Ken Klippenstein

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Graham Platner Loses Washington’s Vote

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:00:10 GMT

Maine Democrat Graham Platner, who is running against 29-year incumbent Senator Susan Collins, is involved in another “scandal” for sexting women who aren’t his wife.

Washington Monthly editor Bill Scher declared that “Mills should get back in the race,” referring to the 78-year-old governor — favored by party leaders like Chuck Schumer — who suspended her primary campaign in April after getting her clock cleaned by Platner so badly she’s probably still shitting pieces of her dentures out.

The question on Washington’s mind now is: Why can’t Maine just nominate an asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant as candidate rather than some tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff like Platner?

The answer is simple: That’s not what Maine voters want.

People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be. Think of the telegenic types like Gavin Newsom who never have a strand of hair out of place or much of anything to say (certainly not against the establishment). Think of Cory Booker, who at age 56 announced his first marriage, complete with a made-for-media rollout — clearly on the ridiculous assumption that people still give a shit about their presidential candidate having a typical family. Think of Pete Buttigieg, a politician with a public persona so clinical and detached that his own communications director, caught on camera during a raw debate prep session, complained that he was “coming across like the fucking Tin Man up there.”

Susan Collins and Janet Mills would never be embroiled in a sexting scandal (too much integrity?)

These are people who think we’re still living in the I Love Lucy world where married couples retire to separate beds so as not to offend viewers’ delicate sensibilities.

Not only are those days long gone — they never really existed. When longtime Massachusetts congressman and liberal icon Barney Frank died on May 19 at age 86, the beltway obituaries did him one last favor by sticking to his Dodd-Frank regulatory and gay-rights legacy rather than his sex scandal in which a male escort he’d hired ran a prostitution operation out of Frank’s apartment. Outlets like CNN gave him a respectful interview on the future of the Democratic Party.

Just this year, congressman Tony Gonzales of Texas resigned after pressuring a married staffer to have sex with him, leading to her suicide by immolation(!)

Some other examples off the top of my head:

Matt Gaetz — resigned from Congress in 2024 under a House Ethics cloud, the panel later concluding there was evidence he’d paid women for sex, including a 17-year-old
Eric Swalwell — the California Democrat resigned the same week as Gonzales, facing sexual-misconduct allegations from multiple women
John Edwards — the married former presidential contender fathered a child with a campaign videographer, then leaned on an aide to falsify a DNA test, all while his wife was dying of cancer.
Bill Clinton — blowjob etc.

And of course there’s personal scandals of a non-sexual nature, such as with Hegseth and Kash Patel, who are drinking themselves to (our) death.

We must not allow Platner to sully the sterling reputation of Congress

In the real world, it seems everyone and anyone can have dark present and past. Take Obama—the squeaky-cleanest of them all, the liberal patron saint of respectability and decorum. Biographer David Garrow’s Rising Star documents that before Obama ever met Michelle, he twice proposed to an earlier girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager — and kept seeing her into the early ‘90s even as his relationship with Michelle deepened.

I don’t care about any of this because I never bought his or any politician’s fairy tale story to begin with. It’s patronizing that grown adults are expected to believe such things. Voters are electing a politician, not a Pope. And they know that.

Platner will survive this — not because voters are thrilled he was sexting other women, but because they already assume half of Congress is doing the same, or worse.

And it’s not as if I’m some Platner booster. He’s always struck me as an impulsive dumbass (not unlike me I suppose, except I would never run for Congress). But I'll take a dumbass over Susan Collins, a three-decade incumbent who has rubber-stamped every war she's ever met and just about every major Washington disaster since I was in elementary school.

Consider how she answered Platner's remark that she'd voted to send him to Iraq. She said “that was Platner’s decision to serve. He was not drafted.”

That's the kind of casual cruelty that falls out of these decorum-humpers the moment an election forces them to face an actual human being. And here's the thing about everyman dumbasses like Platner: they don't talk like that. That line is pure thirty-year operator — the reflex of someone who's spent a career treating war as a line item and the people fighting them as a footnote. These people hold you in contempt and are indecent straight through. They just know which side of the plate the salad fork goes on.

And let’s be real, Platner’s story here is a pretty common one. This and his other “scandals” sound a lot like other former Marines I know. So when Washington acts like it’s disqualifying, what they’re really saying is that ordinary people aren’t fit for higher office. And to the public they are saying: Go back to the kiddie table at Thanksgiving and pick from the pre-approved smoothgroins we’ve selected for you.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Congress's CIA Eyes AI Data Center Critics

Dan Boguslaw — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:04:03 GMT

As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it grows, Congress is taking notice — not with any legislation or law, but by spying on public opposition.

A newly created intelligence agency of the Congress (yes, it has its own now) is warning that legislators are in danger from an angry public. The U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau, created after January 6 and in parallel to the 18-member Executive Branch intelligence community, laid out the warning in an internal intelligence report produced in April.

“ISB has prepared this Intelligence Note to provide the US Capitol Police and law enforcement personnel with information related to recent threats and attacks likely linked to grievances concerning data centers,” the report says.

Data Center Intelligence Note

420KB ∙ PDF file

There’s only one problem: the report admits that there is no evidence of any actual threat to Congress.

“The US Capitol Police is not investigating any data center-motivated threats to Members of Congress,” the report says.

Nonetheless, it goes on to warn that artificial intelligence “related policies introduced on the Hill and in local communities are likely to continue drawing opposition, increasing potential concerns for public officials.”

The Congressional intelligence office that authored the report was formed in the aftermath of January 6th and justified to bring the congressional police force “in line” with federal intelligence agencies and thereby gain more access to the massive existing intelligence community. The “intelligence note” was also distributed to police organizations and state-level fusion centers across the country.

“We now have a world class intelligence operation,” then-Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Thomas Manger said last May. “We are significant players in the intelligence community in the Washington, D.C., region and, frankly, all over the country … Whereas before, we were basically just — we were consumers of information. The FBI would give us intelligence, other agencies would give us intelligence. Now we are gathering our own."

The motivation for the report appears to be an attack on the home of Indianapolis city councilman Ron Gibson. Gibson, a supporter of a local data center project, reported to police that someone had fired 13 gunshots through his door and left a note on his porch that read “No data centers.” No suspect has yet been arrested.

The intelligence report reveals that the Intelligence Services Bureau is monitoring social media content critical of data centers, looking for potential threats.

“You can be damn sure there are thousands more rounds where this comes from, and if you keep voting for data centers, we will all begin returning to the early days of American freedom and express ourselves via violence over words,” one user posted.

“Threatening the politicians who actually make decisions is actually logical,” another social media user posts. “I would rather shooters shoot up the senate than a high school [sic].”

Neither of these comments represents an actionable threat, the Capitol Police notes.

The report also summarizes crimes associated with data centers, including one committed over five years ago.

One example is that of Seth Pendley, who was arrested five years ago in 2021 and charged with attempting to blow up a data center in Northern Virginia. The Capitol Police connect him to Congress by noting that at some point he claimed to have “brought a sawed-off assault rifle into DC but left the weapon in his car, before proceeding to the US Capitol building but not entering it on January 6, 2021.” Pendley is incarcerated 600 miles away from D.C. in Terre Haute, Indiana.

What is clear is that data centers have become an overwhelmingly unpopular issue for American voters. A Gallup poll from this month found that seven in ten Americans oppose the local construction of data centers for AI. Their concerns range from the environmental pollution to the increased utility prices generated by data center water and electricity use.

The Intelligence Services Bureau report briefly touches on these concerns and more, identifying “possible government use of AI to spy on Americans,” “environmental impacts,” “rising energy costs,” and “loss of jobs in certain industries” as reasons why Americans oppose their construction. The report does not examine why activism regarding AI and data centers is anything other than free speech.

Grasping for evidence of increased criminal dangers, the report dedicates a full page to threats made against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is neither an elected official, nor within the purview of the Capitol Police.

Altman blamed the attack on “incendiary” news media coverage, writing in his blog that “I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” In other words, AI leaders like Altman see the problem as one of controlling what the public says.

Congress, now in the intelligence business, is responding by focusing on the threat of the American public rather than the threat to the American public.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Real Reason Tulsi Gabbard Resigned

Ken Klippenstein — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:23:21 GMT

When intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard resigned this past week, citing her husband’s health, the battle immediately began to shape the narrative — saying it was due to clashes with Trump over Iran, or being frozen out of the West Wing, or deep frustration with her own agency.

These stories all have one thing in common: they cast Gabbard as a martyr. But that isn’t what happened. If you look at what Gabbard actually did, the picture is less flattering.

She oversaw her agency’s National Counterterrorism Center move into purely domestic matters (contrary to its original design). The intelligence budget went up. The surveillance state tightened its grip on the American people, with Gabbard presiding over an intelligence community striking up alliances with private companies, including social media giants.

The real story is one of defeat. It’s the story of an intelligence chief discovering she wasn’t really in charge of much, and a national security system that strangles reform with such ease you almost have to stand in awe of it.

Gabbard’s title — Director of National Intelligence — was created in response to public outrage over the intelligence community’s failure to prevent 9/11. But because the member agencies (CIA, FBI, etc.) did not want to have to answer to a higher authority, the position was rendered so toothless and symbolic that one former DNI himself even called the position “neutered.”

Here is the story of how it got that way and why Congress is responsible.

The CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, recently published a remarkably candid 20th-anniversary retrospective on the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 — the law that created the DNI. The lead essay is written by the senator who authored the law: Susan Collins (of electric toothbrush fame).

Collins opens with a reference to “sausage-making” — never a good sign:

“Remember that old saying that there are two things you never want to see made: sausage and legislation? In this article, I’m going to provide an insider’s account of the sausage factory in Congress, a behind-the-scenes look at how the most significant intelligence reforms in more than 50 years became law in 2004.”

The 9/11 Commission, in its 2004 final report, recommended a single, overarching intelligence boss with actual authority over the entire community — modeled, loosely, on the Goldwater-Nichols Act that instituted significant new powers for the Department of Defense.

But the moment Collins and Joe Lieberman started writing their bill, the keepers of the national security establishment began working against it.

Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney wanted nothing to do with a new official who could touch the intelligence budget of the Pentagon, which controls four of the five largest U.S. intelligence agencies. House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, doing Rumsfeld’s bidding, immediately held up the committee’s final report to stall the bill.

The memos detailing this saga are now publicly available in the historical record. On September 11, 2004 — three years to the day after the attacks the bill was supposed to address — Rumsfeld sent President George W. Bush a private memo dripping with contempt and titled, “Intelligence ‘Reform.’” Note the scare quotes around “reform.”

Rumsfeld warned the president that giving the new intelligence director “full budget authority” — the exact position Bush had publicly endorsed to appease voters — would create “a train wreck.” Instead, Rumsfeld proposed a precise blueprint for the toothless agency. The new director’s “importance and value,” Rumsfeld wrote, “is not as a collector or producer of intelligence — or as a super CIA director — but rather as the leader of the intelligence community.”

That word — “leader” — was intentionally hollowed out. Rumsfeld’s proposal sought to strip the position of any real budget authority, collection capability, and operational responsibility. “Leader” here meant about as much as a Burger King crown.

Photo depicting intelligence “leader” role

Rumsfeld closed his memo by warning Bush that the current Congressional draft was “undesirable,” would “harm US intelligence capabilities,” and most importantly, that Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers shared his concerns.

To back up that warning, House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter held up the bill in committee. Behind the scenes, Hunter spoke to Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, the intelligence chief on the Joint Staff working for Gen. Myers. Burgess helped Myers draft a late-night letter to Hunter, making the Pentagon’s case in three short paragraphs: the intelligence budgets must pass up through the defense secretary, and the appropriations must flow right back through the defense secretary in turn — a loop Myers called a “vital flow.”

President Bush had promised real reform as a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, and his own staff realized the Pentagon had just blown a massive hole in the bill weeks before voters headed to the polls. Burgess writes that days later, Myers told him he’d received a frantic call from the White House saying the general had “just cost the president his chance at reelection.”

The day after Myers sent that letter, Rumsfeld fired off a memo to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Titled “Possible Talking Points,” Rumsfeld apologized for not giving the White House a heads-up, ran interference for Myers by insisting the chairman was legally obligated to give his best military advice to Congress, and provided a script to smooth things over with the public by selling the gutting of the bill as “reform.”

Congress caved instantly. As Collins cheerfully recounts in her essay, her staff counsel buzzed her BlackBerry with a solution: just insert four words stating that the bill shall “respect and not abrogate” the authority of the Defense Secretary. Collins texted Lieberman about the fix “in the middle of Billy Joel playing a tribute to Elton John,” she writes. What fun! Never mind that the compromise completely defeated the entire point of a centralized intelligence boss. It got the bill moving.

None of this shameful display of congressional subordination seems to bother Collins at all. To finalize the surrender, Vice President Dick Cheney personally carried the White House’s written language over to Hunter, as Collins recounts. With the loophole secured, Hunter gave his consent and signed off.

The Pentagon had won, and Rumsfeld knew it. In a later internal memo — this one lacking the scare quotes around the word reform — he expressed his relief over the final product:

“This is a substantial and welcome improvement over previous drafts … No one could suggest that the Secretary of Defense does not have ‘full budget authority’ over the Services and the Department of Defense. … We believe that this arrangement may also prove more congenial to those on Capitol Hill …”

This episode shows what the national security world thinks of Congress — that they’re a joke — and how the security apparatus effortlessly undermines the Constitution’s balance of powers. Nowhere does Collins express an ounce of frustration, because Congress has completely internalized its role as the ball-gag wearing gimp in Pulp Fiction.

The final receipt of this capitulation was proudly entered into the public record by the bill’s own sponsor, Joe Lieberman. On December 8, 2004 — the day of the final Senate vote — Lieberman asked unanimous consent to insert the Myers surrender letter into the Congressional Record alongside a “fact sheet” trying to put a brave face on the retreat. The sheet concedes the entire point: “the conference report accepted the recommendation of General Myers.” On the very day of the bill’s historic passage, its authors entered the exact document that gutted it into the permanent record.

As former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper later noted in that same CIA journal, the change to the law added by Rumsfeld resulted in “effectively neutering the rest of the act” — again, I stress, this coming from someone who literally held the job!

Senator Arlen Specter, who had been trying to consolidate intelligence authority since 1996, was the only member of Congress willing to stand on the floor and say what really happened.

The Pentagon, he said, had “successfully attenuated intelligence reform legislation.” The new DNI’s budget authority was “effectively the same authority that the current DCI is given.” The new official would have no power base, no troops, and “no actual authority.”

Then he voted yes!

The 9/11 Commission had officially exposed the fatal dysfunction of American national security. Congress had an idea of reform based on the conclusions and yet the authors mostly hated what they produced. The White House was upset with the final product. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was a puppet of Rumsfeld who was a puppet of Cheney who was the high priest of national security and thus the demands of the religion.

One could make the mistake of saying that the main culprit here was pitbull Rumsfeld, who was protecting his turf, but the major actor wasn’t a person or an agency. It was “national security,” the mindset itself, and the religion behind it. The belief that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the generals, the military brass, knows best. It was able to defy the will of the people, the president, and the Congress.

Tulsi Gabbard never had a chance.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Terrorist “Body Count” Captivates the White House

Ken Klippenstein — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:45:18 GMT

White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka

The Trump administration is bumping off terrorists at an unprecedented rate, so it says, eliminating 860 across the world since it took office.

“We are bringing down the hammers of hell on our enemies,” White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka told Newsmax last week.

“Since our first operation on day 11 of this administration, a scant 15 months ago, we have killed 860 jihadis across the globe,” Gorka continued, divulging a number that is normally classified.

And that’s what it’s come down to: numbers. In Gorka’s telling, the bestest, mostest, biggest, and baddest Trump administration has unleashed the dogs of war in a “body count” contest to beat Sleepy Joe Biden. The number is unverifiable by design — targeted killings are rarely disclosed, and when they are, the administration decides how to characterize the targets.

Consider Abu-Bilal al-Minuki. Trump announced in a Truth Social post last week that he’d been killed in Nigeria, the president calling him “second in command of ISIS globally.”

Trump’s Truth Social post

“With his removal ISIS’s global operation is greatly diminished,” Trump said.

This would be a big deal — if it were true.

Trump's "second in command of ISIS globally" label is, at best, a stretch. It derives from a disputed claim that al-Minuki may have been elevated to head a single ISIS directorate after another figure's death in March 2025 — a regional bureaucratic promotion that HumAngle, a Nigerian investigative outlet, describes as "a political claim, pitched to an American domestic audience that requires a recognizable villain."

None of this is mentioned in virtually any of the mainstream media reporting on al-Minuki’s death, which dutifully echoes the White House’s “second in command” rhetoric.

Trump says

“Trump Says a Top ISIS Leader Was Killed in a U.S.-Nigerian Mission,” a representative headline in the New York Times reads.

The picture gets more complicated still. Al-Minuki wasn’t some global operative skulking around Africa in hiding, as Trump’s Truth Social post implied (“thought he could hide in Africa”). He was a Nigerian, born in the town of Mainok in Borno State, and killed in his home country. He rose through the ranks of the indigenous Boko Haram movement before pledging allegiance to ISIS in 2015. Describing him as a figure who “hid” in Africa is like saying a Kansas farmer “hid” in the Midwest.

Then there’s the question of what “brave American forces” actually undertook the operation, as Trump brags. The Nigerian military, in its own statement said flatly that there were “no foreign boots on the ground” (which could, of course, be a smokescreen). Though Americans provided intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support, Nigerian forces executed the mission themselves. In other words, the Trump administration helped Nigeria in its own terror war, one that hardly threatens the United States.

Hilariously, the Nigerian military in 2024 actually claimed that al-Minuki had already been killed — a falsehood that lingered until Trump’s announcement. In April 2024, then Nigerian Director of Defense Media Operations Edward Buba publicly announced that al-Minuki had been killed on February 21, 2024, during operations in the Birnin Gwari Forest in Kaduna State. Nigeria’s presidential office, now scrambling to square the two announcements, attributes the 2024 claim to “mistaken identity or misattribution in the fog of sustained counterinsurgency operations.” But this time, Nigeria says, it is “100 percent certain.”

Whoops!

It’s worth noting this kind of uncertainty is a pattern in the game of counterterrorism, not a one-off. Longtime Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau was declared dead multiple times across more than a decade. ISIS’s founding caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was reported killed or seriously wounded on several occasions before he actually was killed in 2019.

All of which points to a deeper problem with the Trump administration’s approach to counterterrorism, embodied by Gorka himself. His kill-count boosterism — the “860 jihadis” figure, his repeated boasts about terrorists being turned into “a cloud of red mist” and stacked “like cordwood,” his reported NSC lanyards reading “WWFY&WWKY” (for: We Will Find You and We Will Kill You) — is bluster bordering on desperation. And in the mind of gun-toting yet desk-bound Gorka, it is “information warfare,” a Pentagon source tells me. “Their definition of deterrence is ranting about how tough they are,” the former officer tells me, “even though there’s no evidence ISIS cares about the message.”

Meanwhile, the actual terrorism threat landscape tells a different story than the one Gorka is selling. ISIS and its affiliates remain the world’s deadliest terrorist organization. In Africa alone — the very theater where Trump is claiming his greatest wins — the Islamic State Sahel Province has grown from an estimated 425 fighters in 2018 to somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 today. In March 2025, ISIS formally launched a new military campaign it called “Burning Camps,” explicitly focused on Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Mozambique. Six of the ten countries most impacted by terrorism globally are now in sub-Saharan Africa.

Expect more of this. Gorka in a recent interview following the release of the National Counterterrorism Strategy remarked: “Now the real work can begin.”

So let’s be clear: The same administration that has spent months decrying the nihilistic assassination culture spawned by Luigi Mangione and the killing of Charlie Kirk is making numbers-driven assassination its official doctrine of statecraft — complete with branded merchandise.

— Edited by William M. arkin

Iran War vs. Epstein Files

Ken Klippenstein — Sun, 17 May 2026 23:19:24 GMT

Thomas Massie attends debate alone that challenger Ed Gallrein skipped

There’s a heated primary election for Congress this Tuesday that is nothing short of a referendum on “national security.” Fittingly, one candidate’s background is almost entirely unknown because, he claims, it’s classified.

His name is Ed Gallrein, a Trump-backed retired Navy captain challenging incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The focus of Gallrein’s campaign (and one of the few things he seems willing to talk about) is his claim of having served in SEAL Team 6, the secretive commando group most famous for the killing of Osama bin Laden. He certainly knows how to operate in the shadows: I can count on one hand the number of interviews Gallrein has sat down for, and he’s skipped literally every debate, each attended alone by Massie. Gallrein’s campaign touts endorsements from unnamed military officers, their identities and other supposedly sensitive details redacted to burnish the security theater. He’s even called civilians “sheep.”

The strategy seems to be to let Trump's endorsement and the SEAL mystique do the work — and to avoid as much public scrutiny as possible. In the few appearances Gallrein has made, his message to voters is consistent: the most important things about him are classified, the president has seen the file, and that should be enough.

“The president is playing five-dimensional chess,” Gallrein told a local NBC affiliate, in response to a question about the Iran War’s effect on gas prices last week. By the next day, the game had mushroomed to “nine-dimensional chess,” as Gallrein later described Trump’s handling of the war to commentator Mark Levin.

See the trident?

By contrast, Thomas Massie is a vocal critic of the national security state — and it has cost him. He voted against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill,” pushed for release of the Epstein files alongside Democrat Ro Khanna of California, and has been one of the most vocal congressional opponents of the Iran War. Whatever you think of his views, he's one of the few members of our pathetic Congress who is willing to defy his own party's leadership. For that, he's been buried in out-of-state spending and made a personal target of the president.

"We'll get a 100% vote except for this guy named Thomas Massie," Trump said while promoting the Big Beautiful Bill. "There's something wrong with him." Now he has escalated to calling Massie "the worst Republican Congressman in History” and demanding his ouster.

Into this fight steps Gallrein, whose pitch beyond Trump loyalty is a story he tells repeatedly about his first visit to the Oval Office. By his account, when he arrived, Trump had a leather binder containing his complete, classified “top secret” career file sitting on the resolute desk. The lesson, Gallrein told the Maywood Country Club:

“He [Trump] knows everything about me. He knows what I did for you in uniform. He knows what I’ll do for you in Washington. I’ll be your champion.”

The message here is as insulting as it is creepy: Trump has seen the classified record, the classified record establishes fitness, therefore voters need only ratify the commander-in-chief’s decision. Voters’ job isn’t to evaluate; it’s to trust the officials who have.

Ed Gallrein poses next to Donald Trump

Gallrein is pro-Iran War (and as far as I can tell, any other war) pro-Trump, and pro-“national security,” but that’s about all we’re allowed to know. If you’d like to know more about this figure that could well be representing the country next year, too bad. The campaign slogan might as well be Shut The Fuck Up and Salute.

He also rails against "politicians" who burned SEAL Team Six's cover by talking publicly about the bin Laden raid — but those politicians include the president and other democratically elected leaders who represent the only real check on the secret world that exists (at least in theory.)

His contempt for the public’s right to know presents itself almost like a verbal tic.

"Foreign policy and national security are inseparable,” Gallrein told a podcast called USA Cares. “You can't talk about one without talking about the other. If you are, you're an amateur."

In other words: what your government does overseas, from Gaza to Venezuela, isn’t any of the public’s business. Your only job is to perform gratitude. As Gallrein told the Optimist Club:

“You should be proud to know as Americans there’s units like Delta Force, our Army sister unit, and SEAL Team Six, that the kind of operation you saw to get Maduro, they’re standing ready 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for you and your family. Mercifully and fortunately, all the things they do don’t hit the press. I’m sorry to disappoint the media, but that’s what I can share with you.”

Note the framing: they work for “you and your family.” Constitutionally and legally, they work for the elected president. Gallrein knows this (or should).

If you think I'm reading too much into his paternalism toward the civilian world, he literally calling civilians “sheep” and SEALS “sheep dogs.” Per his USA Cares interview:

“I don't know if you've heard this, the famous theory there's three kinds of people in the world. There are sheep, there are sheep dogs, and there's wolves. SEALs are sheep dogs. We don't care what letter jacket the adversary wears. If they're bad people and they mean, mean harm to our sheeps, we're on it.”

Civilians are the sheep. The special operators are the sheepdog, their self-appointed protectors. The sheep don't give the sheepdog orders. This is the worldview of someone running for an elected position in which he would oversee the sheepdogs!

And as for sheepdogs, it’s not even clear how much he really was one. Military sources tell me that Gallrein not only went to the Naval Postgraduate School as a young Lieutenant, but that he served in a number of educational and training positions, including the head of instruction at the Joint Special Operations University before he retired. He stresses in interviews that SEAL Team 6 isn’t just the combat operators but support staff as well.

I wonder what his job was!

Whatever the case, he sure loves to talk like some kind of shadow warrior. In fact, in just the few interviews he’s even done, I counted at least a dozen references to secrets he claims he’s not at liberty to divulge, including:

“I can’t speak to any classified operations I may or may not have ever been involved in.” — The Mark Levin Show
“SEAL Team six is different, classified, won’t go into it...” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet
“Let’s talk about Seal Team Six for a minute. This is all I can tell you.” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet
“…SEAL Team Six; can’t talk much about that, but it was an honor to lead those great Americans...” — The Mark Levin Show
“The only reason you know about SEAL Team Six is ‘cause politicians ran their mouth about it after we got Osama Bin Laden and Captain Phillips, didn’t they?” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
“I continued to be a senior advisor for what we would call s—uh, let’s just call them security activities and special operations, i.e., the black world...” — The Mark Levin Show
“Think pager bombs, black ops, and things that happen that don’t get divulged, mercifully, unless politicians talk about it.” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
“It just manifests itself in some very interesting activities and operations. Of course, we can’t talk about that, ‘cause that’s TS/SCI, it’s SAP [Special Access Program] information.” — The Mark Levin Show
“And I could go into some detail about that, but- Yeah ... there’s a movie about it and so forth and so on. But I will not disclose anything classified, ‘cause I still have a- I appreciate that, yeah ... a clearance and I, I will abide by- Yes ... uh, the, uh, the agreements I have made with our US government as they pertain to such.” — USA Cares Podcast
“I’m very familiar with it. I’ll say no more.” — USA Cares Podcast
“...many times we would deploy in the dark in the night- Mm-hmm ... and we would come back in the dark at night- Yeah ... ‘cause our nation asked us to. Right. And I won’t go into any further details.” — USA Cares Podcast
“I won’t share the confidential private pieces that are classified or otherwise I shouldn’t divulge...” — Optimist Club Speaker Series

A few things here are worth flagging. Gallrein refers to "security activities" — that phrase does not exist in military or intelligence parlance; the correct terms are "special activities" or "sensitive activities." He also describes a classification level as "secret compartmented information" — it's sensitive compartmented information.

Anonymous endorsement

As if the whole Chris Kyle cosplay isn’t enough, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is en route to Kentucky to campaign with Gallrein, according to the local press.

There is one episode in Gallrein’s post-military career that exists in full public record — and it cuts against his vaunted expertise.

After retiring, he took a job as a Safety and Security Specialist at the Department of Energy’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the country’s most sensitive nuclear facilities. He was fired in May 2013. He filed a whistleblower complaint alleging retaliation for raising concerns about deficiencies in security training programs.

The complaint was dismissed. Among the reasons: he had reported his concerns to a fellow subcontractor employee — not a DOE official or his own employer’s chain of command, as the regulations required. The man campaigning on mastery of the classified world filed his whistleblower complaint with the wrong person and lost his job at a nuclear security facility. He has not mentioned any of this on the campaign trail.

Gallrein Whistleblower Determination

253KB ∙ PDF file

This hiding behind national security is not a partisan phenomenon. Last year I wrote about the Democrat national security moms, electeds like Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Elissa Slotkin. The political establishment loves these figures because national security is an official-sounding way to tell the public to shut the fuck up and let the professionals handle things.

Gallrein seems to think that “his country” or “the nation” is some disembodied entity that doesn’t have elected officials, that “national security” is what gives him orders, and that the secret world is an autonomous entity. Most important though, he believes that the people are sheep and that those in uniform have some license to protect them regardless of pesky politicians, and that that license derives from some secret regulation rather than from laws and the Constitution.

What Gallrein represents is something both parties have been quietly building toward for twenty-five years: the national security state as its own source of political legitimacy, floating above democratic accountability, not answerable to the public it claims to serve.

The sheep vote Tuesday.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Pentagon Shakedown No One Noticed

Ken Klippenstein — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:24:27 GMT

Pete Hegseth coming for your money

For my money (and yours), the most insane scandal today is how little anyone seems to care about the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request — an increase of more than $400 billion over last year.

Congress has barely said anything about this, instead spending precious hearing minutes arguing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as to whether the Iran War costs 25 or 29 billion dollars — a drop in the bucket compared to what the Pentagon is poised to spend.

No need to worry, Hegseth insists, this new budget will create a cost-saving plan to innovate how the Pentagon buys things, breaking with the ways of the past.

“We have flipped the Pentagon acquisition process from a bureaucratic model to a business model,” Hegseth says, adding that the Department is “decisively moving from an acquisition environment paralyzed by bureaucratic red tape into an outcomes-driven organization focused on delivering the most for taxpayer dollars.”

We’ve been hearing the same bullshit since the Reagan years. The Pentagon’s dirty secret is that it has no business model. It’s never even passed an audit!

But this year’s request is the military’s biggest taxpayer heist ever.

Sure, we all know about the $600 toilet seats, the soldiers sent to war without proper armor, the drone threat nobody planned for. But those seem almost quaint compared to the biggest problem these days: the billions spent on the kind of business model “innovation” Hegseth described earlier, supposedly to speed things up or take advantage of “commercial” offerings.

In fact, I did a deep dive and counted at least 211 Pentagon organizations devoted to "rapid," "innovative," or "future" procurement. I’m not even talking about the research laboratories that have been around for decades; or the normal R&D orgs that exist; or the regular “materiel” commands of the services. I’m talking about 211 organizations created since the second Iraq War because those existing organizations obviously and evidently didn’t do their jobs.

Organizations, plural! This is duplication at an industrial scale.

Here’s the reality. Time and again, when the troops have had to go out there and fight, we’ve watched ad hoc organizations spring up to spend billions because someone didn’t foresee something or didn’t anticipate the very warfare that they’re supposedly preparing for. Or they didn’t buy enough. Or they bought the wrong thing. Or they bought too much of something and not enough of another. Or they priced themselves out.

“We’re not just buying something,” Hegseth said just before the Iran War. “We are solving life and death problems for our war fighters. We’re not building for peacetime. We are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing.”

The irony, of course, is that Hegseth oversees the exact bureaucracy he’s decrying.

All these 211 (and counting) offices, cells, labs, experiments, agencies, and commands are part of the problem. They dole out money. And they constantly change their names, their sponsors, and their emphasis and they search for a funding source, as they keep up with the buzz words of the day, and as they shovel money to everyone from their obscure and favorite Death Inc., to the giants at Amazon.

One organization exists today, another pops up tomorrow. They are their own universe, an army that marches to its own cadence. Will Hegseth slash them? No. Instead, we’re sure to see the creation of a new Business United Thoughtful Futures Cell (BUTFUC) to spread the extra $400 billion around.

It’s almost impossible to audit the American military. It is so vast. But it can be done. Here’s a start:

75^th Innovation Command
Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT)
Advanced Battle Management System Battle Lab
Advanced Command and Control Accelerator (CDAO)
Advana (now part of Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office)
Advanced Campaign Cell (DNI)
AFWERX/AFWERX Ventures Program (Air Force Research Laboratory)
Agent Network (CDAO)
Air Force CCA Experimental Operations Unit, Nellis AFB, NV (Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA))
Air Force Concepts Development and Management (CDM) Office
Air Force Futures (formerly Integrated Capabilities Command)
Air Force/MIT AI Accelerator
Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office
Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office
Air Force Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation Office (SDPE)
APEX Accelerators
ARCWERX (National Guard)
Army Applications Laboratory (AAL)
Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM)
Army Expeditionary Technology Search (xTech/xTech Prime)
Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment (AEWE)
Army Futures and Concepts Center
Army Intelligence Battle Lab (IBL)
Army Maneuver Battle Lab (MBL)
Army Multi-Domain Targeting Center (AMTC)
Army Pathway for Innovation and Technology (PIT)
Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (formerly Army Rapid Capabilities Office)
Army Rapid Equipping Force
Army SBIR CATALYST
Army Software Factory (T2COM)
Artificial Intelligence Integration Center (Army Software Factory)
Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC) (CDAO)
Beholder’s Gaze experiment
Catalyst Accelerator (AFRL)
Center for Advancing Science, Technology, Learning, and Engagement (CASTLE)
Center for Rapid Innovation (Air Force Research Laboratory)
Coastal Hyperspectral Reflectance Object Material Analysis (CHROMA) project (NRL)
Combined Federated Battle Laboratories Network
Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJAC2) Joint Demonstration Environment (JDE)
Commercial Capabilities Integration & Transition Division (CCIT) (Air Force Global Space Command)
Corsair Ranch (National Guard)
Counter NEXT (DIU)
Crucible Innovation Lab (Space Force)
Cybersecurity Collaboration Center (CCC) (NSA)
CYBERWORX
Defense Commercial Solutions Offering Pilot Program
Defense Digital Service (now part of Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office)
Defense Experimental Research Testbed (DHS)
Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet
Defense Innovation Board
Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)
Defense Rapid Innovation Fund (RIF)
Defense Technology Experimental Research (DETER) (DHS)
DEFENSEWERX
Department of Defense Innovation Capability and Modernization Office
Desert Guardian
Desert Spark
DEVX Autonomy (Army)
Digital Transformation Office (Air Force)
DISAWERX
Doolittle Institute (AFRL)
DoWx (DICE) (Defense Innovation Unit Community of Entities)
DreamPort
EAGLEWERX
Emerald Flag
Ender’s Foundry (CDAO)
Enterprise Agents (CDAO)
Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP)
ERDCWERX (Army Engineer Research and Development Center)
eSOF (Engage SOF) (SOCOM)
Experimentation Office (DEVCOM Analysis Center)
Falcon Peak (NORTHCOM CUAS)
FATHOMWERX (Navy)
Future Concepts Center (Army)
FutureG Office
Future Technology Division (DIA)
FUZE Program (Army)
GenAI.mil (CDAO)
Global Information Dominance Experiment (GIDE)
Golden Dome - Direct Reporting Program manager (DRPM)
Ground Vehicle Systems Center
G-TEAD (Global Tactical Edge Acquisition Directorate) (Army)
Hyperspace Challenge
IN3
In-Q-Tel (CIA)
Innovare Advancement Center (AFRL)
Innovation & Modernization (I&M) Office (USDRE)
Innovation Exchange Lab (IXL) (Army)
Innovation Foundry (SOCOM)
Innovation Oasis (CENTCOM)
Integrated Capabilities Directorate (Air Force)
Integrated Fires Rapid Capabilities Office (IFRCO) (Army)
Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate (IWTSD)
Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (now part of Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office)
Joint Counter‑small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO) (now JIATF 401)
Joint Hypersonic Transition Office (JHTO)
Joint Innovation Outpost
Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JFIX)
Joint All-Domain Warfighting Laboratory
Joint Production Accelerator Cell (JPAC) (now the Wartime Production Unit (WPU))
Joint Interagency Field Experimentation Program (Naval Postgraduate School)
Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (Counter-UAS)
Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell (JRAC) (OUSD(A&S))
Kelly Johnson Joint All-Domain Innovation Center (National Guard)
Kessel Run (Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control)
Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity (LAC)
Laboratory for Analytic Sciences
Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS)
Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences
LeoLabs
Maneuver Support and Protection Integration Experiment
Marine Corps Rapid Capabilities Office (MCRCO) (Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory)
Marine Corps Software Factory
Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory Futures Directorate
Marine Innovation Unit (Marine Corps)
Maritime Accelerated Capability Office (MACO)
Maritime Accelerated Response Capability Cell (now part of NAVRCO)
Marne Innovation and Technology Center
Maven (now part of Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office)
Microelectronic Commons
Minerva Research Initiative
Munitions Acceleration Task Force (WPU)
National Advanced Mobility Consortium (DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center)
National Security Innovation Capital (NSIC)
National Security Innovation Network (NSIN)
National Security Technology Accelerator
Naval Air Warfare Rapid Capabilities Office
Naval Center for Space Technology (NRL)
Naval Information Warfighting Development Center
Naval Innovation Center
Naval Warfare Development Center
NavalX/NavalX Tech Bridge Network (now part of Navy Rapid Capabilities Office)
Navy Disruptive Capabilities Office (now part of NAVRCO)
Navy Rapid Capabilities Office (NAVRCO)
Navy SBIR Experimentation Cell
NC3 Tech Accelerator (OSW(R&E))
NetModX
Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) (Army)
Nimble Titan
NIWC Atlantic Rapid Capabilities Office
Northeast Tech Bridge (Naval Underseas Warfare Center)
NSTXL
Office of Acquisition Enablers
Open Arsenal (CDAO)
Open Technology and Agility for Innovation (OTAFI) (AFRL)
Pacific Multi-Domain Training Experimentation Capability Program Office (PMTEC) (INDOPACOM)
Pacific Northwest Tech Bridge (Navy)
Palmetto Tech Bridge (Naval Information Warfare Center)
Pathway for Innovation and Technology (PIT) (Army)
PEO IWS Rapid Capability Office (NAVSEA)
Program Manager Disruptive Futures (AFLCMC)
Project Capstone
Project Convergence (Army JADC2)
Project Grant (CDAO)
Project Overmatch (Navy JADC2)
Q-Station Collaboration facility and Soft Landing Accelerator
Rapid Campaign Analysis and Demonstration Environment
Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER)
Rapid Dragon (Air Force Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation Office)
Rapid Enterprise Solutions Division (AFLCMC)
Rapid Equipping Force
Rapid Experimental Missionized Autonomy (REMA) (DARPA)
Rapid Innovation Fund (Department of the Navy)
Rapid Prototyping and Experimentation Program (RAPx) of Unmanned Systems
Rapid Reaction Branch, Space Systems Command
Rapid Reaction Technology Office (RRTO)
Rapid Integrated Scalable Enterprise (RISE)
Rapid Sustainment Office
Replicator Initiative/Replicator 2 (SOCOM/Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG))
Resilient Global Positioning System (R-GPS)
Robust Artificial Intelligence Test Event (RAITE)
Scaled Directed Energy (SCADE)
Sea Land Air Military Research Initiative (NPS)
SOF Digital Applications
SOFWERX (SOCOM)
Soldier Warrior (SWAR)
SOSSEC
Space Capabilities Office
Space Commercially Augmented Mission Platform (Space CAMP)
Space Force Rapid Capabilities Office (SpRCO)
Space Ventures (SpaceWERX)
Space Test Program (STP)
SpaceWERX/Space Spark (Space Force)
Special Operations Forces - Training and Experimentation Center
Strategic Capabilities Office (DOD) (OUSD(R&E))
Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP)
Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) (AFWERX)
STRIKEWERX (Air Force Global Strike Command)
Swarm Forge (CDAO)
Synchronized Persistent Army Experimentation (SPARX)
System of Systems Integration Technology and Experimentation (SoSITE) (DARPA)
Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) (AFWERX)
T-BRSC
TechLink (ARL)
Technical Experimentation (SOCOM)
Technical Support Operational Analysis (Army)
Technology Operational Experimentation Exercise (TOEE) (Marine Corps)
Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX)
The Catalyst Accelerator (Space Force)
Thunderstorm
Tradewinds (CDAO)
Training and Readiness Accelerator (TReX) Consortium
Vanguard Prospect
Viper Experimentation/Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model – Autonomy Flying
Testbed (VENOM-AFT)
Virtual Transition Marketplace (Navy)
Vulcan Scouting Program (SOCOM)
Warfighter Senior Integration Group
Warfighting Lab Incentive Fund (WLIF)
Wartime Production Unit (previously Joint Production Accelerator Cell)
xTech/xTechSearch (Army)

— Edited by William M. Arkin

New Counterterror Strategy Eyes Tucker Carlson

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:31:13 GMT

Sebastian Gorka

Two right-wing figures — Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — have been named by the White House as possible domestic terrorists, according to the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official.

Sebastian Gorka, himself a former right-wing influencer turned National Security Council principal, has been making his rounds on conservative media, explaining the meaning and purpose behind the President’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy (which I reported on previously).

Between grandiose monologues about his vision of a crusade to save Western civilization from “anti-American” and “anti-Christian” extremism, Gorka let slip that the administration’s war on “domestic terrorism” isn’t just aimed at the left. It targets anyone who isn’t in line with the broader MAGA agenda. While Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7 explicitly singles out the left with its list of so-called terrorism indicators, many of them could describe people on the right as well.

The new Counterterrorism Strategy, Gorka’s brainchild, identifies three groups as priorities for the administration: narco-terrorists, Islamist terrorists, and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists.” Nowhere in the document does it mention right-wing extremists; and while that may have led those on the right to believe they are immune, Gorka’s remarks make clear that they are not.

Asked by Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow if there’s any “right-wing terror” or “right-wing extremism” threat, Gorka replied by pointing to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and streamer Nick Fuentes — both of whom have become vocal critics of the Trump administration — arguing they aren’t actually conservatives anyway. Here’s the exchange:

MARLOW: “ I wanna get your thoughts on any right-wing terror … Do you regard it as a threat at all or anything that's important to be considering right now?”
GORKA: “…I'm not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives. If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I'm not sure that means you're part of the conservative movement. So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they're not conservatives, what's left?”

Gorka’s charge that Carlson lauds Sharia law is, to put it lightly, ridiculous.

Here’s what Carlson actually said:

CARLSON: “But you go to a country like Japan or the Emirates or Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and you see that when people are self-confident, when they’re really pleased with what they’re doing, and they believe their system is the right system — that self-confidence results in a kind of welcoming attitude. So you'll be sitting at dinner in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and you'll say, you know, I just, I'm really kind of pro-Jesus, like I'm a Christian. They’ll be like, ‘That’s so great!’
HOST: And they don’t have the same beliefs?
CARLSON: No, they’re Muslims. It's a country governed by Sharia law! — [laughs] — I mean, and they're like, ‘That's great!’

Is Carlson naive for mistaking his Four Season’s experiences in whatever Gulf monarchy with an egalitarian society? Absolutely. But “lauding Sharia law?” Come on.

I’m an absolutist when it comes to free speech, for the right and the left (and anyone inside or outside that spectrum). Gorka as a government official has no business sticking his nose into whether people define America in the same way he does.

And let’s be real: none of this is actually about extremism. It’s about the fact that Carlson, like Fuentes, recently broke with Trump — bitterly — over the Iran War. That's the real offense. So now they’re being cast as extremist threats. But to avoid alarming conservatives, the administration can't just say that — it has to first strip them of their conservative credentials, redefine them as something foreign-affiliated and dangerous, and then go after them.

That’s how the terrorism two-step works: the Trump administration just asserts that a right-winger isn’t really a right winger and then it can say it doesn’t target right-wingers. This is literally the No True Scotsman fallacy (No Scotsman puts sugar in his tea / But Ian from Glasgow does / Well, no true Scotsman does). That, in a nutshell, is how NSPM-7 can be weaponized against the right without calling it that.

You don’t have to like Carlson or Fuentes (who says things like “I love Hitler” and is easy not to like) in order to see that. Consider, for a moment, the rhetoric that likely fueled Gorka’s freakout.

Carlson has called Trump’s Iran war “the single biggest mistake Trump, or any American president, has made in my lifetime.” He has slammed the strikes as “reprehensible and immoral,” insisting the war “doesn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way” and suggesting it happened “at the behest and then the demand of Israel.”

When Trump ordered strikes on Iran, Fuentes said in a social media post: “NO WAR WITH IRAN. ISRAEL IS DRAGGING US INTO WAR. AMERICA FIRST.”

You can imagine why Fuentes feels so strongly about Israel.

Taken together, that’s the substance Gorka is trying to launder out of the “conservative movement” by redefining Carlson and Fuentes as something else: in Carlson’s case, a Sharia fan.

At this point you might be wondering why none of this has been reported — a question big mouth Gorka answers in an interview with actor-turned-media commentator Dean Caine about the National Counterterrorism Strategy. Gorka beams about how little negative coverage the media have given the Strategy, calling it “delicious.”

Gorka said:

“I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy. 50 articles were written that day about the press call. Only one of them from those putzes at Politico was even slightly negative... We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”

Here Gorka is mostly right — the media really have been asleep at the wheel on this story.

I say “mostly” because I wrote a negative story about the Strategy, which he apparently didn’t notice. Maybe he’ll notice this one.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Why Is Susan Collins Shaking?

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:16:09 GMT

Senator Susan Collins

With a single tweet last week, I forced virtually every major media outlet to finally report on 73-year-old Maine Senator Susan Collins’ visible and worsening tremor.

But they’re still not telling the truth.

After 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of Maine’s U.S. Senate race, I was curious who upstart Graham Platner would be facing. Watching Collins' video announcing her sixth-term bid, I noticed the senior senator visibly shaking despite some clever camera cuts. When I checked the coverage, I was amazed no one had ever reported on her tremor.

So I tweeted the video clip, saying she was vibrating like an electric toothbrush. I’d like to apologize for that. On reflection, she shakes more like a chihuahua in the snow.

My tweet went so viral that within days, Collins was compelled to respond.

Here’s what Collins told a local NBC affiliate she granted an exclusive interview: “What I have is an extremely common condition that is called a benign essential tremor.” The outlet, News Center Maine, used the same language in its headline: “Sen. Susan Collins reveals medical condition: benign essential tremor.”

There’s just one problem. The condition isn’t actually called that. It’s called “Essential Tremor.”

Movement-disorder neurologists dropped the word “benign” from the name over a decade ago — and for good reason. The condition coincides with a 300 percent increased risk of dementia and a 45 percent increased risk of death. For many people the condition is debilitating, with 85 percent of patients seeking treatment reporting “functional disability” in daily life tasks like eating and drinking. Even sleep often becomes difficult. As a result, about 80 percent of patients screen positive for signs of clinical depression — the same rate as found in Parkinson’s cases.

In other words, Collins isn’t being honest; but the local media amplified her framing anyway, too lazy (or cushy) to independently check. And then the New York Times and other national outlets did the same.

Here’s the real story.

In 2011, two prominent neurologists working on the disorder — Elan D. Louis of Columbia (now at UT Southwestern) and Michael S. Okun of the University of Florida — published a paper titled, “It is Time to Remove the ‘Benign’ from the Essential Tremor Label.”

The old picture of essential tremor as a mild, single-symptom nuisance is wrong, they argued. Newer evidence has recast it as a progressive disorder linked to cognitive decline, mood disturbance, gait problems, hearing deficits, and even increased mortality. Calling it benign, they wrote, “is a mischaracterization of the disease course, and could prove misleading.”

Quoting from the paper:

“Over recent years, the older view of ET as a simple, monosymptomatic condition has been challenged, as new data have emerged painting a picture of a progressive disorder associated with several co-morbidities, and possibly even an increased risk of mortality.”

Today, medical institutions use the term “Essential Tremor.”

So how did countless national news outlets end up parroting a retired medical term? Because the local outlet she chose to give the exclusive to didn’t question it. And this wasn’t the first time.

The reporter behind the story, News Center Maine’s Phil Hirschkorn, got another campaign exclusive from Collins in which he somehow forgot to do his homework.

“Sen. Susan Collins says if she wins in November, it’ll be her last term,” another Hirschkorn exclusive from earlier this year reads.

What the reporter neglected to mention anywhere in the story is that Collins made this pledge before. During a televised debate during her first campaign for Senate in 1996, candidate Collins looked into the camera and said:

“I do support term limits and I have pledged that if I’m elected, I will only serve two terms, regardless of whether a term limits law or constitutional amendment passes or not. Twelve years is long enough to be in public service — make a contribution and then come home and let someone else take your place.”

Now Collins is running for her sixth term, after 29 years in office.

In other words, Collins made and violated the exact same promise she’s making now — something Hirschkorn should have at least mentioned in his article (or better yet, pressed her on).

To back up Collins’ “benign” framing, Hirschkorn quoted Dr. Rees Cosgrove, Chief of the Division of Functional Neurosurgery at Mass General Brigham. He said essential tremor is “not at all” incapacitating, that it isn’t associated with “cognitive decline or memory decline,” and — when asked whether it’s a physical condition without a mental component — replied, “Absolutely.”

Cosgrove is a real expert. He performs focused ultrasound treatments that target the part of the brain causing the tremor and destroys it. But in his own publications going back decades, I cannot find a single instance where he calls it “Benign Essential Tremor.” He calls it “Essential Tremor.” Because that’s what it’s called.

On a Mass General Brigham page detailing the procedure, Cosgrove says of patients: “This is the operation that makes grown men cry. They’re so emotional and they can’t believe that their hand, which has been shaking for years, isn’t shaking anymore.”

In a video interview, Cosgrove describes a grown man crying with relief after the treatment.

“One man who had had tremor since university days, and, uh, he was never really able to be fully employed at the level because he was socially so, uh, cognizant and reticent about being in public because he had such severe shaking… as he wrote his name, he started crying because he said, ‘You know, I haven’t been able to do that in 20 years.’”

But not at all incapacitating! What?

Essential Tremor also gets worse with age. Cosgrove’s clinical page lists “at least 70 years old” among the criteria for surgical intervention. Collins is 73. He also lists current medication use as a criterion. Collins has confirmed she takes medication for the condition.

In Collins’ statement to the AP, picked up by the Times and everyone else, she took a swipe at me.

“The tremor is occasionally inconvenient, and sometimes the subject of cruel comments online, but it does not hinder my ability to work,” she said.

You know what I call cruel? A sitting U.S. senator, facing a tough reelection, throwing millions Americans living with Essential Tremor under the bus to control a news cycle. Many of those people cannot work. Some sit in Dr. Cosgrove’s surgical suite and weep when their hands stop shaking for the first time in decades.

But that’s not how decorum works. “Cruel” is what little people get called; for the powerful like Collins who make decisions that result in layoffs, in cuts to public services, and in wars, she’s just being clear-eyed, hard-nosed, unsentimental.

It’s possible that Collins is one of the lucky ones who has a good prognosis. But how could she know for sure? And isn’t it the job of journalism to question and give the voters the opportunity to decide what they make of it? Instead, virtually every major outlet picked up News Center Maine’s “benign” framing — which is to say, they picked up Collins’ framing.

The New York Times’ headline reads, “Susan Collins Says She Has Long Had a Benign Tremor.”

NBC News at least put scare quotes around it: “Sen. Susan Collins reveals ‘benign’ tremor, says it hasn’t affected her job or how she feels.”

The Associated Press wire moved with “benign essential tremor” in the lede, and outlets from Fortune to ABC and even People Magazine ran with it.

All of these headlines are a subtle way of telling the public to stay in its lane, that you’re not authorized or credentialed enough to care about this issue.

Now some of you wince at the language I used to describe Collins’ tremor. Fine. But can you argue with the results? The announcement video had been on YouTube for three months — about as glaring a tableau of the gerontocracy as you could find anywhere — and not one major outlet had touched it. Until I posted the word “toothbrush.”

On the Breaking Points show, conservative commentator Emily Jashinsky noted that questions about Collins’ health had been circulating among Republicans for years before I broke the silence. Years. That’s the kind of logjam the media could break if it just spoke plainly about things.

The Times, hilariously, acknowledges this in its prim and proper way, linking to my post but refusing to quote it. The Times says:

“Her remarks came amid mounting online scrutiny — pushed in particular on the left — of the shakiness that is often detectable when Ms. Collins speaks, and questions about whether it has worsened with time.”

Questions about whether it has worsened with time? Anyone with access to YouTube can pull up Collins from ten years ago and Collins from last month and answer that question in about 30 seconds. The condition is well-documented as progressive. But the Times can’t just say what it plainly sees. In old school journalism, what I call Journalism 1.0, stating the obvious is considered “editorializing.”

Then there’s “pushed in particular on the left.” That little label reduces the scrutiny to partisan sniping. It suggests this is just “left” criticism, a tribal food fight. I’ve been writing about gerontocracy for years, and I’ve been just as blunt about Joe Biden’s decline and plenty of other Democrats. I don’t need to launder that through quotes from operatives or experts. I just say it.

That’s the core problem. The straitjacket of Journalism 1.0 is that reporters are not allowed to describe reality in their own words. They must route everything through someone else’s mouth. So they go hunting for the most “authoritative” voice they can find — which, in this case, turns out to be the politician with the strongest incentive to minimize the story. And so we get “benign.”

Here is how that works in practice:

A senator hands a friendly local outlet her preferred language.

The local outlet prints it.
The networks pick it up from the local.
The wires pick it up from the networks.
The national papers pick it up from the wires.

At no point does anyone in this chain stop and ask whether the word is medically accurate, or even consistent with the facts in front of them.

That is Journalism 1.0 in a nutshell. And clearly, newsrooms have learned nothing from the Biden episode.

The stakes here are not small. Collins is in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country. She’s up against 41‑year‑old Democrat Graham Platner, a combat veteran who has been open about his own health — chronic pain, PTSD, a 100 percent VA disability rating — while continuing to work as an oyster farmer. Collins, by contrast, said nothing about a condition she now admits she has had for her entire 29 years in the Senate.

That is an actual story. And the only reason it is being told at all is because some punk outside the DC cocktail circuit had the audacity to type the word “toothbrush.”

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist “Extremists"

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:55:27 GMT

Sebastian Gorka

The White House declared war on the American people today, labeling its political opponents as terrorists, including “Left-wing extremists.” The new label also claims that there are “deepening alliances” between “the far-left and Islamists” — or pro-Palestinian protesters.

The language is contained in the White House’s newly released National Counterterrorism Strategy. It is the first National Strategy to be unveiled since 2021, when the Biden administration issued its document. The Strategy identifies the “left-wing,” “anti-Fascists,” “Anarchists” and “radically pro-transgender” ideologies as threats equivalent to jihadi groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, or narco-traffickers.

The Strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, an eccentric figure I have reported on, who last year hinted at terrorism charges being levied for political opponents of the administration. The document makes clear he got his wish. Gorka called the Strategy “my life’s work,” and apparently waxed so poetic in previous drafts that his superiors told him (by his own account): “Cut it down, Gorka!”

“Currently we face three major types of terror groups,” the Strategy says, listing “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”

Strategy

2.52MB ∙ PDF file

"Counterterrorism" itself is a propaganda term, sanitizing the actual practice: pre-crime, which aims to build cases against people for what they might do, most ominously based on speech or beliefs. (I've written about the Bureau’s pre-crime push at length.) The Strategy doesn't bother hiding it. It promises to "Identify terror actors and plots before they happen" and to use "law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent."

The Strategy also hints at a crackdown on pro-Palestinian groups. In a section laying out “five functional aspects of the current CT environment” beyond the previously named three categories, it warns of “New and deepening alliances between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the ‘Red-Green’ alliance” — a phrase borrowed from conservative discourse to suggest a conspiratorial alignment between the American left and radical Islam.

The “Red-Green alliance” term has been pushed by Israeli think tanks like the Reut Group — which defines the term as “the nexus between radical progressive groups to Islamists organizations” — and picked up by right-wing U.S. news outlets. The framing is designed to recast pro-Palestinian activism as a front for jihadism.

The Strategy proposes employing the same tactics used to map out jihadi networks like al Qaeda against Americans here at home, promising “rapid identification and neutralization” of the supposed threat. This is exactly the technique that Gorka and other top Trump officials like Kash Patel cut their teeth on during the post-9/11 global war on terror — experience that I previously warned they would lean heavily on.

Per the document:

“In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT [counterterrorism] activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) defines the threat as those espousing “anti-American,” “anti-Christian” and “anti-Capitalism” viewpoints. The new National Strategy uniquely identifies “radically pro-transgender ideologies” as terrorists, adding yet another threat group to the federal government’s targeting.

As I reported last year, the FBI in response to Charlie Kirk’s murder was preparing a war on what it considers transgender “extremism,” based on my sources. That report was subject to endless fact-checks asking how I knew this — something I can’t answer without burning my sources — and whether I was spreading panic in the transgender community. The counterterrorism strategy affirms my reporting, explicitly pointing to “the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies” as part of its justification for the new targeting.

The Strategy is, in important respects, Charlie Kirk’s strategy. Within hours of his September 10, 2025 murder at Utah Valley University, White House, Justice, and Homeland Security officials scrambled to draft a sweeping domestic crackdown, as I previously reported. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the killing “a domestic 9/11,” vowing his department would now do to American political networks what it once did to al Qaeda’s in going after their finances.

Charlie Kirk was not just an ally of the new terror hunters. Trump reportedly considered the 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder part of his “extended family,” in his words, with a direct line to the Oval Office that few others enjoyed. The President credited Kirk with delivering young voters in 2024, posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on what would have been his 32nd birthday, and used his February 2026 State of the Union to mourn “my great friend Charlie Kirk,” with Kirk’s widow Erika seated in the chamber as a special guest.

Kirk’s death resulted in the issuance of NSPM-7, on which much of the new counterterrorism Strategy is built.

The new Strategy also leans heavily on grievances about the “weaponization” of counterterrorism powers under prior administrations to justify a sweeping expansion of those same powers. It cites past FBI controversies — surveillance of “conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia,” “parents standing up for their children at school board meetings,” and investigations of “Members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates” — as the rationale for what it calls a previous “radical shift” in U.S. counterterrorism.

In other words: abuses of counterterrorism authorities against the right have now become the grounds for unleashing those same authorities against the left.

The Strategy anticipates this reversal and tries to inoculate against it. “Our counterterrorism powers will not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us,” it insists, before going on to describe a regime that does precisely that — provided the disagreement is categorized as “extremism.”

Except that’s exactly what it does!

The strategy includes a foreword by President Trump that emphasizes its unparalleled focus on the homeland: “my Administration has put an unprecedented focus on dismantling threats to the American homeland in our Hemisphere.”

The global war on terror has come home.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Voters Take Keys Away From Elder Politician

Ken Klippenstein — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:14:19 GMT

Janet Mills (be nice!)

Janet Mills is out.

The 78-year-old Maine Governor suspended her Senate campaign today. The official story — dutifully repeated by Washington-obsessed major media — is that she didn’t have enough money.

The truth is that she didn’t have enough people.

While the major media chews over campaign strategy and timing and what she shoulda woulda coulda done differently, here’s what actually happened: Americans didn’t want her, and they refused to budge. It’s an extraordinary victory of public will.

Mills was handpicked by Senate Leader Chuck Schumer himself. Party leadership saw her as their best shot at toppling Susan Collins — the only Republican senator from a state Kamala Harris won. Voters were endlessly browbeat about how inexperienced her primary opponent was, how this race was existential, how a vote against Mills was a vote for the political abyss.

There was a time when that kind of emotional blackmail worked. Not anymore.

And no, this didn't happen because Mills "did not want to run for Senate," as The New York Times put it. If you take a look at Mills’ announcement today, you can practically hear her grinding her teeth through it:

“While I have the drive and passion, commitment and experience, and above all else — the fight — to continue on, I very simply do not have the one thing that political campaigns unfortunately require today: the financial resources. That is why today I have made the incredibly difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the United States Senate.”

That is not how someone whose heart isn't in it sounds. From the start of her campaign it was clear that she was hellbent on winning. Mills opened with one of the most brutal opposition research salvos I've ever seen one Democrat throw at another — even digging up Reddit posts her opponent had written more than a decade ago and turning them into TV ads. When that didn't work, she tried to defuse the age issue by pledging to serve only one term.

She was absolutely playing to win. She just lost.

Or, put another way, the voters won.

Not that the legacy media noticed. Virtually every major outlet ran with Mills' own "I ran out of funds" line — a verbal sleight of hand that makes it sound like a budgeting problem, like her campaign manager overdrew her checking account. None of them asked the obvious follow-up: why didn't she have the money? That question doesn't get asked because asking it puts voters at the center of the story instead of Washington donors and consultants. Mills’ opponent, Graham Platner, had money — because people gave it to him. People who wanted him to win.

That's the whole story, and it's the one none of these major media organs are telling. Instead we get “she said she ran out of financial resources.” Consider the lede sentences of the three biggest papers’ stories on her exit:

New York Times: “Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, the Democratic establishment’s choice to run for the Senate seat long held by Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, suspended her campaign on Thursday, saying she no longer had the financial resources to compete against Graham Platner, a progressive political newcomer.”
Washington Post: “Maine Gov. Janet Mills announced Thursday she is dropping out of her race to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the crucial state for Democrats’ hopes of winning Senate control, saying she had run out of money to compete.”
Wall Street Journal: “Maine Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the Democratic Senate primary on Thursday, saying she didn’t have the financial resources to stay in the race after months of trailing behind her progressive opponent Graham Platner in opinion polls.”

This is a beautiful illustration of the problem with news media conventions (what I call Journalism 1.0), which hold that the reporter must quote what the official person said — even if it’s obvious bullshit. And boy does this one reek.

The numbers tell the real story. Platner — an oyster farmer who was a complete unknown until last August — outraised Mills nearly 4 to 1, $4.8 million to $1.5 million. He led her by as much as 27 points in primary polling. He drew crowds to more than 60 town halls in a state with barely a million voters.

Mills didn’t just “run out of money.” The voters rebelled against her and the party machine, and she couldn’t keep up.

But again, to tell that story, the major media would have to put voters on center stage instead of Washington wonkery about cashflow and ad spend. It would also force an uncomfortable question on the people who run the Democratic Party: what does it mean that Schumer's hand-picked recruit — a sitting governor, the first woman elected attorney general in Maine, the first woman elected governor in Maine — couldn't generate any support?

As for Platner, his simple anti-old ways message and affordability patter is clearly what people want right now. The press has spent months pointing out that he has no credentials, no qualifications, believes the wrong things, is anti-party, an “upstart,” a “newcomer” — at a time when rank-and-file voters could not possibly care less.

The candidates the party keeps putting up — are old, scripted, allergic to risk, and fluent only in the dialect of cable news. They are not who voters want. Mills would have been the oldest freshman senator in American history. She would have been 86 at the end of her first term. Think about that. At a moment when even mainstream Democrats are begging for generational change, the party’s solution to flipping a must-win seat was a 78-year-old whose pitch was essentially “I have been around a long time.”

People are fed up with an establishment that doesn’t listen, that tells them everything is under control even as it drives the country into a ditch. So they’re taking the keys away.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: this is the same energy, the same rage, the same loss of faith in institutions driving everything else right now — including the wave of political shootings we keep seeing. I’m not equating them. Voting a geriatric establishment hack out of a primary is a healthy democratic outcome. Shooting a CEO or a politician is not. But they spring from the same well. People do not believe their voices are heard through normal channels. They do not believe the people in charge are competent, honest, or even particularly aware of what life is like outside the bubble they live in.

And the thing is, they’re right.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Cole Allen Hated the Democratic Party, Too

Ken Klippenstein — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:58:29 GMT

Cole Tomas Allen

Extremist. Radicalized. Leftist. Anti-Christian. Democrat.

To read the coverage of Cole Allen, the alleged White House Correspondents' Association dinner gunman, you'd think he was a poster boy for the administration's belief that the country is under siege from a left-wing insurgency (see: NSPM-7). The evidence, as you'll see, says otherwise — but everyone from the White House to major media outlets are sticking to the script regardless.

President Trump declared Allen “radicalized.”

RNC Chairman Joe Gruters blamed a “radicalized left” for the incident, calling it “the inevitable result of a radicalized left that has normalized political violence.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said investigators were probing any connection Allen may have had to left-wing groups or were looking for accomplices and co-conspirators.

Even hyper-liberal MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) “Justice and Intelligence” correspondent Ken Dilanian parrots the administration line, claiming Allen is one of several attackers “on the far left fringes”:

“So it really fits the pattern of what we’ve seen with Luigi Mangione, accused of killing the United Healthcare CEO, or Tyler Robinson, accused of killing Charlie Kirk — of these sorts of people on the far-left fringes who have become radicalized, who are living in a world of unreality, bombarded by conspiracy theories, who decide that they have to take violent action.”

But as I’ve written, Luigi Mangione, Tyler Robinson and now Cole Allen were neither far-left nor on any partisan fringe. Instead, they were united in a sense of frustration with failed institutions defined by inaction — and a determination to embody the opposite through shocking spectacles of action. What nobody in power wants to admit is that the belief that institutions have failed is as mainstream as Taylor Swift, not the fringe radicalism of '70s outfits like the Weather Underground that pundits keep invoking.

Allen, his social media posts reveal, was not singularly focused on Trump. He had plenty of contempt for Democratic leaders too — a contempt for both parties that, far from being fringe, actually puts squarely in the majority of American opinion. By early 2025, the Democratic Party had sunk to historic lows: 27% approval in NBC News polling and 29% at CNN — the lowest in CNN's polling since 1992. A Pew survey found 59% of Democrats disapproved of their own congressional leadership. That’s more than 25 million American voters, according to the latest numbers.

Hating the political establishment may once have made you a member of the radical fringe, but those days are long gone. Strange as it may seem, Allen is, politically speaking, a dime a dozen.

Consider his social media posts.

“If this is the extent to which Democratic leadership is willing to lead, it is time to form an actual third party,” Allen posted on Bluesky on January 21, 2025.

It was one of numerous other similar posts in which Allen called for an alternative to the Democrat and Republican parties.

“At this point might be faster to replace it with a new party … call it the ‘Do Something’ party, idk,” he said in another post, one of countless hints at his frustration with political inaction.

“If this is the level of analysis coming out of the leaders of the dem party!!…might need an entirely new party tbh,” he said in another post.

“I swear the democrat party does not comprehend the concept of priorities…,” he wrote on February 13.

By March, he was calling for the ouster of the top-ranking Democrat in Congress, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Is there such a thing as a vote of no confidence for Senate minority leader?” he posted on March 13.

The day before, Allen was cracking jokes about Schumer’s uselessness.

“Schumer is acting like an rpg [role playing game] player who hoards every single potion, powerup, and consumable he comes across because ‘maybe I’ll need them later,’” he wrote on March 12.

“Schumer’s assignment was not turned in on time,” he cracked on April 8 — days before the attack.

To call Allen a foot soldier of the Democratic left requires ignoring much of what he posted online. It’s a convenient narrative — it casts political violence as a product of partisan extremism rather than what the polling actually suggests: a broad, bipartisan collapse of faith in American institutions and their leadership.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Assassin Wasn’t on FBI’s Radar, Sources Say

Ken Klippenstein — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:53:10 GMT

Cole Tomas Allen

Cole Allen was never flagged by the FBI’s sprawling domestic counterterrorism apparatus, sources including a senior FBI official tell me. The 31-year-old alleged gunman who attempted to penetrate the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday was, by all appearances, a normal guy — until he wasn’t.

Allen himself was reportedly stunned by what he called the “insane” lack of security at the Washington Hilton — a venue that has hosted the dinner for decades (and was the site of the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981). Video shows that after the guests were seated, the Secret Service agents and DC Metropolitan Police security people were just shooting the shit as Allen ran by.

Now, rumors are already swirling that Allen is some anti-Christian zealot aided by a network of left-wing compatriots. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says the FBI is looking into whether Allen was operating alone. But who was he, exactly? And what does he represent?

The answer, drawn from a copy of his resume I obtained and interviews with people who knew him, is unsettling in its ordinariness.

Cole Allen Resume

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Allen graduated from Caltech in 2017— the Pasadena STEM powerhouse behind 24 Nobel laureates and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. With a Mechanical Engineering degree, he went to work for IJK Controls LLC, a small Southern California engineering firm, where he worked on the kind of precision hardware that keeps cameras and sensors stable on moving platforms — the technology used in drones, satellites, and military targeting systems — as well as software for beaming data between devices using laser beams instead of radio waves.

Before Caltech, he'd interned at a biomedical startup, designing 3D-printed casings for medical devices and building the specialized clamps and fixtures used to attach electrodes during manufacturing.

He also made video games — not modded existing ones, but built them from the ground up. His most notable project, Bohrdom, was entirely his own: the underlying physics system that governed how objects moved and collided, 750 original graphics, and a score he composed himself.

Former classmates say this feat wasn’t uncommon at tech-savvy Caltech, where seniors often build elaborate puzzle-games for underclassmen — a tradition called “Ditch Day Stack.” Allen, by all accounts, threw himself into that endeavor.

“He seemed proud of it,” one former classmate told me.

The Allen his classmates describe was studious, devout, and polite.

“He was pretty prominent at the Caltech Christian Fellowship,” one acquaintance and former classmate told me. “Pretty Christian and mellow.”

“If I didn’t see his face eating carpet, I would’ve never believed it,” he added, referring to the photo of Allen on the ground after police officers finally subdued him.

That detail — his faith — flies in the face of how President Trump has characterized the attack.

“When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians,” Trump told Fox News. “He hates Christians, a hatred.”

A blizzard of unnamed “administration officials” echoed this Trump claim in major media outlets.

But that’s not what the manifesto says. And if anything, it appears that Trump’s portrayal of himself as Jesus Christ (you know, the AI-generated image of a robed Trump healing the sick) might have provoked Allen. Also, an alleged copy of his manifesto reported by the New York Post shows Allen invoking Christian theology to defend the shooting, working through Gospel passages one by one like someone who had spent real time with the Bible.

In a section of the manifesto titled “Rebuttals to objections,” the first rebuttal addresses the Gospel injunction to turn the other cheek — a teaching from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:38-39, where Jesus instructs his followers not to retaliate against personal wrongs done to them. Allen reframes it as inapplicable when others are the ones suffering:

Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.
Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

Then he addresses “Render unto Caesar” — a phrase from the synoptic Gospels (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25) in which Jesus, when asked whether Jews should pay taxes to Rome, replies that one should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. The passage has been cited for centuries to argue for deference to political authority. Allen disputes that framing on constitutional grounds:

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

A third reference to religion appears in a brief thank you to his church:

“Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.”

Allen’s reported Bluesky social media account also contains repeated reference to Christianity, including one from earlier this month in which he identifies “as a Protestant,” and repeated comparisons of Trump to the Antichrist.

On April 13, in response to the Trump-as-Jesus image, Allen replied quoting a verse from Revelations about the antichrist that now reads like a foreshadowing:

“There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.”

Perhaps the sharpest irony comes from a story former classmates shared with me.

Allen was once president of Caltech's Nerf club — a role he apparently took seriously enough to butt heads with the club's own culture. He pushed back against what he saw as the militarization of the toy guns — members modifying them to be more powerful and painting them to look more like real weapons — worked closely with campus security, and by former classmates' accounts, de-escalated conflicts with a deftness that genuinely impressed people.

In other words, the same person who once fought to keep Nerf guns from looking too much like real weapons allegedly drove cross-country with a sawed-off shotgun and handguns (per NBC), intending to kill the president.

“This is a shock,” someone else who knew him said. “He seems extremely smart from the small conversations I’ve had with him.”

So what happened?

From Luigi Mangione to Cole Allen, these shooters aren’t the antisocial loners of media imagination. They’re smart, well-liked, often idealistic. They have no prior criminal record. They take pains to avoid bystander casualties, as Allen reportedly did. But they share one conviction: that the political system has failed completely, and someone has to act.

“I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack,” Allen’s manifesto reads.

Trump’s comments on Allen’s hatred of Christianity, however inaccurate, echoes the language of his national security directive NSPM-7, which labels “anti-Christianity” as an indicator of domestic terrorism. That view will triumph, regardless of the facts, and the FBI and the intelligence agencies will be tasked to find out more about the supposed anti-Christian threat. The law enforcement agencies will request more money for security screening and for surveillance and they will get it.

The only question is if anyone will ask why increasingly normal people feel the political system is so unresponsive to their concerns that they resort to violence.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

U.S. Spies on the Vatican

Ken Klippenstein — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:02:50 GMT

Pope Leo XIV meets with Italy’s intelligence chiefs

When Trump declared Pope Leo “terrible for foreign policy,” the U.S. intelligence community took the president’s remarks as a directive to prioritize spying on the Vatican.

It has for years, sources tell me. The CIA has human spies working inside the Holy See bureaucracy. The NSA and CIA seek to intercept telecommunications, emails, and texts. The FBI investigates crimes committed against and by the Vatican. The State Department closely follows the ins and outs of Papal diplomacy and politics. All of these agencies liaise with the Vatican’s own foreign policy, intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump said in an April 12 social media post. Trump went on to cite several specific foreign policy grievances, including the Pope’s criticism of the Iran War and the abduction of Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro. Trump said:

“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States …”

Tension between the Vatican and the White House is nothing new, but historically it has taken place through surrogates, policy statements, or pointed silence. Trump’s very public swipe against Pope Leo cast the American-born head of the Roman Catholic church as a threat to U.S. interests. It is an unprecedented label.

My first hint of the government’s interest in this subject was a recent job posting by SOS International, a major national security contractor headquartered in Reston, Virginia. It is looking for an Italian speaker to work for an unnamed “U.S. Government Client” to “provide social media monitoring, translation, and current event awareness” on subject matters including “religion.”

It is a pretty innocuous contractor job, and though it does not require a security clearance, it lists as a preferred qualification “experience supporting the Intelligence Community.”

But it got me thinking: Just what does the U.S. do to spy on the Pope and the Vatican? What I found, after some reporting, was a portrait of a longstanding — and quietly extensive — relationship between the U.S. national security apparatus and the Vatican. It involves genuine diplomatic, law enforcement, and even cyber security cooperation, all of which serves as both genuine cooperation and convenient cover for collecting intelligence.

FBI documents I obtained show that the first Trump administration sought to beef up its coordination with Italian intelligence agencies and Vatican officials on things like cyber security, white collar crime, human trafficking, art theft and other issues. One particular project was to help the Vatican actively thwart, cyber intrusions into its networks. The FBI also regularly provides threat intelligence to the Pope during his travels (though it’s unclear whether that cooperation still exists).

The CIA is represented in the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican and the Agency has been penetrating (or attempting to penetrate) the Vatican government and diplomatic corps for years. The NSA intercepts Vatican communications, working independently and through a joint NSA/CIA “Special Collection Service.”

The State Department, meanwhile, maintains a daily Vatican-centric news digest circulated to diplomats worldwide, according to another document I reviewed. The department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research has analysts dedicated to producing classified assessments on Vatican affairs — a function that, given the current climate, is unlikely to be winding down.

Even the U.S. military has a Vatican-specific language code on its books as a distinct linguistic capability. “QLE” designates Ecclesiastical Latin — the Vatican’s preferred liturgical register — as distinct from classical Latin (”LAT”), which is used primarily for historical and legal documents. It’s a small detail, but an illustrative one: the national security state is thorough, and it has been thorough about the Vatican for a long time.

Trump’s broadside against Pope Leo didn’t create this machinery for spying on the Vatican — it just pointed it in a new direction by labeling Pope Leo himself (a U.S. citizen, by the way) as a threat to America. Intelligence collection is rarely a switch that gets flipped; it’s a dial that gets turned up or down depending on where the Washington leadership wants to focus. Though not a part of formal priorities, Trump has made it clear that he wants the skinny (and any dirt) on Leo.

There’s also a geopolitical dimension worth noting. Pope Leo has emerged as one of the few global figures willing to publicly challenge the Trump administration on multiple fronts simultaneously — the Iran conflict, immigration enforcement, Venezuela, even ethics and culture. That makes him not just a religious leader in Washington’s eyes, but a political actor with a global platform and moral authority that rivals many heads of state.

The intelligence community may grumble privately but it ultimately exists to inform the president, not to just collect for its own interests. Nobody wants to be that guy who has to answer some question from Trump (or J.D. Vance) by saying that the U.S. doesn’t have “any visibility on that.”

The Vatican, for its part, is not naive about any of this. The Holy See has its own intelligence apparatus — discreet, ancient in its methods, and highly attuned to the political currents swirling around it.

In a move unusual for a Pope, Leo addressed Italy’s top intelligence officials directly last December, in a speech that landed with considerably more weight than its diplomatic setting implied. He opened by thanking them — expressing gratitude for Italian intelligence’s efforts in securing the Vatican — but then turned to the abuses he’s seen, including blackmail.

“In several countries,” Leo said, “the Church is the victim of intelligence services that act for nefarious purposes, oppressing its freedom.”

He laid out a framework for what legitimate spy work should look like: proportionate to the common good, respectful of private and family life, freedom of conscience, and the right to a fair trial. The activities of intelligence services, he said, “must be governed by laws that are duly promulgated and published, subject to the control and supervision of the judiciary, and their budgets must be subject to public and transparent controls.”

Leo continued: “Strict vigilance is required to ensure that confidential information is not used to intimidate, manipulate, blackmail or discredit politicians, journalists or other civil society actors. All this also applies to the ecclesial sphere.”

What we’re watching, in other words, is not American spying on an unsuspecting institution. It’s two very old hands sizing each other up — one with a global moral platform, the other with a signals intercept capability that blankets the globe.

National security, as I’m fond of pointing out, is everywhere around us. Even in the pews.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Death by A.I.

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:52:32 GMT

U.S. Air Force Air Commando

The U.S. military’s secretive Special Operations Command plans to establish its first-ever center for AI-driven missions like targeted assassinations.

Autonomous warfare is all the rage at the Pentagon, where computers and artificial intelligence process intelligence data, select targets and then transmit kill orders to a waiting robot, or a “loitering” missile or airplane.

The new “Special Operations Forces Autonomous Warfare Center” is referenced in the $1.5 trillion Department of War budget request to Congress this week.

Special Operations Forces refers to commando units like Navy SEAL Team, Army Green Berets, Marine “Raiders” and others who support “unconventional” warfare, and since 9/11, targeted killing. SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force of the Army are two of the most infamous of the secret units, and have been central to capture and decapitation operations like those in Venezuela and Iran.

One can say a lot of things about the rapid and chaotic adoption of artificial intelligence in the American military. But in this context, the term “autonomous warfare” is a euphemism for automated killing. (Autonomous intrinsically means acting independently, governing internally, or operating without external control.)

An unusually frank description of the role AI will play in the future comes from former Joint Special Operations Command chief Gen. Stanley McChrystal (ret.), who compared AI to “infant Hercules,” invoking the Greek god’s own role as a killer even in infancy.

McChrystal says:

“And like the infant Hercules who strangled two snakes sent by Hera to kill him in his crib, AI will grow to be strong — and a part of almost everything we do going forward.”

What McChrystal doesn’t mention is what happened when Hercules grew up. He spent his life carrying out killings on the orders of Eurystheus — a weak, cowardly king who hid in a jar and never had to understand anything. Hercules’s overwhelming power substituted for strategy.

In the most famous of his myths, Hercules fought the Hydra, a monster that grew two heads for every one he cut off. He was strong enough to keep swinging, but sheer power alone only multiplied the problem. He had to change his approach entirely to win. It’s a useful parable for a military that has spent two decades perfecting decapitation strikes only to watch the threats multiply.

Welcome to the era of CombatGPT. The Pentagon has since 2022 used AI in quarterly exercises for “target detection” involving personnel from all six military service branches. The computers pull together the ocean of information pieces that are collected every day — every minute — and extract the most important, according to the AI program, aggregating and geolocating the blips and dots into a potential target.

During the most recent Iran War, Middle East commander Adm. Brad Cooper felt it necessary to give assurances that the use of AI still includes a “human-in-the-loop” to make decisions. “Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot, and when to shoot,” he said. That statement, of course, contradicts the very idea of “autonomous.”

Cooper’s assurance echoes a long line of similar promises. The Air Force said the same thing about drones before the unmanned kill chain was compressed to the point where the “decision” became a rubber stamp. The pattern is consistent: a new capability is introduced with human-in-the-loop safeguards, the speed and scale of operations make those safeguards a bottleneck, and the bottleneck becomes the “Agree to terms” button on your computer most people click without thinking.

(Note that the FY 2027 budget request also zeroes out funding for Pentagon work in civilian harm “mitigation,” eliminating the element that might also be able to “autonomously” warn of direct civilian casualties and damage.)

Screenshot from the Pentagon’s FY27 budget request showing empty space for “civilian harm" mitigation"

The budget document doesn’t say what the Autonomous Warfare Center’s initial budget will be, but it doesn’t need to be large. The infrastructure already exists. Two decades of decapitation strikes have produced the targeting architecture, the intelligence pipelines, the kill chains. What AI does is remove the last friction — the human time spent correlating down to attacking a target.

Much of what the Special Operations Autonomous Warfare Center will be working with is already there. Both in Ukraine and in Iran, the military sees its challenge as dealing with “swarms” of low-cost enemy weapons, from one-way attack drones to relatively rudimentary ballistic missiles.

The Miami-based Southern Command, which is responsible for the shooting part of the drug war, has also established its own autonomous command to automate the tracking and killing of drug shipments where the speedboats and mini-submarines serve as the low-cost targets.

Nobody in Congress has so far asked about the creation of “autonomous” killing commands. The budget line item will likely pass without a hearing, buried in a special operations (and mostly classified) budget that receives less oversight than virtually any other part of the Pentagon. By the time the public learns what the Autonomous Warfare Center actually does, it will have been doing it for years.

McChrystal is right that AI will be “a part of almost everything we do going forward.” What he left out — what the myth he invoked actually teaches — is that the strongest weapon in the world is only as good as the mind wielding it. Hercules eventually learned that.

Will the Pentagon?

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Exclusive: ICE Glasses

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:32:42 GMT

Federal agent wearing smartglasses

The Department of Homeland Security is developing specialized smart glasses that will allow federal agents on American streets to automatically identify “illegal aliens” from a distance, budget documents reveal.

These new ICE Glasses, building on available glasses that allow video recording and heads-up data display, will be able to pulse vast federal holdings of biometric data — from facial recognition to walking gait — to identify people in real-time.

Per the budget document:

“The project will deliver innovative hardware, such as operational prototypes of smart glasses, to equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field.”

A Department of Homeland Security attorney who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity said of the ICE Glasses project, “It might be portrayed as seeking to identify illegal aliens on the streets, but the reality is that a push in this direction affects all Americans, particularly protestors.” The official also says that the technologies and algorithms behind the smart glasses are as applicable to general government surveillance as they are to the current immigration war.

Commercial smart glasses are already facing major hurdles regarding privacy, ethics, and data security — and ICE Glasses will only deepen those concerns. They presumably will be two-way, not only able to detect, and with the help of AI, match to suspects already in databases, but also to secretly record people to add them to new domestic watchlists.

When Google introduced its own smart glasses in the early 2010s, dubbed “Google Glass,” the public backlash was so fierce that it led to a nickname for users: “glassholes.”

The intelligence community and classified enclaves of the military have been experimenting with smart glasses for years, and such displays have been used to help special operators to find and identify high-level targets that are on various terrorist kill lists.

Such specialized glasses enable the fusing of “identity intelligence (I2)” to include biological, biographical, behavioral, contextual, and reputational attributes “to identify and assess threat individuals and networks, their capabilities and capacity, centers of gravity, objectives, and intent,” according to a leaked document I reviewed.

ICE Glasses will presumably benefit from this research, providing federal agents with real-time awareness of the identities of anyone within sight and who is on one of homeland security’s various watchlists (the existence of which I’ve reported here).

The budget document says that the ICE Glasses should be available by September of 2027.

Biometrics are automated methods of identifying or verifying a person’s identity based on unique physical (or behavioral) characteristics. Fingerprints, facial features, iris patterns, even voice prints are analyzed by technology for border control or access.

Following 9/11, biometrics — and later identity intelligence — became a core tool for identifying and keeping track of terrorists.

From the original terrorist watchlist, the U.S. military developed its own “Biometrically Enabled Watchlist” (BEWL), a repository of identifying information of virtually everyone it came in contact with in the Middle East — detainees, prisoners, suspected terrorists, travelers, contractors, etc. BEWL is the military equivalent of the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), a civilian agency biometric database that tracks international travelers. ABIS grew to hold more than 15 million biometric submissions in its first decade of operation, according to a 2015 report.

In ten years, ABIS more than doubled in size, and according to homeland security data, contains about 75 million biometric records today. The system’s prime contractor, Leidos, says that the system is able to process on the order of 45,000 biometric submissions per day, with surge capacity up to roughly 100,000 during major operations.

During the global war on terror, handheld devices like the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, or HIIDE, became the collection workhorses that collected biometrics and fed ABIS and, eventually, BEWL. HIIDE is a rugged, battery‑powered device about the size of a small camcorder, with built‑in sensors for iris scans, fingerprints, and facial photos.

Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan used HIIDE to enroll people encountered at checkpoints, on patrols, or in raids — capturing their fingerprints, iris images, and faces, tying that data to a name or alias and basic biographical details, and then syncing those records back to the intelligence community. Once a person’s biometrics were in ABIS and analysts decided that they might merit closer tracking, the identity was promoted onto the BEWL, turning a scan on a handheld device into a watchlist “hit” that tells a soldier this is someone the U.S. military is actively looking for.

ICE Glasses eventually will do all of that in a more compact way. The secret recesses of the government already collect what are literally called “non‑cooperative biometrics,” where the data is captured without a subject’s consent. (The Defense Department sometimes prefers the more euphemistic term “non‑obtrusive biometrics” for collection that is silent, standoff at a distance, or otherwise invisible to the person being recorded.)

That’s the world of ubiquitous surveillance that the Department of Homeland Security is looking to reproduce here on American soil.

FBI Director Kash Patel hinted at the enormity of the biometrics effort in a social media post last December saying the Bureau “undertook a project earlier this year to vastly expand our overseas biometrics program,” adding: “We’ve worked with partners across the federal government at @DHSgov @CBP and more … to implement improvements at every level.”

Then in January, Patel announced that the FBI had “doubled intelligence production at our threat Screening Center” — which maintains the domestic terrorism watchlist — pointing to “sharply increased biometric matches…”

The ICE Glasses project is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security’s research and development arm, called the Science & Technology Directorate.

Though Congress has been notified of the project, no members have said anything publicly, including Homeland Security Committee leaders Bennie Thompson, Rand Paul, Andrew Garbarino, and Gary Peters.

When that federal agent near an ICE protest in Maine said, “We have a nice little database,” he wasn’t kidding. The only joke here is Congress.

— Edited by William M. Arkin

You Do Not Hate The IRS Enough

Ken Klippenstein — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:11:47 GMT

The Internal Revenue Service, everyone’s favorite tax collector, is facing deep budget cuts — but don't get too excited. The agency has a bold new plan to audit more of the little people while hiring as few of them as possible.

The agency plans to replace the nearly 30,000 employees it lost to Trump administration cuts with a new army of auditors, one that doesn’t sleep. I’m talking about artificial intelligence, which the IRS has identified as a top priority in its new budget request.

Documents I obtained show that the IRS already has a powerful set of tools to force compliance, from undercover agents to wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance. The collaborates with ICE to monitor the travel of American citizens through. But now, thanks to AI, the IRS’s ultimate goal is for “minimal human contact,” as one document put it.

The centerpiece is Palantir software that allows IRS investigators and auditors to conduct "near real-time data analysis" through a custom tool called the “Selection and Analytic Platform,” or SNAP.

What that means in practice is that millions of middle-income Americans who once fell below the threshold of what scarce human auditors could manage are now within reach. The little guy just became a lot easier to monitor at scale.

The big guy? Not so much.

The budget cuts gutting the IRS's human workforce were largely engineered by Elon Musk and his DOGE crusade. The beneficiaries are obvious: billionaires who use entirely legal means — offshore trusts, shell companies — to pay little or nothing in taxes. These structures are largely impervious to the IRS’s tools, AI or otherwise. Your cash tips and side hustles are not.

Happy Tax Day!

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Luigi-Inspired Arsonist Threatened “Our Way of Life,” Feds Say

Ken Klippenstein — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:25:53 GMT

Fire engulfs the Kimberly-Clark distribution center in Ontario, California

A 29-year-old California man has been arrested for allegedly causing $500 million in damage when he set fire to a Kimberly-Clark warehouse to protest the cost of living and the Iran War.

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the Justice Department’s indictment alleges he said in video posted to Instagram. “[T]hey had it coming … fucking eight hours, six days … stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live … pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off … fucking wars.”

In a press conference, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli went out of his way to stress that the defendant had “compared himself to Luigi Mangione” in a comment to a witness.

No one was injured in the early morning fire, but Justice wants to make a point: Chamel Abdulkarim’s target was the system of capitalism itself.

Arson, and admittedly a serious case (if the government is correct); and politically motivated, given the remarks Abdulkarim made.

But Mangione? The FBI and the national security machine is going to jump on this, affirming for them that a “copycat” terrorist points to a bigger trend lurking in society.

That fact is at the very center of NSPM-7 — national security presidential memorandum 7 — signed by President Trump last September, that identifies “anti-capitalism” as a so-called indicator of domestic terrorism. The directive opens with a section that mentions “the 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive” — i.e. Luigi Mangione — as indicative of a growing threat.

Take a look at what the federal indictment focuses on, alleging Abdulkarim said:

“[S]hould have paid us enough to fucking live.”
“1% is a fucking joke.”
“If you’re not going to pay us enough to fucking live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this shit.”
“Billionaires profiting off of war ...”
[Y]ou know, we may not get paid enough to fucking live, but these bitches dirt cheap”
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the share holders picking up a shift.”
“[T]hey had it coming … fucking eight hours, six days, [unintelligible] stuck paying rent on a bullshit ass apartment that I can’t afford to fucking live … pedophiles out here fucking children, profiting off [unintelligible] fucking wars.”

Federal indictment

898KB ∙ PDF file

US Attorney Essayli goes on to cast the arson attack as a sign of anti-capitalist sentiment, promising to “aggressively” pursue anyone who attacks capitalism — or “our way of life,” as he put it:

“Look, America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism. Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we’re gonna come after aggressively.”

Get used to stuff like this. As I reported in January, a leaked draft copy of the Department of Homeland Security’s upcoming annual Homeland Threat Assessment introduced a new “extremism” threat category: “class-based or economic grievances.”

Screenshot of leaked Homeland Threat Assessment

By contrast, state authorities did not portray the crime as some sort of threat to capitalism. In fact, San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson seemed to not understand it at all.

“Arson, to me, is a real head scratcher; I do not understand that somebody who is suspected of arson does something where they get no value out of it,” Anderson said at the press conference.

They still don’t get it.

While reporting on this, when I tried to figure out what exactly the suspect’s job entailed while working for Kimberly-Clark — the company whose 1.2 million square foot facility he allegedly set on fire — I realized that he didn’t actually work for them, but for a third-party contractor, something called “NFI Industries.”

The dreary name reminds me of reporting on Amazon warehouses and hearing one worker after another bitterly refer to its much-hyped $15 minimum wage as not applying to them because they worked for similar subcontractors. This two-step is also how Amazon can claim it’s not them but rather the contractors responsible for the infamous practice of workers having to pee in bottles to meet their punishing quotas.

NFI has been accused of similar practices and was sued in 2015 by New Jersey port and warehouse truckers who said the company systematically misclassified them as “independent contractors” while exercising full employer‑style control. In 2022, a federal judge ruled in the driver’s favor, ordering NFI to pay them over $5 million in a class action settlement.

The obscene price of gasoline as a result of the Iran war (part of our hallowed “way of life,” which allows oil companies to price gouge even in emergencies) has once again thrust the cost of living into the spotlight. Millions of Americans resonate with Mangione and Abdulkarim.

Isn’t anyone in power curious why that is?

As a friend told me today when I brought up the Kimberly-Clark fire: Who that’s worked a shitty job hasn’t fantasized about burning it all down? (This is literally the plot of the cult classic movie Office Space!)

Democrats and Republican politicians alike mouth “affordability” but do nothing. Civil government is also starved, bled of resources by our national security colossus that devises more and more ways to spy on anyone opposed, or drowns out their voices by flooding the media with security-speak.

There are basically two ways the government can respond to things like the Kimberly-Clark fire: (1) treat them as national security threats to be monitored and preempted forever; or (2) address the underlying grievances causing them.

Sounds like a real “head-scratcher.”

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Pre-Teen Terrorists: FBI’s New Target

Ken Klippenstein — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:11:12 GMT

The FBI has designated an online group, many of its members adolescents or children younger than 13, as an “extremist” threat.

Called “764,” the FBI has labeled the group “Nihilistic Violent Extremists,” a new classification for domestic terrorists created by the Bureau last year, as I first reported.

Publicly, the FBI casts these investigations as a crusade to protect the children from predatory adults. What they rarely mention is that many of the suspects are children themselves. To obscure this ugly reality, law enforcement portrays itself as merely focused on social media and gaming platforms — ones that just so happen to be popular among children, like Roblox.

The focus on child gamers is so great that law enforcement are privately employing Gen Z slang like “clout chasing” and “aura farming” in its intelligence reporting (see below).

Screenshot of Connecticut Intelligence Center bulletin. Credit: Daniel Boguslaw

Connecticut Intelligence Center bulletin

1.43MB ∙ PDF file

Because minors’ identities are not disclosed in court records, we have no idea how many children the FBI is investigating. (The Bureau has not responded to my request for comment at the time of this writing.)

One rare acknowledgement of the presence of children in these groups came from the FBI’s Boston Field Office, which in February issued a statement referring to 764’s “juvenile predators”; another FBI public service announcement described a similar group’s (“The Com”) members as “between 11 and 25 years old.”

Screenshot of FBI PSA

The Com — short for “the community” — is an umbrella term for the decentralized online networks like 764, known for coordinating harassment, extortion, and the coercion of minors into producing violent or sexually explicit content.

Sick stuff, obviously. But with much of it carried out by minors themselves (some originally victimized by the groups before joining them), is this really terrorism?

The FBI thinks so.

The Bureau defines Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs) as those inspired by “a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” This represents a departure from not just past FBI counterterrorism categories, but from the dictionary, which defines terrorism as politically-motivated and nihilists as not believing in anything, politics or otherwise.

Strange as it may seem, this is not some fringe program. The FBI has seen a 300% increase in domestic terrorism investigations, “a large chunk of which are nihilistic violent extremism,” as Director Kash Patel testified to Congress last year.

The FBI also says that all 56 of its field offices are involved in investigating 764 alone, of which it is investigating at least 350 members in the United States. The group was founded in 2021 by then 15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead of Texas.

The reticence of the government to speak openly about all of this is partly constitutional. In the United States, the First Amendment sharply limits the government’s ability to target people based on ideology, association, or demographic characteristics — including age.

Federal counterterrorism law requires a nexus to violence or material support for it; “being a radicalized child” is not a crime. So rather than acknowledging that it is effectively targeting a juvenile population, the FBI routes its investigations through platforms where they congregate. Gaming platforms — Roblox, Minecraft, Discord — have become the main target of government scrutiny. The FBI says it isn’t investigating children; it’s investigating violent criminal networks that happen to recruit on children’s platforms.

The distinction is real obscures the truth: the domestic terrorism apparatus is being trained on pre-teens.

The gulf between how the U.S. government describes its targets became concrete in April 2025, when the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging two 764 leaders — Leonidas Varagiannis, known online as “War,” and Prasan Nepal, known as “Trippy.”

The affidavit listed five co-conspirators identified only by their online aliases. One of them, listed simply as “Slain764,” was named in the document as a key participant in the network. Swedish investigative reporting by SVT subsequently identified Slain764 as a 14-year-old boy from a Stockholm Suburb.

In other words, the FBI was investigating a 14-year-old for terrorism.

U.S. court filing

The U.S. government’s court filing made no mention of his age. To read it, you would have no idea that one of the named co-conspirators in a federal “terrorist” indictment (or how many of the other co-conspirators are as well).

The FBI’s public tallies of NVE investigations — 350 subjects, 56 field offices, a 300% increase in domestic terrorism cases — tell you almost nothing about how many of those subjects are children. The government is simultaneously claiming a massive juvenile victim crisis while running a parallel investigative apparatus targeting minors that it is, by law and by practice, almost entirely shielded from public scrutiny.

But that’s not the case in other countries that have no First Amendment.

The Five Eyes — the intelligence-sharing alliance comprising the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — in 2024 issued a statement titled, “Young people and violent extremism: a call for collective action.”

The statement is possibly the only example in which the U.S. government plainly links terrorism with “minors,” warning even of cases in which the suspect is “not carrying out an attack.” It singles out “seemingly innocuous social media and gaming platforms” like “Discord, Instagram, Roblox and TikTok” as particularly concerning.

Per Five Eyes:

“ … the development of online content and environments has facilitated the entry of minors and young people into violent extremist pathways. This is concerning, as minors are particularly vulnerable to online radicalisation. Online environments provide an avenue for first approaches to minors, including through seemingly innocuous social media and gaming platforms, such as Discord, Instagram, Roblox and TikTok.”

Five Eyes statement

1.71MB ∙ PDF file

The Five Eyes statement goes on to include several case studies in different member countries.

In the United States, there’s the case of a 14-year-old arrested by local police in Arizona on state terrorism charges. In New Zealand, another case exists where “The individual made racist, misogynistic and anti-authority comments.” And in Canada, “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) received information that a social media user had been promoting involuntary celibate (incel) ideology online.”

That last example gets sad fast.

“Through judicial authorizations and subsequent interviews, the RCMP located the minor who had no documented history of violence and no criminal record,” the Five Eyes statement says of the incel case. “The parents stated their son suffered from a developmental disorder, but noted no other health concerns.”

The numbers in these other countries are striking. In Australia, the domestic intelligence agency ASIO reported that one in five of its priority counterterrorism cases now involves a minor — and in the most recent annual reporting period, every single disrupted terrorist attack or plot involved a minor or young person. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess put it plainly: “As a parent, the numbers are shocking; as an intelligence officer, the numbers are sobering.”

Since 2020, Australian Federal Police and their partners have investigated around three dozen counter‑terrorism cases involving minors. The youngest subject was just 12 years old.

Europe tells a similar story. Europol’s 2025 terrorism trend report found that of the 449 people arrested for terrorism-related offenses across EU member states in 2024, 133 were between the ages of 12 and 20 — nearly one in three. The youngest was 12, arrested for planning an attack. Belgium’s intelligence service reports that roughly one in three individuals in its recent terrorism cases is a minor. A cross‑national analysis drawing on the 2026 Global Terrorism Index concludes that youth and minors accounted for 42% of all terror‑related investigations in Europe and North America in 2025, a threefold increase since 2021.

Seamus Hughes, a senior research faculty member at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, says that even many federal agents in the U.S. are uneasy with the shift.

“Interviews with FBI agents around the country reveal a recurring theme: They feel they can’t arrest their way out of this problem, and, even if they could, they didn’t join the counterterrorism section of the FBI to lock up confused kids for decades.”

Pre-teen terrorism is what Europe and the commonwealth have embraced; and it’s what the Trump administration has signed onto with its war on Nihilistic Violent Extremism.

What’s next, toddler terrorism?

— Edited by William M. Arkin

Trump's Biggest Iran Fear

Ken Klippenstein — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:33:48 GMT

“A whole civilization will die tonight,” Donald Trump announced today, threatening to rain down hell on Iran.

Don’t let the bravado fool you: he’s scared.

On Monday, the president made a rare show of submission, bowing not to Washington or Wall Street, but to the people.

“Unfortunately, the American people would like to see us come home,” Trump said of the Iran War on Monday, visibly irritated. “If I had my choice, I’d keep the oil; but I also want to make the people of our country happy.”

The Iran war is deeply unpopular with Americans, basically every poll finding a majority opposed since the war began on February 28 — an extraordinary fact that media have largely glossed over. It is virtually unprecedented not to see a spike in popular support when Washington launches a military operation, so much so that political science has a term for it: the “rally around the flag” effect.

In the case of the Iran War, it’s not that the spike in support was small or short-lived. It never happened at all.

I do not pretend to know what the president will decide at 8pm ET, his deadline for Iran. I doubt even he knows. But the unprecedented public skepticism is clearly on the top of his mind. And it’s very likely on the Pentagon’s mind, too. When the commander-in-chief demands “a plan” (as Trump has), the military obliges; but in fraught situations like these, it exercises some discretion in how those plans are briefed, filling it with low percentages and high risks to send a message to the bomber-in-chief that it isn’t the preferred option.

And the polling could not be more clear that this isn’t the preferred option.

“Even in the most controversial wars, like Iraq, when the war initiates, people tend to rally around the flag … this is remarkable that at the very beginning of the war, there’s overwhelming opposition not only from liberals and the left, but … from much of Trump’s base as well,” politics professor Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco says.

CNN’s data guru Harry Enten made this point in greater detail in a segment this week, crunching decades of data about rally around the flag effects across every major U.S. military engagement in the Middle East. The numbers are stark. During the beginning of the Iranian hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter’s net approval jumped 32 points. George H.W. Bush saw a 31 point surge in the first month of the first Gulf War. George W. Bush got 14 points out of the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Trump? One month into the Iran War, he is down four points — making him the only president in the modern era to lose ground after launching a war.

Enton compared it to the one recent precedent he could find: Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, which cost him six points and, as Enton put it, effectively ended his presidency politically. Biden never recovered.

Whether the Iran War is the death of Trump and Trumpism remains to be seen, but the picture looks grim. The war started 12 points underwater in public polling and has since dropped another 10 — and only 29 percent of Americans say it’s worth the cost, compared to 59 percent who said the same about the 2003 Iraq War at a comparable point.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is 30 points net unfavorable, versus Donald Rumsfeld’s plus 48 at the equivalent moment in Iraq — a nearly 80-point gap. Dick Cheney was plus 62 during the Gulf War, a gap of over 90 points.

Trump’s approval on the economy has hit 27 points underwater; on foreign policy, 25 points underwater.

The dumb guy explanation for all of this is — incidentally, the explanation you’ll find in basically all the major media coverage — is that Americans are just feeling the pinch of gas prices. But that doesn’t explain the immediate opposition to the war from day one, before any of the economic effects started to kick in. And I don’t think Larry in Wisconsin is worrying about oil futures and the Strait of Hormuz.

What makes Americans’ quiet skepticism all the more incredible is that it exists despite a tsunami of propaganda they’ve been bombarded with about the war. This week has been dominated by glowing media accounts of the made-for-Hollywood heroics involved in the rescue of the American pilot downed in Iran, the CIA’s role, their escape training, the evasion of IRGC military dogs and hunters, and on and on.

Trump has pushed this personally, trying to desperately associate himself with something, anything popular.

Before the shoot down and the rescue, the American public was saturated with media coverage that mostly highlighted the excellence of our weapons systems, the exquisite intelligence, and how perfectly it’s all being carried out — the surgical strikes, the careful target selection, the assurances that civilian casualties are being minimized, the retired generals nodding along on cable news about the operational brilliance on display.

This is a war of the future, relying overwhelmingly on the acceleration of decision-making fueled by AI with again the message that air power provides minimal U.S. casualties. Check the news coverage on any day though: there is hardly a word about what is actually being bombed and why. It’s all 90 percent destroyed here, ahead of schedule there, practically ignoring the fact that civilization is being strangled in the routine.

This is exactly the kind of ostensibly low-stakes war that the national security system has been perfecting for decades now, not so much because it is manipulating the public on purpose but because it wants to reduce the friction of public (and presidential) opinion and interference, thereby minimizes opposition.

And then there’s the massive social media blitz the Trump administration has run, a spectacle that even a grizzled internet veteran like myself had never seen anything like. The Pentagon and its allies have been posting polished strike footage — bombs finding their targets, infrastructure vaporizing in infrared — with the cadence of a TikTok influencer. It is war as spectacle, war as highlight reel, designed for maximum virality. The administration has essentially been its own embed, cutting out the journalistic middleman entirely and pushing combat footage directly into the feeds of millions of Americans. By any historical standard, the propaganda infrastructure behind this war is without parallel.

And yet it hasn’t moved the needle. At all.

Americans just aren’t buying it anymore, this idea of fully automated luxury warfare. And the president knows it.

Just about the only group that doesn’t know it is the major media, which treats every event as contingent on Washington (always the protagonist in its reality), or what the Europeans or international community say, or the price of oil and the state of the stock market.

I see a civilization here at home that is bigger than any of those things, one that’s gaining the confidence to question the national security state. Trump again sees it, too (though he also sees the roughly 70 percent of his own party who support the war).

Will he listen?