Operation Shield of Judah: Who The War In Iran Is Actually For

Welcome to Brave the New World.

This is Matt Carano.

CJ Campy with me today's off deal with some family stuff

and has been for the last week or so, two weeks.

Almost actually do have another episode

that I've already recorded with my buddy,

Sterlin, that was gonna come out this morning,

but then as I'm recording this United States

and Israel are bombing Iran.

That started happening this morning,

February 28, 2026, American and Israeli forces launched

with the Pentagon as calling Operation Epic Fury.

Israel's name for it is Operation Shield of Judah.

And so I thought it would be important to talk about this first

and then I'll release that next episode sometime

in the next few days or so.

And hopefully I get CJ back here this week.

But like I said, United States is calling it Operation Epic Fury.

Israel's calling it Operation Shield of Judah.

It's two names for the same war.

One is obvious propaganda from the United States

designed to sound tough for domestic consumption

or so tough.

And the other one though is an admission, right?

They named it after themselves, Shield of Judah.

They told you who this war is for in the title.

And there are massive explosions

shaking Tehran right now.

All day it's been the first Israeli strike landed

near the offices of Iran Supreme Leader

who I now am pretty sure is dead.

It looks like it's been confirmed by President Trump

and a few other new agencies.

And they've been hitting the presidential palace,

the National Security Council,

nuclear sites or former nuclear sites, military installations.

And it is really military official told the press this morning

that this was planned for months

and has much more ambitious aims

than last June's Operation Midnight hammer.

And if you take that and then also if you look at

the asset build up in the Middle East,

this is of course true that it's been planned for months.

It doesn't make any sense otherwise

with two carrier groups in the Gulf

and all this other weaponry and assets.

And that's juxtaposed over the fact

that we were supposedly negotiating peace.

But even though we're negotiating peace,

the war was already decided.

Tucker Carlson who I like and respect very much said

even this a few days ago that Trump hadn't made up his mind yet.

I know that he met with Trump.

I think it was this past week a few days ago, maybe.

So he obviously knows a lot more than I do,

but I find that kind of hard to believe.

You don't point a loaded weapon

if you're not prepared to shoot it.

And so after the two carrier build up,

the inertia for war was there.

It would have been much harder in my estimation

to actually pull it back.

So I think what's more likely is Trump's handlers

have been telling us telling him

that we're gonna do this for months.

And maybe he at one point thought

he had some say in the matter.

I don't know, but likely did not.

Maybe that's why he sounded so unenergetic

and deflated in the state of the union.

Actually we're recording episode talking about that,

but I didn't get to finish and I didn't get it out.

But he sounded so deflated.

There was no of none of the kind of the trademark

Trump enthusiasm.

I just didn't believe him.

That was the thing when listening to it.

There's many parts of it that you could talk about

or I could talk about, but kind of the overarching

sentiment was it sounded like a pep rally for a one in 10 team.

He had no energy whatsoever.

And then so today,

Trump went on camera and told the Iranian people

to take over your government.

So any like veneer that this was

some sort of military operation to stop

the capacity of Iran from striking in some way,

talk through this a little bit, that's gone.

I mean, this isn't a military operation anymore only.

This is a regime change, right?

Especially now that Kamani's dead.

Like what's going to happen now with the government?

And of course, Iran's already responded.

The revolutionary guard has fired missiles

at least for US military bases across the Gulf.

Might be more than that now.

This was earlier today when I was looking at it.

As far as I know, no US soldiers are dead,

which is very fortunate.

I mean, they're very exposed.

A lot of these bases are not really bases.

They're like, they're these forward positions that that are exposed.

But explosions have been reported all over the place by rain,

Kuwait, UAE, Qatar.

There are people who are dead in UAE.

And Hezbollah and Iraq is announced that they're coming for every US

base in the region.

The revolutionary guards are also promising continued retaliation

until the enemy is decisively defeated.

That's what they said.

I think that they're going to be able to decisively defeat

the United States, but they definitely can do some damage.

And it only took hours.

Like it took hours for every single warning

that a number of people on the thinking side of this,

including me, I like to think, every single warning has come true.

The retaliation, the regional escalation,

the Gulf States getting dragged in against their will,

American bases under fire, all of it.

It's happening right now.

Iran is threatening the straight-of-form moves.

I released a 10 minute or 11 minute video on this yesterday

warning about all of this stuff.

You can see, it's still pinned on Twitter.

I didn't release it on the RSS because it's shorter,

but I've been doing shorter episodes on Twitter

and releasing it on YouTube.

Follow me at Matthew Carano, M-E-T-T-H-W,

Carano on Twitter.

If you are interested in seeing those or you can follow,

you can subscribe to Brave New World on YouTube

and you can hear some of that stuff,

but it's not like I have some seer or anything.

This has just seemed very clear what would happen

and it is happening and it's terrible news

because Americans are in danger right now

and the threaded escalation is very high.

You have service members on those bases that got hit.

You've got sailors on those carriers in the Gulf

and you have, of course, Iranian civilians,

including what looks like,

I've seen the numbers fluctuate

and you always have to be careful with these things,

but it looks like dozens of girls at a primary school

on Southern Iran struck this morning, children at school.

Israel hasn't responded to a request for comment on it.

And you think about that in comparison to the people

who told you this war was about protecting innocent life,

like who used protecting protesters as a reason to step in,

but now you've got children killed on day one.

How does that compute?

It doesn't, but this war is terrible for many reasons,

economic reason, loss of life reasons,

but also it's terrible because it confirms

how captured the US government is.

Like we know it.

We know that APAC and Adelson's,

all that, their money is flowing into 90 something

percent of all federal politicians.

Trump has literally sound camera that Miriam Adelson,

who has given him roughly 200 million plus,

that's what I've seen, hundreds of millions of dollars.

He's even said it out loud that she loves Israel

more than America, but at least before today

there was some slim hope that it wouldn't escalate.

I want to believe that he didn't want this to happen.

I mean, he talked about it a decade ago in the,

let's see, or right, maybe he's even longer than that.

When Obama was president, he's talked about Iran multiple times

over the years, probably over the last decade

about stepping in against Iran would be a bad move.

It's not a rock.

Iraq was a bad move, and he went after the bushes

over Iraq, he knew what a disaster that was.

So I want to think that he didn't want to get this done,

but he's just so handled.

He's just so corrupted and captured that, that, here we are.

But based on what Trump campaigned on too,

on him being on record saying Iraq was a huge mistake.

Like I said, I hope that he wouldn't do something this foolish,

this unpopular, and this clearly not in America's interest,

but he did.

80% of Americans didn't want this.

Every golf nation begged us not to do it.

A senior Middle East diplomat with direct knowledge

of the peace talks that are plainly this morning.

He said, get again when negotiations got close

to success, Israel has intervened to preempt diplomacy.

So what it sounds like to me is the talks were working.

And this happened last time too, in the 12-day war,

talks were ongoing, they were ongoing,

but in the middle of them, we struck, Israel struck.

And seems like the talks were working again,

but Israel killed them with bombs.

And then named the operation after themselves

and drag us into it.

So what I want to do in this episode,

I think is important, is to walk you through

some of the things to give some context to what's happening.

And why?

And maybe what we can expect at Brave the New World,

we, our show is young, but we want to talk about narratives

and what the administration, the powers that be,

the elite want us to believe versus what is going on.

We want to talk about who benefits from these things.

So I'm going to try to break some of the stem

for the next, for the next little bit.

Okay, so first thing is,

let's talk about the alleged case for war,

because this is, it's so insane to think about.

But this is how we got here.

The, most people know, the justification

has really shifted multiple times in the last eight months.

It happened with Venezuela as well.

You can see these patterns just keep going.

And when the reasons keep changing,

there is ultimately no reason.

Like they were looking for a reason

that stuck long enough that would hopefully

get some American support behind them

before they started bombing.

But this morning, they really stopped looking for it.

They never got it, because you still

had 80% of Americans who opposed this thing.

And, you know, so their propaganda as it was,

their reasons as they were did not work.

The second thing we'll talk about is the,

so that's the case for,

the second thing we'll talk about is the case against.

So everything this war is going to cost America

and not an abstract terms either in real things

and in real-time American bases are under fire.

As I mentioned, oil, likely to spike,

which has ripple effects through our economy.

America is probably more sheltered

than a lot of other countries in the world,

but still, plus another, you know,

however long of the region being completely destabilized,

it's been destabilized for the last 25 years.

And we'll talk about these consequences

that I've been warning about,

other people have been warning about me and my small microphone,

but I have been saying it,

and a lot of people with big microphones have been saying it too,

including Dave Smith, Tucker Carlson, et cetera.

Third thing we'll talk about is who is selling this thing and why?

And then the fourth thing will happen

about it as like what happens now?

What's next?

So let's talk about the first thing,

the justifications for this war.

And these are the goal posts and they keep changing.

So I've talked on the show before too,

about how this works, how goals,

the goal posts kind of,

this moving goal post framework in Venezuela

is a great example of that,

but it's one of the most reliable indicators

that you're being manipulated.

When the justification of a policy keeps shifting,

when they can't settle on a reason

that makes any sense whatsoever,

it means that the decision was already made

and that the reasons came after,

it's like they had the end in mind

and they just needed something that would perhaps support it,

they failed, but that's what they were looking for.

So they're not driving policy with any coherent arguments,

they're selling an outcome, that's what they're trying to do.

And it's very transparent, like no thinking person,

if you look at it believes otherwise,

the only people still attempting to justify striking around

are pursuing an outcome that they know they can't defend honestly

and they don't care, it's either for political gain,

it's for monetary gain, it's for influence, whatever,

they've got a worldview, whatever,

but it's certainly not justifiable

to drag America into this.

And to the end, the ends justify any means,

even if that means harm to America

with no possible outside.

And I want to tell you, there is no upside to this.

And so now the bombs are falling onto Ron

and now American bases are being hit.

Let's look at the goal, the goal post shifts in order

with their own words, because looking at them now,

knowing where we ended up this morning,

you can see that the pattern is really undeniable.

There was a destination and the reasons were always disposable.

So the first one was nuclear.

And this came about in June of 2025.

So June 13th, of course, it was in 2025,

the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer,

which was a massive aerial bombardment

of Iranian nuclear facilities.

And there were multiple sites hit.

Trump goes on national television and says,

and I'm quoting that we obliterated

Iran's nuclear weapons program.

That's what we said, obliterated.

And say to great, he didn't say set back.

He said obliterated gone.

Message was clear, threats gone.

Mission accomplished, right?

And at that point, honestly, the conversation should be over, right?

If you obliterated the nuclear program

and your reason for confronting Iran was nuclear,

well, then the threats gone, right?

So there's no justification for further military action.

But then what happens is goalposts too.

You get weeks later after Operation Midnight Hammer,

Steve Wicoff, who's Trump's on void,

goes on the record saying, well, Iran is a week away

from the bomb.

What?

A week away.

Weeks away after we obliterated their program.

So you got two statements from the same administration,

weeks apart, the president said obliterated.

It is on voice, on voice said a week away.

Both can't be true.

It's not possible to obliterate a nuclear program

and have that same program just spin up from the ground

and be a week from producing a weapon shortly after.

So either Trump lied about the success of the operation,

which means the case for the first strike was fraudulent

or Wicoff was exaggerating the threat

to justify continued aggression.

But either way, someone in the administration

was lying about Iran and they want us to trust him

with a bigger war, it's stupid.

And then by the way, Trump doubled down on obliterated

during the state of the union dress,

dress a few days ago, he was still saying it.

While his own people were simultaneously saying

that the threat was imminent a week away.

And while as we know,

this morning's operation had already been planned.

It was already in the planning stage, stages.

Now, I believe what Trump said,

that their capacity for a nuclear weapon was obliterated

or at least close enough, they weren't close

to achieving nuclear weapons before the June strikes.

Even though Netanyahu has been saying Iran is a week away

for 30 years, it's a meme.

We make fun of him for this,

but it's been untrue the entire time

and it's less true after the strikes, right?

A second goal post.

The third one is the protesters in late 2025.

So in late 2025, there were massive protests

that erupted inside Iran.

You had what looked like,

what was reported as hundreds of thousands of people

in the street protesting the regime.

And then immediately though, the neocons, they pivot

because they know the nuclear thing is not satisfying.

They can see the polling, Americans aren't buying it.

So suddenly, it's not about nuclear anymore.

Now it's about supporting the uprising.

It's about democracy.

It's about the Iranian people rising up against their oppressors

and America needing to stand with them.

You get Trump who goes on air and says he vows

to intervene militarily to support the protesters,

polls that, that's not popular.

He's talking about military intervention for protests

in a sovereign country that never attacked us.

Now, as this accelerates, I'll probably say this again,

but do I have sympathy for the Iranian protesters?

Absolutely I do.

I mean, they're brave people risking their lives,

but let's be honest about what happened.

The war hawks saw an opportunity and seized it.

The protesters weren't the reason they were the packaging

that the product had never changed.

And here's how you know, ask yourself,

did these same people advocate military intervention

with protesters when they erupted in Egypt

or in Saudi Arabia or in Bahrain

where our own fifth fleet is stationed?

No, because those are our allies.

We don't bomb our friends when they crushed a cent.

We sell them the weapons that they used to do it.

So the selective outrage is the tail.

A principle has to be for everything.

Every situation has to encompass everyone.

Not just your select group doesn't make any sense.

So obviously they don't care about Iranian protesters.

They care about having a justification

that plays on American empathy.

And for a few weeks, it worked.

It was all over Twitter.

People were talking about it.

And then again, this morning,

Trump went on camera and told the Iranian people

to take over your government.

So it's still using those protesters as cover

for regime change.

Except now there's this cruel irony.

So while Trump calls on the Iranian people

to rise up, Americans and Israeli bombs

are killing Iranian civilians.

Like what did you think would happen?

You can't just start shooting Tehran, Tehran

and not expect civilians to die,

including dozens of girls at a primary school this morning.

You can't be claiming to fight for the Iranian people

while bombing their children,

but of course they're gonna try.

And then it goes, the next goalpost was human rights.

So this is January this year, a month and a half ago or so,

but the protests had died down

because the regime was cracking down hard.

And there were reports of up to a few thousand protesters

that were killed.

It's a brutal repression.

It's not a good regime.

And no one who sees that likes it.

I mean, it's horrible.

And the goalpost moves again.

Now it's not about supporting an active uprising

because the uprising has been crushed.

Now it's about the killings of demonstrators,

a humanitarian justification.

They're saying we need to act

because of the human rights abuses.

Now, of course the crackdown is horrifying.

Of course those killings are wrong,

but since when does the United States go to war

over human rights abuses?

We allied with Saudi Arabia, a country that dismembered

a journalist with a bone saw.

We saw weapons to Egypt, which has thousands

of political prisoners.

We maintain relationships with dozens

of authoritarian regimes.

And here's what should make your blood boil.

The same people crying about dead Iranian protesters

don't have a single word to say

about the tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza.

At minimum, not one word.

They don't care about innocent people being killed.

They're using dead protesters as a prop

because Americans have empathy.

We're feeling people.

We don't like to see that shit.

And they think that this might be the justification

that finally increases their support,

but it doesn't.

Americans see right through it.

You have neocons and spoke people saying

that 30,000 protesters were killed.

I mean, just making up numbers, just making them up.

Some people saying more than Gaza,

just making that up.

It's nowhere near that the numbers

seem the most legit, but are probably still inflated.

I saw a come from the CIA, the US CIA.

And somewhere like 6,000 or 65 probably,

that's probably inflated, but still probably thousands.

You know, it might be 2,3000 protesters.

That's terrible.

We hate to see that, but justification for blowing up

Tehran and killing more civilians.

No.

Any shred of humanitarian justification

disappears when you bob Tehran.

And that's not even considering what happens

after what happened to Iraq after the US invasion

became a failed state.

It's not just direct military action

that kills people, it's disease,

starvation, infrastructure collapse,

draping war on a flag of humanitarianism

is propaganda at its most cynical.

We are setting right now the conditions

for mass death for innocent Iranian people.

And it's our fault our government's

choosing to do this for no coherent reason.

So humanitarian reasons, not the justification

for what we're doing right now, doesn't make any sense.

Then the goal post changed again back

this past month in February.

We came full circle, nuclear again.

The demand was back to nuclear.

Iran must be stopped from enriching uranium.

The original justification returned,

like the last ones had never happened,

but wait, we already obliterated their enrichment capacity.

The president said so, he just said it again,

as I mentioned on the state of the union.

So demanding they stop enrichment makes no sense

if you've already destroyed their ability to do it.

Really, what they're saying is something like

they must stop thinking about possibly

enriching uranium in the future.

That's what it is, like just don't have the thought.

They're like reading minds.

Oh, we think that they're potentially

gonna try to do it in the future.

So we gotta strike them now.

It's not a coherent argument.

It's not a coherent argument.

You're obviously not looking for compliance

from them, you're looking for a reason to strike them.

And now we know they weren't even looking

for a reason anymore.

They're not even trying to justify it.

I said this as a senior diplomat from the Middle East,

went on the record today saying that the talks were getting

close to being successful.

They said diplomacy was working.

I mean, looked like it.

As long as we're talking, we're not fighting.

But I didn't mean to be cynical about it,

but I knew exactly what happened during the first round

of talks before the 12-day war, US and Israel broke it off.

They were still negotiating,

just started bombing them.

And I thought, well, this is gonna be cover.

I'm gonna start bombing them again.

And they did.

But Iran was at the table, and Israel preempted it.

Killed the talks, started the bombing,

while negotiations were still ongoing.

So they didn't really want or need justification.

They were trying to sell it.

They were trying to get some support from American people

when that didn't come.

It just didn't matter anymore.

The justifications really worth theater.

They were gonna do it anyway.

We had five goal posts that changed.

These like costume changes for the same war.

And this morning they stopped it.

They just started bombing.

So the real reasons are on full display,

like listen to Trump this morning.

The White House put out a video of him talking,

Trump called it Regene Change on camera.

Netanyahu said the goal is to remove the existential threat.

Israel's defense minister called it a preemptive attack

to remove threats to the state of Israel.

Not threats to America, of course, threats to Israel.

That's what this is all about, not America.

There's no upside for America.

This is the moving goal post framework

in its purest form.

It's most transparent form.

Everyone can see it.

When the reason keeps changing,

the reason doesn't matter.

The decision was made before the first justification

was ever offered months ago.

Would the American people buy it?

They wondered, but we never did.

Everything was marketing.

They never found any support.

They tried it anyway.

If the veil didn't live for you during COVID

or watching this Epstein cover up,

where the administration tried to block all the files

from coming out after running on it.

If that wasn't clear for you then,

it should be crystal clear for you now

who is in control of our government.

They have no case for war.

Those pushing for it were always in coherent.

They couldn't hold a consistent position

for more than six weeks because they didn't have one.

We've established two things.

One, the case for the war was always in coherent.

There's no justification that's surviving any basic scrutiny.

And in the end, they didn't even bother landing on one

before the bomb started falling.

And really the case against is so overwhelming.

There's just no upside for America.

Iran can't hit US soil with anything.

They don't have nuclear capacity.

Anyway, it's gone, it's obliterated.

They don't have any missiles or any way

to strike American soil.

But besides like a terrorist attack,

we're always going to be vulnerable for that.

They haven't hit us in America on American soil.

So what's the upside for America?

I don't see one.

There's only downside.

It's downside is tremendous amount of debt.

And what are we going to do?

Print more to fund this thing.

Downside of, I've seen reports that America is very low

in our in our munitions.

And so what happens while we're spending it all

on a war of choice in Iran and something happens here

that we need to defend ourselves against.

We're not going to have the capacity to do that.

It's just stupid.

So why did this happen?

If there was no case for it,

if 80% of Americans oppose the war,

if every Gulf ally begged us not to do it,

if the military reality is a nightmare

of the economic consequences or catastrophic,

if every historical precedent tells us

that this ends in disaster,

if the peace talks were actually working,

why are American bases under fire this morning?

Because the people who drove this decision

were never representing you.

They were never representing America.

They were representing a very specific set of interests

and they built a pipeline to convert those interests

into American foreign policy

without needing American support.

Here's how it works.

You have special interest funded think tanks

like the foundation for defense of democracies, FTD.

You and according to multiple media reports,

FTD has been, quote, instrumental in writing trumps

around policy.

They are, quote, driving the push for war.

So you have a think tank and it's not just them,

there are others wrote the policy that produced this morning,

not the state department, not the Pentagon,

not career diplomats or military strategists

with decades of experience, a think tank with donors,

with an agenda with a very specific ideological worldview

that prioritizes Israeli security interests.

And this is the same neo-conservative infrastructure

that brought us the Iraq war.

It's the same network that told you

that Saddam and weapons of mass destruction

that told you we'd be greeted as liberators,

that told you it would be quick and clean

and democracy would bloom in the desert.

They were wrong, of course, about everything.

They were exposed as either liars or in components.

And instead of being banished from serious policy conversations,

they rebranded new names, new organizations,

same agenda, same playbook, same catastrophic judgments.

So you got orgs like the FTD who write policy papers,

they provide the intellectual architecture,

they create the framework that politicians can cite

and media personalities can repeat, they're the factory.

And everything else is distribution.

So then once the policy exists, it needs to be sold.

That's where the media personalities come in.

You've got Ben Shapiro, who spent months demanding,

not suggesting, not cautiously supporting,

demanding the Trump bomb Iran.

Again, harder, more.

This is, of course, never Trump or Ben Shapiro

who is now firmly entrenched in the mech cult.

And when people raised the very reasonable concerns,

thousands of Americans could die

and that we'd lose the war that follows.

Shapiro mocked them, mocked them this morning.

American bases have been hit by Iranian missiles,

the revolutionary guard promising continued strikes

until the enemy is decisively defeated.

You've got Hezbollah mobilizing against US positions

in Iraq, you've got American service members

under fire right now.

That's still mockable, Ben Shapiro

is a self-described proud Zionist.

He's been open about the fact that he views American foreign policy

through the lens of what's good for Israel.

It's his words, his framework.

He built a career opposing identity politics

while openly practicing the most consequential form of it,

advocating that American kids die in wars

that serve a foreign nation's strategic interest.

Then there's Mark Levin, maybe my favorite,

because he's just such a belligerent boomer.

Levin didn't just advocate for war from behind his microphone.

He went to the White House to do it directly.

He was physically there.

And what was his argument?

I mean, his argument suck.

He wrote Netanyahu is the elected prime minister

of sovereign nations and we should follow him.

He knows what's best in that region.

And Israel is such an important, an important partner.

We should do what he says.

So he wants American kids to go to war for Israel.

Well, Netanyahu got, Netanyahu got his war.

American kids are under fire and Levin

is behind a microphone where he always has been,

where he'll be until he sheds his mortal coil.

The think tanks right the policy,

the media personalities create the public permission structure

or try to, in this case, they failed.

The public said, no, as I mentioned, 80% opposed,

but the pipeline doesn't need public support.

It just needs the appearance of a debate.

Shapiro, Levin, those like him did that.

Dave Rubin, another one, although he's the dumbest of them.

They made it seem like there were two sides

when there was really just one side

and 80% of Americans.

That was it.

So you got the policy written,

you got the media campaign running.

Now it needs political authorization.

Not explicitly, but nonetheless backing,

and that's where the senators come in, of course,

and nobody in the United States Senate has pushed harder

for bombing around than Lindsey Graham.

Nobody.

Graham has been calling for strikes on Iran for years,

not cautiously, not conditionally, openly,

gleefully.

It's like a hyena advocating for military confrontation

as if it were a football game.

Iraq, he was for Libya, for Syria, for Iran.

He's been begging for it.

Wonder what they all have in common.

And who funds into Graham?

Well, that's the question you should always ask

when a politician's position on war doesn't align

with what 80% of his constituents want.

No, he's funded by defense contractors.

He's funded by APAC, and it's affiliate PACs.

It's the same donor network that funds FDD,

the same ecosystem, the same money, the same agenda,

different nodes, but all on the same network.

Graham sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He has direct influence over military authorization.

He has direct access to classified briefings,

direct input into the policy process,

and he uses every lever available to him

to push for exactly what happened this morning.

And here's what tells you everything about Graham's priorities.

When it comes to spending money on American infrastructure,

healthcare, veterans care, anything that directly benefits

the people of South Carolina who elected him suddenly,

he's fiscally responsible,

or fiscal responsibility matters to him.

Suddenly we need to watch the budget.

Suddenly we can't just spend money we don't have,

but a war with Iran, a multi-trillion dollar military operation

against a country of 90 million people, blank check.

He's for it.

No questions asked.

The money is always there when the bombs are for someone

else's benefit.

Tom Cotton, same breed.

Cotton wrote the infamous letter to Iran

during the Obama administration,

designed to sabotage the nuclear deal

before it was ever finalized.

A sitting senator actively undermining American diplomacy

because the deal didn't serve the interests he represents.

And those interests aren't in Arkansas.

Cotton has been one of the loudest voices

calling for maximum pressure on Iran.

No deal, no diplomacy, no negotiations, only force.

Check the donor roles, defense industry, pro-Israel packs,

the same pipeline, the same money.

In this morning, Cotton and Graham got,

they were pushing, they've been pushing for.

Their constituents, working families in South Carolina and Arkansas

are about to eat the economic consequences.

They're gonna have higher gas, higher groceries, higher everything

while their senators cash checks from the people

who profit from the bombs.

And then there's the foreign government, Netanyahu himself,

the foreign leader at the end of the pipeline,

the one who lobbied harder, harder than anyone

for the bombs that fell this morning.

Before the Oman peace talks even started,

Trump's on-voice Steve Whitcough met with Netanyahu first.

So we get the American negotiator checking in with Israel

before negotiating with Iran,

which tells you who's running this process.

Nanyahu was at the White House,

was it a dozen times in the last year,

seven times maybe in the last year,

proposing follow-on strikes, expanded operations.

He told Trump that any deal with Iran

must include elements of vital to Israel, must.

Not we'd prefer, not we'd appreciate must.

You had a foreign head of state telling the American president,

funding them, that American foreign policy

must serve his country's interests in this morning.

It does.

At the cost of American lives, probably an American treasure.

And the talks were working.

Diplomacy was producing results in Netanyahu killed it.

He preempted the peace process with a military operation

that his own officials say was planned for months.

And remember Netanyahu said the goal

is to remove the existential threat.

Israel's defense minister called it a preemptive attack

to remove threats to the state of Israel.

They're not hiding it.

They're saying openly on the record

that this is about Israeli security.

Achieved with American weapons,

flown by American pilots,

protected by American sailors,

paid for by American taxpayers

who were 39 trillion in debt,

and also they don't care what comes next for Iran.

Chaos is fine for them

because it means that their regional rival is declawed.

If there's chaos in Iran, their regional rival,

then Iran can't oppose them in any way.

They're happy about that.

They don't care if there's a humanitarian crisis.

They don't care that just like after other failed advances

in the Middle East that you had failed states

and refugees pouring into Europe.

They don't care about that stuff.

They just care that they can't be opposed in their region.

And meanwhile, the countries that actually board it, Iran,

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, UAE, Kuwait,

every single one of them said, don't do it.

They refused, in fact, to let us use their basis.

They lobbied for diplomacy because they live there.

They don't care about that.

They don't care about that.

They don't care about that.

They don't care about that.

They knew what would happen.

I mean, Dubai is getting hit today.

Bahrain's getting hit today.

They're getting hit today.

Oman got hit today.

Iranian missiles are landing on their soil

because we started a war that they asked us not to start.

So let's just be very clear about the chain

of influence that produced this morning.

So you got captured thing tanks that write the policy.

You got Shapiro 11 corporate media and other shills,

Ruben tried to sell it to the public.

Public says no, 80% opposed.

Graham and cotton provide the political infrastructure

and cover Netanyahu lobby is the president directly.

You've got the A pack and the other Israel first packs

and Adelson's giving Trump hundreds of millions of dollars.

Preamps working piece negotiation

and everybody plans this operation for months

while pretending to support diplomacy.

That's the pipeline.

And here's the thing that needs to be said clearly

on a day like this, none of them will serve,

none of them will send their children.

None of them will be on those bases that got hit this morning.

FTD will publish a lessons learn paper

and raise more money for the next policy.

Shapiro and Levin will be behind microphones

where they have always been

and where they always will be.

Graham and cotton will issue statements

calling your kid a hero, put a flag pin on,

look somber on camera and then go back to the same offices

where they built the architecture for this war

to start building the architecture for the next one.

Netanyahu will give a speech about the unbreakable bond

between American and Israel from a podium in Jerusalem,

not from a base in Kuwait, pulling missile fragments

out of concrete, not from a school in southern Iran,

pulling children out of rubble from Jerusalem

where he's safe, where he's always been safe.

None of them will bear any cost they never do.

The cost are yours, mine.

So let's talk about the buildup.

For weeks, the United States assembled

the largest military force in the Middle East

since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Yet two carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf,

F-22 Raptors deployed to Israel

saw for the first time in history

a B-2 stealth bombers in position strike windows

leaked to the press.

Reuters reporting plans for weeks long operations.

Anyone paying attention knew what that meant

that there's a principle.

In military strategy, as old as war itself,

you don't deploy forces, you don't intend to use.

The act of deployment carries its own gravity.

It creates expectations within the military,

within the administration, within allied governments,

within the enemy's calculus.

Once the gun is pointed, standing down

becomes harder than pulling the trigger.

The buildup was the decision.

It wasn't posturing.

It wasn't coercive diplomacy.

It wasn't a show of force.

It was the decision.

And there's a detail that makes it worse

because once you know that the operation

was planned for months with much more ambitious aims

than June, then everything else was a sales job in a facade.

The F-22s didn't go to Avda air bases of precaution.

They went as a prepositioned asset

for an operation that was already planned.

It was already a go.

The carriers didn't move into the Gulf of the show of force.

They moved because the strike packages were already written.

The B-2s were positioned as a deterrent.

They were in a weapon waiting for a launch order

that was already coming.

Yet every piece of the buildup was a piece of the plan.

It wasn't a signal.

It was the plan for a war decided months ago

while peace talks were ongoing

while American diplomats sat across from Iranian diplomats

in good faith while the public was told diplomacy was the priority.

But none of it was real.

The peace talks were the theater.

The buildup was already the decision.

The Geneva talks through Oman with the last diplomatic window.

There was reason to suspect that they might be designed to fail

all the buildup, number one, as it just mentioned.

And it was only there to provide cover

so that Americans could say,

so the American diplomats or the Trump administration could say,

we tried diplomacy.

It didn't work.

We have no choice, but it is clear.

That's not what was happening.

I mean, it seems like they were succeeding.

And Iran had no capacity to have a nuclear weapon.

So we had time, but Israel killed it.

So progress was being made.

A deal was within reach.

And Israel, which had been planning this operation

from a society that a successful negotiation was a threat

because a peace deal would eliminate the justification

of the war that they've already decided

that they wanted to fight and wrote us into.

So they preempted it.

They launched strikes, dragged us in while the negotiations

were still ongoing and negotiators were still stable.

So this isn't a failure of diplomacy.

This is the assassination of diplomacy

by a country that needed diplomacy to fail

in order to get the war that I wanted.

Paid for by another country, fought for

by another country's children, ours.

And now the administration has its cover story.

It's transparent as it is that we can all see through it.

But now they can say we tried, it didn't work.

We had no choice, but it's a lie.

We can all see threat diplomacy didn't fail.

Obviously.

So now the guns have been fired, what follows?

So this morning, of course, is not, I mean, still,

it's ongoing and it's not the end.

It's closer to the beginning.

If we believe a lot of the reports that have come out

that the plan was for weeks of bombardment,

I mean, we'll see.

I hope it stops.

I hope it stops.

But likely not.

So what's going to happen?

I mean, Iran's revolutionary guards

have promised continued retaliation

until the enemy is decisively defeated their awards.

I don't think that, I don't think that they can do that,

but a sustained military commitment can be done.

They're demonstrating their capability as we speak.

Iran is not a rock.

The, their proxy network is, is activating.

You got Hezbollah has announced operations

against every US base in Iraq.

Thousands of American troops who were there

for counter ISIS operations are now targets

in a war they weren't deployed for.

Nobody asked them.

Nobody asked their families.

Many of these bases, I said this earlier,

but they're little more than outposts with tents.

Like they're not really equipped to defend themselves.

They're not major air bases or anything.

Not a lot of them.

And Hezbollah in Lebanon, in Lebanon was struck,

I think it was struck yesterday by Israel.

And I'm sure it was to try to remove some of this threat,

but Hezbollah in Lebanon has the largest non-state missile

arsenal in the world.

There's something like 150,000 rockets

and missiles that they're disposal.

And if they activate them, that's northern Israel

becomes a war zone, right?

And then then what happened?

So Israel's got to escalate there too.

And now it's multi-front.

Then what?

We escalate Iran escalates.

The, this is a spiral that could,

that could happen that analysts warned about.

You also have, I mean tangentially,

you get the Houthis in Yemen who've already demonstrated

their ability to strike shipping in the Red Sea

and hit targets deep inside Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

So they're part of the Iranian network.

They could act.

You've got the Strait of Hormuz.

20% of the world's oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz

and Iran has spent decades building the capability

to shut it down with anti-ship missiles,

fast attack boats, naval mines.

Their entire naval doctrine exists because of this.

And they may not close it today,

but every day the war continues.

The probability increases.

It's a credible threat.

And, you know, they said even today

that they're shutting it down.

I don't know if they, if they can't fully,

but they may try and we'll see what happens.

It's not a veiled threat.

But then oil likely spikes.

And since nothing about this morning's

suggest escalation and the Strait gets threatened,

you're looking at, you know, oil spikes, gas prices

that are harder on working families.

Maybe a little bit easier to tolerate.

Like I said earlier here in the United States,

but across the world you've got more inflation.

We have to pay for this somehow.

So you're gonna have the money printers go print.

Maybe a recession.

That's all in play.

And then there's the military reality

that no one is really talking about.

You can't bomb a country into submission from the air.

Like it doesn't work.

Not against a country of this size, 90 million people

with this level of military capability.

Air campaigns degrade.

They destroy, they kill, but they don't produce surrender.

They don't produce regime change.

They produce rage.

They produce resilience.

They produce the exact opposite of what the planners

say that they intended.

So if the goal is actually regime change

and the Iranian people aren't gonna do it themselves,

which find it unlikely that,

find it more likely that they'll fractionalize

then they will regime change.

Then if the goal is regime change,

then airstrikes are phase one.

Like we can't do it that way.

So then what?

A ground invasion of a 90 million person country

with what army?

Like we can barely recruit enough soldiers

to maintain our current force levels.

And then how long would we occupy for?

With what money?

With 39 trillion in debt.

No one pushing Trump into war has offered a coherent answer

to what comes next.

And as I mentioned before, the humanitarian fallout,

how's that gonna end up?

So likely the air campaign failed to produce

a regime change.

The regime survives in some way, even with money dead.

And you've then got a population

that just watched US bomb their schools.

And then we're left with a country

that's more hostile, more dangerous,

more motivated to develop actual nuclear weapons

and more capable of striking us than before this morning.

That's a trajectory.

That's where this goes.

It's not me being pessimistic

it's because that's where it's gone every single time

or rock, Afghanistan, Libya, the outcomes

are always worse than the status quo.

No exceptions.

And the architecture of those disasters

where the architects of those disasters

are the same people architected this one.

So here we are, February 28th, 2026.

The United States is at war with Iran.

America calls it Operation Epic Fury.

Israel calls it Operation Shield of Judah.

Two names, one war, one's marketing from Trump,

Ra Ra marketing and the other one is an admission

to what we're really doing there.

We had ongoing peace talks up until yesterday

appeared to be working, doesn't matter, started bombing.

The Neocons never left Washington.

They put on mega hats.

The people who sold you Iraq were wrong about everything

who were exposed as liars and competent.

They were never held accountable.

They just rebranded new names, same agenda, same playbook.

And this morning they delivered their second catastrophe,

different president, different target, same con,

same pipeline.

You've got think tanks, like the FDD who wrote the policy,

you've got Shapiro and Levin and others who sold it.

You got Graham and Cotton and others

building the political architecture.

You got Netanyahu lobbying the president, preempting peace,

planning the war for months while pretending to support diplomacy.

You get the American people, the ones who actually fight

and die and pay well ignored completely.

80% said no, they did it anyway.

But that's the pipeline.

Think tank media, Congress, foreign government, war.

And the American people are not in that chain.

We're not a variable, we're the fuel.

So we've got a war, not for us, not for the Gulf nations

that asked us not to do it, not for the military families,

probably terrified right now, not for the taxpayers,

not for the Iranian citizens, the children being pulled from rubble,

not for the next generation who will inherit the debt,

the enemies and the blowbacks, not for America.

The wars for Israel, fought by Americans,

funded by Americans, opposed by Americans,

suffered by Americans.

I say that not with hatred, not with bigotry,

not with animosity towards Jewish people

or Israeli civilians in bomb shelters right now

because their prime minister made this a choice for them too.

He did.

I say because of the truth, this war isn't for us

and it never was.

You wear the flag on the dress like a cat, direct.

To do a color, see the truth and then filter it.

And now your mind's eyes ooze like a pewd.

Jealous, you evangelize and lie with the saferest agents.