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.”

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"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.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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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.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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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.)

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?

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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.

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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!

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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

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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.”

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.”

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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).

Connecticut Intelligence Center bulletin

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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.”

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.

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

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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?

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“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?

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President Trump's budget request to Congress contains the largest counterterrorism spending increase in years — and buried inside it is a new FBI-led center dedicated to “proactively” hunting Americans the government classifies as so-called domestic terrorists.

The new center and funding boost represent the implementation of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the sweeping federal order I’ve been covering since it was signed last September.

Though public opposition to ICE succeeded at forcing the administration to back down in Minnesota — even firing both Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino — the FBI is doubling down its domestic terrorism obsession.

Now, Trump’s budget request reveals, the FBI runs a dedicated “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center”; with personnel from 10 federal agencies, it is busy “proactively” identifying domestic terrorists motivated by any of the following beliefs:

• “anti-Americanism,”

• “anti-capitalism,”

• “anti-Christianity,”

• “support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government,”

• “extremism on migration,”

• extremism on “race,”

• extremism on “gender,”

• “Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,”

• Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on “religion,” and

• Hostility towards those who hold traditional views on “morality.”

In other words, if your political views are practically anything other than MAGA, you’re on notice, courtesy of the FBI.

The new center combats these supposed threats “by integrating intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis,” the budget request says.

Its creation appears to be inspired by the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — an event that reportedly precipitated the formulation of NSPM-7 in the first place — according to the budget request, which alludes to “heinous assassinations” having “dramatically increased.”

The budget request also singles out social media as some kind of breeding ground for domestic terrorism, saying:

“Domestic terrorists exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications. They use these platforms to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials encouraging radicalization and mobilization to violence.”

Good thing millions of law-abiding Americans don’t use those!

In his testimony to Congress, FBI Director Kash Patel said that he would investigate every single person on the Discord channels used by accused killer Tyler Robinson. But leaked screenshots of those same Discord chats that I obtained, as well as interviews I conducted with its participants, made clear that these chats were about gaming, not politics.

This was far from Patel’s only overreach. Shortly after Kirk’s death, he announced the Bureau was investigating “the possibility of accomplices,” vowing to run down all “theories and questions” about outside involvement — including a possible foreign nexus.

Patel would later conclude that there was no evidence for any of it, but by then, baseless theories about an Israeli government role in Kirk’s death had proliferated across social media. Joe Kent, Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center director until his resignation last month, reportedly tried to investigate these claims while in government, and has since echoed them publicly.

Maybe these guys should’ve taken their own advice about the perils of social media.

It’s hard to overstate how much the FBI is focusing of domestic terrorism under Patel and the Trump administration. Yet the media have barely covered NSPM-7, let alone the FBI shift.

Shortly after Kirk’s death, FBI Director Kash Patel testified to Congress that he was overseeing a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations.

And in the first months of the administration, the FBI replaced the 9/11-inspired Terrorist Screening Center with the “Threat Screening Center.” As I reported at the time, the new mission broadened the scope to include “all national security threats,” which ostensibly was expanded to accommodate increased focus on transnational criminal organizations. Now the threat screening center oversees multiple terrorist watchlists that separate international terrorists, transnational criminals, and purely domestic “threats.”

Then there’s the fact that the FBI’s domestic terrorism watchlist is growing, as I reported last year.

Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.

The public might have won the battle of Minneapolis, but the White House hasn’t given up on its domestic terrorism fixation, even after virtually every official has walked back claims that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.”

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“Our objectives here from the very beginning had nothing to do with the leadership,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Al Jazeera yesterday, denying once again that the Trump administration is seeking a change in governments.

It’s a pretty weird thing to say given that the opening salvo of the now month-long war was to target the leadership in Tehran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and numerous others at the top level.

“Would we be heartbroken if there was a change in leadership?,” Rubio asks. “Absolutely not. If there’s something we could do to facilitate that, would we be interested in participating? Of course.”

So is Rubio's insistence that they're not seeking regime change a lie? Yes and no. Though regime change is not an official objective, there's a covert war running alongside the overt one, and its whole purpose is to usher in regime change, sources tell me.

It’s been something that Israel has been explicitly pursuing since the beginning. But not the Pentagon; not officially, anyway.

Rubio repeated to Al Jazeera the commonly cited four objectives of the war: destroying (1) Iran’s air defenses, (2) its ballistic missile and drone capacity, (3) Iran’s navy, and (4) Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors in the future. The administration is happy to talk about its progress on these objectives, constantly bragging about destroying this target, eliminating that capability.

But there is a sub rosa war, one that is being fought in the shadows, and it is beyond the kinds of special operations that would carry out a raid on targets like Kharg Island, as I reported yesterday. They are even more secret, involving the “black” special ops forces and the CIA and the Israelis.

There are several reasons that the operations are secret: to keep “conventional” war within the bounds of the law and what is indeed conventional, to hide special capabilities (like exploding pagers), to protect Iranian insiders who might be helping but might govern tomorrow, and to ensure that a very difficult to achieve objective not be the standard by which the war is judged.

That there is a “white” side and a “black” side to these operations is never well explained because of secrecy, and the media does a terrible job of clarifying. This has led to all kinds of confusion and speculation of a massive ground invasion that bears little resemblance to the actual war, as I’ve reported.

In contrast to the U.S., Israel has been quite open about attacking the fabric of domestic control in Iran. It has even acknowledged targeting internal security forces at a granular, so-called “hyperlocal” level, right down to police departments and even security checkpoints.

From the first moments of the war, the IDF has been striking Internal Security forces headquarters (ISF or FARAJA), the national police, as well as Basij headquarters, the paramilitary militia of the regime used to suppress protests and enforce social control. On March 4, for example, IDF spokesperson Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said that beyond military targets, “we also struck the regime’s repression mechanisms. These include the Basij, the Internal Security Forces, and the notorious intelligence headquarters.”

Since then, the list of security targets includes daily strikes on headquarters in Tehran and the provinces, as well as the IRGC and its intelligence elements, special units, the Tehran Revolutionary Court, Law Enforcement Command, the Basij and other police offices and posts. Headquarters, command centers, units, and supporting infrastructure have all been struck, moving to lower and lower echelons as top-level elements are destroyed.

On March 10, a dedicated protest-suppression command center run by the IRGC was attacked. On March 17, a high-impact strike reportedly on a “makeshift headquarters” in Tehran killed Basij Organization Commander Brigadier General Khalam Reza Soleimani and his deputy, Ghassem Ghoreyshi. Some reports claim that approximately 300 Basij commanders and field officers were eliminated.

Around this time in mid-March, the U.S. military joined the effort, a well connected military official tells me.

“For now,” the Intelligence Community’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment stated on March 18, Iran “retains the ability to … suppress internal threats to the regime’s hold on power.”

The next day, President Trump stated that the Iranian regime was “failing from within” and said his “biggest problem” was having no clear leadership left to negotiate with after the elimination of high-ranking Iranian officials.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that same day that “we are seeing defections at all levels as they’re starting to sense what’s going on with the regime … The regime will probably collapse within itself.”

Those indiscretions weren’t followed up, and the media interpreted their statements as refuting Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony, but in reality, the president just slithered back into safer territory focusing on conventional military targets, declaring on March 20:

“We won. We’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait [of Hormuz]. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.”

On the “white” side, the U.S. was bombing the IRGC (and intelligence) at lower and lower echelons, directly and indirectly supporting the “black” efforts to facilitate a change in regime or foment an uprising. It’s normal for the U.S. and Israel to deconflict their attacks, but what I’m describing goes beyond that. More than just the indirect support (e.g. provision of targeting intelligence) to Israel, there are also occasional direct U.S. attacks on Iran’s internal security forces, including cyber and space attacks.

So what effect is this all having? It’s difficult to know what’s happening on the ground inside Iran with any confidence, especially with the Internet being suppressed. The regime has also long suppressed independent media, and the current conflict has only tightened that information environment — dissidents and journalists don’t speak publicly in a police state, particularly one in the middle of a war. But there are indicators.

One of the more striking ones emerged this week: Iran’s IRGC announced a recruitment campaign for civilian volunteers called “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” setting the minimum age to 12, as Human Rights Watch has observed. In other words, Iran’s premier ideological military force is apparently desperate enough to recruit children to help staff the exact kind of checkpoints and security posts that have been systematically targeted in the strike campaign described above.

And on Monday, a top IRGC commander in charge of internal security of the capital, Brig. Gen. Hassan Hassanzadeh, was reportedly killed. (The claim comes from an Iranian opposition outlet, so treat it with a grain of salt; but Iranian authorities have not disputed it, and these are exactly the sort of people Israel and the U.S. are targeting.)

As Rubio says, overthrow, regime change, change of government, revolution is not the official purpose of Operation Epic Fury. That tracks with what military officials have described to me: the CIA working with whomever it can find that might provide intelligence and support covert operations, the U.S. sharing intelligence and targeting data with Israel, and the supporting U.S. bombing that weakens the IRGC’s control over the country. The strikes on internal security forces, a campaign of Starlink smuggling — these are consistent with creating conditions for internal change without formally owning that as a goal.

(The Trump administration has reportedly smuggled thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran ever since its brutal crackdown on protests last year to facilitate internal and external communications. Iran is apparently worried about this, with state media organs announcing periodic arrests and seizures of the Starlink devices.)

All of this is echoes Donald Trump’s call, on the first day of the war, for the people of Iran to “take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Trump, having launched his first presidential campaign bitterly critical of the Bush administration’s regime change wars, has found a version he can live with, which is no stated goal. (Note that in Desert Storm in 1991, the official position of the first Bush administration was that it was not pursuing regime change against Saddam Hussein even as bombing and other operations were undertaken to find the silver bullet that might achieve that very goal.)

All eyes might have shifted to the Strait of Hormuz and escalation threats, and a supposedly looming large-scale ground “war,” but amidst it all, the bombing continues. An increasing thrust is attacking the apparatus of state control, sources have made very clear to me.

Will it work? As Rubio would say, what “it”?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Most Americans are bracing for a massive ground invasion of Iran, one that military sources tell me will not happen. That’s because there’s another plan entirely.

What’s in store is a “raid,” all of these sources agree.

Of course, it all depends on what Donald Trump orders, and sources say they don’t know what that might be on any given day. So they offer the White House different alternatives, highlighting the cost for operations that they don’t want to undertake and focusing on the epic, derring-do nature of those that they would prefer.

Planning for small raids onto Iranian soil has taken over as the favored outcome, I’m told, operations that would be carried out by commandos rather than conventional soldiers.

Those missions include taking Kharg Island as leverage to use it as a bargaining chip since it dominates Iranian oil and gas exports, or a similar island raid in the Strait of Hormuz to help open up shipping, or, most spooky and Maduro-like, a “black” operation to seize Iran’s nuclear materials.

And what do the American people think? Millions are afraid of what won’t happen and largely unaware of what could. This is reflected in a recent poll by Reuters/Ipsos finding 65 percent of Americans believe Trump will order troops into a large-scale ground war in Iran, though only seven percent support such a scenario.

Seven percent! In other words, Americans want a ground war like they want to give a hug to Congress (which enjoys a slightly higher approval of 10 percent, per Gallup).

Tucked away in the Reuters poll is another question that no other pollster seems to be asking": whether Americans “support deploying a small number of special forces for targeted operations?”

The results? Some 34 percent of Americans say yes — including 63 percent of Republicans. That is roughly in line with American opinion on the Iran war in general, which clearly hasn’t deterred the White House so far.

In other words, though a full-scale ground invasion is not politically viable, a special operations raid is.

A full-scale ground invasion isn’t even logistically feasible (at least for now). The U.S. troop presence in the Middle East has increased just 20 percent since the beginning of mobilization two months ago, The New York Times reported Sunday. And most o of those people are not “boots on the ground” types of forces, but are augmenting operations, logistics, maintenance, air defenses, etc.

When the Marines aboard the USS Tripoli group arrive and the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division are deployed and ready, there will be some 5,000 troops at the “ready,” but even here, we’re talking about some 2,500 actual “boots,” fighters with guns.

That’s a significant number of course, but it is hardly the numbers you’d need for an Iraq War-style invasion or occupation. In 2003, for context, 466,985 U.S. personnel were deployed for the Iraq operation using the same count that includes air, ground, and naval forces across the region. Today, there are some 50,000 personnel in the region, roughly 10,000 of which are part of the increased ships and aircraft, etc.

What none of this fiddling includes are the number of special operations forces which are not officially disclosed. This includes special operators from Army special forces groups, Army Rangers, Army aviation from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Navy SEALs and “special warfare” personnel, Air Force “special tactics” fighters, Marine commandos, the Joint Special Operations Command that spearheaded the Maduro operation, and supporting intelligence, transport, communications, as well as CIA paramilitaries, clandestine intelligence collectors and others.

These are exactly the kinds of forces that would carry out the various limited raids.

When I reported last week on the unlikeliness of a conventional ground invasion, it created a flurry in major media which had been starved of any actual reporting on the ins and outs of actual deployments and readiness.

This weekend, CNN broadcast a segment about our story, with anchor Michael Smerconish practically tugging at his collar in discomfort over having to cite me in the absence of someone more mainstream.

“I read something online from a guy who writes provocatively, admittedly, his name is Ken Klipperstein [sic],” Smerconish said, putting to his guest, retired Admiral James Stavridis, my point that a major ground invasion of Iran was simply not in the cards at this time.

A clearly flustered Stavridis, who like other cable news retired military brass was making coin off hyping the war, replied: “It’s not inevitable, obviously,” adding: “inevitable, no; possible, yes.”

That’s what four stars and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year buys you: ‘Well, this could technically happen.’ Admiral, it’s technically possible that an asteroid wipes us all out, or the sun doesn’t rise. Yet you still bother to get out of bed and show up for these cable hits because you know there’s a difference between possible and probable.

What we should focus on is the probable that is the raid(s). Like with the raid that deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January, or the killing of the Ayatollah, or even the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in 2011, we will likely just wake up and find out it happened after all. In these types of operations, the government has developed a remarkable capacity to evade public scrutiny and make them feel inevitable, like the weather.

Partly that is done through “messaging” and disinformation which encourages the media and even the experts to look in one direction, in this case, a “boots on the ground” invasion. The confusion is stoked by messaging like the letter (embedded below) written by Lt. Gen. Leonard F. Anderson IV, head of the Marine Corps Reserve, which blithely says that “a mass mobilization could become reality.”

With millions of Americans already nervous about a ground war and even a possible draft, one wonders what Gen. Anderson knows that we don’t. I asked and the answer I get from reliable sources is: nothing. There are no preparations for any kind of mobilization and there is not any thought of some draft.

So, see how it works? Boots on the ground, a months-long ground war that smells like Iraq (or even Vietnam for the seniors), a mass mobilization, a draft, such stories fill the media and social media and in the end when the special operators come to the rescue, people are not only relieved but they “support” such an operation.

Support, of course, when it’s all over, if it’s successful. The cycle of disinformation and secrecy ensures that your only job is to discuss what happened after-the-fact, not whether it should have happened at all.

It’s a style of warfare perfected for decades that limits public involvement and consent because a combination of remote air and drone warfare and the favored clandestine special operators make the war machine impervious to true debate. As the deliberations continue regarding the mythical ground war, or as Donald Trump continues to babble about destroying this or that, the bombing continues. The Pentagon is saying practically nothing about what is being bombed or how much, or what the assessed impact is, and certainly what it is saying is so exaggerated and fact-free that it’s hard to determine what the true effect is.

Meanwhile the media has nothing much to say. Organizations with dozens of reporters on the case focus on every Trump utterance while the actual war “on the ground” is referred to in passing. Retired cable news generals and admirals with conflicts of interest that would make the Wolf of Wall Street blush have nothing to say either.

Bolstered by the “success” of the Maduro raid, Trump will inevitably fall in love with the next seductive briefing involving some slickly produced video that shows jumping and rappelling and shooting all coming together in a cinematic ending.

The only question is if the American public approve of these operations — assuming the media bothers to report on them.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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There’s a joke among cybersecurity geeks that they changed their password to “incorrect” so whenever they forget it, the computer reminds them: “Your password is incorrect.” Evidently FBI Director Kash Patel did something similar because the Iranians managed to hack his personal email.

Patel, who is fond of jogging and other workout routines with new Bureau employees to demonstrate discipline, should exercise some when it comes to computers. The FBI more than any agency knows that they are a target of these hacks. Today, Iranian actors, perhaps even Iranian intelligence itself masquerading as the Handala Hack Team, released a slew of emails and photos that it says were hacked from the top lawman in America’s email.

The FBI has confirmed that Patel’s email had been targeted, with spokesman Ben Williamson saying in a statement: “We have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity.”

Can a pooh-bah of national security, the very Cardinal of all things cybersecurity, be so stupid? Looks like it!

The FBI loves to lecture people, from teachers and parents to corporations and government workers, about the virtues of cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity hygiene — those annoying (and largely pointless) training sessions your employer gives you, for example — is apparently only for the little people.

Something always bugged me about “See something, say something,” the post-9/11 government urging of the public to pay attention to and report suspicious activities. It’s not just the creepiness of deputizing everyone into the national security state and whipping up a vibe of paranoia. It’s the shamelessness of a multibillion-dollar agency telling us to do its job for them for free. A job they don’t even do themselves, judging from the Patel hack.

Speaking of not doing their jobs, the news media (or at least Reuters) seems to have gotten the leak, and there was a link to the documents, but it has since been taken down. So much for digging into Patel’s life and views to see if there’s anything newsworthy.

Below are the materials I could find.

Oh, and the FBI has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Handala hackers. Guess we’re all paying for the FBI’s fuckup.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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If you watch or read the media, you would think that a “ground invasion” of Iran is “imminent” — either to land on Kharg Island, a five-mile speck that processes 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, or to take some coastal strip adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz.

It is not imminent and not even inevitable.

Military sources tell me that for weeks, the Pentagon has exaggerated the readiness and potency of the Marines, setting in motion a media frenzy that is part stupidity, part disinformation to spook Tehran, and part manipulation to please Donald Trump.

“We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island [Kharg],” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News Sunday. “We did Iwo Jima. We can do this.”

Sounds scary, right? Here’s the reality.

On March 13, headlines blared that the “three-ship” USS Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group, carrying the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was ordered from Japan to the Middle East. Over the next week, news outlets across the globe literally tracked the supposed 2,200 Marines making their way moving west through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean.

In actuality, one of the three ships, the USS San Diego, never left Japan and is still there. And the other two ships, carrying just 1,500 fighters, are sitting at Diego Garcia, roughly 4,260 kilometers from Iran’s coastline.

And that second Marine Expeditionary Unit? Contrary to some reporting that said that the USS Boxer Group left Hawaii on March 19, it departed San Diego. It will have to cover approximately 22,200 kilometers to reach the region and wouldn’t be able to arrive until mid-April at the earliest. Navy sources in San Diego say it is still unclear to the unit itself whether it is headed for the Gulf or just moving to the Pacific to cover the departing Tripoli group.

Not exactly imminent!

And yet here’s NPR, implying an ominous military buildup:

“Between 2,000 and 3,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division have received written orders to deploy to the Middle East … The deployment, combined with two Marine Expeditionary Units already moving toward the Persian Gulf, could bring 6,000 to 8,000 U.S. ground troops into close proximity to Iran.”

CBS went even further, linking the 82nd Airborne explicitly to the “Iran war.”

The 82nd is just a light infantry battalion. The idea that we’re going to parachute the 82nd for a ground invasion is absurd. We didn’t even do that at the height of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when a good part of the entire U.S. Army was poised to strike Saddam. (And the 82nd made a near-identical movement in January 2020 after the assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.)

The 82nd has a quick reaction brigade to serve exactly as a “ready unit” to quickly deploy anywhere in the world, but CENTCOM sources tell me that with the majority of the brigade is in training in Louisiana and the battalion ‘on its way’ is going to perform a force protection role in the interim, waiting for you know who to decide to do something stupid.

Then there’s the “increase” in U.S. forces constantly being referred to, as if ground troops are building up in the Gulf or more and more aircraft are constantly flowing. But the truth is that almost all of what has augmented the forward deployed forces are maintenance, ordnance, and logistics to sustain a bombing campaign that started as a quick strike and is now extended to a weeks-long campaign for who knows how long.

That augmentation, if you believe the news media, includes a “Third Aircraft Carrier” on its way. “Third US aircraft carrier heads to region as Trump signals long war with Iran and demand for surrender,” YNet news reports.

There is a third carrier that is potentially ready, the USS George H.W. Bush, which could go to the Gulf, especially to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln, which is well overdue for rotation, but it is sitting in Virginia, with a liberal leave policy over Easter Week.

And even a second carrier? The USS Gerald Ford — the carrier that’s been bombing Iran from the Mediterranean Sea, has been in port at Souda Bay on Crete in Greece this week, not for combat operations but because it suffered a significant non-combat fire that originated in the ship’s laundry spaces. The blaze rendered more than 100 berthing spaces unusable and displaced several hundred sailors. The Ford isn’t projecting power toward Iran; it’s getting its laundry room repaired.

If you squint, an invasion seems inevitable. But look closer at the actual state of each force being cited, and a very different picture emerges. How is it possible, for instance, that every news organization from the New York Times on down, can report three ships leaving Japan with the Tripoli group when there were only two? Secrecy. Sloppiness. Sops.

With Trump in charge, one never knows. But even if there were a ground operation against Kharg Island, it would most likely involve Army Rangers and special operations forces, Green Berets and Navy SEALs — not some conventional ground assault à la Normandy. The idea of the U.S. Marines storming the beaches while the 82nd Airborne drops on parachutes from above is a cable news fever dream.

This frenzy echoes the panic after Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was arrested in January, when breathless coverage of military movements convinced many that a conventional U.S. intervention was hours away. It wasn’t.

The panic has even reached active-duty service members, several of whom have contacted me worried they were heading into ground combat.

It also reminds me of another media freakout Iran’s mining of the strait of Hormuz, giving the impression that Tehran had mined the entire passage. It later became clear that Iran either hadn’t mined anything at all or had only planted a few as a signal.

Which is what all of this is about, signaling to Iran. From the beginning of the bombing, signaling that the U.S. is serious this time, that the enemy will be given no quarter, etc. Then came the Marine and then the 82nd Airborne, and a third aircraft carrier, and threats of hell and damnation coming from the mouths of Trump and Hegseth.

It’s the White House’s prerogative to scare the shit out of the Iranian government. But does the media need to do that to the public?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

While ICE agents are temporarily confusing things even more at airports, behind the scenes the Trump administration is paying a posse of local police to carry out its immigration war.

An internal ICE financial ledger I obtained shows how the agency is turning local police departments across the county into a vast, decentralized immigration army. This includes payments if cops sign up to be deputized, reimbursements for transportation, salary supplements for cops who process migrant children, and per-arrest-style incentive payments.

All of this is taking place under an ICE program called 287(g), part of a 1996 law that granted the Attorney General (and later the Secretary of Homeland Security) the authority to enter into written agreements with state and local governments on immigration. The first agreement under the law was signed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement after 9/11; as of last year, the number of agreements has swelled past 1,000.

Today, the program employs a “task force model” under which local police are deputized as ICE agents with the authority to carry out federal immigration law. So despite the broad public backlash against ICE, the agency has a way to carry out its mission without drawing attention to itself.

An internal ICE diagram I obtained shows that local officers only become eligible for stipends and salary reimbursements after making their first arrest. The document labels that first arrest as the moment a participant becomes “OPERATIONAL.”

The ledger lists over 400 police departments where ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations is currently negotiating new or expanded cooperation agreements with local police departments, including the amount of money currently allocated to buy their cooperation.

The largest payouts are to Florida law enforcement. In addition to earlier awards, ICE has set aside an extra $89 million in incentive funding for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles’ Division of Highway Patrol, which already has 1,803 “task force officers” credentialed under the program. Then there’s roughly $5 million for the 719 task force officers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’, and nearly $4 million for the 503 task force officers of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

ICE 287(g) payouts

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In addition to Florida, other red states (and they are mostly red states) are taking ICE’s money to become bounty hunters to arrest supposed immigration law violators. Arkansas State Police is receiving a base award of $4,225,025 covering 550 task force officers, with an estimated $8,250,000 more in incentive funding to come. Oklahoma’s Department of Public Safety is getting a $5,380,025 base award covering 704 officers, a $1,650,000 salary modification on top of that, and a staggering $38,220,000 TBD line item still pending. Louisiana State Police is receiving a base award of $880,025 for 104 officers, plus an additional $45,000 salary modification.

The money flows well beyond large state agencies, to small and obscure agencies most people (including myself) have never heard of. The Point Comfort Police Department in Texas — a town of fewer than 700 people — has a base agreement of $167,525 to supply nine task force officers, plus an additional $5,000 salary modification. The Key Colony Beach Police Department in Florida is getting $119,000 for a single officer once you add its $107,500 base award to an $11,500 salary supplement. The Coward Police Department in South Carolina, also serving a town of roughly 700, has a base award of $107,520 for one officer, with another $15,000 modification layered on top.

Then there are the departments whose payouts have exploded between their initial agreements with the federal government and the later Trump modifications in 2025 and 2026. Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina started with a base award of $542,525; now it has a pending modification that tacks on nearly $3 million more in incentive payments. Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Florida received $385,015 upfront, and is now slated to receive an additional $2,835,000 in a later modification. Most jarring is Bradley County Constable District 7 in Tennessee: a single officer received a base award of $107,525, followed by a $11,500 salary bump — and now a further modification appears to add $1,820,550 in new funding for that one cop.

An ICE source provided me with a screenshot of some of the disbursement categories, which included salaries and benefits for task force officers “conducting enforcement activities” and incentive payments for those “conducting immigration enforcement activities related to the locations of UACs [Unaccompanied Alien Child].”

The ICE source told me that the program had grown so large that simply administering it is taking up a significant amount of the agency’s time.

Absent from the list of bounty payments to states and localities are new payments to California, New Mexico, Illinois, Vermont, and Massachusetts as well as other “blue” states. The reason? The money is being doled out to cooperative pro-Trump states and departments, affirming that these are political payoffs and hardly a pure national program.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

The Pentagon has quietly dictated to spy satellite companies what to say about the Iran war, exercising censorship over what the American public is allowed to know.

Military sources tell me that the level of secrecy surrounding the specifics of the Iran war is unprecedented, with barely any data being released about the level of bombing, the targets being attacked, or the assessed effects. Now the Trump administration is trying to further control what private companies say in a behind-the-scenes effort not been previously reported.

As the American and Israeli bombing of Iran commenced on February 28, the military promptly issued guidance to satellite operators of what “language and terms to avoid” when describing damage caused by Iran to American bases in the Middle East, according to a copy of the guidance leaked to me.

“Avoid language that implies battle damage assessment (BDA) or operational conclusions,” one slide produced by U.S. Space Force says. It goes on to warn against using phrases like “Target destroyed,” “Target eliminated,” and “Structure rendered inoperable.”

The guidance includes the following examples of what to say and what not to say.

Incorrect Example: “Strike successfully destroyed the facility.”

Correct Example: “Imagery shows the structure largely collapsed with debris covering the building footprint.”

About 100 American companies are licensed by the U.S. government to operate their own reconnaissance satellites, a $6-7 billion a year industry that serves military and commercial customers with everything from methane detection to bomb damage assessments. Most of the revenue of these companies comes from the military services and the federal government. The “big four” — Maxar Intelligence, Planet Labs, BlackSky Technology, and Spire Global — operate some 350 imaging and interception satellites.

While the Pentagon “guidance” to the commercial companies is framed as an advisory, the companies comply because their contracting relationships with the government make them afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. As a result, private companies are increasingly becoming a controlled and auxiliary Little Brother to the U.S. intelligence machine, a trend I reported on last year.

Space Force has issued the guidance I obtained to virtually all commercial satellite companies in the form of written requests, sources say. This includes not just companies in the classified space but even those that work on the collection and dissemination of public or “open source” materials that inform the news media, academia, think tanks, and other groups.

“While there’s a case to be made that they [the companies] should fight it, almost everyone makes the vast majority of their revenue from government contracts in this industry and after Anthropic, nobody is interested in putting up a fight,” a source familiar with the guidance told me. “I think it’s also another layer of trying to make things [about the war] seem less bad than they are.”

Since February, Anthropic has refused to allow its AI model, Claude, to be used for certain missions involving mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Pentagon in response has threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company’s cooperation.

Pentagon pressure has already yielded results.

Planet Labs, one of the largest commercial satellite imaging companies in the world, has blocked public access to imagery of the entire Iran war theater by imposing a 96-hour delay on February 28, then extending it to a 14-day blackout on March 10. The company claims the decision was its own, made after consulting military and intelligence experts.

This kind of soft censorship is not unique to the Trump administration, nor is it a partisan phenomenon. When I first reported on the rise of Little Brother as articulated in a little-noticed intelligence community directive on coordinating with “Non-State Entities,” it was Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines who signed it.

The directive ordered spy agencies to “routinize” and “expand” their partnerships with private companies, and even authorized these relationships in cases of greater “risk” to the government due to security or legal concerns.

Whether it is in artificial intelligence, cyber security, unmanned vehicles, and now remote sensing by satellites, corporations have grown so powerful that they are starting to rival nation states in terms of resources. But Little Brother is happy to cooperate with Big Brother.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

Senator Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s next homeland security chief, testified before his colleagues this week and apologized.

He’s sorry about the ham-fisted conduct of the department. He’s sorry about warrantless searches. He’s sorry about the labeling of protesters as terrorists.

In his confirmation hearing, Mullin sounded like a disgraced politician begging for a second chance.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said. It was an obvious reference to the mountain of bad publicity regarding ICE, Border Patrol and other homeland security agencies the past several months.

The media won’t admit it, but the anti-ICE protesters in cities across the country like Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles, won big. And as a result, Mullin had to roll over and show his belly in a humiliating display of submission to the popular will. During his testimony, he couldn’t seem to stop apologizing for the reign of Kristi Noem. Mullin offered up one concession after another, the exact opposite of Noem’s unyielding, my-way-or-the-highway rhetoric.

“Those words probably should have been retracted,” Mullin said about his echoing of Noem’s smearing of Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti as a terrorist immediately after he was killed by federal agents. “I went out there too fast. I was responding immediately without the facts. That’s my fault. That won’t happen as secretary.”

Asked directly if he regrets his statement, he said flatly: “Yes, sir.”

Ask yourself: when have you ever heard the Trump administration apologize like this before? It was an extraordinary act of surrender to the public.

On the practice of warrantless “forcible entries” into homes, Mullin committed to a stricter standard, saying: “A judicial warrant will be used to go into houses and places of businesses unless we’re pursuing someone that enters … that place.”

On Noem’s ignoring her own Inspector General and failing to hand over documents to Congress, Mullin promised to scrap the policy requiring the Secretary to personally approve small grants, calling it “micromanaging” that botched disaster response.

The Trump administration has spent months treating blue-state elected officials — governors, mayors, attorneys general — as enemy combatants. It threatened to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities. It sent federal agents into states whose leaders explicitly said they weren’t welcome.

Mullin apologized about that as well. He promised blue Senators that he’d lower the temperature, saying, “I respect every one of you guys... You were elected by your state and I respect that.”

Mullin decried “the partisan bickering that we have.”

None of this is the language of a government on offense. It is a meaningful departure from how homeland security and ICE has been operating. It is a retreat dressed up as humility. Mullin watched Noem turn DHS into a meme account and get pushed out. And he’s calculating that the only way to survive this job is to stop acting like the agency is at war with the American public.

But the bigger picture is that Noem is gone and Mullin is adopting this new way because public pressure forced it.

Despite all the media coverage of the confirmation hearing, virtually none of it acknowledges that the protagonist here is not Mullin, Noem, Trump, or anyone in Washington. It’s the people.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin

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The American revolution against Donald Trump can claim another victory. The president’s top counterterrorism official has resigned, issuing a blistering condemnation of the Iran War. He did not resign in some scandal. Not under pressure. Not to spend-more-time-with-my-family or whatever BS is usually given.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent said in a powerful letter today. He adds: “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

It’s definitely a bracing statement for say-nothing Washington.

But it’s also another victory in the ongoing American upheaval I’ve been documenting for weeks now. From Mamdani’s election to the Epstein files disclosures to the victory in Minneapolis to the firing of Kristi Noem, the Trump administration is increasingly being beaten back. That’s not the result of anything that the courts have done, and certainly not Congressional action (what action?). It’s the result of the public pressure—people power, first and foremost.

Kent’s letter, for all its patriotic rhetoric, seems a lot like an insider coup against a declining president; and an attempt to capture the leadership of an increasingly unhappy MAGA. Kent is, after all, a politician who has run for Congress twice and seems all but certain to do so again. A cynic might even call this a campaign launch.

For all of his supposed truth-telling in his resignation letter, Kent is hardly anti-war. The letter praises Trump for “killing Qasem Solamani” and for “defeating ISIS,” a naked appeal to the president’s vanity (and to his supporters). Kent is just more a doctrinaire isolationist, the very kind of ideologue that Trump hired when he was in his “I won’t go to war” phase.

He does, however, now echo the same concerns about the Iran war that have been expressed by a majority of Americans since the February 28 airstrikes that killed Iran’s leader.

The majority of Americans oppose the Iran War, as seen in virtually all of the dozen or so available polls. It is striking to behold, not only because there has been no “rally around the flag” effect, as I’ve written, but also because the opposition is so broad based.

So when Kent says this war isn’t serving America, he’s echoing the view of a clear majority of the country. A majority so clear that politicians like Kent want to tap into it. And that’s a good thing.

But there’s a cynicism to his letter and its insistence that the president of the United States is some defenseless lamb being led astray by Israel.

The obvious conclusion here, that President Trump has chosen to ignore the popular will of Americans, is somewhere Kent isn’t willing to go. He instead offers the questionable explanation that the nation of Israel is somehow calling all of the shots. It is a clever ploy for a politician who is clearly looking to gain the support of MAGA without criticizing their standard bearer.

Kent has a tone that speaks directly to Trump and MAGA, assuring them that their blameless leader has been hoodwinked. Israel is to blame, he says, and thus he can argue that the true path of the Trump revolution can be preserved. Just stop the war.

But when the news cycle is done focusing on Kent, the war in Iran will still be there. It will have the same lame salad bar of objectives, and targets will continue to be struck with perfect and obscene precision. Congress will do nothing. Wall Street will focus on their bottom line. Washington will fight about the spelling of some word. But the Pentagon? It will continue, continue with a level of efficiency and preparedness that has come to characterize “war” in the current era, an industrial efficiency that no president can seem to resist.

People who read his letter might be spurred to action against Israel but about the U.S. military they will have nothing much to say because Kent gives them nothing.

The ease with which the military can now, aided by modern technology and AI, rapidly put together a plan of attack, bomb with relative impunity, and destroy lots of “targets” is the lingering problem for the future. Barack Obama was similarly seduced by the ability to kill with drones, and then undertook assassinations from the air driven largely by the seeming “success” and buoyed by the low-risk enterprise.

It is true that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agitated for war, but the Israeli military is operating more and more of one mind with the U.S. military. The two countries have shared a common war plan against Iran since the Biden administration. That level of cooperation has solidified under Trump, driven more by a true affinity and affection for the technologically and operationally sophisticated friend than anything Donald Trump (or Benjamin Netanyahu) has ordered.

A senior intelligence officer tells me that rather than Trump, it is Hegseth, a self-described “warrior,” who is most susceptible to Israeli influence.

“For a Hegseth who only wants the ‘warrior’ answer, Israeli swagger and combat competence is catnip,” the officer says.

The source adds that while Trump loves a winner, and he loves action, it is Hegseth and his “impetuousness” that pushes the relentless destroy-the-target, no-rules. no-quarter style of warfare that has unfolded.

That reality—the ease of warfare I’m describing—is the enduring problem that we will need to address long after Trump is gone and Kent is a Senator, or the next Charlie Kirk or MAGA-darling. (Axios reports that the White House is already prepping for a Tucker Carlson interview of Kent.)

So Kent is right in decrying that Israel’s objectives hold too much sway over what America sees as its interests, but he too easily lets Trump (and the Pentagon) off the hook, portraying them as helpless victims. The buck stop over there.

“You hold the cards,” Kent says to President Trump in closing.

Now turn them over to me, he means.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin