking. His designation operates less like a sanction and more like a formal inscription into the enemy category. The Valdai experts sit in a similar register.

By the end of 2025, a petition circulating out of Switzerland and Germany counted fifty-nine journalists, scholars, and analysts designated under the Russia-related sanctions regimes in their various iterations. The figure aggregates across the original 2014 measures against state broadcasters, the 2022 wartime listings, and the 2024 hybrid-threats framework under which Baud, Doğru, and Yamb are held. The petition’s signatories include Ninon Colneric, a former judge of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and Alina Miron, a legal scholar at the University of Angers. Colneric and Miron have jointly written a legal opinion arguing that the underlying acts violate EU law on multiple grounds. Their opinion has been lodged with the Council. The Council has continued to list.

The Russian Federation conducts information operations in Europe. That is not disputed. On 15 December 2025, the same Council decision that listed Baud also listed three GRU officers — two of them identified as members of the Russian military intelligence service’s unit 29155 — whom German and Czech authorities had tied to arson and sabotage operations on European soil. Ukraine’s former Kremlin-linked political fixer Viktor Medvedchuk, along with his associate Artem Marchevskyi, had been funding the Voice of Europe media operation that channelled cash to members of the European Parliament in the run-up to the 2024 European elections. RT and Sputnik, under an older sectoral sanctions regime dating from the 2014 annexation of Crimea, had had their broadcasting licences in Europe suspended for running what the European Commission assessed as editorially state-directed operations.

All of those are real cases. Some of them — the GRU unit, the Medvedchuk cash — involve documented crimes or clearly documented state direction. Others — the broadcasting licences of RT and Sputnik — are administrative measures against state-owned outlets, of the kind most jurisdictions apply to entities openly controlled by foreign governments. None of those cases resemble the designation of Nathalie Yamb for talking about sovereignty in Bamako, or of Jacques Baud for quoting a former adviser to Zelensky, or of Hüseyin Doğru for reporting on a student encampment at Humboldt.

Hervé Letoqueux, the chief executive of a disinformation-monitoring firm called Check First, told the fact-checking desk of Euronews in December 2025 that the impact of Baud’s and Moreau’s commentary on European public opinion was “relatively modest.” Their audiences, he said, were “already largely won over” to positions aligned with “conspiracy theorists and ultra-nationalists.” The Council sanctioned them anyway. What Letoqueux’s assessment illuminates is the disjunction between the sanctions regime’s stated purpose — deterring effective foreign influence — and the profile of the people it has reached. The designation capacity is being built because a capacity that can reach Baud and Yamb can reach other people later, who may be influential.

Washington, where the instinct toward a similar architecture also existed, has gone the other direction. The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center had been created by Barack Obama in March 2016 with an initial mandate to counter foreign terrorist propaganda. It had grown into a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-person office with a sixty-one-million-dollar budget, a dense web of contracts with third-party ratings firms — the Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard — and a practice of funding instruments whose effects reached domestic American media. By 2024, the Center had become a principal target of American conservative complaints about federal “censorship.” On 23 December 2024, Congress declined to renew its authorisation and the Center closed. The Biden administration, in its final weeks, established a successor office called Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) within the State Department, with a reduced budget and forty staff.

R/FIMI lasted four months. On the morning of 16 April 2025, its employees were summoned to an 11:15 a.m. meeting and told they were being placed on administrative leave and would be terminated within thirty days. The order came from Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, who said the office had “actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans” and called its continuation “inconceivable.” The same month, the Trump White House placed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s foreign-disinformation staff on administrative leave; the Department of Justice scaled back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Malign Influence Center remained in place, conducting analogous analytic work inside the intelligence community’s classification architecture, with no public-facing footprint.

Europe and America, in 2025, faced the same underlying question about where the line runs between countering foreign propaganda and regulating domestic political speech. They answered in opposite directions. The United States dismantled its public architecture, conceded the ground to those who had accused it of censorship, and placed the analytical function behind the classification wall. The European Union kept its architecture and added a coercive end-stage: a list that freezes bank accounts.

The decade for which the machinery now running out of Brussels is being built appears in outline across the strategic-planning documents of every major Western government: the British Ministry of Defence’s Global Strategic Trends projections, the European Defence Agency’s Capability Development Plan, the scenario-planning documents issued by Rand and by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. In their sober technical language the word that reliably appears is “resilience,” which is the language of civilian preparedness, and the phrase that reliably appears is “societal cohesion,” which is the language of managing discontent. The doctrine assumes civil unrest as a baseline condition of the years ahead.

Inside that assumption, the pipeline Brussels has built over the last eighteen months has a specific shape. The European External Action Service’s Strategic Communications Division identifies through its FIMI reports. The Council designates through its sanctions decisions. The payment networks enforce automatically. Member-state ministries — the German Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, the French Trésor — interpret the downstream consequences for employment, banking, and publishing. A hearing on 11 November 2025 before the European Council itself heard testimony from Colneric, Miron, and other European legal scholars arguing that the regime as currently operated violates EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights on multiple grounds. The Council continued to list. In January 2026 it added six more individuals. In March it added four more.

The one European state that has refused to import the framework is Switzerland. The Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs has adopted every one of the sectoral EU sanctions packages against Russia since February 2022 but declined, in October 2024, to adopt the hybrid-threats framework, for reasons its officials have declined to state publicly in detail but which it has privately indicated to cabinet-level interlocutors: the regime sits outside the criminal-law framework, lacks judicial oversight, and is open-ended in its grounds. It is, in other words, the kind of instrument a small neutral federation with a strong free-speech tradition has instincts against. Baud, a Swiss citizen, is consequently not sanctioned in the country of his citizenship. He is sanctioned only across the Union he has made his home.

The phrase François du Cluzel chose in 2020 — “an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors” — was, at the time he wrote it, a sentence in a paper on a website. Five years later, the programme whose doctrine the paper set down is operational, the law that enforces the doctrine has been written, and the people who fit the category the doctrine describes are being identified and designated and removed from commerce inside their own cities. The architecture that makes it possible was built quietly, across five years, by officials working mostly without press scrutiny, inside institutions most of the alliance’s citizens would struggle to name. It runs now. Its first designated subjects are a Swiss colonel in Brussels whose friends carry groceries to him by hand, a German journalist in Berlin who cannot legally be offered a sandwich, and a Swiss-Cameroonian activist in Lomé who cannot fly home. Whatever it is built to do next, the evidence of what it can do now is already in the file.

Sources

Primary EU legal instruments

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2024/2643 of 8 October 2024 — framework

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/963 of 20 May 2025 — broadened scope

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/966 of 20 May 2025 — May listings (Doğru, Lipp, Röper, AFA Medya)

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/1443 of 15 July 2025 — July listings

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/2572 of 15 December 2025 — December listings (Baud, Moreau, Valdai experts)

• European Parliament written question P-002725/2025 (Doğru)

• Case T-429/25 (Doğru and AFA Medya v Council)

Primary NATO doctrinal documents

• François du Cluzel, “Cognitive Warfare,” NATO Innovation Hub, January 2021

• Claverie & du Cluzel, “The Cognitive Warfare Concept,” 2022

• NATO Chief Scientist Research Report on Cognitive Warfare, December 2025

• NATO Innovation Hub, “Open Innovation – Cognitive Warfare Use Case” proceedings (9 November 2021) — contains the 5 October 2021 panel exchange including Du Cluzel’s “protect our population” answer

• NATO ACT Cognitive Warfare landing page

• Peer-reviewed analysis of the NATO ACT concept (Frontiers in Big Data, 2024) — quotes the NATO “anti-establishment populism” framing

Canadian case — mainstream reporting

• CBC News, “Military campaign to influence public opinion continued after defence chief shut it down” (June 2021)

• CBC News, “Canadian military members violated intelligence-gathering rules during pandemic operation” (March 2026)

• Ottawa Citizen / National Post, David Pugliese on the Gosselin investigation (September 2021)

US case — mainstream reporting

• MIT Technology Review on R/FIMI’s closure (April 2025)

• Tech Policy Press on the GEC’s dismantling (April 2025)

• Defense One on the downstream effects (April 2025)

Baud — mainstream reporting

• SWI swissinfo.ch, “Former Swiss intelligence officer targeted by new EU sanctions” (December 2025)

• SWI swissinfo.ch, “Ex-Swiss intelligence officer to appeal EU sanctions” (December 2025)

• SWI swissinfo.ch, “Sanctioned former Swiss intelligence officer granted humanitarian waiver” (February 2026)

• Euronews, “Who are the Westerners sanctioned by the EU for spreading Russian propaganda?” (December 2025)

• Costas Lapavitsas, “Jacques Baud and the Demise of the EU as a Liberal Project” (Brave New Europe, December 2025)

• The Brawl Street Journal, “Sanctions Come Home” (December 2025) — on the Arestovych quote parallel

Baud — food-delivery and interview sourcing

• Eva Bartlett / “The Communists,” with direct interview quotations (January 2026) — original source of the grocery-delivery account, drawn from Baud’s Dialogue Works interview, late December 2025

Doğru

• Peoples Dispatch on Red.media’s closure (May 2025)

• WSWS on the Ministry of Economic Affairs ruling on employment (October 2025)

• Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah interview with Doğru (February 2026)

• Bianet on the subsistence-allowance detail (2026)

• Hüseyin Doğru’s own account at DiEM25 (June 2025)

• Robert Dale, Counterfire (March 2026)

Yamb

• Seneweb on Yamb’s reception by Tiani in Niamey (August 2025)

• EUvsDisinfo’s treatment of Yamb’s “racist and colonialist” response — primary record of the Council’s rationale and Yamb’s counter-claim

• Felix Abt, “Arbitrary, Brutal Suppression of Freedom of Expression” (January 2026) — contains Yamb’s Telegram quotations

Petition and legal challenges

• Free Jacques Baud petition (English)

• Free-Baud.org — with names and statements from Colneric and Miron

EEAS / EUvsDisinfo institutional primary sources

• EEAS FIMI landing page

• EUvsDisinfo “About”

• 4th EEAS FIMI Threat Report (2025)

This companion text isn’t a recap of the video. The video does the forensic work on the film. What I want to add here is the part I couldn’t have written in July 2025: what has happened since, and how the picture has sharpened.

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The film actually worked

Let’s start with the unsentimental data. As of August 2025, Heads of State had pulled in north of 75 million worldwide Prime Video viewers, making it the fourth most-watched Amazon MGM film of all time on the platform — behind only Red One, The Accountant 2, and Road House. That’s not a niche release. That’s an audience the size of Germany’s population, sitting through 113 minutes of a script in which the line “If NATO falls, there’s no backstop against despots and dictators” is delivered without irony, in between fight choreography. Whatever you think about the artistic merits — and the reviews ranged from “fitfully diverting” to “background noise for laundry” — the delivery system succeeded.

Worth noting: Amazon MGM has now hired the same director, Ilya Naishuller, to helm Road House 2. The pipeline isn’t a coincidence; it’s a pipeline.

NATO published the doctrine after I published the article

Here is where the timeline gets uncomfortable for anyone who wants to dismiss the original piece as conspiracy-coded. In late 2025, NATO’s Science and Technology Organization released the Chief Scientist’s Research Report on Cognitive Warfare, and throughout January, February, and March of 2026 it has been digested across the defense-policy press as the new operating doctrine.

The report does not merely confirm the framing I used. It goes further. It defines cognitive warfare as broader than information operations, psychological operations, strategic communications, and cyber warfare — placing all four as means subordinate to a higher contest “over cognition itself.” It ties the discipline to the OODA loop. It names “narrative penetration,” “topic drift,” and “trust erosion” as defensive metrics. And — this is the part I want readers to sit with — the U.S. 2026 National Defense Authorization Act formally directed the Pentagon (now rebranded “Department of War”) to define cognitive warfare for itself, relate it to existing doctrine, and identify which organizations carry functional responsibility, with a deadline of March 31, 2026.

In other words: the framework I described in July 2025 as a suspected operating logic behind a Hollywood action-comedy is, as of this spring, the explicitly legislated operating logic of U.S. defense policy. The film didn’t anticipate the doctrine. The doctrine caught up with the film.

The fictional summit and the real one

Heads of State climaxes at a NATO summit in Trieste, where the heroes prevent the Alliance’s dissolution at the hands of an internal traitor and a foreign arms dealer. In the world the film addresses — its actual audience, in actual 2026 — NATO leaders will meet in Ankara on July 7–8. According to Reuters reporting from this past week (six sources in Brussels and Washington), the Alliance is now considering abandoning the practice of annual summits altogether, with proposals on the table to either move to a biennial cadence or skip 2028 entirely. The stated reason: reducing internal friction with the Trump administration and improving decision-making.

Read that sentence twice. The same Alliance that just paid (via its corporate-entertainment shadow) for a film whose central message was that NATO’s dissolution would mean global anarchy is now, less than a year later, quietly reducing the frequency of the meetings at which it demonstrates its existence.

Other 2026 stress points the film could not have scripted:

• Trump’s proposal that the United States annex Greenland, sharply opposed by European allies

• European reluctance to back the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in late February 2026

• A flood of AI-generated disinformation around those strikes on February 28, which the Atlantic Council and others described as “shaping political narratives rather than altering military outcomes”

• A reported U.S. troop drawdown in Romania of up to 3,000 personnel

• A White House dinner shooting last week and the political turbulence that followed

The fantasy of the film is unity restored by personal heroism. The reality of April 2026 is an alliance trying to space out its photo opportunities so its disagreements don’t become photo opportunities.

The titytainment thesis ages well

In the original article, I leaned on Brzezinski’s 1995 coinage titytainment — the proposition that pacification of an economically surplus population would proceed via emotional anesthesia rather than political engagement. I paired it with the 2023 Israeli influencer-payment operation as a contemporary case.

That pairing has, unfortunately for everyone, gotten more vivid. Reports surfaced this month that Israel has hired Brad Parscale — Trump’s former 2020 campaign digital director — to lead a multimillion-dollar campaign aimed at influencing how AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini portray Israel. Set aside the politics of the specific actor; consider the architecture. The 2023 version of the operation paid human influencers to seed sentiment into human social feeds. The 2026 version pays an operator to seed sentiment into the training and retrieval surfaces of large language models — the systems through which an enormous fraction of the next generation will mediate their understanding of the world.

This is the trajectory the Heads of State analysis was pointing toward, and it has accelerated faster than I expected. Affective persuasion through entertainment is becoming the back-up layer. The primary layer is moving upstream into the inference stack itself.

Why this matters for how you watch the film now

If you watch Heads of State in April 2026, watch it as an artifact, not a movie. The shelf life of its narrative — heroic transatlanticism rescued by personal valor — is being publicly contradicted by the Alliance it was made to defend. The film’s villain wants NATO members to “hate each other and disband the organization.” The actual 2026 challenge is not that members hate each other; it is that the membership has stopped agreeing on what NATO is for, and the Alliance is responding by reducing the visible cadence at which it has to answer that question.

The film cannot say that. The 2025 NATO Chief Scientist report can say it, and does, in the dialect of doctrine. The 75 million viewers who streamed the buddy comedy got the dialect of laughs.

Both are the same message, calibrated for two different audiences. That is what cognitive warfare looks like once it stops being a hypothesis and becomes a budget line.

— The video goes deeper into the financing, the production lineage, and the specific cinematic mechanisms. This is the postscript I couldn’t write last year.

I’ve spent the last eight months building something — a platform that reads what governments and major media outlets say, every day, and tries to detect the shape of the rhetoric underneath. Around 175 sources across 30 countries. Government websites, state media, policy institutions, the major private outlets. About 3,000 fresh headlines come in each night, get translated where needed, and get analysed by a stack of language tools that score the framing, the rhetorical goal, the implied story being told.

The platform isn’t public yet. But it’s been running long enough to have collected something interesting: roughly 150,000 analysed headlines from the last two months, sitting in a database.

So this Saturday afternoon, I decided to look. No plan, no agenda — just to see whether two months of data could already tell us something we didn’t already know.

The answer turned out to be yes.

The setup

This week Donald Trump extended his Iran ceasefire indefinitely. The previous two-week version was set to expire; he announced the extension on Tuesday, citing what he called Iran’s “seriously fractured” government and a Pakistan-mediated request to keep things calm. By Saturday — four days later — the dust had settled enough to ask a simple question.

In the weeks before this announcement, what were American media outlets actually saying about Iran?

Not “what was their position” — that produces useless answers. Something more specific. What story were they telling, week after week? What were they trying to make their readers feel? And — most importantly — did the way they talked about Iran change as the diplomatic situation changed?

The corpus has nine weeks of relevant data. Roughly 1,776 headlines that mention Iran in some adversarial framing. The New York Times alone accounts for about 35% of that. Add Bloomberg and CBS and you’re at three-quarters of the entire US-Iran coverage in the dataset.

The first finding

For each of the nine weeks, I asked the data two things: what’s the dominant story American sources are telling about Iran, and what are they trying to achieve by telling it?

The story turned out to be remarkably stable. In every single week — across pre-conflict tension, the actual conflict spike in early April, the initial ceasefire, and the new indefinite extension — the dominant frame was the same. Iran is a threat.

Not “Iran is a problem”. Not “Iran is a regional rival”. Not “Iran has legitimate interests we disagree with”. A threat.

For nine consecutive weeks, with no exceptions, across seventeen of the largest US news organisations and government voices.

That, by itself, isn’t surprising. But the second piece is.

The second finding

While the story never changed, the goal did. And the goal moved in lockstep with the diplomatic situation.

In late February and early March, when the diplomatic temperature was rising, the modal rhetorical goal across US sources was justify action — building the case for doing something about Iran. By mid-March it had shifted to delegitimise opponent — attacking Iran’s standing, eroding any claim Iran might make to legitimate authority. During the conflict spike in early April, that delegitimisation reached its peak intensity and volume — the most articles, the most attack-shaped rhetoric.

Then the ceasefire came. And the goal flipped again, this time to reassure domestic audience — calm the American public, signal that the situation is being handled.

If you read that sequence as a script — build case, attack legitimacy, calm the audience — it’s a coherent arc. The opening, the climax, the resolution.

But here is the thing that should make you pause. Through every act of that performance, the underlying frame never changed. Iran was a threat in the build-up. Iran was a threat during the conflict. Iran is still a threat now, in the calm-the-audience phase. The story didn’t get rewritten. The same story just got used for a different purpose at each stage.

This matters for a reason that isn’t obvious until you state it plainly. A ceasefire that leaves the threat frame intact is a ceasefire on borrowed time. The infrastructure for the next escalation is the threat narrative itself, and the threat narrative wasn’t dismantled — it was repurposed. If the policy reverses next month, none of the rhetorical groundwork has to be rebuilt. You don’t need to convince Americans that Iran is dangerous; that consensus is already built and being maintained. You just swap the goal back from reassure to justify. The cycle restarts.

This is what people sometimes mean when they talk about “manufactured consent”. Consent isn’t manufactured by saying “go to war”. It’s manufactured by holding the threat frame stable for so long that it becomes the air, and then modulating the action-implications to match whatever the policy needs at any moment.

What jumped out about the sources

A few outlets did something different from the rest, and the differences are revealing.

The Pentagon’s framing was the only one to break from “Iran as threat”. Pentagon-sourced headlines instead leaned on a victory archetype — claiming outcomes, projecting that the prior conflict had been resolved on American terms. That’s the institutional shape of a defence ministry: claim wins, hold a confident posture. If you ever see Pentagon framing pivot away from victory and back toward threat-justification, that would be a signal — the institutional posture preparing for another round.

Brookings, the foreign policy think tank, was different again. Their modal frame was crisis paired with the goal of manufacturing consent. That’s the policy-shop shape: don’t claim wins, don’t reassure, don’t attack — instead, sustain a sense that Iran is an unresolved problem requiring policy action, and build audience demand for that action. Think tanks generate the appetite that media outlets later feed.

Bloomberg and CBS, alone among the major news outlets, defaulted to reassure domestic audience across the whole window — earlier than the others, before the ceasefire even existed. Bloomberg’s audience is markets, and instability is bad for markets. CBS’s posture is broadcast-news public-reassurance. Both have audience-driven reasons to soften.

The remaining outlets — New York Times, Washington Post, AP, Fox, CNN — all clustered around the same posture as the collective trajectory. They were the modulating layer, the part of the system that adjusts to track the diplomatic cycle.

What you’re looking at here is a system. Pentagon claims wins. Brookings builds demand. Media outlets carry the modulating signal. Each lane has its own institutional logic, and together they produce the integrated rhetorical environment that makes American Iran policy feel inevitable to anyone reading inside it.

What the data lets us predict

I’m cautious about prediction. The corpus is two months old, the post-extension window is only four days, and any forecast made from this much data should be made with humility. But the trajectory is clear enough to say a few things.

The threat frame on Iran is structural, not situational. It won’t soften because the diplomacy softens. As long as the post-extension reassure posture holds, the ceasefire holds rhetorically. If the modal goal across US sources shifts back toward delegitimise or justify action — and that’s something a query like the one I ran can detect within a week of it happening — that’s the cycle restarting, and the policy ground will follow.

I’ll be watching for it. The platform will keep collecting headlines every night. The same query will run a week from now, and the week after that, and the week after that.

If the cycle restarts, you’ll know. The data already knows the shape it takes.

What the video doesn’t address — because nobody predicted it — is what happens when a competing sacred authority enters the field and issues a counter-pronouncement in the same register.

On Palm Sunday, Pope Leo XIV stood before the faithful and quoted Isaiah. “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen,” Leo said. “Your hands are full of blood.” He was not making a constitutional argument. He was not citing the laws of war. He was doing what the Hegseth operation had been doing for months — speaking in prophetic register, claiming scriptural authority, addressing the question of divine favor directly. But he was pointing it the other way. Jesus, Leo said, “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war but rejects them.” He called the American posture in Iran a “delusion of omnipotence.” He demanded that those “who have the power to unleash wars choose peace.”

This is the development the video’s analytical framework didn’t anticipate, and it is genuinely significant. Pete Hegseth and Paula White and the NAR apostles have constructed an elaborate sacred architecture around this administration. But architecturally, they are operating in a tradition that has a visible hierarchy — and at the top of that hierarchy, for 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide, including a substantial share of the U.S. military’s own ranks, sits an American-born pope who has now directly contradicted their claim to divine sanction. Leo is not arguing against sacred framing. He is out-framing them on their own terrain, with better institutional credentials than anyone in the room.

Trump’s response was to call the Pope “weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy” — which is roughly the theological equivalent of arguing with a stop sign. Then, on Easter Sunday itself, he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ on Truth Social.

The reaction inside his own coalition was the most interesting data point in weeks. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose fealty to Trump has been one of the constants of this administration, wrote publicly: “he posted this picture of himself as if he is replacing Jesus.” A conservative Christian commentator with impeccable MAGA credentials called it “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy” and demanded he ask forgiveness from God. Even for people who had accepted the Cyrus king framing — the secular vessel of divine will — there was apparently a line. The vessel claiming to be the divine source itself was too much.

This is where the evolutionary psychology the video discusses becomes genuinely illuminating. The Sanctity foundation, Haidt’s research shows, is a sword with two edges. It can elevate. It can also trigger the disgust response — and disgust, in Haidt’s framework, is one of the most powerful and rapid moral reactions the human brain produces. It bypasses deliberation. It doesn’t need an argument. You see the Trump-as-Jesus image and something in you simply recoils, regardless of your politics. That recoil, appearing inside Trump’s own evangelical base, is the first visible crack in a frame that the video correctly identifies as almost impossibly durable.

Almost.

The Cyrus king doctrine worked as long as the king stayed in his lane. Cyrus was useful to the prophets precisely because he didn’t claim to be the messiah. He was the instrument, not the source. The entire theological elegance of the framework rested on that distinction — it allowed evangelical leaders to support an irreligious man by saying, essentially, God works through imperfect vessels. The moment the vessel started insisting it was the divine source itself, that framework collapsed from the inside, and from the place nobody was watching: the conservative Christian right, not the secular left.

None of this means the sacred framing project is over. The National Mall rededication event is still scheduled for next month. The Pentagon prayer services continue. The inspector general investigation into the Armageddon briefings has produced no public findings. Hegseth continues to hold press conferences in which he describes the war’s progress in the language of providential victory. The machinery is intact.

But the Easter weekend produced something the video’s analytical framework said was extremely rare: a crack in a self-sealing frame, opened not by evidence or argument but by the frame’s own internal logic overextending itself. The president reached for the one identity that even his most devoted theological supporters had reserved for someone else.

That moment is worth watching carefully. Not because it ends anything, but because of what it reveals about where the overreach is.

Watch the video. Then come back and ask the question it doesn’t quite answer: when a sacred frame finally breaks, what breaks it — and whether the crack we saw on Easter Sunday was the beginning of something, or just the sound of a man who has never understood the difference between being anointed and being God.

On February 26, 2026, two days before the United States and Israel launched their attack on Iran, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff sat with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva for what all parties understood to be the last serious chance at diplomacy. The talks were mediated by Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, who shuttled between delegations through a morning and an afternoon session. Progress, by multiple accounts, was real. Araghchi had arrived declaring he came with “real ideas to achieve a fair and equitable deal.” Iran’s senior adviser Ali Shamkhani wrote on X, as the talks were still running, that an agreement on the core nuclear weapons question “aligns” with Khamenei’s fatwa and Iran’s doctrine, and that “an immediate agreement is within reach.”

The obstacle was the American demand. Kushner and Witkoff insisted that Iran destroy its three main enrichment facilities and surrender its entire stockpile of enriched uranium to the United States. Iran refused. It had spent two decades insisting on its right to enrich, and it was not surrendering that right under the barrel of a military buildup. The gap was real. But the gap was also, by the accounts of every mediator present, bridgeable.

Forty-eight hours later, the bombs fell.

Araghchi did not forget Geneva. When the New York Times revealed in mid-March that Kushner had been simultaneously soliciting billions in new investments from Gulf state sovereign wealth funds while serving as America’s de facto Middle East envoy, Iran’s foreign minister posted the headline directly to X. His full caption deserves to be read without redaction: “I’ve been told that family of a U.S. soldier killed in the war of choice on Iran is relying on public donations. As fair and equitable deal was within reach, those providing poor advice to POTUS are responsible for bloodshed. This war is imposed on both Americans and Iranians.”

No diplomatic language. No hedging. The man America sent to negotiate peace had, at the same moment, been pitching his fund to the governments that had lobbied for the war’s beginning.

This is the story that should be dominating front pages. It largely isn’t.

Affinity Partners, the private equity firm Kushner founded immediately upon leaving the White House in 2021, is not, by any conventional measure, an investment firm. Its investment committee at Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal outright, citing inexperience and excessive fees. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman overruled them. Through 2024, Affinity had collected approximately $157 million in management fees from foreign investors — $87 million from Saudi Arabia alone — while generating no return on investment and distributing no earnings back to clients. In Affinity’s SEC filings, the line items related to annual rate of return are marked simply “N/A.”

The Senate Finance Committee, after a years-long investigation led by Senator Ron Wyden, reached its conclusion in plain language: Affinity’s investors “may not be motivated by commercial considerations,” but rather by the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family. Wyden subsequently referred Kushner to the Department of Justice for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Nothing happened. Kushner kept the fees. And when Trump returned to office, the son-in-law came with him — not as a registered official subject to ethics laws, security clearances, or Senate confirmation, but as a “volunteer.” In this capacity, he has led or co-led negotiations over Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran — three of the most consequential foreign policy files in the world — while running a firm whose assets under management are 99% foreign-sourced, having grown from $3 billion at the start of the 2024 election year to $4.8 billion by year’s end, a surge the Garcia-Wyden letter attributes to Gulf states “currying favour” in anticipation of a second Trump term.

There is a sixth investor in Affinity Partners whose identity Kushner has declined to disclose.

The financial architecture here rewards close attention. Saudi Arabia pays Kushner 1.25% of its $2 billion investment annually — $25 million per year, guaranteed, regardless of performance, through August 2026. August 2026 is also the month Saudi Arabia gains the right to renegotiate its terms or withdraw its funds entirely — an exit window falling squarely in the middle of a second Trump term, and squarely after a war whose outcome will reshape the regional order the Saudis have been paying Kushner to influence.

Saudi Arabia, according to CNN reporting and the New York Times, was among the Gulf governments that privately urged Trump to strike Iran — the kingdom’s longtime regional rival. The UAE, another major Affinity backer with approximately $200 million committed to the fund, was part of the same lobbying campaign. Steve Witkoff, Kushner’s co-negotiator in Islamabad, meanwhile co-founded World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture into which UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan secretly purchased a 49% stake for $500 million — a deal signed by Eric Trump four days before the inauguration and never publicly disclosed. Of the initial payment, $187 million flowed to Trump family entities and at least $31 million to entities tied to the Witkoff family.

These are the men America sent to make peace. The governments funding their private fortunes had lobbied for the attack those talks were meant to prevent. This is not a conflict of interest in the conventional sense. It is a business model.

What makes the Islamabad episode so revealing is not that the talks failed — failure in diplomacy is common enough — but the terms on which they failed. The US demanded, as non-negotiable parameters, that Iran end all uranium enrichment, dismantle its major nuclear facilities, and retrieve more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium believed buried underground — terms Tehran had rejected in every prior round of negotiations, before and during the war. Iran’s Foreign Minister, after 21 hours of talks in Islamabad, posted on X that the delegation had come “in good faith to end war” but encountered “maximalism, shifting goalposts, and blockade.”

Iran was being asked to dismantle its deterrence permanently, with no binding security guarantee against a future attack — by the same country that had attacked it during the previous round of negotiations.

The more searching question is whether the American team arrived in Islamabad to succeed. A deal that ends the war also ends Kushner’s utility to his investors. A grinding, unresolved conflict — punctuated by ceasefires, crises, and fresh rounds of talks — keeps his access perpetually valuable. Saudi Arabia does not need Jared Kushner to manage a bond portfolio. It needs him close to power during a war that is redrawing the map of the region it dominates.

The Senate’s investigators came close to stating this explicitly. The Garcia-Wyden letter to Affinity states that Affinity’s “main value could be in making political connections and problem-solving, not rendering investment expertise,” and that Kushner’s arrangement with foreign sovereign wealth funds “is not only criminal but is endangering the lives of Americans and threatening our national security.” The letter is signed by sitting members of Congress. The White House has not responded to its demands.

The war itself was launched without legal foundation that any named intelligence official has been willing to publicly defend. Joe Kent, the director of the Trump administration’s own National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on March 17and posted his letter on X: “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee the following day, declined entirely to confirm that Iran posed an imminent threat — telling Senator Ossoff that determining imminence was the president’s responsibility, not the intelligence community’s. The Arms Control Association, analysing the intelligence community’s own 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment, concluded that neither Iran’s nuclear nor its missile programmes met any recognised legal threshold for imminent threat. The Defense Intelligence Agency had assessed, separately, that Iran would not have ICBM capability until 2035.

The administration has offered multiple, shifting, and at points directly contradictory justifications for the war — nuclear capability one day, Iranian proxies the next, the Strait of Hormuz the day after — cycling through rationales the way a prosecutor cycles through charges when the first ones don’t stick.

There is a school of American political analysis that reaches for the word “dysfunction” when confronted with spectacles like this. The word is wrong. What has unfolded in the Iran war is not a system failing to achieve its stated goals. It is a system achieving its actual ones.

Political scientists who study the deep structural logic of American power — and there are very few willing to name what they see plainly — have long argued that the criminality woven through US foreign policy is not incidental but constitutive. That the rule of law in American statecraft is not the norm from which exceptions occasionally deviate, but rather the decorative frame around a picture painted entirely in exceptions. The arrangement Aaron Good describes in a recent and essential interview — where oligarchic networks, organised crime, and political power blur past the point of distinction, where crime is a feature of the system rather than a defect — is no longer academic in its implications. It has a name: Affinity Partners. It has a fee schedule. And it has a war.

Good, a political scientist whose 2022 book American Exception: Empire and the Deep State traced this structural logic from the postwar national security state through to the present, spent a decade building an evidentiary case that most of his colleagues preferred not to engage. Watching the Islamabad talks collapse while Kushner’s fundraising calendar ran uninterrupted, it is difficult to argue with his conclusions. His interview — which maps this terrain with a clarity that mainstream commentary has studiously avoided — is worth watching in full before the next round of negotiations begins.

The citizens of Iran did not choose this war. Their supreme leader was killed in its opening hours. Their cities absorbed weeks of strikes. Flights across the Middle East came to a near-complete halt, stranding millions. The human cost, still accumulating, will define this region for a generation.

None of that cost was necessary. The talks in Geneva on February 26 were going somewhere. Oman’s mediating foreign minister said so publicly; Iran’s negotiators said so; a senior US official told Axios the talks were “positive.” What stopped them was not Iranian intransigence — it was an American ultimatum that Iran could not accept and that the US team almost certainly knew Iran could not accept.

What was not offered, because it cannot be offered, is an honest account of the interests that were actually served: the Saudi crown prince who needed Iran weakened, the son-in-law whose August 2026 investor renegotiation window needed to arrive with his geopolitical value demonstrated, the father-in-law whose hold on power is inseparable from a world kept too chaotic for accountability to land.

The Garcia-Wyden letter calls it directly: a “corrupt arrangement” that is “not only criminal but is endangering the lives of Americans.” It was written into the congressional record. The Senate Finance Committee documented the financial structure in granular detail. You do not need to theorise about motives when the evidence has been entered into the public record by sitting senators and congressmen.

The Islamabad talks are likely to resume, with a ceasefire expiring April 21. Kushner remains on the US delegation. His firm continues its fundraising. Saudi Arabia’s withdrawal window opens in four months.

There is a question worth sitting with as the next round begins: when a man’s personal financial interests are structurally aligned with the failure of the negotiations he is conducting, when the government that appointed him has classified him a “volunteer” to avoid asking hard questions, and when his largest investors are the governments that lobbied for the war — what exactly is being negotiated?

The answer is not peace. The answer is the price.

Aaron Good’s interview — on the deep-state architecture that makes arrangements like Kushner’s not only possible but predictable — is available in full here.

Sources

This article is based on extensive open‑source research, including reports, investigations, policy papers, corporate documents, and legal or NGO. Most sources are shared via the inline links in the article.

In the video above, I walk through the financial architecture of this war: who paid, who profited, and how precisely those two groups overlap. This piece is meant to sit alongside it—not to repeat the receipts, but to go deeper into a few threads the script could only sketch.

The Ballroom Is a Cialdini Experiment

In the video, I mention Lockheed Martin’s $10 million contribution to the White House ballroom and call it reciprocity. But the more I’ve looked at the donor list, the more I think the ballroom is something richer than a single favour. It’s a compliance architecture.

Robert Cialdini—whose work on persuasion I reference constantly—identified a principle he called commitment and consistency. Once someone takes a small action aligned with an identity, they’ll take progressively larger actions to stay consistent with it. The ballroom donation list reads like a textbook illustration. Thirty-seven donors. Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Palantir, Lockheed, Booz Allen Hamilton. Each one made a voluntary, public commitment to the president’s personal project. Not a policy. Not a campaign. His dining room.

And here’s the part Cialdini would underline: the White House released the names but not the amounts. Which means every donor knows what they gave, and the president knows what they gave, but the public doesn’t. That’s not transparency. That’s leverage. Each donor now sits in an asymmetric information game where the president can selectively reward or punish, and nobody outside the room can track the correlation between gift and favour.

CBS News reported that Lockheed Martin donated over $10 million to the ballroom, and the company typically receives tens of billions in annual federal contracts. CBS News Ethics experts warned that donor companies “want something from the government and are paying for access.” FactCheck.org Then the war started. Then the White House meeting with defence CEOs. Then the order to quadruple production.

The sequence isn’t hidden. It doesn’t need to be. That’s the point.

The Subscription Model Has a Name

The video’s most striking metaphor—that the war functions as a subscription service—deserves unpacking, because the economics are even worse than they sound.

The $12.77 million THAAD interceptor versus the $50,000 Iranian drone isn’t just a cost asymmetry. It’s what military analysts call an “attrition exchange ratio” that structurally favours the attacker. Iran can produce cheap drones at industrial scale. The US burned through $5.6 billion in ammunition in just the first two days of the conflict. Time Bernstein analysts noted that in any scenario, the need for urgent munitions restocking means upward pressure on Lockheed and RTX share prices. CNBC

But here’s what makes this a true subscription rather than a one-off purchase: the replacement cycle is self-reinforcing. Every interceptor fired creates a procurement order. Every procurement order extends the production timeline. Every extended timeline justifies the “bigger, longer deals” the Pentagon has been explicitly pursuing since November 2025. The Pentagon’s own strategy memo calls for awarding weapons makers longer contracts so they’ll invest more in expanding the industrial base. Time

In behavioural economics, this is called a “sunk cost escalation” combined with “status quo bias.” Once you’ve spent $200 billion, the argument for spending another $50 billion to “protect the investment” becomes almost impossible to resist psychologically—even when the original expenditure was itself irrational.

What the Sixteen Minutes Actually Imply

The video flags the $580 million oil futures spike sixteen minutes before Trump’s announcement. I left it as a suggestive data point. Let me push further into why it matters structurally, not just as a potential scandal.

Modern financial markets operate on information asymmetry. That’s not cynicism—that’s literally what they’re for: they aggregate private information into public prices. The question isn’t whether someone traded on advance knowledge. The question is whether the system is designed to make such trading inevitable.

Consider the architecture: a war run without congressional authorisation, with strike decisions made by a small circle, announced via social media posts by a single individual who has publicly stated that rising oil prices benefit “us.” Trump has boasted that Iran’s military has been “obliterated” while acknowledging that Tehran still controls ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. CNBC The same person who controls the timing of military announcements is the person whose social circle is saturated with energy investors and defence executives. You don’t need conspiracy. You just need proximity and a group chat.

The Polymarket bets—150 anonymous accounts wagering on strikes the day before they happened—are even more structurally interesting. Prediction markets are supposed to aggregate distributed intelligence. What happens when the “intelligence” being aggregated isn’t analytical insight but leaked operational information? The market doesn’t just reflect the bet. It moves other markets. Oil futures, defence stocks, currency pairs. The prediction market becomes a transmission mechanism—a way to convert inside knowledge into price signals without ever touching a regulated exchange.

Kushner’s Fund Is Worse Than You Think

In the script, I call Kushner’s dual role “a conflict of interest” and leave it at a punchline. But the reporting that’s emerged since makes the original description look generous.

The New York Times reported that Kushner is seeking $5 billion or more for his firm Affinity Partners, with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund among those in discussions. MS NOW This is the same PIF that, according to reporting, overruled its own advisers’ objections to invest $2 billion in Kushner’s firm just six months after he left the White House. Wikipedia Those advisers had flagged the management team’s inexperience, excessive fees, and operations they deemed unsatisfactory in every respect. The crown prince overruled them personally.

Since 2021, Affinity Partners has collected at least $112 million in fees from Saudi Arabia and other international investors but has yet to yield any profits for the governments funding the firm. CEPR Read that again. Zero returns. $112 million in fees. The Saudis aren’t investing in Kushner’s financial acumen. They’re investing in his proximity to the man who started a war against their regional rival.

And then there’s this detail, which the video couldn’t include because it emerged after we scripted it: according to the Washington Post, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman privately lobbied Trump to attack Iran in a series of calls in February. Popular The same MBS whose sovereign wealth fund is Kushner’s anchor investor. A Gulf diplomat described Kushner and Witkoff as acting like “Israeli assets” who engaged in “unorthodox and destructive diplomacy” that allegedly manipulated the President into the conflict. Wikipedia

Meanwhile, Kushner’s representatives are also seeking investment from the UAE and Qatar, whose sovereign wealth funds have already invested in Affinity. AOL He promised in December 2024 to halt new fundraising to avoid conflicts. That pledge appears to have been short-lived. Inkl The White House is not requiring him to file financial disclosure documents. Congress attempted to subpoena him. Republicans defeated the motion 24 to 22. Inkl

The Real Cost Isn’t $200 Billion

The Pentagon’s supplemental request is $200 billion. That number is in the video. What isn’t is what J.P. Morgan calculated this week: every ten-cent rise in gasoline prices adds over $12 billion annually to consumer outlays, and the total hit to purchasing power from the current price surge amounts to roughly $100 billion if prices persist through the year. CBS News

So the war costs $200 billion in direct military spending. Plus $100 billion in consumer purchasing power. Plus the fuel surcharges that are now cascading across the economy—the US Postal Service has enacted an 8% fuel surcharge on all packages CNN, airlines are raising baggage fees, jet fuel prices have surged 95% since the war began. International Business Times Economists describe higher energy prices as functioning like a tax on consumers, rippling across goods and services. CNBC

Nobody voted for this tax. Nobody debated it. It emerged, fully formed, from a war launched without congressional authorisation, for objectives that remain publicly undefined, enriching a class of shareholders and insiders whose names appear on a ballroom donor list that the White House released without dollar amounts.

In the video, I end by asking: whose security is doing well? The answer, six weeks in, is clearer than ever. And it isn’t yours.

The full article with sourced financials is linked below. The video walks through the timeline. Share both.

The bombs have been falling since February 28th. Tehran’s nights are lit by interceptor fire. A girls’ school in Minab is rubble and 167 girls had been buried inside it. Iranian missiles have landed in close proximity from Dimona, the desert reactor where Israel keeps the nuclear arsenal it has never officially acknowledged, and the International Atomic Energy Agency is monitoring radiation levels in real time. A fragile ceasefire, brokered under Pakistani pressure, was agreed on April 9th. Donald Trump has threatened to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages.” The people of Iran, ninety million of them, are living inside that threat.

This is where the talking point arrived. Not at a campaign rally, not in a debate soundbite, but here: a regional war of unknown duration, unknown ceiling, and, for the first time since the Cold War, a credible risk of nuclear exchange between states. The “47 years of Iran” argument did not cause this war on its own. But it built the political infrastructure that made the war feel not just permissible but overdue. Understanding that infrastructure — its psychological mechanisms, its deliberate omissions, its exploitation of human instinct — is no longer an academic exercise. It is a precondition for surviving what comes next.

Start, as the narrative never does, with what actually happened in 1953. That year, the CIA and MI6 jointly destroyedIranian democracy by overthrowing the elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, whose offence was nationalising his country’s oil. The CIA’s own declassified documents confirm the coup was “carried out under CIA direction.” Britain’s files on the operation remain sealed to this day, London having pressed Washington for decades not to publish documents that name British participants. For the twenty-six years that followed, the Shah’s government — sustained by American money, American weapons, and CIA training of his secret police SAVAK — ran one of the region’s most efficient systems of repression. The US Embassy in Tehran was not, as State Department mythology would have it, a diplomatic post. It was, as the students who seized it correctly identified, the operational centre of a foreign-managed state. The revolution of 1979 was not irrational. It was the delayed consequence of an intervention Washington had spent three decades pretending had not occurred.

None of this reached the American television audience that watched Ted Koppel’s nightly hostage count for 444 days. What reached them was the image: blindfolded Americans, burning flags, a superpower humiliated. The context — the coup, the Shah’s torture chambers, the CIA’s long occupation of Iranian political life — was absent. What remained was the loss, purified of its causes. And loss, as Kahneman and Tversky established, is the most politically potent emotional register available. The “47 years of failure” framing that has animated American hawkishness ever since is built entirely on that structure: a wound without a wound-maker, a grievance without a history.

The wound was then deliberately kept open for political gain. The hostages were released minutes after Reagan’s inauguration — a timing of such precision that it has never been satisfactorily explained by coincidence. Gary Sick, the Iran expert on Carter’s National Security Council, documented extensive evidence that Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey had met with Iranian officials in Madrid to coordinate delay in the hostages’ release until after the election, in exchange for a promise of unfrozen assets and — via Israel — military spare parts. In 2023, a prominent Texas Democrat confirmed he had witnessed senior Republicans making exactly such approaches across the Middle East. The congressional investigations of the 1990s found the evidence “insufficient” — though critics, including The Intercept, noted those investigations were structurally inadequate. What is certain is that the crisis that became the foundational myth of American Iran policy was exploited, at minimum, as an electoral weapon by the party that has since most loudly demanded Iranian accountability.

The exploitation did not stop there. In July 1988, the USS Vincennes — operating inside Iranian territorial waters — fired two missiles at Iran Air Flight 655. It was a commercial Airbus on a scheduled route from Tehran to Dubai. All 290 people aboard died, including 66 children. The Pentagon initially issued statements claiming the aircraft had been diving in attack profile — claims contradicted by the Vincennes’s own combat system records. The ship’s captain was subsequently decorated. The United States paid $61.8 million to the victims’ families while declining to admit wrongdoing. George H.W. Bush told the United Nations the crew had acted appropriately. This event is never mentioned in the “47 years” framing. It does not fit the frame, so it does not exist. In Iran, it exists completely.

These omissions are not incidental. They are load-bearing. The political talking point works precisely because it presents the conflict as something that was done to the United States, rather than something the United States did first and has continued doing ever since. Behavioural economics explains the mechanics: loss aversion means that framing built around national wound activates emotion far more powerfully than any account of mutual responsibility. The availability heuristic means that decades of Iran-related news footage — the blindfolded diplomats, the nuclear standoffs, the proxy skirmishes — sits at the surface of memory, ready to confirm whatever the narrative requires. Research into the hostage crisis generation confirms that Americans who came of political age during those 444 days carry a durably more hawkish orientation toward Iran — not from deeper understanding, but from emotional imprinting laid down before they had sufficient information to question it.

Evolutionary psychology takes the analysis further into uncomfortable territory. Humans evolved in contexts where persistent threats from rival groups required decisive leadership response. Duration signals severity: a danger present across decades reads, in the nervous system, as structural and existential — regardless of what caused it or who bears responsibility for its continuation. The “47 years” argument engages this ancient circuitry not through argument but through pattern recognition. It activates dominance instincts — the visceral discomfort of unanswered challenge, the demand for a leader who will finally respond. Diplomatic language registers neurologically as hesitation. Bombing registers as resolution. Trump threatening to send Iran “back to the stone ages” is not a policy statement. It is an appeal to primate status anxiety, and it is received as one.

This is the psychological architecture that was fully assembled when the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026 — a surprise strike that began, according to Al Jazeera’s verified reporting, with a Tomahawk missile hitting the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Minab, killing at least 170 people, most of them girls aged between seven and twelve. Trump denied American involvement. A preliminary US military investigation subsequently found that outdated targeting information had led to the strike. Human Rights Watch called it an unlawful attack that should be investigated as a war crime. The administration that ordered the strike had slashed 90 percent of the Defense Department teams responsible for reducing civilian casualties in military operations. No one has been held accountable.

The first day was a template for what followed. According to Hengaw, the Iranian human rights documentation organisation, at least 595 confirmed civilians — including 127 minors and 168 women — had been killed in the first twenty-one days of the war. Iran’s health ministry put the total killed across all categories at over 2,000 by early April. The Iranian Red Crescent reported 65 schools and 32 medical facilities targeted, and more than 10,000 civilian sites damaged. By April 6, at least thirty universities had been struck, including Sharif University of Technology — Iran’s equivalent of MIT. The Iranian Minister of Culture described the campaign as “a deliberate and conscious attack on Iranian identity.” Human Rights Watch noted the pattern directly: a US strike, a statement emphasizing precision, then reports of civilian dead. “Each incident is explained as an anomaly, but over time, the pattern itself becomes the story.”

The nuclear dimension has graduated from background risk to immediate reality. On March 21, after US and Israeli strikes hit Natanz again, Iran fired ballistic missiles at the towns of Arad and Dimona — injuring at least 180 people, with missiles landing fourteen kilometres from the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Centre, the facility where Israel has produced an estimated 800 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium across six decades of continuous operation. The IAEA reported no damage to the facility and no abnormal radiation. But as the Arms Control Association noted immediately afterward, past studies on a potential strike on Dimona “suggest significant radiological risks to surrounding populations.” The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons pointed out that striking nuclear installations is explicitly banned under international law. Netanyahu had declared Iran’s missile capabilities “destroyed” the day before the Dimona strikes. Iran’s Aerospace Force commander warned of “upcoming surprises.”

The Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant has been struck three times since the war began, prompting Russia to evacuate personnel and Iran’s Foreign Minister to warn publicly of radiological contamination risk across the region. The Strait of Hormuz — through which twenty percent of the world’s oil and gas passes — has been effectively closed by Iran since the conflict began, with China and Russia vetoing the UN Security Council resolution to reopen it. The Energy Information Administration has warned that fuel prices will keep rising until the strait reopens, with US gas prices expected to peak at $4.30 a gallon this month. A ceasefire holds as of this writing. It has been violated repeatedly by both sides. Pakistan’s prime minister warned that the US and Iran were “close to sitting at the negotiating table” when Israel launched its latest strikes, triggering Iranian retaliation across the Gulf.

What brought us here was not forty-seven years of Iranian aggression. It was forty-seven years of a story told in one direction only — one that began not in 1979 but in 1953, when Washington and London decided that Iranian democracy was less valuable than Iranian oil, and that the consequences of that decision were Iran’s problem to manage. The “47 years” talking point worked because it activated every psychological lever simultaneously: loss aversion, availability bias, dominance instinct, the sunk-cost logic that insists half a century of failed policy demands a radical response. It worked because it was structurally immune to counter-argument — bipartisan enough to appear above politics, historical enough to feel like fact, emotional enough to preclude scrutiny.

The bombs are the talking point’s final destination. The school in Minab, the missiles over Dimona, the reactor at Bushehr leaking into the Gulf wind — these are not the unintended consequences of a foreign policy argument. They are its logical conclusion. A narrative built on the erasure of American and Israeli agency produced, in the end, an American and Israeli war. The question now is not whether the talking point was effective. It was devastatingly effective. The question is at what cost — and who will be made to pay it.

Sources

This article is based on extensive open‑source research, including reports, investigations, policy papers, corporate documents, and legal or NGO. Most sources are shared via the inline links in the article.

At 6:49 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, March 23, 2026, the oil futures market was doing what it always does on a sleepy pre-dawn Monday morning: almost nothing. The thin volume of contracts changing hands ticked along in the background hum of algorithmic noise and overnight hedging. There was no Federal Reserve speech on the calendar, no economic data release imminent, no obvious catalyst to move markets.

Then, 27 seconds before the clock struck 6:50, something extraordinary happened.

Roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts changed hands in a single minute — a torrent of selling with a notional value of approximately $580 million, according to the Financial Times’ analysis of Bloomberg data. The average trading level for that same time window over the previous five trading sessions had been about 700 contracts, Bloomberg News reported. This was not a gradual shift. It was a single, concentrated, enormous bet — placed in near-total silence, with no public catalyst to explain it.

Simultaneously, a similar increase in activity was observed in S&P 500 futures, with about 6,000 contracts traded, representing more than $2 billion in notional value — a sharp spike against an otherwise quiet premarket session. Again: no news. No data. No speeches. Just an explosive, perfectly timed mirror trade — sell oil, buy stocks — that would only make sense if you knew, with certainty, that the geopolitical outlook was about to improve drastically in a matter of minutes.

At 7:05 a.m., sixteen minutes after that volcanic eruption of trading, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. The United States, he claimed, had been engaged in “productive conversations” with Iran about ending the war. He was halting his planned strikes on Iranian power plants. S&P 500 futures soared more than 2.5% before the opening bell. West Texas Intermediate futures dropped nearly 6%. The Dow surged more than 1,000 points. Whoever made those trades at 6:49 a.m. had just pocketed a fortune.

An unnamed trader at a major hedge fund told the Financial Times that this was “really abnormal”. “It’s Monday morning, there’s no important data today, there aren’t any Fed speakers you’d want to front-run. It’s an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk,” the trader said.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut responded to the reports by asking: “Who was it? Trump? A family member?”“This is corruption,” the senator wrote. “Mind-blowing corruption.”

The Anatomy of a Suspicious Trade

To understand the magnitude of what apparently occurred on March 23, it helps to understand how futures markets work — and how someone with inside knowledge can exploit them with devastating efficiency.

Oil futures are contracts to buy or sell crude oil at a set price at a future date. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explained in an interview following his widely read Substack column: “You could sell a bunch of oil futures at 6:30 in the morning. Let’s say that the price was $98 a barrel. And you could actually sell oil futures you don’t have — you could basically just borrow them and then buy them back at 7:07 after Trump has made his announcement for $90 a barrel. You’re basically arbitraging between the price just before and the price just after.”¹

On the stock side, the logic runs in reverse. If you know oil prices are about to fall and geopolitical tensions are about to ease, stocks will rally. So you buy S&P 500 futures and sell after the announcement.

Combined, the oil and stock futures trades represented well over a billion dollars in notional value. The entire operation was executed in a window of roughly one minute, in a market where virtually nothing else was happening.

The circumstantial evidence is, as Krugman told NPR, “not really ambiguous.” There was nothing else happening. No news, no public information, no scheduled events. The trades were not part of a gradual trend. “If we’d seen a gradual sale of oil futures over the course of a day or two, then that would’ve been a plausible explanation,” Krugman told NPR. Instead, “it is actually just a large slug of money, basically all at once and just 15 minutes before the big announcement.”¹

Stephen Piepgrass, a partner specializing in futures trading at the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke, told CBS News that the volume spike was “certainly enough to raise eyebrows, and I think to launch an investigation.” Ben Schiffrin, director of securities policy at Better Markets, called the timing “suspicious.” Craig Holman of Public Citizen was more direct: “It is very difficult to believe these bettors would place that amount of money, moments before an official announcement that would impact oil prices, based on simple chance.”

Not an Isolated Incident

What makes March 23 so alarming is not just the scale of the trades themselves but the fact that they fit a now-unmistakable pattern. As Axios reported, “mysterious trading patterns” have followed Trump into war. Each time this administration makes a consequential decision, an “epidemic of suspicious trading” materializes just before the public learns of it.

The trail begins in Venezuela. On the weekend of January 3, 2026, U.S. Special Forces conducted a surprise raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The operation was closely held. Yet on Polymarket, an anonymous account created just days earlier — on December 27 — had placed a $32,000 wager that Maduro would be out of power by January 31. The odds at the time stood at roughly six percent. When Maduro was captured, the account cashed out $436,759 in profit. Two other accounts made similar bets, bringing the combined profit to more than $630,000.

The account had been created exclusively to make Maduro-related bets, and Polymarket listed the odds of his ouster as low as 5.5%. Crypto analysts at Chainalysis traced the funds being withdrawn through U.S. exchanges, suggesting the bettor was not even attempting to conceal their identity. As Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets told CBS News, the bet “has all the hallmarks of a trade based on inside information.”

Then came the Iran war. On the Friday before U.S.-Israeli strikes began, more than 150 Polymarket accounts placed hundreds of bets predicting American military action. An anonymous user trading under the handle “Magamyman” netted more than $553,000 on a bet related to the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, placing the wager just moments before an Israeli airstrike killed him. On Polymarket alone, half a billion dollars was traded on the timing of U.S. military operations in Iran.

Even the seemingly trivial has been gamed. On January 7, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt concluded her daily briefing at approximately 64 minutes and 30 seconds — just shy of the 65-minute mark that Kalshi had set as a betting threshold. When the market showed a 98% probability that the briefing would exceed 65 minutes, traders who bet against the outcome saw returns of up to 50x within seconds. While the total volume was small — just $3,400 — the incident was revealing.

But Krugman was emphatic in his interview that the prediction markets were a distraction from the real scandal. “There are enormously bigger opportunities for malfeasance in conventional markets and futures markets,” he said. “All financial markets are bets on the future, and somebody who knows the future a little bit can make a lot of money.”¹ The Polymarket bets were, in his words, “penny ante malfeasance” compared with what went down in futures markets on March 23.¹

More Than Insider Trading: The Case for Treason

When officers of a corporation trade on confidential financial information, it is insider trading. It is illegal. People go to prison for it. As Salon noted, Martha Stewart spent five months behind bars for lying about a tip that saved her roughly $45,000. The amount at stake on March 23 was roughly thirteen thousand times larger.

Krugman, in both his Substack column and his subsequent interview, argued that what happened transcends insider trading. He used a word that few public intellectuals deploy lightly: treason.

His argument rests on three pillars.

First, the nature of the information. This was not corporate earnings. This was information about whether the United States was going to bomb civilian power plants in a foreign country or stand down. “There is hardly anything that is more sensitive, protected by any normal notion of what is essentially treason or not, as national security information of the kind that we’re going to call off a bombing mission 15 minutes from now,” Krugman said.¹

Second, the trades themselves constitute a form of intelligence disclosure. Any adversary monitoring financial markets — and Krugman was unequivocal that they are — could infer from the trading exactly what was about to happen. “If CNBC and the Financial Times are watching these things,” Krugman wrote, “how can you imagine that the Russians and the Saudis and the Chinese aren’t watching it?” The trades did not merely exploit classified information; they broadcast it.¹ As he explained in his interview, a large financial transaction in the midst of a military standoff, betting that tensions are about to ease, “is clearly signaling that Trump is going to de-escalate in a few minutes.”¹

Third, the moral distance between trading on national secrets and selling them is vanishingly thin. “Somebody’s willing to place a $580 million bet in the futures market on the basis of national security,” Krugman said. “How different is that from just plain selling that information to a foreign power?”¹

Krugman’s educated guess is that the trade was not placed by a White House insider directly. “My guess is this was somebody close to the White House selling the information to some large financial operator to make the trade.”¹ If true, this would represent not just insider trading but a commercial transaction in classified intelligence.

The Watchdogs That Won’t Watch

The agency charged with policing futures markets is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Under the Biden administration, the CFTC had fined Polymarket $1.4 million in 2022 for operating as an unregistered commodities market and banned the company from U.S. operations. It went to court to try to stop Kalshi from accepting bets on political events.

When Trump took office, the CFTC dropped its efforts against both platforms. Its appointed chairman, Mike Selig, is an enthusiast of prediction markets. When asked by Rolling Stone whether it intended to investigate the March 23 trades, the CFTC declined to comment. At the SEC, enforcement dropped to record lows under Trump’s first term and plunged again when he returned to office.

Meanwhile, ProPublica reported that more than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides made well-timed stock trades since Trump took office, most of them selling before the market plunged amid tariff fears. Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million in Trump Media stock on April 2, 2025 — the same day Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sold stock in nearly three dozen companies two days before Trump announced reciprocal tariffs. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene purchased up to $750,000 in Treasury bonds before the tariff announcement, then bought hundreds of thousands in Apple and Amazon stock while markets were still crashing — and profited handsomely when Trump reversed course.

The White House has offered a familiar mix of deflection and outrage. Spokesman Kush Desai called the implication that officials were trading on insider knowledge “baseless and irresponsible reporting.” White House counsel David Warrington insisted that “President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner.”

These denials would be more persuasive if they were accompanied by an investigation. They are not.

The Wider Ecosystem of Corruption

The March 23 trades did not materialize in a vacuum. They emerged from an administration that has transformed the presidency into a profit center on a scale without historical precedent.

The Wall Street Journal reported that ventures launched by the Trump family since the election had generated at least $4 billion in proceeds and paper wealth. Forbes calculated that Trump’s net worth rose from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion since the election. The Trump Organization’s revenue increased 17-fold in the first half of 2025. Crypto now represents more than 20% of the family’s $7.2 billion fortune.

The family’s cryptocurrency operations have been staggeringly lucrative. The $TRUMP meme coin launched days before inauguration, with the family and its partners collecting an estimated $320 million in trading fees alone. The family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, was co-founded by Zach Witkoff — the son of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy. A $2 billion infusion into World Liberty from the government of Abu Dhabi came shortly before the administration approved a plan to export advanced AI chips to the UAE despite national security concerns. At a private gala for top meme coin holders, attendees who had spent roughly $2 million each were rewarded with a dinner with the president and a VIP tour of the White House.

And then there is Jared Kushner.

Trump’s son-in-law, who carries no official government title but serves as a de facto special envoy leading negotiations on Iran, has been simultaneously raising billions for his private equity firm. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was the founding investor in Kushner’s Affinity Partners, committing $2 billion — overruling the fund’s own investment advisers in the process. According to a congressional investigation by the Democratic staff of the Senate Finance Committee and House Oversight Committee, Kushner has collected more than $110 million from Saudi Arabia in management fees “for investment management services that have reaped little to no return.”

Now, in the middle of a war that directly serves Saudi strategic interests — MBS has reportedly pressed for attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure and urged Trump to consider putting troops on the ground — Kushner is seeking to raise $5 billion from sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. His firm has already met with PIF to discuss the additional investment. Senator Elizabeth Warren summarized the situation: “In the middle of a war with Iran, our ‘Peace Envoy’ is in the Middle East trying to raise $5 billion for his private equity firm.” A Democratic investigation found that Kushner “is simultaneously being paid millions of dollars by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies while leading diplomatic negotiations with Iran and Russia.”

Meanwhile, CNN reported that Iran no longer wants to negotiate with Kushner or Witkoff, and has asked instead for Vice President JD Vance. Witnesses at the Geneva negotiations reported that neither Kushner nor Witkoff brought nuclear experts or technical specialists, departing from basic diplomatic standards.

The conflicts of interest extend across the Trump family. The Trump sons, Eric and Donald Jr., have invested in drone companies competing for Pentagon contracts in the same wars their father is prosecuting. Donald Trump Jr. serves as an investor and unpaid adviser to Polymarket and a paid adviser to Kalshi — the very platforms where suspected insider trading on his father’s military decisions has occurred. The Saudi government financed a $7 billion development deal with the Trump Organization, building a Trump-branded hotel and golf course as part of a mega-project funded entirely by PIF. Over two terms, Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 donors and allies convicted of fraud.

When Trump was asked by the New York Times why he didn’t divest from his business interests this time around, his answer was startling: “I found out nobody cared.”

As Krugman observed in his interview, this is the kind of presidential self-enrichment that Americans used to “kind of ridicule Latin American polities” for. “Presidents would always come out of office immensely richer than they came in, and that doesn’t happen in America — except now it does.”¹

The War Itself: Policy or Market Play?

Perhaps the most disturbing question is whether the financial opportunities created by Trump’s war on Iran are not merely a side effect of erratic policymaking, but a feature of it.

On the Saturday before the March 23 trades, Trump had posted an ultimatum demanding Iran “FULLY OPEN” the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours or the United States would “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants. The threat sent markets reeling. Then, 48 hours later, he backed down. The justification — that productive conversations were taking place — was immediately denied by Tehran. Iran’s parliament speaker called the claim “fake news” used to “manipulate the financial and oil markets.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to rationalize the cycle: “sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate,” he told Meet the Press. But the pattern is impossible to ignore: a maximally provocative threat, followed by a dramatic reversal, with a window of time in between that is, for anyone with advance knowledge, an invitation to make an obscene amount of money.

Krugman raised exactly this concern in his Substack column: “Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest? If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.”

What Happens Next

For now, the identities of the March 23 traders remain unknown. But the paper trail exists. As Krugman noted in his interview, “at some level, these orders have to be placed with somebody” — and with subpoena power, “there would be a pretty clear trail.”¹

More than forty Democratic lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, sent letters on March 29 to the CFTC and the Office of Government Ethics demanding they issue guidance reminding federal employees that insider trading is illegal. The letter cited suspicious trades related to military actions in Venezuela and Iran, the length of White House press conferences, and the firing of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Legislation has been introduced: the BETS OFF Actfrom Senator Murphy and Representative Casar, and the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act from Representative Ritchie Torres, backed by 30 Democrats. Senator Andy Kim demanded immediate investigations: “We need immediate investigations into these trades. If they used insider information, they need to be held accountable.”

In the most recent development, federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York met with Polymarket officials over possible illegal insider trades. Polymarket has since implemented its first actual insider trading rules for its global site. Previously, insider trading — even based on classified military intelligence — was not specifically prohibited under the platform’s rules.

Democrats, favored to win back the House in the November midterms, are already laying the groundwork for full investigations. If they succeed, the March 23 trades will be among the first orders of business.

The question is whether the trail will still be warm. As Krugman acknowledged, “it’s possible” that evidence could degrade. But he suspects the traders were not trying hard to hide. “Given that the people who place these trades almost certainly have to have reckoned on the possibility that they would be found out,” he said, “they’re just operating on the presumption that they will never be held accountable.”¹

That presumption may yet prove correct. Under this regime, there is no functioning watchdog willing to investigate crimes committed in the service of power. The CFTC has been defanged. The SEC has retreated. The FBI answers to Kash Patel. The Justice Department answers to Pam Bondi.

But the trades exist. The records exist. The brokers know. And at some point — perhaps in nine months, perhaps in four years — someone with subpoena power will come looking.

Until then, we are left with an administration that wages war and makes peace according to no discernible strategic logic, while a select few appear to turn every gyration into a payday. We are left with a president’s son-in-law negotiating the end of a conflict with countries that are simultaneously financing his personal fortune. We are left with a family that has generated billions of dollars in wealth from the presidency while dismantling every institution designed to prevent exactly that.

And we are left with one minute of furious trading on a quiet Monday morning — $580 million in oil, $2 billion in stocks — that somebody, somewhere, thought they could get away with.

As Krugman wrote: “You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt.”

Sources

This article is based on extensive open‑source research, including reports, investigations, policy papers, corporate documents, and legal or NGO.

On the morning of 28 February 2026, as the first American B-2 stealth bombers completed their runs over Tehran, two sets of numbers were updating simultaneously. One tracked strike assessments at US Central Command. The other tracked share prices on Wall Street. Within hours, Lockheed Martin had hit an all-time high of $676.70. The three largest US defence firms together registered a single-day shareholder gain of between $25 and $30 billion. In the Gulf of Mexico, executives at Venture Global LNG were already drafting the press releases. The question that serious journalism must ask — and that the mainstream Western press has been conspicuously slow to pursue — is whether those two sets of numbers were ever really separate.

What happened on February 28 was not, by any credible reading of international law, a legitimate act of self-defence. The US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury while diplomatic negotiations were actively underway in Geneva. Just two days before the bombs fell, the Omani mediator had described a diplomatic breakthrough. Pentagon briefers acknowledged to congressional staff on 1 March that Iran was not planning to strike US forces unless Israel struck first — directly undermining the White House’s claim of imminent threat. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the strikes at the Security Council. Yale law professor Oona Hathaway called them blatantly illegal. The UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism stated plainly that the strikes constituted “the international crime of aggression.”Article 2(4) of the UN Charter — the foundational prohibition on force against another state’s territorial integrity — admits no exceptions except Security Council authorisation or genuine self-defence. Neither applied here.

This is the context in which the economic consequences must be understood. A war that had no legal basis has produced, for a very specific set of American interests, consequences that are extraordinary in their convenience.

The LNG Jackpot

Qatar had spent three decades building the world’s most reliable liquefied natural gas operation. In 1996, it loaded its first LNG tanker bound for Japan. By 2026, it accounted for roughly 20% of global LNG supply — the second-largest exporter on earth, and the single most consistent. That record ended on 2 March, when Iranian retaliatory strikes knocked out 17% of Qatar’s LNG export capacity. Two of fourteen production trains and one of two liquefaction facilities were destroyed. QatarEnergy CEO Saad al-Kaabi told Reuters the repairs would take three to five years, sidelining 12.8 million tonnes of LNG per year and costing an estimated $20 billion in lost annual revenue. Qatar’s condensate exports fell by nearly a quarter. Force Majeure was declared on all output.

Iran had been explicit. After US and Israeli strikes destroyed its own South Pars gas facilities, Tehran announced that Qatar’s infrastructure would pay the price. Washington and Jerusalem received the warning clearly. They struck anyway.

The energy consultancy Criterion Research subsequently told clients that US LNG exports could nearly double by 2030, with the supply gap Qatar leaves behind large enough to “restructure the market for a decade.” Qatar’s North Field expansion — the three-phase programme that would have raised Qatari capacity to 142 million tonnes annually — is, according to analysts, effectively dead. The combined gap approaches 100 million tonnes per year into the early 2030s. No other single producer can fill it.

The United States can come closest. The firm Venture Global, already in commissioning at Golden Pass LNG, has further projects at Port Arthur and Rio Grande LNG scheduled for 2027. These projects alone are projected to reach 39 billion cubic feet per day by 2033 — effectively doubling current US export capacity. Venture Global CEO Michael Sabel did not wait long before announcing that the US has “the largest available incremental LNG capacity” in the world and stands ready to supply it. Shares in Cheniere, America’s largest LNG exporter, rose around 7% in the first week. Venture Global surged nearly 24%. European gas futures, meanwhile, soared more than 80% in the first week of the conflict. The people of Germany, France, and the Netherlands will spend this winter paying those prices. The shareholders of Cheniere will receive the proceeds.

The Arms Economy’s Perfect Asymmetry

Defence stocks had, in a detail that deserves considerably more scrutiny than it has received, already risen nearly 40%since January — before the first bomb fell. Lockheed Martin’s all-time high on Day 1 was not the market responding to the war. It was the market confirming what it had already priced in.

The arithmetic of modern warfare explains why. Iran deploys a Shahed drone that costs an estimated $20,000 to $50,000to produce. The US intercepts it with a PAC-3 MSE missile that costs $4 million. A ballistic missile warrants a THAAD interceptor at $12.77 million per round. Every intercept is a guaranteed future procurement order. In January 2026, weeks before Operation Epic Fury, Lockheed signed a framework agreement with the Pentagon to quadruple THAAD interceptor production from 96 to 400 units annually. The timing does not require comment.

Northrop Grumman closed up 6% on Day 1. RTX gained nearly 5%. L3Harris, General Dynamics, and BAE Systems all recorded solid increases. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth subsequently confirmed the Pentagon had sent the White House a request for $200 billion in supplemental funding. Trump, who had stated in January that the military budget for 2027 should rise from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, invited the CEOs of RTX, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, BAE, L3Harris and Honeywell to the White House, after which he announced they had agreed to quadruple production of advanced weaponry. Hegseth summarised the philosophy without apparent irony: “It takes money to kill bad guys.”

The Money Trail

The same companies registering these gains were among the largest contributors to Donald Trump’s political operation. This is not hidden. It is not alleged. It is the public record of American political finance, available to anyone willing to look.

What is harder to prove, but impossible to ignore, are the trading patterns that have shadowed Trump’s military decisions throughout this conflict. On one Monday, $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a sudden spike — with no public news to explain it — roughly 16 minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants. On the Friday before the war began, a surge of more than 150 Polymarket accounts placed bets predicting a US strike on Iran by the following day. These accounts were anonymous. The trades were not small.

Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law and one of his designated Iran envoys — is simultaneously seeking to raise billionsfor his private equity fund from the Persian Gulf governments most directly entangled in the war’s consequences. Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have invested in drone companies competing for Pentagon contracts. The White House called any implication of wrongdoing “baseless and irresponsible.” Democrats have begun laying the groundwork for congressional investigations.

The evidence does not yet establish criminal conspiracy. What it establishes, beyond reasonable dispute, is that the private financial interests of the people who decided to launch this war align, with extraordinary precision, with the consequences of having launched it.

The Geopolitical Prize

Beyond money lies power — and here the strategic logic of the war becomes its most explicit. China, the world’s largest energy importer, now faces the simultaneous loss of both Iranian and Qatari LNG, its two primary Gulf suppliers. Russia cannot fill the gap at scale in the near term. Chatham House analysts note that Asian buyers have the option of increasing imports from the US, Australia, Canada — and that to safeguard market share, Qatar may now have to soften commercial terms in ways that systematically favour US exporters. Taiwan, which generates 40% of its electricity from LNG and imports heavily from Qatar, has already announced it will source more gas from the United States. India began rationing natural gas on 3 March.

This is energy dependency engineered at gunpoint. Countries that buy American gas do not easily impose competing sanctions on Washington, support Iranian diplomacy at the UN, or chart foreign policy independent of American preferences. This is not conspiracy theorising — it is the explicit logic of energy statecraft that Washington has pursued openly since 2017, and which this war has accelerated by a decade.

The Limits of the Windfall

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what the war has not delivered cleanly. US terminals are already running at full capacity — the immediate benefit is price, not volume: higher profits on existing shipments, not new ones. New export capacity requires years of construction and regulatory approval. Regasification infrastructure in South and Southeast Asia lags badly behind, meaning large new markets cannot materialise quickly regardless of supply. The Deloitte global impact analysis warns of rising stagflation risk across major economies, which depresses energy demand overall. And the energy shock may accelerate the renewable transition in Asia faster than any policy intervention could — a structural shift that ultimately undermines US LNG’s long-term market. American consumers, too, are not insulated: domestic gas prices were already forecast to rise due to LNG export expansion, before this crisis made matters considerably worse.

The war is not a clean win. It is a brutally asymmetric one: the costs fall on Iranians, Qataris, Europeans, and ordinary Americans paying for petrol. The gains concentrate in boardrooms and brokerage accounts.

The Conclusion No One in Washington Will Draw

Wars of aggression — and this is what the UN Secretary-General, the UN special rapporteur, and the large majority of international legal scholars have called this — do not announce their purposes in State Department briefings. They announce them in stock filings, in earnings calls, in the quiet surge of futures contracts placed sixteen minutes before a presidential announcement.

The beneficiaries of Operation Epic Fury were not difficult to identify. They were in the White House meeting room. Their stocks rose before the bombs fell. Their lobbyists shaped the energy policy that made the war strategically coherent. A girls’ elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan Province, where 165 children and teachers died in a strike whose perpetrator has never been clearly established, does not appear on any earnings call. It does not move the Lockheed share price. It is, in the ledger of this war, an externality.

That is the word a certain kind of person uses when they mean: someone else paid.

Sources

This article is based on extensive open‑source research, including reports, investigations, policy papers, corporate documents, and legal or NGO.

For readability, the full source list is not listed here in full. If you want to review the complete bibliography, including direct links, outlet names and publication dates, you can request it by sending me a private message on Substack. I will share the full source list and additional background material on request.

Dubai lost $120 billion in stock market value in thirty days. Hotels slashed prices. Over 18,000 flights were cancelled. Jebel Ali, one of the world’s largest free trade ports, went silent. Private jet evacuations cost $250,000 a seat. Pets were abandoned in the streets by fleeing expats. Twenty-one people in Dubai were arrested for filming Iranian strikes and posting them online.

For decades, the Gulf’s economic model was built on a single unspoken promise: this is the safe place in the dangerous neighborhood. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha — they sold stability to the world. Come invest, come live, come park your wealth. Ninety percent of the UAE’s population are foreigners. The economy runs on people who chose to be there. The moment that choice becomes questionable, the entire model starts to unravel.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. Real estate transactions in Dubai have dropped by over fifty percent compared to February. Goldman Sachs says they’re down thirty-seven percent year-on-year. Properties are being sold at ten to fifteen percent discounts by those rushing for the exit. The developers, the sovereign wealth funds, the family offices managing more than a trillion dollars combined — all of them are recalculating.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who’s been tracking this conflict with a clarity that makes most commentators look like they’re reading off a teleprompter, put it bluntly when we spoke: these Gulf states are entirely dependent on food imports, eighty to ninety percent of their populations are foreign workers on contract, and the economic model is collapsing sector by sector. He estimated eighty-three percent of the UAE’s income streams are now either frozen or severely impaired.

That number might be debatable. What isn’t debatable is the direction.

The Paradox in the Strait

Now consider something that should keep strategists up at night — a paradox that turns the entire Western narrative on its head.

Iran is making more money during this war than it made before it.

Before the conflict, Iran was producing just over a million barrels a day and selling at a steep discount — roughly $47 per barrel after an $18 markdown. Today, according to data Johnson shared in our conversation, production is up to 1.5 million barrels daily, sold at $110 with only a minor discount. The payment mechanism has shifted away from Dubai-based channels and now runs through China. Add the fees Iran is charging for ships that want to pass through the Strait under its selective blockade — Chinese vessels, Pakistani ships, Muslim-flagged carriers get through; Western-allied shipping does not — and you’re looking at a country that has effectively monetized the very crisis meant to destroy it.

Meanwhile, the country that launched the war to prevent Iran from obtaining leverage is now watching its own allies beg for help reopening a waterway it never had to close.

As of yesterday, the White House acknowledged that reopening the Strait of Hormuz is no longer a “core objective” of the operation. Trump told other nations to “go get your own oil.” And tonight, he’s addressing the nation with what’s been described as an “important update” — after saying the war could end in two to three weeks, while simultaneously weighing the deployment of Special Operations Forces for a potential ground assault on Kharg Island.

Two to three weeks. Kharg Island. Pick one.

The Real Question

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of having these conversations: the value of someone like Larry Johnson isn’t in predictions — it’s in pattern recognition. When he told another interviewer back in May 2025 that a US-Israeli attack on Iran would “break the West,” that wasn’t prophecy. It was analysis. It was reading the force deployments, the economic dependencies, the structural fragilities that mainstream commentary either ignores or doesn’t understand.

In our latest conversation, Johnson goes deep into territory you won’t find on cable news. The internal Israeli fault lines between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi communities. The dead-hand system Iran has reportedly developed — an automated retaliatory mechanism designed to function even if the entire leadership is decapitated. The religious eschatology driving American foreign policy at the operational level, including reports of two hundred complaints from within the U.S. military about commanders framing this as a holy war. The fact that Iran’s Jewish community — one of the oldest in the world, dating back 2,500 years — receives state-funded religious education under the Islamic Republic, a detail that demolishes a decade of Western propaganda in a single sentence.

These aren’t talking points. They’re the threads that, when pulled, reveal the actual fabric of what’s happening.

What’s Coming

China and Pakistan just released a joint five-point peace proposal. Iran has agreed to let humanitarian and agricultural shipments through the Strait. Defense Secretary Hegseth says the “upcoming days will be decisive.” Hundreds of Special Operations Forces — SEALs, Rangers, paratroopers — are now deployed across the region. CBS reports the Pentagon has drawn up options for a ground mission to seize Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile.

The ground is shifting beneath this conflict daily. And the gap between what you’re told and what’s actually happening has never been wider.

The full conversation with Larry Johnson is below. I’d suggest you listen carefully — and not just to the parts that confirm what you already think.

Thomas S. Karat interviews former CIA analyst and military intelligence expert Larry Johnson on the evolving Iran war, the collapse of the Gulf economic model, and why the real crisis is the one you haven’t heard about yet.

On March 13, standing before the press, Pete Hegseth promised “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” The phrase has a specific legal meaning. Orders of no quarter — killing enemies who surrender or are rendered unable to fight — have been prohibited under international law since the Hague Convention of 1899. They are listed as a war crime in the aftermath of World War II. They violate the Geneva Convention. They violate the U.S. Marine Corps’ own rules of engagement. Hegseth had already described those rules, in the opening days of the war, as “stupid” and “politically correct.” Human Rights Watch’s Washington director, who has worked with the U.S. military for two decades, called the language “a serious red flag” from an atrocity-prevention standpoint.

A U.S. strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran killed more than 170 people, most of them children. The U.S. Navy sank the Iranian training vessel Dena off the coast of Sri Lanka — 87 dead, 61 missing — and did not send a single vessel to assist with rescue operations, which the Geneva Convention largely requires. The UN’s Independent Fact-Finding Mission has called for evidence to be preserved for potential war crimes accountability.

These are not a separate story from the one the article and video tell. They are its logical conclusion.

Here is the connection that the evolutionary psychology literature makes explicit and that our political coverage keeps missing: sacred framing does not only motivate soldiers. It removes the internal brake. When you tell someone they are executing divine will, you have not just given them a reason to fight — you have given them a reason to stop asking whether what they are doing is right. Haidt’s moral foundations research, which the video walks through, shows that the Sanctity foundation doesn’t just activate commitment. It deactivates deliberation. Things framed as sacred are not subject to cost-benefit analysis. They are not subject to proportionality assessments. They are not subject to the question a soldier is supposed to ask before pulling a trigger: is this lawful?

Rules of engagement exist precisely because that question is hard to answer under fire, under orders, under the pressure of institutional hierarchy. They are, in the most literal sense, pre-committed answers to moral questions that combat makes impossible to reason through in real time. When the Secretary of Defense calls them stupid, he is not just expressing a preference for aggressive tactics. He is dismantling the cognitive infrastructure that prevents atrocity.

And when commanders tell their troops that the war is God’s plan — that the president has been anointed to trigger Armageddon — they are doing something even more fundamental. They are telling soldiers that the question of whether an order is lawful has been superseded by the question of whether it is divinely sanctioned. Those are not the same question. They have never been the same question. The entire architecture of the laws of war — Hague, Geneva, the UCMJ, the rules of engagement — rests on the premise that human authority, not divine authority, governs the use of force. The moment that premise is successfully replaced, not even the rules that exist on paper can do the work they were designed to do.

This is what the founders understood when they built the establishment clause. Not that religion was dangerous in private life. That religion was dangerous when fused to the coercive power of the state — specifically because a state that acts in God’s name has, by definition, placed itself beyond human accountability. You can court-martial a soldier who violates the rules of engagement. You cannot court-martial God’s instrument for carrying out God’s plan.

The article I posted last week documents the institutional machinery: the tattoos, the prayer services, the apostles in the Oval Office, the Seven Mountain Mandate, the theological scaffolding that has been under construction for years and is now, for the first time, operating at the level of an active war. The video above gives you the analytical vocabulary — the evolutionary psychology of sacred framing, the Cyrus king doctrine, the linguistic tools to recognize prophetic register when it appears in political speech.

What neither piece addresses directly is where this leads when things go wrong on the battlefield — which they always do. When a soldier who has been told he is executing divine will commits an act that would otherwise be called a war crime, who is accountable? The commander who gave the apocalyptic briefing? The Secretary of Defense who dismissed the rules as stupid? The White House theology that provided the permission structure?

These questions do not have comfortable answers. But they are the questions that the evidence, taken seriously, now requires us to ask.

Read the article. Watch the video. Then watch what the inspector general does — or doesn’t do — with the 200 complaints that are sitting on his desk.

That silence, too, will be data.