“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
Veteran of the Normandy invasion, Jim Radford sings his own composition in remembrance of his crew mates and the thousands more who died on D-Day.
The Shores of Normandy – Jim Radford (D-Day 70 Years On)
4:44
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Sam Elliott pays tribute to SGT Ray Lambert on the 2019 National Memorial Day Concert
6:50
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2,510 Americans died June 6, 1944 in D-Day Operations.
1:04
Grok. (Emphasis mine.)
Broader Normandy Campaign.
If you’re asking about the entire Battle of Normandy (June–August 1944, not just D-Day), U.S. forces suffered far higher losses. American battle casualties in Normandy and northern France from June 6 to mid-September totaled around 135,000, including roughly 29,000 killed.
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D-DAY: THE ALLIED INVASION OF NORMANDY
The Allied assault in Normandy to begin the Allied liberation of Nazi-occupied Western Europe was code-named Operation Overlord. It required two years of planning, force and logistics build-up, and extensive training by the United States and Great Britain in the British Isles. Overlord was one of the most heavily guarded secrets of the war, and it benefitted from a sophisticated Allied deception effort to fool Nazi leaders of the true Allied objective. In the leadup to the operation, a combined Anglo-American air campaign and liaison with the French Resistance helped set the conditions for the operation and ensured that the Allies would control the skies over the front in Normandy and delay German counterattack forces.
With the build-up complete, Allied forces were poised for the assault at the start of June 1944, but poor weather caused a delay. Finally, on the morning of June 5, 1944, in a meeting with his American and British subordinates, U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, announced, “O.K. We’ll go.” The “departure day” or D-Day for the operation was set for June 6.
General Eisenhower’s decision put into motion an armada of over 7,000 naval vessels, including 4,000 landing craft and 1,200 warships, to cross the English Channel toward Nazi-controlled Normandy, France. That night 822 aircraft, carrying parachutists and towing gliders, deployed the airborne troops of one British and two American divisions over landing zones in Normandy. Intended to be the vanguard of the operation, the landing of those 23,400 airborne troops just after midnight, early on June 6—D-Day, proved a tremendous success, protecting the flanks of the landing forces and facilitating their continued advance.
From the sea, after preliminary naval bombardment and bombing attacks by Allied aircraft, amphibious assault troops began to land on the beaches of Normandy at 6:30 in the morning. American divisions landed at beaches code-named Utah and Omaha, British divisions at Sword and Gold, and the Canadians at Juno. Although caught by surprise, the Germans fought fiercely, but on four of the five beaches, casualties in the assault echelons were less than some Allied leaders had feared. On Omaha Beach, American troops suffered the heaviest casualties and had a difficult fight to break through German defenses on the bluffs and move inland; despite the tough fight, however, over 34,000 Americans came ashore at Omaha alone on June 6.
Whether by parachute, glider, or amphibious assault craft, in all, nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed in Normandy on D-Day. By nightfall on D-Day, Allied assault troops across Normandy had suffered over 10,300 casualties—killed, wounded, and missing— of which approximately 2,400 were on Omaha Beach.
In addition to the massive naval armada, supporting the operation were about 12,000 Allied aircraft. In addition to major forces from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, 12 other Allied nations or contingents were part of the largest and most complex amphibious invasion in history.
Allied assault troops gained a foothold on the Continent of Europe on D-Day and fought to gradually expand their beachhead. By the end of June, the Allies had landed over 850,000 troops, 570,000 tons of supplies, and nearly 150,000 vehicles across the beaches of Normandy. There would be months of hard fighting in Europe before the Nazis finally surrendered in May 1945, but the D-Day invasion gave the Allies the success they needed to initiate the campaigns that would lead to the liberation of Occupied Europe.
10yo granddaughter had no idea what D-day was. Fifth grade, I prolly should not be surprised. She is actually a very bright and inquisitive youngster. Lots of questions. 15yo grandson, rattled off depression, holocaust, WWII, something…
They are both now well aware of D-Day, including why “D” in D Day.
Smacks of another opportunity, with July 4th, in four weeks. 🙂
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Secrets of D-Day: The Great Invasion (Full Episode)
47:22
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The Wounded Cameraman Who Captured D-Day’s Deadliest Moment
24:32
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June 6, 1944, D-Day, Operation Overlord
1:40:18
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Worth repeating…
Image AI. From American Thinker
“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” Arnold Toynbee.
We, can NOT allow America to go the way of Europe and England. Down the…
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More recently…
Never, Ever Forget…What the bastards did to us during Covidiot, the Poisonous Jabs…
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…
In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.
Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
Pass SAVE Act
Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
Trash Filibuster
Trash Blue Slips
Confirm Trump Nominations.
Codify Trump Executive Orders.
Ban Sharia Law.
Progress unlikely, until R-Cons GROWASET.
growASet
Speaking of embracing…THIS.
Alysia Liu. pure Joy!
America IS Back!
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
Prices pulled last evening. Gold $4,555.40. Silver $76.03. Bitcoin $73,500.
America 250 delivered another video.
12:07
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Stuff…
A Pretty Good Analysis of the Recent Oreshnik Use
This is a video from the “Millennium 7 * History Tech” channel. I can’t quite place his accent, so not sure his biases. The “Description” text places him in the UK, but clearly as an immigrant. Not quite Russian, not German, but seems somewhere in the Slavic / Germanic family (I lean toward a non-Russian Slavic language). Perhaps some digging would surface more information. In any case, his analysis seems unbiased. His focus (per the video library) looks to be military history and technology, not politics.
What he finds is that 2 Oreshnik missiles were used, but one was near the front lines so was not noticed by folks focusing on the Kiev area.
Other than that, much of his video is showing the impacts from available recordings, and some speculation about the missile & warhead “bus” construction along with speculation about the likely targets.
As for many other creators, he does a plea to subscribe but then says he doesn’t know why people do not. Well, I can tell you why. You MUST have a EwTube sign-in to subscribe. This signs you up for a load of specific monitoring and history gathering. I prefer to watch anonymously and NOT be tracked, packaged, and have a history to be sold to the highest bidder AND handed over to “authorities” on demand. Privacy, it’s a thing.
But back at the Oreshnik…
I can’t see any way to intercept this. It is approaching at Mach 10 (or so). There is insufficient time to detect it AND get an interceptor launched on the needed trajectory to hit it before the bus has done the job of dumping the impactors. Then, you have 36 objects to hit. That would take 36 perfect ABMs (anti ballistic missiles) or more likely 72+, all capable of hitting a Mach 10 projectile.
The only hope I can see of ever doing that would be with a laser system. But even there, a hard chrome mirror surface would deflect a lot of the energy and it already can take Mach 10 atmospheric heating. Then there is the problem of producing 36 megawatt scale pulses in short order OR having a beam stay focused and coherent through a lot of turbulent atmosphere to high altitude AND stay on a Mach 10 target at distance long enough to disrupt the missile or buss before separation… which still leaves you with a load of passive impactors doing Mach 10 whacking into something in the rough area of their trajectory…
Not going to happen any time soon.
My best guess is that the Russians have about a decade of “nobody can stop it” before the first decent attempts at stopping it show up.
Here’s the video:
But what was it shot AT?
There’s 2 mysteries here. What was at that airbase outside of Kiev? My guesses would be either some kind of hidden command and control facility for the attack that took out the Girls Dormitory in Russia; or perhaps some kind of drone development center (use of airport runway for testing?). I lean toward command & control.
The other use is even more of a mystery. What could it be that was close to the line of contact that needed this energetic perpetrator? Again my best guess: Either some hidden underground “whatever” of importance, OR the impactors have different types and one of them doesn’t dig down deep but dumps energy on impact and is useful against surface troop concentrations.
In any case, mysteries that may unfold over time when “someday” Ukraine lets us see what actual damage was done.
Update & Add-On:
Military Summary Channel does a good job of unbiased reporting of “just the facts” on the battlefield. In this video they cover 2 very important points.
1) Some Russian drones ended up dropping on a Romanian (NATO) city.
was this a Russian FU to NATO for their very active participation in this war? Another channel (Glenn Diesen? or maybe someone else on Neutrality Studies channel? I’ll have to look for it again…) had suggested that Russia might do a trivial “attack” on a NATO site to act as a bit of a slap on the face for their “bad targeting” assistance (subtext of maybe deliberate provocation of Russia…). So was this that deliberate “slap” to measure NATO “attitudes”? To find out if NATO ignores it in fear or starts and “Article Five” process and puts NATO in the war obviously (as opposed to covertly).
Or was this a NATO “GPS” (or Russian alternative) Spoofing to redirect the drones into a False Flag attack? So NATO can get more actively involved…
2) Expect more activity in the ground war. A LOT more Russian advances on more fronts with more troops involved.
It does look like Russia is on the move from North to South all along the line of contact. Prior to this they tended to a “Ripple” offensive style. The active spot would move along the line of contact as then Ukraine would shuttle their few remaining good troops back and forth across the line of contact (wearing out men, equipment and resources) while various Russian groups had a sporadic engagement and then a nice rest & refit.
This looks more like a “hit everywhere and push forward where you find softness” approach. I think it feels like a formal Big Push to just take out what remains of the AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine) along with crippling the government in Kiev… and perhaps with some “Bloody the NATO Puppet Masters in Ukraine too”
My Speculation
IMHO there’s a couple of loose ends here.
First off, the killing of young girls in their dormitory was a BIG mistake. It has royally pissed off the people of Russia. Both Lavrov and Putin are clearly P.O.’d about it and more importantly, they were holding back the army to a sedate pace hoping for a Ukrainian agreement / surrender.
Now, per their own words, Putin & Lavrov are going to do what The People wanted for months now (years?); and that is “Get ‘er done!” by wiping out Ukrainian authority & military. IF NATO decides to get actively involved, just deal with it and whack NATO too since the “proxy” part of this war has become at best a “polite fiction” and at worst a public farce. NATO IS IN THIS WAR and in fact has spent 11 or so years trying to get it going hot with Russia. But Russia out-played them and never gave them the justification. That’s over.
The Russian People and the Russian Government are now ready, willing, and able to end it with NATO.
Why the dorm?
Was it deliberate provocation? Or an error? I heard one report that NATO was picking targets with the aid of some A.I. programs. A question I’d like asked: Did this school have uniforms? IF so, does the A.I. understand the difference between MILITARY uniforms and civilian School Uniforms? Eh?
So either a deliberate FU to Russia to show how much Ukraine can do (not much but piss on their shoe…) OR perhaps a simple mistake by the NATO Target picking masters (or a big FUBAR by their A.I.)
Ukraine Long Range Drone attacks:
The use of longer range drones to harass Moscow is just stupid. There’s isn’t enough payload to do big damage to any one site, and there are not enough drones getting through to damage many sites. So why do it? The self-deception among NATO “Leaders” that this will Piss Off the Russians AND THEN they will dump Putin. That is in error in a very critical way. Unlike EU Nations & UK: P.O’dd Russian Citizens do not then seek peace via surrender or quitting; P.O.’s Russians just push to “go kill the attackers”. They expedite and escalate Putin & Lavrov.
Furthermore, demonstrating that a drone or two can get to Moscow just tells Moscow that MORE of Ukraine needs to be turned into a Buffer Zone between them and NATO. Russia will know from where these drones were launched. Then the planners will draw a line on the map some many kilometers behind it and label that line “Buffer Zone border objective”. Perhaps with a footnote saying “Must assure any land east of here is NEVER in a NATO country where a nuke could reach Moscow on a drone”.
The more attacks done further into Russia and close to Moscow, the more of Ukraine WILL be incorporated into Russia at the end of this NATO / Russia war.
Anyway, here’s the present state of things in far too much detail and with a thick accent; but with good accurate reporting:
Mosques are popping up like a fungus in every city in the U.S. Yet so many Americans are asking why are they stopping traffic to “pray” in the streets. It’s not about prayer, folks. It’s a declaration of war. The invaders are declaring their ownership.
Mosques are popping up like a fungus in every city in the U.S. Yet so many Americans are asking why are they stopping traffic to “pray” in the streets. It’s not about prayer, folks. It’s a declaration of war. The invaders are declaring their ownership. pic.twitter.com/YiAQntYcQW
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…
In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.
Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
Pass SAVE Act
Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
Trash Filibuster333
Trash Blue Slips
Confirm Trump Nominations.
Codify Trump Executive Orders.
Ban Sharia Law.
Above unlikely. R-Cons need to Growacet.
—
Speaking of embracing…THIS.
Alysa Liu…Pure Joy
America Is Back!
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
FWIW. Slow Guy read the below articles, in their entirety.
They are a VERY LONG read. An easy read. Perhaps break the read into parts.
An important read.
To understand, WHY the extended pause.
Iran’s Quiet War: What OSINT Says About Unconventional Warfare Beneath the Surface – Part One
I. Introduction: The War Everyone Can See, and the War Most People Are Missing
Everyone is watching the skies over Iran.
They are watching for missiles, airstrikes, drone launches, air defense failures, nuclear sites, naval movements, and the next public statement from Washington, Jerusalem, Riyadh, or Tehran. They are watching the visible war because visible war is easier to understand. Aircraft take off. Targets are struck. Buildings burn.
Leaders issue warnings. Markets react. Cable news builds maps with arrows on them and calls it analysis.
But the most important fight over Iran’s future may not be happening in the sky.
It may be happening in the seams of the regime.
That is where authoritarian states usually begin to break. Not all at once. Not because one bomb lands in the right place. And certainly not because one speech inspires an entire nation to rise up overnight.
Regimes like Iran survive through layers: fear, surveillance, patronage, ideology, intelligence services, neighborhood informants, loyal security forces, prisons, courts, militias, and the careful belief that resistance is futile. They collapse when those layers begin to separate from one another.
That is the part of the Iran story most people are missing.
The question is not simply whether President Trump, Israel, or the Gulf States are willing to strike Iran again. The better question is whether Iran’s internal resistance is ready to make the next strike matter.
Airpower can destroy infrastructure. It can punish commanders. It can degrade nuclear facilities, missile sites, radar systems, and IRGC nodes.
But airpower alone rarely produces political collapse. For that, the pressure outside the regime has to connect with pressure inside the regime.
That is where unconventional warfare enters the picture.
Unconventional warfare is not just rebels with rifles hiding in the mountains. It is not just sabotage, protests, propaganda, or foreign intelligence support. It is the organized effort to weaken, divide, and eventually break a hostile regime by enabling resistance from within.
Sometimes that resistance is armed. Sometimes it is political. Sometimes it is underground and invisible until the moment it is not. The point is not chaos for the sake of chaos. The point is to turn a regime’s own internal fractures into strategic pressure.
Iran already has fractures.
It has ethnic and sectarian tension in the border regions.
It has a young population that has repeatedly shown it is willing to challenge clerical rule.
It has women who have become symbols of national defiance.
It has labor unrest, economic exhaustion, corruption, currency pressure, and a legitimacy crisis that cannot be solved by another speech from the Supreme Leader.
It has armed resistance in places like Sistan and Baluchestan.
It has Kurdish opposition networks in the northwest.
It has diaspora groups, hackers, activists, and information channels constantly probing for weakness.
But having fractures is not the same as having a revolution.
It is important to understand that. Iran is not yet in a clean, nationwide insurgency; at least not from what we can see overtly. There is no clear shadow government commanding the loyalty of the opposition inside the country. There is no unified national resistance front visibly coordinating armed groups, urban protest networks, labor strikes, and political leadership.
The regime’s security architecture still works. The IRGC, Basij, intelligence services, police, courts, and prisons remain dangerous, loyal enough, and capable of punishing dissent.
So Iran is not stable. But it is also not yet broken.
It sits in the space between fear and rupture. That is the space unconventional warfare lives in. It is the preparation space. The shaping space. The quiet war before the loud one.
The place where underground networks are built, auxiliary support is tested, communications are hardened, confidence targets are struck, opposition factions feel each other out, and outside powers decide whether the internal resistance is strong enough to justify another turn of the wheel.
That may explain the current pause better than the usual political commentary does.
On the surface, the pause looks like diplomacy, restraint, hesitation, or strategic patience. It may be all of those things. But through a UW lens, it also looks like timing. If Trump, Israel, and the Gulf States strike too early, they may damage the Iranian regime without creating the conditions for political change.
If they wait too long, Tehran may use the breathing room to crush underground networks before they mature. But if the timing is right, the next external strike would not just be about destroying targets. It would be about creating space for Iranians already fighting beneath the surface.
That is the real question.
Not whether Iran can be hit.
It can.
The question is whether Iran’s internal resistance is ready to move when it happens.
Author’s Note: This piece is long, but that is because the UW enviornement inside of Iran is complex, fragmented, and clandestine. The intent for this piece is to explain the UW process that I believe is unfolding in Iran currently based off of available Open Source Intelligence. Thank you for your interest in this article; I hope it successfully relays why I believe the US, Israel, and the Gulf States are all in coordination with this current pause.
II. Iran Is Not in Civil War, But It Is Not Stable Either
The first mistake people make when looking at Iran is trying to force it into a category that feels familiar.
They want it to be a revolution, a civil war, a protest movement, a proxy war, a counterterrorism problem, or a nuclear crisis. The truth is that Iran is all of those things in pieces, but none of them completely. That is what makes the situation so dangerous. It does not fit neatly into the boxes policymakers, journalists, and cable news analysts prefer to use.
Iran is not Syria in 2012. It is not Iraq in 2006. It is not Libya before the fall of Qaddafi. There are no large liberated zones inside the country. There is no national insurgent army holding terrain. There is no recognized opposition government administering population centers. There has not been a visible cascade of military defections. Tehran has not lost control of the capital, the major cities, or the core institutions of the state.
All of that information matters.
A regime can be hated and still remain in control. A population can be angry and still be unable to organize. Armed attacks can happen without becoming a national insurgency. Protests can shake a government without toppling it. Iran lives in that uncomfortable middle ground, where the regime is wounded but not collapsing, and the opposition is real but not yet unified.
That middle ground is where serious analysis has to begin.
The Iranian regime still controls the formal instruments of power. The Supreme Leader remains in place. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains the backbone of the system. The Basij still gives the regime reach down into neighborhoods, universities, workplaces, and religious communities. The intelligence services still arrest, intimidate, infiltrate, and disappear people. The courts still convert dissent into prison sentences or death sentences. The state still has the ability to shut down communications, flood the streets with security forces, and punish families for the actions of their sons and daughters.
That is not a broken state.
But it is also not a healthy one.
Healthy regimes do not need that much fear to survive. They do not need to beat schoolgirls, execute protesters, shut down the internet, imprison journalists, and send security forces into the streets every time the population finds its voice.
They do not need to treat hair, music, labor strikes, university campuses, and funerals as national security threats.
Iran’s government still has power, but much of that power is coercive. It can compel obedience. It cannot manufacture legitimacy.
Obedience is what people give when they are afraid. Legitimacy is what people give when they believe the system has a right to rule. Iran still has obedience in many places. It has loyalty in some. But its legitimacy is badly damaged, especially among the young, urban populations, women, ethnic minorities, labor networks, and families who have watched the regime turn ordinary dissent into a security crisis.
This is why Iran should be understood as a hybrid internal conflict environment.
In the southeast, there is an active localized insurgency among Baluch militant networks that have repeatedly targeted security forces and symbols of state authority. In the northwest, Kurdish opposition groups maintain political and militant structures that continue to challenge Tehran, even if they have not developed into a decisive internal front. In the cities, protest networks, student groups, labor elements, women led resistance, online activists, hackers, and diaspora information channels create persistent pressure against the regime.
None of these pieces alone is enough to break the Islamic Republic. Together, they create an environment the regime cannot fully pacify.
That does not mean collapse is imminent.
It means the regime has to spend more energy maintaining control than it used to. It has to watch more places, arrest more people, censor more information, and prepare for more triggers. A death in custody can become a national protest movement. A strike can become political. A border attack can become a symbol.
A funeral can become a rally. A hacked broadcast can become a psychological blow.
In a stable country, these events remain isolated. In an unstable authoritarian system, they begin to echo.
Iran is in that echo chamber now.
The regime still has the guns, prisons, money, institutions, and foreign networks.
The opposition has grievance, courage, numbers, diaspora support, and enough armed activity on the margins to matter.
What it does not yet have is synchronization.
The Baluch fight is not fully synchronized with the Kurdish fight. The Kurdish fight is not fully synchronized with urban protest networks. Urban protest networks are not fully synchronized with labor, clerical dissent, exile politics, or a credible transition authority.
The anger is national. The organization is still fragmented.
That fragmentation is one of Tehran’s greatest advantages.
The regime does not need to convince every Iranian that the Islamic Republic is worth saving. It only needs to prevent the people who want change from becoming one movement. It can isolate ethnic minorities from urban Persians. It can portray armed groups as foreign backed terrorists. It can use nationalism to rally people against outside attack. It can divide monarchists, republicans, liberals, leftists, ethnic parties, religious dissidents, and diaspora figures against each other. It can let the opposition argue over the future while the regime controls the present.
That is why describing Iran as either “stable” or “on the verge of collapse” misses the point.
Iran is neither.
It is brittle. It is pressured. It is internally contested. It has localized insurgency, national dissent, deep legitimacy problems, and a security apparatus that still functions.
That is the key tension. The regime is strong enough to survive the moment, but weak enough that every new shock matters. Every strike, sanction, protest, assassination, cyberattack, economic crisis, or regional humiliation lands on a system already carrying too much weight.
This is the strategic space before a decisive phase.
Not peace. Not civil war. Not revolution. Not normal politics.
A pressure cooker.
And from a UW perspective, that is exactly the kind of environment outside powers watch closely. Because the question is not whether people are angry.
They are. The question is whether anger can become organization, whether organization can become resistance, and whether resistance can become a political force capable of surviving the morning after the regime begins to crack.
III. The UW Lens: How to Read Iran Without Getting Lost in Headlines
To understand what is happening in Iran, you have to stop reading every event as a separate headline.
A protest is not just a protest. A courthouse attack is not just a courthouse attack.
A hacked broadcast is not just a cyber incident. A strike by workers, a funeral that turns political, a border clash, an internet blackout, a women led demonstration, or an IRGC convoy getting hit in the southeast all have to be placed into a larger framework.
Alone, each event can look isolated. Together, they may reveal whether a resistance movement is starting to mature.
That framework is unconventional warfare.
UW is one of those terms that sounds more complicated than it needs to be. At its core, unconventional warfare is the use of internal resistance to pressure, weaken, or overthrow a hostile regime.
It is not simply foreign commandos running around in the dark. It is not just guerrillas with rifles. It is not just sabotage or propaganda. Those can all be pieces of it, but UW is really about turning a regime’s internal vulnerabilities into organized political and military pressure.
The key word is organized.
That is what separates anger from insurgency. Every authoritarian state has angry people. Every corrupt government has citizens who hate it. Every brutal regime produces victims, martyrs, and exiles. But anger by itself does not topple a state.
Anger has to become networks. Networks have to become organization.
Organization has to become capability. Capability has to become pressure. And pressure has to become political direction.
Without that progression, a regime can survive almost anything.
It can survive protests. It can survive sanctions. It can survive airstrikes. It can even survive isolated armed attacks.
What it struggles to survive is synchronized pressure: urban unrest, labor disruption, ethnic insurgency, information operations, economic stress, elite defections, external military pressure, and a credible political alternative all hitting at once.
That is when a regime starts to lose the ability to decide where the emergency is.
Iran is not there yet.
But some of the pieces are visible.
The first piece is grievance. Iran has no shortage of it. Economic exhaustion, corruption, clerical rule, gender repression, ethnic discrimination, political imprisonment, regime violence, and the constant gap between the wealth of the ruling elite and the lives of ordinary Iranians all create fertile ground for resistance.
Grievance is the fuel. It does not guarantee action, but without it there is no movement to build on.
The second piece is the underground. This is the part most outsiders never see clearly. The underground is the hidden structure of a resistance movement. It is made up of organizers, communicators, couriers, safe house providers, clandestine media cells, hackers, financiers, local coordinators, and people who keep the movement alive when the streets go quiet.
In Iran, some form of underground almost certainly exists. You do not get repeated protest waves, persistent anti-regime messaging, cyber disruptions, and localized armed activity without hidden networks sustaining them.
But the real question is not whether an underground exists.
The question is whether it is coordinated.
A thousand brave people acting separately are vulnerable. A thousand brave people tied into a secure network are a threat. That is the difference Tehran cares about. The regime can arrest individuals, beat protesters, intimidate families, and shut down neighborhoods.
It becomes much harder when the movement has depth, redundancy, discipline, and the ability to keep functioning after leaders are taken off the board.
The third piece is the auxiliary. In UW terms, the auxiliary is the population support system around the underground. These are not necessarily fighters.
Most never pick up a weapon.
They are the people who hide activists, pass messages, provide money, move supplies, share intelligence, shelter families, document regime abuse, or simply refuse to cooperate when the state demands obedience. A resistance movement cannot survive on fighters alone. It survives because ordinary people quietly make the regime’s job harder.
Iran likely has auxiliary networks in pockets.
The problem is that pockets are not the same as national alignment. Baluch communities may support Baluch resistance for reasons that do not perfectly overlap with urban student movements in Tehran. Kurdish opposition networks may have different goals than Persian monarchists or secular republicans. Labor organizers may want a different future than diaspora political figures. Women led resistance may be the moral center of the movement, but moral authority does not automatically create command and control.
The Iranian opposition is broad, but breadth is not the same as unity.
The fourth piece is armed capability.
This is where the border regions matter. In Sistan and Baluchestan, armed resistance has demonstrated the ability to hit regime linked targets. In the Kurdish northwest, opposition groups have organization, history, and militant experience, though they remain constrained.
These fronts matter because they show that not all resistance in Iran is symbolic or political. Some of it is violent, organized, and persistent.
But armed capability alone is not enough.
An insurgency can fight for years and still remain geographically isolated. A militant group can hit police stations and convoys without becoming a national revolutionary force.
That is the trap analysts have to avoid.
Every armed attack is not a sign that the regime is falling. Sometimes it is just proof that the regime has an unresolved peripheral insurgency. The question is whether those attacks begin to connect with a broader national movement.
That is what synchronization would look like.
If a border attack happens at the same time as urban protests, labor strikes, cyber disruptions, elite defections, and coordinated messaging from a credible political opposition, then the situation changes. The regime would no longer be dealing with separate problems. It would be dealing with a campaign. That is the line between unrest and something much more dangerous.
The fifth piece is political leadership.
This may be the weakest part of the Iranian resistance picture right now. There are leaders, symbols, parties, exile organizations, activists, and influential voices.
But there does not appear to be a single accepted political authority capable of speaking for the movement inside the country.
That is important because tearing down a regime is only half the problem. The harder question is who replaces it, who gives orders, who prevents chaos, who negotiates with security forces, and who convinces ordinary people that the morning after will be better than the night before.
This is why shadow governance matters.
A true shadow government is not just a website, a press conference, or a diaspora coalition. It is a parallel political structure with enough legitimacy and reach to administer, coordinate, and represent the resistance.
It gives fence sitters a place to go. It gives defectors someone to contact. It gives outside powers a partner. It gives the population a picture of what comes next.
Iran does not appear to have that yet.
That is one reason the regime still benefits from uncertainty. Many Iranians may hate the Islamic Republic, but fear what could follow if it collapses without order.
That fear is not irrational.
People have watched Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan. They know that regime collapse can produce freedom, but it can also produce militias, revenge killings, foreign interference, economic collapse, and years of instability.
Tehran exploits that fear constantly. It tells the population that the choice is not between dictatorship and freedom, but between dictatorship and chaos.
A mature UW campaign has to break that argument.
It has to make the regime look weak and the alternative look real. It has to show that resistance is not suicide, that organization exists, that support is broad, that the security forces are not invincible, and that the day after has a plan.
Until then, most people will watch, wait, and quietly calculate risk. That calculation is not cowardice. It is survival.
This is why Iran’s current phase is so important.
The regime is trying to keep every pocket of resistance isolated. The opposition is trying, whether deliberately or instinctively, to connect them. Outside powers are watching to see whether those connections become strong enough to matter.
If they do not, then even another round of strikes may only produce damage, outrage, and temporary disruption. If they do, then external pressure could land on a regime already cracking from within.
That is the UW lens.
Do not ask only whether Iran is angry. It is.
Do not ask only whether the regime can be hit. It can.
Ask whether the anger is becoming organization. Ask whether organization is becoming capability. Ask whether capability is becoming synchronized pressure.
Ask whether the population believes resistance can survive. Ask whether the regime’s own enforcers still believe the system is worth bleeding for.
Those are the questions that tell us where Iran really is.
IV. The First Real Front: Sistan and Baluchestan
If you are looking for the clearest insurgency indicators inside Iran, you do not start in Tehran.
You start in Sistan and Baluchestan.
That does not mean Tehran is unimportant. Tehran is the political center of gravity. It is where the regime’s legitimacy would ultimately be tested, where elite fractures would matter most, and where any true national transition would have to become visible.
But from a UW perspective, the southeast is where the armed resistance picture is clearest. It is the place where grievance, geography, identity, state repression, and militant capability overlap in a way that looks less like ordinary dissent and more like a persistent insurgent problem.
Sistan and Baluchestan sits on Iran’s southeastern edge, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. That geography is immensely important. Borderlands are difficult for centralized regimes to fully control.
They provide smuggling routes, tribal and family networks, sanctuary opportunities, weapons flows, and cross border depth. They also tend to produce populations that feel neglected by the capital and abused by security forces.
In this case, the province is home to many Sunni Baluch in a Shiite Persian dominated state, and that ethnic and sectarian divide gives the conflict a deeper emotional and political charge.
This is not a new problem for Tehran.
The Iranian state has faced years of unrest, militancy, and security force clashes in the province. Jaish al-Adl, a Sunni Baluch militant group, has repeatedly targeted Iranian police, border guards, and IRGC linked positions. Iranian officials call the group terrorist. The group presents itself as defending the rights of the Baluch population against regime repression.
Those two descriptions are not mutually exclusive in the real world of insurgency.
A movement can use terrorism, exploit legitimate grievance, and still draw oxygen from real state abuse.
That is why this front matters.
The violence in Sistan and Baluchestan is not just criminality or random extremism. It is connected to a broader political environment where a marginalized population has deep grievances against the state, where security forces are seen by many locals as occupiers rather than protectors, and where armed groups have demonstrated the ability to hit regime targets.
In July 2025, gunmen attacked a courthouse in Zahedan, killing at least six people and wounding around twenty more, according to reporting from the Associated Press and The Guardian. Iranian linked reporting attributed the attack to Jaish al-Adl, and the attackers reportedly used firearms and grenades before security forces killed three of them.
A courthouse is not just a building.
In a place like Sistan and Baluchestan, it is a symbol of regime power. It represents the state’s ability to arrest, judge, imprison, and execute. When militants attack a court building, they are not merely trying to create casualties.
They are attacking the image of state control. They are telling the population that the regime can be reached. They are telling local security forces that they are vulnerable. They are telling Tehran that the province is not pacified.
In UW terms, that is what makes it a confidence target.
A confidence target is selected not only for tactical effect, but for psychological effect. The point is to build confidence among supporters, shake confidence among regime loyalists, and force undecided locals to reconsider who actually controls the environment.
A successful attack does not have to destroy the state. It only has to make the state look mortal. That is how insurgencies begin to alter the emotional terrain of a conflict.
The same pattern shows up in attacks against police and security forces.
In October 2024, at least ten Iranian police officers were killed in an ambush in the same province, another incident tied in open reporting to the persistent violence in Sistan and Baluchestan.
The Associated Press also reported that Iranian security forces later killed thirteen militants in separate operations in the province, with Iranian state television saying several of those militants were linked to the killing of police officers. That cycle is important: insurgent attack, regime raid, arrests, more resentment, more security presence, more opportunity for militant recruitment.
That is the rhythm of a low grade insurgency.
The regime hits the network. The network hits back. The population is squeezed in between. Every checkpoint, raid, funeral, arrest, and accidental killing becomes part of the political story.
Tehran can call it counterterrorism. The militants can call it resistance.
Locals may see elements of both depending on who was killed, who was arrested, and how the security forces behaved afterward.
This is where governments often misread the battlefield.
They count bodies and assume they are winning. They kill militants and announce the network has been dismantled. They flood the area with security forces and call it stabilization.
But insurgency is not measured only by how many fighters are killed. It is measured by whether the grievance survives, whether the population continues to provide passive support, whether replacement fighters emerge, whether intelligence dries up, and whether the state’s presence becomes more feared than respected.
By that standard, Sistan and Baluchestan remains a real problem for Tehran.
It is also the one part of Iran where the auxiliary question becomes sharper. In UW terms, the auxiliary is the support structure around the underground and armed elements.
It is the family that hides someone for a night. The cousin who passes a warning. The shopkeeper who notices unfamiliar security vehicles. The driver who moves a package without asking too many questions. The local cleric who shapes opinion. The teenager with a phone who records the aftermath of a raid. The population does not have to openly join the insurgency to make the regime’s job harder.
There are strong reasons to believe some auxiliary support exists in the southeast.
You do not sustain repeated militant activity in a heavily policed province without some combination of local knowledge, cross border facilitation, intimidation, ideological support, family networks, or passive tolerance.
That does not mean the entire Baluch population supports Jaish al-Adl. It almost certainly does not. It also does not mean every act of violence is popular. Civilian casualties can backfire, and militant groups can alienate the very population they claim to defend.
But the persistence of the violence suggests the regime has not fully penetrated or neutralized the environment.
That is a meaningful UW indicator.
Still, this front has limits.
Sistan and Baluchestan is not enough to topple the Islamic Republic by itself. The province is geographically distant from the regime’s core. Its ethnic and sectarian identity can make it easier for Tehran to isolate the conflict from the Persian urban majority.
The regime can portray Baluch militants as separatists, foreign backed extremists, or terrorists, and many Iranians outside the region may accept that framing even if they dislike the regime. That is one of Tehran’s most effective defensive tools: keep each grievance trapped inside its own identity box.
So the question is not whether there is an insurgency in the southeast.
There is enough open source evidence to say there is a persistent localized insurgency or insurgent environment. The real question is whether that fight can connect to the broader anti-regime struggle.
If the Baluch front remains isolated, Tehran can manage it as a peripheral security problem. It can surge forces, conduct raids, pressure Pakistan, execute suspects, and control the narrative. But if Baluch armed pressure begins to synchronize with Kurdish activity, urban unrest, labor strikes, cyber disruption, and elite fractures, then it becomes something much more dangerous.
That is the difference between a local insurgency and a national UW campaign.
Right now, Sistan and Baluchestan looks like Iran’s most mature armed resistance front, but not yet the engine of nationwide collapse. It shows that the regime can be hit. It shows that some armed networks retain capability. It shows that Tehran does not have uncontested control in every province. It also shows the limits of fragmentation.
A courthouse attack in Zahedan can embarrass the regime, inspire militants, and terrify local officials, but it does not automatically move students in Tehran, workers in Ahvaz, merchants in Isfahan, or soldiers inside the IRGC.
That is why synchronization is the word to watch.
If future attacks in the southeast remain isolated, they will continue to bleed the regime at the margins. If they begin to align with a wider resistance architecture, they could help stretch the security apparatus at the exact moment outside pressure increases.
That is when the province stops being a peripheral insurgency and becomes part of a strategic campaign.
For now, Sistan and Baluchestan is the first real front.
Not because it can defeat Tehran alone.
Because it proves the regime’s monopoly on violence is already contested.
V. The Kurdish Belt: Organized, Armed, But Still Constrained
The second major pressure point sits in Iran’s northwest.
This is the Kurdish belt.
If Sistan and Baluchestan gives us the clearest picture of localized armed insurgency, the Kurdish northwest gives us a different but equally important piece of the UW puzzle: organization, identity, history, and political memory.
Kurdish opposition to Tehran is not new. It did not begin with the latest protest wave, the latest Israeli strike, the latest American threat, or the latest round of sanctions. It is older, deeper, and more structurally rooted than most outside observers understand.
That matters because insurgencies do not come from nowhere.
They are built out of memory. They are built out of grievance passed from one generation to the next. They are built out of families who remember executions, villages that remember raids, parties that remember betrayals, and communities that believe the state has never represented them.
For Kurdish opposition groups, the Islamic Republic is not just a bad government.
It is a state that has repeatedly denied political autonomy, suppressed identity, targeted dissidents, and treated Kurdish organization as a security threat.
That gives the Kurdish front a different character than the urban protest movement.
Urban protest movements can erupt quickly. They can spread fast, especially when a single event becomes a national symbol. The death of Mahsa Amini showed that clearly.
Her death did not create Iran’s legitimacy crisis, but it lit a match in a country already soaked in fuel. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” moved from Kurdish regions into the national bloodstream because it touched something broader than ethnicity.
It became a language of defiance.
But Kurdish resistance also has something street protests often lack.
It has structure.
There are Kurdish political parties, armed wings, exile networks, veteran cadres, media channels, diaspora support, and experience operating under state pressure. That does not make them decisive. It does not mean they can march on Tehran. It does not mean they are unified among themselves.
But it does mean the Kurdish theater contains preexisting political and militant infrastructure that could matter if Iran’s internal crisis deepens.
From a UW perspective, that is important to understand.
A resistance movement does not only need anger. It needs people who know how to organize. It needs people who understand clandestine communication, safe movement, recruitment, messaging, survival under surveillance, and the relationship between political activity and armed pressure.
Kurdish opposition networks have more of that experience than many other parts of the Iranian opposition. That makes them a serious factor in any broader assessment of Iran’s internal vulnerability.
But this is where the analysis has to stay disciplined.
The Kurdish belt is not currently a liberated zone. It is not an independent front openly holding major Iranian territory. It is not a conventional army waiting to roll south.
Iranian Kurdish groups have political history and militant capability, but they are still constrained by geography, Iranian intelligence pressure, regional diplomacy, internal factionalism, and the complicated politics of Iraqi Kurdistan. Tehran knows this front matters, which is exactly why it watches it closely and pressures it aggressively.
Iran has spent years trying to keep Kurdish opposition boxed in.
That means cross border pressure, intelligence penetration, targeted strikes, arrests, executions, and diplomatic coercion aimed at limiting the ability of Kurdish groups to use neighboring territory as a rear area. This is a classic regime move.
If an insurgent movement has depth across a border, the regime tries to make that depth unsafe. If it cannot fully control the mountains, it pressures the governments, parties, and security actors on the other side of the line. Tehran understands that insurgencies breathe through borders.
That is why the northwest is dangerous but not yet decisive.
The Kurdish opposition has organization, but organization alone does not create national collapse. It has armed experience, but armed experience alone does not synchronize a countrywide movement. It has powerful symbolism, especially after Mahsa Amini, but symbolism has to become operational connection.
The strategic question is whether Kurdish networks can link their struggle with the broader Iranian opposition without being isolated by Tehran’s ethnic separatist narrative.
That narrative is one of the regime’s most reliable weapons.
Tehran wants the Persian urban majority to see Kurdish, Baluch, Arab, or other minority resistance as something separate from the national struggle. It wants to portray minority armed groups as separatists, foreign backed militants, or threats to Iran’s territorial integrity.
That framing is powerful because even many Iranians who hate the regime still fear national fragmentation. The regime knows how to exploit that fear. It wraps itself in the flag when the ideology is not enough.
This is one of the hardest problems for any Iranian resistance movement.
The opposition has to convince ordinary Iranians that ethnic minority grievances are not peripheral distractions. They are part of the regime’s core vulnerability. A state that has to rule its borderlands through fear, arrests, executions, and militarization is not strong in the way it wants to appear.
It is strong in the way a prison is strong. It can control movement. It can punish disobedience. But it cannot generate loyalty.
Still, Kurdish groups face their own strategic problem.
They need to remain organized enough to matter, but not so isolated that Tehran can portray them as a narrow ethnic insurgency disconnected from the national cause. They need armed capability, but not actions that alienate potential supporters in the rest of Iran. They need external space, but not so much visible foreign association that the regime can brand the entire movement as a foreign project.
Every insurgent front lives inside that tension. The Kurdish front lives there permanently.
This is why the Kurdish theater should be understood as a potential accelerant, not yet the central engine.
If the regime begins to fracture elsewhere, Kurdish networks could move quickly.
They could increase pressure on security forces, force Tehran to divert units,
inspire other minority regions, and provide an experienced organizational model for resistance.
In a synchronized UW environment, that is extremely important. The regime cannot easily handle pressure in Tehran, Baluchestan, Kurdistan, Khuzestan, and the labor sector all at once. Its security system is strong, but it is not infinite.
But if the rest of the country remains quiet, the Kurdish front can be contained.
That is the hard truth. Tehran has proven it can manage localized insurgency if it remains localized. It can surge forces. It can arrest families. It can execute dissidents. It can strike across borders. It can use diplomatic pressure. It can flood the information space with accusations of foreign manipulation. It can make the cost of participation high enough that many people stay silent.
So the Kurdish belt is both promising and constrained.
It has many of the ingredients UW planners look for: grievance, identity, organization, militant history, external connections, diaspora support, and a population with deep reasons to resist.
But it does not yet appear to be synchronized with a national underground capable of turning regional resistance into countrywide pressure. That is the missing link.
And that missing link is the story of Iran right now.
Every front has something. The Baluch have active armed pressure. The Kurds have organization and political memory. The cities have numbers and legitimacy. The diaspora has voice and money. Hackers and activists have information reach. Labor has economic leverage. Women led resistance has moral force.
But the regime survives because these streams have not yet become one river.
The Kurdish front could help change that.
Not by defeating Tehran alone, but by forcing the regime to fight on another organized edge while the center begins to shake. That is how peripheral insurgencies matter in a UW campaign. They stretch the state. They expose weakness. They create dilemmas. They force the regime to choose between suppressing the borderlands and securing the cities.
For now, the Kurdish belt remains an organized pressure point.
It is armed enough to matter.
It is constrained enough to be contained.
And if Iran moves into a more decisive phase, it may become one of the first places where the regime discovers it has too many fires to put out at once.
VI. The Urban Underground: The Most Important Piece, and the Least Visible
The borderlands matter.
Sistan and Baluchestan matters. The Kurdish belt matters. Khuzestan matters.
Every ethnic, sectarian, and regional pressure point matters because each one forces Tehran to spend attention, manpower, intelligence resources, and political capital trying to hold the edges of the state together.
But if Iran ever enters a decisive phase, the regime will not fall in the mountains first.
It will fall in the cities.
That is where the real question lives. Not whether armed groups can hit police stations in the southeast. Not whether Kurdish opposition networks can survive pressure in the northwest. Not whether diaspora media can keep the conversation alive from outside the country.
Those things matter, but they are not enough by themselves. The real question is whether Iran’s urban centers have an underground capable of turning anger into organization, organization into action, and action into sustained political pressure.
That is the hardest thing to see from the outside.
An underground, by definition, does not advertise itself. It does not hold press conferences. It does not publish a public organizational chart. It does not tell the world how it communicates, who moves money, where safe houses are, who prints leaflets, who coordinates protests, who protects families, who moves people out of danger, or who keeps networks alive after arrests.
If we can see all of it, it is probably already compromised.
That makes assessing Iran difficult.
The visible protest movement tells us one thing. The invisible structure behind it tells us something more important. When protests erupt across multiple cities, when slogans appear in different neighborhoods, when women defy state rules in public, when labor actions spread, when regime abuses are documented and pushed into the information space, when cyber activists disrupt official messaging, and when people continue resisting after waves of arrests, it suggests there is more than spontaneous anger at work.
It suggests some level of underground capacity.
But capacity is not the same as maturity.
Iran almost certainly has underground resistance elements. It would be difficult to explain the persistence of protest activity, clandestine media, anti-regime messaging, cyber disruptions, and local coordination without some hidden networks helping sustain them.
The question is whether those networks are connected across geography, class, ideology, and ethnic identity. That is where the picture becomes less certain.
The Iranian opposition does not lack courage.
It, once again, lacks integration.
That is the central problem. Students protest. Women resist. Labor networks strike. Ethnic minorities fight. Hackers expose. Diaspora figures speak. Families of the dead keep memory alive. Artists, athletes, journalists, clerics, and former officials sometimes break from the regime’s narrative.
Each of these actions matters. Each one chips away at the image of total state control.
But a pile of pressure is not the same as a campaign.
A campaign has timing. It has sequencing. It has redundancy. It knows when to protest, when to go quiet, when to strike, when to flood the information space, when to protect leadership, when to provoke the regime, and when to avoid giving the regime the excuse it wants. It links local action to national purpose. It makes every event feel connected to something larger.
That is what the Iranian opposition still appears to be missing.
The regime understands this, which is why it fights so hard to keep resistance fragmented. It does not only repress people because it fears dissent. It represses people because it fears connection. It fears the student who talks to the labor organizer. It fears the labor organizer who talks to the neighborhood activist. It fears the neighborhood activist who talks to the diaspora media channel. It fears the women-led protest that links up with ethnic grievance, economic anger, clerical dissent, and cyber capability.
Authoritarian regimes can survive isolated outrage.
They struggle with connected resistance.
That is why Tehran treats communications as a battlefield. Internet shutdowns, surveillance, arrests of journalists, pressure on families, infiltration of activist circles, and punishment of public figures are not random acts of cruelty. They are counter network operations.
The regime is trying to prevent the opposition from becoming legible to itself. It wants every activist to feel alone, every neighborhood to feel isolated, every family to believe no one else will move when they do.
Fear works best when it convinces people they are alone.
The purpose of an underground is to prove they are not.
In UW terms, the underground is the hidden skeleton of the resistance. The auxiliary is the flesh around it. The underground organizes. The auxiliary sustains.
The underground may coordinate timing, messages, safe movement, clandestine media, and covert action. The auxiliary may hide people, move supplies, warn of security presence, provide money, shelter families, document abuses, or refuse cooperation with regime demands.
Again, most people in an auxiliary never think of themselves in military terms.
They are not “insurgents” in the cinematic sense. They are mothers who hide a phone before a raid. Taxi drivers who take a longer route to avoid a checkpoint. Shopkeepers who pass along a warning. Students who share a secure channel. Doctors who treat someone quietly. Workers who slow production. Clerics who refuse to echo regime talking points. Neighbors who do not inform. Families who keep showing up at gravesites when the state wants memory buried.
That is how resistance survives between protests.
The mistake outsiders make is assuming a movement only exists when crowds are in the streets. In reality, the most important work often happens when the streets look quiet. That is when networks rebuild. That is when people identify who can be trusted. That is when lessons are learned from arrests, communications are adjusted, leadership is replaced, and the next opportunity is prepared.
Quiet is not the same as defeat.
Sometimes quiet is fear. Sometimes it is exhaustion. Sometimes it is successful repression. But sometimes it is preparation. The challenge in Iran is determining which one we are seeing at any given moment.
Open source reporting can show protests, arrests, strikes, hacks, and public defiance. It can show the smoke. It cannot always show the wiring behind the walls.
That is why the urban underground is the most important and least visible part of the Iran picture.
If it is weak, then every protest wave will continue to rise and fall. People will show courage, the regime will respond with violence, the world will watch, and eventually the streets will empty until the next outrage.
That pattern can damage legitimacy, but it does not necessarily break power.
If it is strong, the next protest wave could look different.
It could move faster. It could appear in more cities at once. It could coordinate with strikes. It could absorb arrests without collapsing. It could push messages that are consistent instead of scattered. It could give security forces the sense that they are facing not just a crowd, but a movement. It could force the regime to defend too many places at the same time.
That is when an authoritarian state begins to panic.
The regime can beat a crowd. It can arrest visible leaders. It can shoot into a demonstration. It can shut down the internet. It can flood a city with security forces. But it cannot be everywhere forever. If protests are synchronized with labor disruption, ethnic armed pressure, cyber operations, and external military pressure, the state starts losing the ability to prioritize.
Every threat becomes urgent.
That is the nightmare scenario for Tehran.
It is also why outside actors would care so much about timing. If Trump, Israel, and the Gulf States strike before the urban underground is ready, the strike may create anger without structure.
It may even help Tehran rally nationalist sentiment and portray every dissident as a foreign agent. But if a mature underground exists, or is close to existing, then external pressure can create openings the regime cannot easily close.
That is the difference between spectacle and leverage.
A strike by itself is spectacle. A strike that coincides with internal organization can become leverage.
It can force the regime to defend military sites, manage public fear, suppress protests, reassure elites, control the currency, secure energy infrastructure, and prevent defections all at once. The more organized the underground is, the more every external blow reverberates inside the system.
But this is also where discipline matters.
There is no public evidence that Iran’s urban underground is fully mature. There is no visible national command structure. There is no accepted internal leadership council directing all resistance. There is no proof that student networks, labor movements, ethnic armed groups, diaspora organizations, and cyber actors are operating from one synchronized plan.
The ingredients are there. The integration is not yet clear.
That is the honest assessment.
Iran’s cities are full of potential resistance energy. They are also full of fear.
The regime has spent decades building systems to penetrate and punish dissent.
It knows where movements are born: universities, factories, mosques, neighborhoods, funerals, prisons, and family networks. It watches those spaces because it understands what many outside observers do not.
The city is the decisive battlefield.
Not because every fight there is armed. Most will not be. The city matters because it is where legitimacy is either restored or lost. It is where ordinary people decide whether they are still afraid enough to comply. It is where security forces decide whether orders are still worth following. It is where workers decide whether the economy keeps moving. It is where families decide whether the dead will be mourned quietly or turned into symbols. It is where the opposition either remains a collection of brave acts or becomes a national force.
For now, the urban underground appears real, but uneven.
It can resist. It can communicate. It can survive repression in pockets. It can produce moments of national defiance. What it has not yet visibly proven is that
it can coordinate a sustained campaign across the country under pressure.
That is the next threshold.
If the cities connect, Iran changes.
If they do not, the regime will continue doing what it has done for years: isolate, intimidate, arrest, wait, and survive.
VII. The Regime’s Strength: The Security Apparatus Has Not Broken
The reason the Islamic Republic still stands is not because it is loved.
It stands because its coercive architecture still works.
That is the uncomfortable truth at the center of any honest assessment of Iran.
The regime has a legitimacy problem. It has an economic problem. It has a generational problem. It has ethnic, sectarian, and regional pressure points that keep flaring up. It has a population that has repeatedly shown it is willing to challenge the state in the streets.
But none of that automatically brings down a government.
Regimes do not fall because people hate them.
They fall when the institutions that enforce fear stop working.
In Iran, those institutions still work. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remains the backbone of the regime. The Basij still gives the state reach into neighborhoods, universities, workplaces, and religious spaces. The intelligence services still monitor, infiltrate, arrest, and intimidate. The police still disperse crowds. The courts still turn dissent into prison time. The prisons still absorb the regime’s enemies. The execution chamber still exists as a political tool.
That is not the profile of a government that has lost control.
It is the profile of a government that understands it is under pressure and still has the machinery to respond.
This is where outside observers often get Iran wrong. They see protests and assume collapse. They see anger and assume revolution. They see a viral video and assume the fear barrier has broken everywhere.
But authoritarian systems are built to absorb outrage. They are designed to survive moments when the population hates them. They are designed to wait out emotion, isolate organizers, punish visible leaders, and make everyone else calculate the cost of being next.
Iran’s regime has had decades to perfect that system.
The IRGC is not just a military force. It is a political institution, an economic empire, an intelligence actor, an ideological guardrail, and a regime survival mechanism. It has interests that extend far beyond national defense. Its commanders, business networks, patronage systems, and internal security role are tied directly to the survival of the Islamic Republic.
For many inside the IRGC structure, regime collapse would not simply mean political change. It could mean prison, exile, execution, loss of wealth, or revenge from the population they helped repress.
That gives them a powerful reason to hold the line.
The Basij may be even more important at the street level. It is easy to think of the
Basij as just a militia, but that misses its real function. The Basij is how the regime embeds itself into daily life. It gives Tehran eyes, ears, fists, and loyalists in local communities. It can intimidate students, monitor neighborhoods, identify activists, mobilize counter demonstrators, and support security crackdowns before protests gain momentum. It is not simply a force that shows up after unrest begins. It is part of the system designed to prevent unrest from becoming organized in the first place.
That matters from a UW perspective.
Unconventional Warfare depends on connection. It depends on building trust networks beneath the surface of society. It depends on organizers, couriers, sympathizers, safe houses, financiers, communicators, and people willing to quietly help the movement survive.
The Basij exists to penetrate that same human terrain. It competes with the underground for control of the neighborhood, the campus, the mosque, the workplace, and the family network.
This is why the fight inside Iran is not only about guns.
It is about access.
Who knows who is loyal? Who knows who is afraid? Who knows who is organizing? Who knows which family has a son in prison, which student is passing messages, which worker can shut down a factory line, which cleric is wavering, which officer is tired of the regime, and which neighbor will inform?
In a UW environment, those questions matter as much as missiles and aircraft.
The side that controls local knowledge controls risk.
Right now, the regime still controls a lot of that risk.
It can make participation expensive. It can fire people. It can expel students. It can threaten parents. It can seize phones. It can freeze accounts. It can raid homes before sunrise. It can use courts to make examples out of people. It can execute enough dissidents to remind everyone that the state is willing to kill. It can force activists to spend more energy surviving than organizing.
That is the brutal math of repression.
And it works until it does not.
Every authoritarian regime believes fear is permanent. It almost never is.
Fear is a resource. It can be spent down. Every arrest teaches the opposition something. Every funeral can become a rally point. Every execution can create a martyr. Every beating can radicalize a family. Every lie can deepen the regime’s credibility problem. Repression can smother a movement, but it can also harden it.
That is why Iran’s security apparatus is both the regime’s greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability.
The more the regime relies on coercion, the more it admits that belief is gone. A healthy government does not need to treat women’s clothing as a national security threat. It does not need to treat university students like enemy agents. It does not need to shut down the internet to survive a protest. It does not need to imprison artists, journalists, athletes, lawyers, clerics, and grieving parents because they refuse to repeat the official story.
Iran’s regime can still compel obedience.
But it cannot easily restore legitimacy.
That is a dangerous place for any government to live. Coercion can hold a system together for a long time, but it creates brittleness. People comply because they are afraid, not because they believe. Officials obey because they calculate survival, not because they are inspired. Security forces follow orders because the institution still protects them, not necessarily because the ideology still moves them.
That kind of system can look strong right up until the moment it starts to crack.
The crack usually begins inside the enforcers.
That is the indicator to watch. Not another protest by itself. Not another slogan on a wall. Not another diaspora statement. The decisive signal would be hesitation, refusal, factional split, or defection inside the coercive organs of the state.
If police begin refusing orders, if Basij units stay home, if IRGC factions disagree over repression, if intelligence officers leak information at scale, if prison guards stop cooperating, if commanders hedge their bets, then the regime enters a different phase.
There is no public evidence that has happened at scale yet.
That is why any serious UW assessment has to be cautious. The regime is under pressure, but its enforcement class has not visibly shattered. There are always rumors, leaks, isolated defections, and signs of dissatisfaction in systems like this.
Those matter, but they are not the same as institutional fracture.
The Islamic Republic remains dangerous because the men responsible for defending it still appear capable of coordinated violence.
For now, that keeps the opposition below the decisive threshold.
The regime does not have to stop every act of resistance. It only has to prevent resistance from becoming synchronized. It does not have to win every argument.
It only has to keep enough people afraid, enough security forces loyal, enough elites invested, and enough opposition factions divided. It can lose legitimacy slowly as long as it preserves coercive control quickly.
That is the balance Iran lives inside.
A regime with declining legitimacy and functioning coercion.
From the outside, that can look confusing. It can look like weakness one week and strength the next. A protest wave erupts and the regime looks vulnerable.
Security forces flood the streets and the regime looks stable. A militant group hits a target and the regime looks penetrated. The state responds with raids and executions and looks in control again.
This back and forth is not contradiction. It is the nature of a contested authoritarian system before the decisive break.
The regime is not invincible.
But it is not hollow yet.
That is why the Trump, Israeli, and Gulf state timing question matters. If outside pressure lands while the security apparatus remains cohesive, the regime may absorb the blow, rally nationalist sentiment, and use the moment to crush internal dissent under the banner of defending Iran.
But if outside pressure lands while the coercive system is already stretched, divided, and uncertain, the result could be very different.
The same strike can have two different outcomes depending on the internal condition of the regime.
Against a cohesive security state, it may harden the system.
Against a brittle security state, it may fracture it.
That is the essence of the UW timing problem. The goal is not simply to hurt the regime. The goal is to hurt it at the moment when internal resistance can exploit the damage. If the underground is not ready, if the auxiliary is not mobilized, if the cities are not connected, and if the security forces remain loyal, then even a successful strike may only create temporary disruption.
But if the regime’s enforcers begin to doubt, everything changes.
Authoritarian systems are built on the expectation that orders will be followed.
Once that expectation breaks, fear starts moving in the other direction. The population begins to wonder whether the regime can still punish everyone. Local officials begin to wonder whether they should hedge. Security forces begin to wonder whether they will be abandoned. Elites begin to wonder who will protect their wealth when the system changes.
That is when power starts to move.
Not when the first protest begins.
Not when the first shot is fired.
When the people who enforce the regime begin to wonder whether the regime can survive.
Iran is not there yet.
But every crisis pushes the question closer to the surface. Every border attack, protest wave, economic shock, cyber intrusion, Israeli strike, American threat, Gulf diplomatic move, and internal scandal adds pressure to the same structure. For now, the structure is holding. That is the most important reason the Islamic
Republic remains in power.
But holding is not the same as healing.
And the more force the regime has to use to maintain control, the more obvious it becomes that control is all it has left.
Iran’s Quiet War: What OSINT Says About Unconventional Warfare Beneath the Surface – Part Two
VIII. The Missing Piece: No True Shadow Government Yet
Every serious resistance movement eventually runs into the same question.
What comes next?
That question matters more than people want to admit. It is easy to talk about bringing down a regime. It is much harder to explain who governs the morning after. Who gives orders? Who controls the streets? Who talks to the military?
Who keeps electricity running? Who prevents revenge killings? Who stops the prisons from becoming massacre sites? Who negotiates with foreign governments? Who tells ordinary people that they can go to work, open their shops, send their kids to school, and not wake up in a failed state?
This is where Iran’s opposition still appears weakest.
There are dissidents. There are activists. There are brave women, students, workers, lawyers, journalists, clerics, artists, hackers, and ethnic opposition figures who have carried enormous risk. There are exile organizations with funding, media platforms, historical claims, and international access. There are diaspora networks that keep Iran in the global conversation. There are symbolic figures who can speak to parts of the population. There are armed groups on the margins. There are protest networks inside the country.
But there does not appear to be a true shadow government.
A shadow government is not just an opposition group. It is not a social media campaign. It is not a government in exile holding conferences in Europe or Washington. It is not a prince with name recognition, a party with a platform, a militant group with fighters, or a coalition with a website.
Those things can matter, but they are not the same as parallel governance.
A real shadow government has reach.
It has trusted representation inside the country. It has a political framework that different resistance streams can accept. It has mechanisms to communicate with the underground. It can speak to labor, students, ethnic minorities, religious dissidents, business elites, and security force fence sitters. It can reassure the population that collapse will not automatically become chaos. It can give defectors someone to contact and foreign governments someone to recognize. It can answer the most dangerous question in any revolution: after the regime falls, who is in charge?
Iran does not appear to have that yet.
That is not an insult to the opposition. It is the reality of operating against a state that has spent decades murdering, imprisoning, infiltrating, exiling, and discrediting anyone who might become a national alternative.
The Islamic Republic understands the danger of leadership. It knows that leaderless outrage can be beaten back. It knows that spontaneous protest can be isolated. It knows that a movement without a clear political destination eventually exhausts itself or fractures under pressure.
So Tehran has worked hard to make sure the opposition remains broad but divided.
Monarchists do not all trust republicans. Secular liberals do not all trust leftists. Ethnic minority groups do not always trust Persian nationalist movements. Some inside Iran do not trust diaspora figures who have not lived under the regime’s daily coercion for years. Some diaspora groups do not trust each other. Some opposition factions are tainted, fairly or unfairly, by past alliances, foreign sponsorship, ideological baggage, or old betrayals.
The regime exploits every one of these divisions.
It does not need the opposition to disappear.
It just needs the opposition to remain unable to become one thing.
That is why the shadow government question is not academic. In a UW environment, political leadership is not decoration. It is infrastructure. It gives the resistance coherence. It gives the population a destination. It tells supporters what they are sacrificing for. It tells undecided citizens there is a plan. It tells regime insiders there is a way out. It tells outside powers they are not simply creating a vacuum.
Without that, even successful resistance can stall.
People may hate the regime and still fear its collapse. That fear is not cowardice.
It is rational memory. Iranians have watched Iraq. They have watched Syria. They have watched Libya. They have watched Afghanistan. They know that the fall of a brutal regime does not automatically create a free and stable country.
Sometimes it creates militias, revenge cycles, foreign intervention, economic breakdown, sectarian violence, and years of suffering.
Tehran understands that fear and weaponizes it.
The regime’s message is simple: you may hate us, but look at what happens when states collapse. Look at the refugees. Look at the militias. Look at the foreign armies. Look at the shattered cities. Look at the chaos.
That argument is cynical, but it is powerful because it contains enough truth to make people hesitate.
A mature resistance has to defeat that argument.
It has to make the alternative feel more real than the fear. It has to show that there is a political center of gravity beyond anger. It has to demonstrate that the movement is not just against the Islamic Republic, but for something disciplined, organized, and survivable. It has to give the population a reason to believe that joining the resistance will not simply trade one nightmare for another.
That is especially important for security forces.
Most regimes do not collapse because every soldier suddenly becomes a revolutionary. They collapse because enough people inside the coercive system decide the regime is no longer a safe bet. Some defect. Some refuse orders.
Some quietly stop enforcing. Some hedge. Some wait to see who is likely to win. In that moment, a credible shadow government matters enormously. It gives wavering officers, police commanders, bureaucrats, judges, prison officials, and local administrators a bridge away from the regime.
Without that bridge, many will stay where they are.
Not because they love the regime.
Because the regime is still the only structure they can see.
This is one of the reasons outside powers may be cautious. Striking military targets is one thing. Helping create political conditions for regime collapse is something else entirely. If the internal opposition is not ready to govern, or at least coordinate a transition, then external pressure can produce damage without decision.
It can weaken the state without producing a viable replacement. That can lead to chaos, and chaos is exactly what Tehran uses to scare the population back into submission.
From a UW perspective, this is the gap between insurgency and revolution.
Insurgency can exist without a shadow government. Revolution usually cannot succeed without one, or without something that performs the same function.
That function does not have to look like a Western cabinet in waiting. It does not have to be polished. It does not have to be public in every detail. In some cases, it may be partly clandestine. But it has to exist in a meaningful way. It has to connect political legitimacy, operational coordination, and post regime planning.
Iran’s opposition has pieces of that.
It has voices. It has symbols. It has martyrs. It has diaspora money. It has media reach. It has networks. It has moral authority, especially through the women led resistance that has become one of the defining challenges to the regime’s ideological control. It has ethnic groups with organization and armed capability. It has activists who have paid for their courage in blood, prison time, exile, and death.
But pieces are not enough.
The hard work is integration. The movement has to find a way to connect the secular student in Tehran, the Baluch militant in the southeast, the Kurdish organizer in the northwest, the labor activist in the oil sector, the grieving mother at a gravesite, the diaspora donor in Los Angeles, the monarchist, the republican, the clerical dissident, and the security officer quietly wondering whether the regime can survive.
That does not require everyone to agree on every detail of Iran’s future. It does require a minimum viable political compact.
Right now, that compact is not visible.
That may change. It could emerge through crisis. It could emerge after another major regime mistake. It could emerge around a transitional council, a unifying figure, a negotiated opposition platform, or a clandestine internal structure that only becomes visible once conditions are safer.
Revolutions often look disorganized until suddenly they do not. But from the open source view, the absence of a recognized shadow government remains one of the biggest reasons Iran has not crossed into a more decisive phase.
This is also why the regime prioritizes discrediting alternatives.
It does not only attack activists because it fears protest. It attacks symbols because it fears replacement. It wants every opposition figure to look foreign owned, corrupt, naïve, dangerous, separatist, extremist, monarchist, communist,
Western backed, Israeli backed, Saudi backed, or incapable of governing. It wants the public to believe there is no trustworthy alternative.
Because if there is no alternative, fear fills the vacuum.
A shadow government exists to fill that vacuum first.
It does not need to control everything on day one. But it needs to give people something to align with before the decisive moment arrives. That is the difference between a riot and a revolution. A riot expresses rage. A revolution redirects loyalty. It tells people that the old order is dying and the new order is already forming.
Iran has rage.
It has courage.
It has localized armed resistance.
It has persistent protest energy.
It has a regime with fading legitimacy.
What it does not yet clearly have is a political structure capable of turning all of that into a national transition.
That is the missing piece.
And until it appears, the Islamic Republic can continue making the same argument it has always made: after us comes chaos. That argument is not enough to restore legitimacy. But for many people, it may still be enough to delay action.
In a UW campaign, delay matters.
The regime uses delay to arrest, infiltrate, isolate, and exhaust. The opposition uses delay to organize, connect, harden, and prepare. Outside powers use delay to assess whether the internal movement is becoming strong enough to exploit pressure.
That is why the absence of a shadow government is not just a political weakness.
It is an operational limitation.
Iran may be full of resistance.
But resistance still needs a destination.
IX. The Trump and Gulf State Pause: Diplomacy on the Surface, UW Timing Beneath It
This is where the Iran picture becomes more than a question of missiles.
On the surface, the current pause looks like diplomacy. It looks like restraint, negotiation, regional pressure, back channel messaging, and the usual public performance that happens before the next round of escalation.
Washington threatens. Tehran blusters. Israel signals readiness. The Gulf States call for stability while quietly preparing for the possibility that stability is already gone. Everyone says they want to avoid a wider war, even as every serious actor in the region knows the next strike may still come.
That is the visible layer.
But from a UW perspective, the pause may be about something deeper than restraint.
It may be about timing.
If the only goal were to punish Iran, timing would matter less. You find the targets, build the strike package, manage the risk, and hit. Nuclear facilities, missile infrastructure, air defense nodes, IRGC command elements, drone production, naval assets, proxy logistics, and internal security targets all offer options.
A strike can be designed to degrade capability, send a message, or impose cost.
That is the clean military logic most people understand.
But regime pressure is not the same thing as regime change.
If the objective is broader than punishment, if the real goal is to force Tehran into a position where the regime cannot easily recover, then timing becomes everything. You do not simply ask whether Iran can be hit. It can. You ask whether the internal environment is ready to exploit the hit. You ask whether the opposition can move, whether the regime’s security apparatus is stretched, whether the population is psychologically prepared, whether the underground can communicate, whether the auxiliary can support action, and whether armed pressure on the margins can synchronize with urban unrest.
That is why the pause matters.
A strike that lands against a cohesive regime may harden it. A strike that lands against a brittle regime may fracture it. The same bomb can produce two entirely different political outcomes depending on what is happening inside the target state. If the population is unorganized, the security forces are loyal, the opposition is fragmented, and the regime can control the narrative, then outside attack may allow Tehran to wrap itself in the flag and crush dissent under the language of national defense.
That is the danger.
The Islamic Republic is very good at portraying its enemies as foreign agents. It does not need much help doing it. Every dissident can be labeled Israeli backed.
Every protest can be called an American plot. Every ethnic minority grievance can be described as separatism funded from abroad. Every labor strike can be framed as sabotage.
If outside pressure comes before internal resistance has enough legitimacy and organization, the regime may use the external threat to isolate the opposition even further.
That is why operational patience can look like political hesitation.
Trump, Israel, and the Gulf States may all have different priorities, but their strategic problem overlaps. They want Iran weakened. They want the IRGC constrained. They want the nuclear and missile threat reduced. They want Iranian proxy networks disrupted. The Gulf States, in particular, want pressure without uncontrolled regional collapse. They do not want missiles hitting refineries, ports, desalination plants, financial centers, or shipping lanes. They want Tehran boxed in, not the entire region lit on fire.
That makes the pause rational.
Publicly, the pause can be explained as diplomacy. Privately, it may also serve as a collection period. Who is moving inside Iran? Which networks are surviving? Are Baluch militants increasing pressure? Are Kurdish groups coordinating? Are labor networks quiet because they are defeated, or quiet because they are preparing?
Are urban protest cells rebuilding? Are security forces showing fatigue? Are regime elites hedging? Is the population angrier at the regime or more afraid of war?
Those are not cable news questions.
Those are UW questions.
A serious UW minded strategy would not rush to strike simply because targets are available. It would look for internal readiness. It would want the regime forced to defend too many fronts at once. It would want the opposition psychologically prepared for the moment after impact. It would want communications hardened against shutdowns. It would want labor and student networks ready to move. It would want minority insurgent fronts to understand the larger timing. It would want information operations prepared to prevent Tehran from owning the narrative.
In plain language, it would want the inside pressure ready before the outside pressure peaks.
That does not mean there is a fully formed American led UW campaign underway. Open source information cannot prove that. It does not prove that
Washington, Jerusalem, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, or any other capital has a synchronized plan to wait for insurgent forces and then strike.
That kind of claim would require evidence we do not have. But the observable behavior makes more sense when viewed through a UW framework than through a simple story of indecision.
The pause creates space.
It creates space for diplomacy, but also for intelligence collection. It creates space for Gulf coordination. It creates space for Iran’s internal networks to either mature or be crushed. It creates space for Tehran to make mistakes. It creates space for the economy to continue grinding down. It creates space for opposition messaging to test narratives. It creates space for outside actors to watch whether internal resistance becomes more coherent or remains fragmented.
That is the gamble.
If the pause is too long, Tehran uses it. The regime arrests organizers, penetrates networks, pressures border regions, executes prisoners, tightens surveillance, and prepares the population for the next confrontation. It hardens targets, disperses assets, moves commanders, improves air defenses, and cleans up vulnerabilities.
Authoritarian regimes do not waste pauses. They use them to survive.
But if the pause is used well by the opposition, the dynamic changes.
Diaspora channels coordinate messaging. Local cells identify trusted people.
Armed groups watch regime patterns. Families of prisoners and the dead keep memory alive. Security-force fatigue grows. Economic pressure deepens. The population may begin to sense that the regime is not simply facing another protest wave, but a strategic convergence.
That is what Tehran fears.
Not one strike.
Not one protest.
Not one militant attack.
It fears convergence. It fears a moment when border insurgency, urban unrest, labor disruption, cyber pressure, elite doubt, economic collapse, and external military force all begin feeding each other. That is the kind of pressure a regime cannot easily compartmentalize. It cannot call it a local problem. It cannot call it a student problem. It cannot call it a Baluch problem, a Kurdish problem, a women’s issue, a labor issue, or a foreign conspiracy if all of them are happening at once.
That is when the security apparatus gets stretched.
And once the security apparatus gets stretched, hesitation becomes contagious.
Local police begin asking whether reinforcements are coming. Basij members begin wondering whether their names will be remembered. IRGC commanders begin worrying about their families and assets. Bureaucrats begin saving documents. Judges begin thinking about the future. Business elites begin hedging. The population begins to notice fear moving upward.
That is the moment a UW campaign tries to create.
Not chaos for its own sake, but paralysis inside the regime.
A pause can help create that moment, but only if internal forces are actually developing. If the underground remains fragmented, if the auxiliary is passive, if the armed fronts remain isolated, if the shadow government question remains unanswered, and if the regime’s security forces stay cohesive, then the pause does not produce leverage. It produces delay. Delay favors the side that uses it better.
Right now, that is the central uncertainty.
Maybe Trump and the Gulf States are waiting because they believe Iran’s internal pressure points are approaching a useful threshold. Maybe they are waiting because Gulf capitals fear the consequences of a wider war. Maybe they are waiting because negotiations still serve a purpose. Maybe they are waiting because the military and diplomatic sequencing is not ready. More than one thing can be true at the same time.
But from a UW perspective, the most important possibility is this:
They may be waiting to see whether Iran’s internal resistance can become more than resistance.
That is the difference between hitting Iran and changing Iran. Hitting Iran is a military act. Changing Iran requires internal political movement. Outside powers can damage the regime, but Iranians have to make the regime ungovernable.
Outside powers can create openings, but internal networks have to exploit them.
Outside powers can disrupt the coercive system, but the people living under that system have to decide whether the fear barrier is finally breaking.
That is why the pause is so important.
It may look like nothing is happening.
But in UW, the most important work often happens before the world sees anything at all.
X. Why the Gulf States Care More Than They Admit
The Gulf States do not look at Iran the way Washington does.
For the United States, Iran is a strategic problem. It is a nuclear problem, a terrorism problem, a regional stability problem, a shipping problem, an energy problem, and a credibility problem.
For Israel, Iran is more existential. It is the regime behind Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, parts of the regional missile and drone architecture, and the long-term nuclear threat. Israel does not have the luxury of treating Iran like an abstract policy debate.
But for the Gulf States, Iran is personal geography.
It is across the water.
That changes everything. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman all live inside the blast radius of any major war with Iran. They do not have to imagine what escalation could do to ports, airports, desalination plants, refineries, LNG facilities, shipping lanes, financial centers, and expatriate heavy cities. They have to plan for it. They know that if the confrontation gets away from everyone, Tehran may not be able to hit Washington, but it can reach the Gulf.
That is why their public language often sounds cautious.
They call for diplomacy. They warn against escalation. They talk about regional stability. They push for deconfliction, back channels, and restraint. This can look like weakness to people who confuse loudness with strategy.
It is not weakness. It is proximity. The Gulf States want Iran weakened, but they do not want to become the easiest revenge target for a wounded regime.
The Gulf monarchies have spent years watching Tehran build and use proxy networks across the region. They have watched the IRGC export missiles, drones, training, money, and ideology. They have watched the Houthis become a strategic threat in Yemen and the Red Sea. They have watched attacks on energy infrastructure remind the world that Gulf security is not theoretical. They understand that Iran’s regional power does not come only from its conventional military.
It comes from networks, deniability, intimidation, and the ability to impose costs without always triggering a direct conventional war.
That is Iran’s own version of irregular warfare.
The Gulf States know this because they live with it. They understand that Tehran does not have to win a traditional war to create strategic pain. It can threaten tankers. It can activate proxies. It can launch drones. It can encourage unrest. It can pressure vulnerable neighbors. It can target energy markets. It can make insurers nervous, investors cautious, and governments look exposed. Iran’s strength is not just in what it can destroy. It is in what it can disrupt.
So when Gulf leaders push for a pause, they are not necessarily trying to save Tehran.
They are trying to control the sequence.
They want Iran contained, weakened, deterred, and ideally forced into strategic retreat. But they do not want an uncontrolled collapse that spills across the region. They do not want loose missiles, fractured command structures, revenge attacks, refugee flows, sectarian mobilization, maritime chaos, or a desperate
IRGC trying to prove it can still bleed its enemies.
A weakened Iran is useful to them. A shattered Iran could become everyone’s problem.
That is why the Gulf position is more complicated than it looks.
On one hand, the Gulf States have every reason to want the Islamic Republic’s power reduced. Tehran has threatened them directly and indirectly for decades. It has backed militias, armed partners, and destabilized the regional order. It has treated the Gulf as both a target set and a bargaining chip. A weaker Iran would give the Gulf more strategic space, reduce pressure on energy infrastructure, and limit the reach of Iranian proxies.
On the other hand, the Gulf States do not want to wake up next to a failed state of ninety million people.
That is the nightmare scenario. A regime collapse in Iran without a transition mechanism could produce factional conflict, ethnic fragmentation, IRGC splinter groups, unsecured weapons, economic implosion, and competing foreign influence.
For Gulf leaders, that is not an academic concern. They have watched what happens when authoritarian states collapse faster than institutions can be replaced. Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen all offer warnings in different ways.
Nobody in the Gulf wants Iran to become a larger version of that problem.
This is where the shadow government question becomes strategically important.
If Iran had a credible internal transition authority, the Gulf States might be more willing to support sharper pressure. If there were a unified opposition council with real domestic reach, links to the urban underground, channels to ethnic minorities, and a plan for managing the security forces after collapse, the risk calculation would shift. But without that, the Gulf has to weigh every move against the possibility that weakening Tehran too quickly may create a vacuum no one can control.
That does not mean the Gulf States are passive.
They can support pressure quietly. They can share intelligence. They can coordinate air and missile defense. They can harden infrastructure. They can facilitate backchannels. They can support information environments that expose regime weakness. They can align economically and diplomatically with Washington. They can give Israel or the United States certain forms of space while publicly calling for restraint. In that part of the world, what is said publicly is often only half the story.
The other half is risk management.
The Gulf States are likely watching the same indicators everyone else should be watching. Are Iran’s internal fronts connecting? Is the Baluch insurgency still localized, or is it becoming part of a larger anti-regime rhythm? Are Kurdish networks preparing or contained? Are urban protest cells rebuilding? Are labor networks willing to move? Are security forces cohesive? Is there any sign of elite hedging? Is the diaspora helping or fragmenting the opposition further? Is there a political alternative that can reassure people inside Iran and governments outside it?
Those questions determine how much pressure is useful.
If internal resistance is not ready, outside escalation could simply hand Tehran a nationalist narrative and push Gulf cities into the retaliation window. If internal resistance is closer to maturity, then pressure against the regime could have a compounding effect.
The Gulf States would not need to publicly say they are waiting for insurgent conditions to improve. They would only need to behave like states trying to avoid premature escalation while the internal battlefield develops.
That is why diplomacy and UW timing can exist at the same time.
A public pause can reduce immediate regional risk while still allowing pressure to build inside Iran. It lets Gulf capitals appear responsible. It gives Washington room to negotiate. It gives Israel time to assess targets and consequences. It gives intelligence services time to watch internal movement. It gives Iranian opposition networks time to either prove they can coordinate or reveal that they remain fragmented.
The Gulf States care because the outcome in Iran will shape the region for a generation.
If Tehran survives, wounded but intact, it may become more paranoid, more repressive, and more willing to use proxies to restore deterrence. If Tehran is weakened but not broken, the Gulf may gain breathing room but still face a dangerous adversary.
If Tehran collapses without order, the Gulf may inherit instability on a scale it cannot easily contain. If Tehran transitions through organized internal pressure, the entire regional balance could change.
That is the prize.
A post Islamic Republic Iran that is not hostile to the Gulf would transform the Middle East. It would weaken proxy networks, alter the energy security picture, change Israel’s threat environment, reduce pressure in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and create space for a different regional order. But getting there without setting the region on fire is the hard part.
That is why the Gulf States are careful.
They want the regime weakened.
They want the IRGC contained.
They want the nuclear threat reduced.
They want the proxy network disrupted.
But they also want the lights to stay on, the ports to stay open, the tankers to keep moving, and their cities to remain untouched. They want strategic change without strategic chaos. That is a narrow path, and it explains much of the caution that outsiders misread as indecision.
The Gulf States are not watching Iran from a distance.
They are watching from across the street.
And from across the street, timing matters more than rhetoric.
XI. What Would Show the UW Campaign Is Maturing?
The signal will not be one massive protest.
That is the first thing to understand. Everyone wants the obvious moment. They want the million people in the street, the burning police station, the viral speech, the dramatic defection, the palace gates opening, the statue coming down.
Those moments matter, but they are usually not where the real story begins. By the time a regime looks like it is collapsing on television, the deeper work has already been happening for months or years beneath the surface.
In Iran, the question is not whether people are angry enough.
They are.
The question is whether that anger is becoming organized enough to survive contact with the regime. That is the difference between another protest wave and a true unconventional warfare environment.
A protest wave can shake the system and then fade. A mature resistance campaign absorbs repression, adapts, reconnects, and comes back with better timing, broader support, and clearer purpose.
It learns. It hardens. It stops being only emotional and starts becoming operational.
The first sign of maturation would be synchronization.
That is the word to watch. Not violence by itself. Not protest by itself. Not another cyberattack, strike, funeral, or border clash by itself. Synchronization means those things begin happening in relation to one another. A labor action coincides with student protests. A protest wave coincides with Kurdish or Baluch armed pressure. A cyber disruption coincides with a major regime embarrassment. Diaspora messaging amplifies the same themes that activists inside the country are already pushing. Local actions start to feel like pieces of one larger campaign instead of isolated sparks.
That would be a major shift.
Right now, Iran has many pressure points. The southeast has armed insurgent activity. The northwest has Kurdish organization and political memory. The cities have protest energy. Women-led resistance has moral authority. Labor has economic leverage. Cyber activists and diaspora networks have information reach. Families of the dead have symbolic power. But these streams do not yet appear fully connected. The regime survives by keeping them apart.
A maturing UW campaign would start to close that gap.
The second sign would be confidence targets expanding beyond the periphery. In Sistan and Baluchestan, attacks on police, courts, and regime linked security targets already show that militants can challenge the state in a localized theater.
But if similar symbolic targeting, sabotage, or disruption began appearing in other parts of the country in a coordinated way, the meaning would change. The state would no longer be dealing with a distant border problem. It would be dealing with replication.
Replication matters because it changes psychology.
A single insurgent front can be isolated. Multiple fronts force the regime to ask whether the model is spreading. The point is not just tactical damage. The point is to make the regime look penetrated, vulnerable, and unable to protect itself everywhere.
In UW, confidence targets are chosen to build courage among supporters and doubt among regime loyalists. They tell people the state can be touched. They tell fence-sitters the resistance may be more capable than it looked yesterday.
The third sign would be labor entering the fight in a sustained way.
Labor is one of the most important indicators because it attacks the regime where slogans cannot: the functioning of the state and economy. Students can embarrass a regime. Women led defiance can destroy its moral narrative. Border insurgents can stretch its security forces.
But labor can make the system stop moving. Strikes in oil, transport, factories, ports, education, or public services would create pressure Tehran cannot solve with street violence alone.
That is why organized labor matters so much.
A regime can beat protesters in a square. It is much harder to beat an entire economic sector back into productivity if the workers are organized, disciplined, and willing to sustain pain. Labor also gives ordinary people a lower entry point into resistance.
Not everyone will join a protest. Not everyone will shelter an activist. Not everyone will risk direct confrontation with security forces. But slowdowns, sickouts, noncompliance, and strikes can turn passive dissatisfaction into collective pressure.
The fourth sign would be communications resilience.
Tehran knows the internet is a battlefield. That is why shutdowns, throttling, surveillance, arrests of online organizers, and pressure on journalists are central to the regime’s playbook. A maturing underground would show the ability to keep communicating despite those measures. Messages would still spread.
Protest timing would still synchronize. Videos would still get out. Local networks would still know where to move, when to pause, and how to recover after arrests.
Communications resilience does not have to look dramatic.
In fact, if it is done well, most outsiders will not see how it works. What they will see is the effect: protests appearing in multiple cities, slogans aligning, security forces arriving too late, regime narratives being challenged quickly, and local incidents becoming national symbols before the state can bury them. That is a sign that the underground has learned how to survive in a denied information environment.
The fifth sign would be security force hesitation.
This is the most important indicator of all.
A regime can survive public hatred as long as the men with guns still obey. It can survive sanctions, international isolation, economic misery, and even military strikes if its coercive institutions remain cohesive.
But once police, Basij, IRGC, intelligence officers, prison guards, judges, or local officials begin to hesitate, the entire system changes. Fear starts moving upward.
The population begins to wonder whether the state can still punish everyone.
Regime loyalists begin to wonder whether loyalty is still safe.
That is when power begins to shift.
The first signs may be small. Security forces arriving late. Units refusing to fire. Police standing aside. Local officials disappearing from public view. Leaks increasing. Arrest warrants not being executed. Families of security personnel quietly leaving the country. Mid level commanders hedging. State media growing more frantic. Regime elites moving assets. None of those alone proves collapse.
Together, they would suggest the enforcement class is beginning to calculate.
The sixth sign would be a credible political center emerging.
This does not have to be perfect. It does not have to solve every constitutional question on day one. It does not have to satisfy every faction of the opposition.
But it has to be credible enough to answer the basic question: what comes next?
A resistance movement can create pressure without a political center. It has a much harder time converting pressure into transition without one.
That political center could take many forms.
It could be a transitional council. It could be a coalition of internal activists and external figures. It could be a clandestine structure that only becomes public when conditions allow. It could be built around a unifying figure, or around a minimum platform rather than a personality. The form matters less than the function. It has to reassure the population, give defectors a bridge, coordinate with resistance networks, and convince outside powers that Iran will not simply collapse into chaos.
The seventh sign would be diaspora discipline.
The Iranian diaspora is powerful, emotional, wealthy, connected, and often deeply committed. It can amplify internal resistance, fund communications, lobby governments, expose regime crimes, and keep Iran in the global conversation.
But it can also fracture the opposition if it becomes a battlefield for ego, ideology, old grievances, and performative politics. A maturing UW environment would require the diaspora to become more useful than noisy.
That means message discipline.
It means amplifying what people inside Iran need amplified, not hijacking the movement for external factional fights. It means funding practical tools, secure communications, legal support, documentation, labor support, and information operations. It means helping create political coherence instead of making every opposition disagreement public and permanent.
In a serious resistance environment, the diaspora should function like strategic depth, not a circular firing squad.
The eighth sign would be regime overreaction producing more resistance instead of more fear.
Repression is not automatically a sign the regime is losing. Sometimes repression works. Sometimes arrests, executions, raids, and internet shutdowns break momentum.
But when repression begins creating more resistance than it prevents, the regime has a serious problem. Every funeral becomes a rally. Every execution creates a martyr. Every arrest spreads the network instead of destroying it. Every lie makes the state less believable. Every crackdown pushes new people from sympathy into action.
That is a dangerous transition for authoritarian systems.
They depend on fear being predictable. They need people to believe that punishment will be swift, isolated, and effective. But if punishment starts generating solidarity, then the regime’s strongest weapon begins to misfire.
A maturing UW campaign would exploit that. It would turn state violence into
recruitment, documentation into narrative, funerals into mobilization, and martyrs into symbols that connect otherwise separate communities.
The ninth sign would be external pressure aligning with internal rhythm.
This is where the Trump, Israeli, and Gulf state pause becomes important again.
Outside pressure is most effective when it lands at the right internal moment.
Sanctions, cyber operations, information exposure, diplomatic isolation, military strikes, and regional pressure all matter more when internal networks are ready to exploit the shock.
If those tools are applied while the opposition is fragmented, the regime may absorb them. If they are applied while the regime is stretched and the population is organized, they can compound.
That is the essence of UW timing.
The outside does not replace the inside. It creates openings. It raises costs. It disrupts the regime’s rhythm. It forces choices. But the internal movement has to be ready to move through the gaps.
If the underground cannot communicate, if the auxiliary will not support, if labor is not ready, if armed fronts are isolated, and if no political center exists, then external pressure may damage the regime without producing decision.
So what would show Iran’s UW environment is maturing?
Not one event.
A pattern.
More synchronized unrest. More resilient communications. More labor participation. More confidence targets beyond isolated border regions. More disciplined opposition messaging. More evidence of security-force hesitation.
More coordination between internal and external actors. More signs that repression is creating resistance faster than it is destroying it. Most of all, more evidence that Iranians are no longer acting as separate pockets of courage, but as parts of a common campaign.
That is the threshold.
When the regime stops facing incidents and starts facing a system, Iran enters a different phase.
XII. Conclusion: Iran Is in the Preparation Space Before the Decisive Phase
Iran is not quiet.
It may look that way if you are only watching for missiles, airstrikes, naval movements, and official statements from Washington, Jerusalem, Riyadh, or Tehran. But that is only the visible layer of the conflict. Beneath it, Iran is carrying the weight of a much deeper internal fight.
The regime is not facing one clean revolution, one unified insurgency, or one organized opposition front. It is facing something messier and, in some ways, more difficult to read: localized insurgency, national dissent, underground resistance, ethnic pressure, economic exhaustion, cyber disruption, diaspora agitation, and a population that no longer accepts the regime’s moral authority.
That does not mean the Islamic Republic is about to fall.
It means the regime is no longer ruling from a position of confidence.
Tehran still has the guns. It still has the IRGC, the Basij, the intelligence services, the courts, the prisons, the informant networks, and the ability to punish dissent.
The security apparatus has not visibly broken. There has been no mass defection from the coercive organs of the state. There is no recognized shadow government operating with broad legitimacy inside Iran. There is no clear national command structure synchronizing the Baluch front, the Kurdish belt, urban protest cells, labor networks, diaspora organizations, cyber actors, and opposition political figures.
So Iran is not in the decisive phase yet.
It is in the preparation space before it.
That is the most honest UW assessment. The ingredients are there, but they are not fully integrated. Sistan and Baluchestan shows the clearest evidence of active localized insurgency. The Kurdish northwest has organization, political memory, and armed potential, but remains constrained.
The urban underground appears real, but uneven and difficult to assess from open sources. The auxiliary likely exists in pockets, but there is no clear evidence that it is nationally aligned behind one movement. Labor has potential, but has not yet become the sustained economic weapon that could paralyze the state.
The diaspora has reach, but not always discipline. The opposition has courage, but not yet coherence.
That is why Tehran survives.
Not because it is strong in the way healthy governments are strong. It survives because it is still strong in the way authoritarian systems are strong. It can isolate.
It can intimidate. It can arrest. It can infiltrate. It can execute. It can shut down communications. It can divide ethnic minorities from urban Persians, monarchists from republicans, secular activists from religious dissidents, internal organizers from diaspora voices, and armed resistance from political opposition.
The regime does not need every Iranian to support it. It only needs the people who oppose it to remain disconnected.
That is the fight now.
Connection.
If the opposition remains fragmented, the regime can continue managing each threat as a separate problem. The Baluch become a border security issue. The Kurds become an ethnic separatism issue. Students become a campus issue. Women led resistance becomes a morality issue. Labor becomes an economic issue. Cyber disruption becomes a foreign intelligence issue. Diaspora activism becomes a propaganda issue. Tehran’s entire survival strategy depends on keeping those categories separate.
But if those pieces begin to synchronize, the situation changes.
That is when Iran moves from unrest into something more dangerous for the regime. Not because one protest fills one square. Not because one militant group hits one target. Not because one foreign strike damages one facility.
The real danger comes when all of those pressures begin feeding each other.
Armed pressure stretches the security forces. Urban protest challenges legitimacy. Labor disruption attacks the economy. Cyber operations break narrative control. Diaspora messaging amplifies internal demands. External pressure forces the regime to defend strategic assets. Elite hesitation creates uncertainty. Security force doubt turns fear upward.
Again, that is the moment every authoritarian regime fears.
The moment it stops facing incidents and starts facing a system.
This is where the Trump, Israeli, and Gulf state pause becomes strategically important. On the surface, it can be read as diplomacy, caution, or de-escalation.
That may be true.
The Gulf States do not want a regional war that puts their ports, refineries, desalination plants, shipping lanes, and cities inside Iran’s retaliation window. Israel does not want a strike that fails to change the strategic balance. Trump does not need to hit Iran merely to prove Iran can be hit. Everyone already knows that.
The harder question is whether a strike would matter.
That is the UW timing problem.
Outside pressure can damage a regime. It can destroy targets, degrade capabilities, raise costs, and create openings. But outside pressure alone rarely produces durable political change.
For that, the internal resistance has to be ready to exploit the shock. The underground has to communicate. The auxiliary has to support. Labor has to move. Armed fronts have to stretch the state. The cities have to become politically active at the right moment. Security forces have to begin questioning whether the regime can still protect them. And some credible political alternative has to emerge, or at least begin to emerge, so ordinary Iranians and regime insiders can imagine a future beyond the Islamic Republic.
Without that, another strike may only produce damage.
With it, the same strike could create decision.
That is why patience can be mistaken for weakness. If the goal is punishment, waiting looks unnecessary. If the goal is strategic collapse or forced transformation, waiting may be the point.
You do not strike when the target list is ready. You strike when the political environment is ready to convert destruction into leverage. You wait until the regime is stretched, the population is primed, the opposition is connected, and the state’s enforcers are forced to wonder whether they are defending a system that can survive.
That does not prove there is a formal, publicly knowable UW campaign being run from Washington or the Gulf.
Open sources cannot prove that.
But the current environment makes more sense when viewed through a UW lens than through a simple story of hesitation. The pause gives outside powers time to assess whether Iran’s internal resistance is maturing or being crushed. It gives the opposition time to connect or fragment. It gives Tehran time to repress, but also more opportunities to overreach. It gives the Gulf States time to manage risk. It gives Israel and the United States time to decide whether the next round of pressure is merely punitive or potentially decisive.
For now, Iran remains suspended between those outcomes.
The regime is wounded, but intact.
The opposition is real, but fragmented.
The insurgency is active, but localized.
The underground is likely present, but not visibly synchronized.
The auxiliary exists in pockets, but not yet as a national support base.
The shadow government question remains unanswered.
And the security apparatus still holds the line.
That is not a stable system. It is a brittle one. It can last longer than outsiders expect, because coercive regimes often do. But brittleness is not strength. It is the condition of a structure that looks solid until the pressure becomes too complex, too synchronized, and too widespread to absorb.
Iran is not waiting for a war to begin.
The war inside Iran has already started.
The question now is whether it remains fragmented resistance, or becomes something the regime can no longer contain.
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…
In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.
Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
Pass SAVE Act
Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
Trash Filibuster
Trash Blue Slips
Confirm Trump Nominations.
Codify Trump Executive Orders.
Ban Sharia Law.
Speaking of embracing…THIS.
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Alysa Liu,
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America Is Back!
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
Prices pulled last evening. Gold $4,555.00 Silver $76.72 Bitcoin $79,100
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Stuff…
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Makes Perfect Sense To Slow Guy.
Clandestine.
Taiwan is Not Ours to Defend
I think we are going to see the eventual withdrawal of US influence in Taiwan and Ukraine.
Trump is removing Chinese/Russian influence from our hemisphere, Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, etc., and I think Trump wants to remove our presence from China and Russia’s neighborhood as well.
Putin and Xi stood down this entire time while Trump removed their influence in our region, and I think they did so in exchange for us to do the same. This fits into my overall thesis that we are seeing the world map be redrawn, and spheres of influence are being consolidated. The US will no longer be the world police, our military is coming home, and the superpowers will be in charge of their respective regions.
I think Trump is ending the proxy wars, the espionage, the weapons of mass destruction arms races, the Cold War that never ended, and preventing WW3 before it begins. We will stay in our yard, China/Russia will stay in their yard, and we can trade with each other and coexist peacefully. We can treat each other as global partners, instead of enemies on a collision course for war.
I think this is the end goal of the plan. A sustainable and lasting peace.
Another, Clandestine. THIS also, makes perfect sense. Common Sense.
China and Russia Want to Protect Their DNA
⚠️REMINDER⚠️
Russia and China are protective over Ukraine and Taiwan, because the people of these nations share bloodlines with their parent nations.
This matters when it comes to genome-specific biological weapons, which Russia and China directly addressed.
RFK Jr. addressed this as well, back in July 2023. He brought up a topic that I have covered extensively, which is all the biolabs in Ukraine and Taiwan, which are collecting Russian and Chinese ethnic DNA, to which we can create viruses that target individuals based on specific sequences in their DNA. This is not some kooky tinfoil hat stuff. Genome-specific, or “ethnic” biological weapons are real, it’s been a central theme in the global geopolitical landscape for years, and both Russia and China want control of their ethnic lineage for this exact reason.
The Deep State were using Ukrainian and Taiwanese blood samples, to build bioweapons designed to wipe out the Russian and Chinese civilizations.
Ukraine and Taiwan is about WAY more than just territory, it’s about bloodlines and national security.
President Trump Announces Massive $1.7 Billion “Weaponization” Fund for Americans Targeted by Biden DOJ, Including J6ers
President Trump is set to launch a massive $1.7 billion compensation fund aimed at helping Americans who were targeted by the Biden Regime’s weaponized Department of Justice.
According to a report from ABC News, the fund would compensate individuals who were politically targeted during the Biden years, including many January 6 defendants, conservative activists, and other Trump allies caught in what critics have called one of the largest political persecutions in modern American history.
The move is already sending shockwaves through Washington.
For years, conservatives have argued that the Biden DOJ operated with a two-tiered justice system, aggressively prosecuting Trump supporters while ignoring violent left-wing extremism and politically connected insiders. Many January 6 defendants spent months or even years tied up in court battles, facing prison sentences, financial ruin, public humiliation, and permanent damage to their reputations.
Trump allies say the new compensation fund is about restoring justice and acknowledging the suffering many Americans endured during the Biden administration.
Supporters of the plan argue that countless ordinary Americans were treated like political enemies simply for protesting, questioning the 2020 election, or supporting President Trump. Conservatives across social media immediately praised the announcement as a historic step toward accountability.
America First AND Only American Values.islam is incompatible with America.
In a nutshell…
Islamization: “The Civilization You Save Will Be Your Own” and One Author’s Warning to the West
“The moderates are jihadi-Islamists with patience,” said F.W. Burleigh, author of the book It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet.
In an interview with The Gateway Pundit, Burleigh offered his assessment of Islam’s global advance, the West’s failure to respond, and what he believes must be done.
Burleigh argues that Muslims are drawn to Christianity because of its message of peace and love. “People are drawn by love, and that is what Jesus projects,” he said. Muslim defectors, having witnessed Islam’s cultivation of hatred toward non-Muslims, seek something different. Christ’s message of a loving Father, he argues, resonates where theology does not, and Jesus “comes to them in their dreams because of their need for love.”
The phenomenon of Muslims having the “Jesus dream” and then converting to Christianity has been well documented. It is not hard to believe that a message of love and sacrifice for others resonates more with some people than a message of destruction in the name of establishing an Islamic caliphate. In his book, Burleigh traces that hatred directly to Muhammad, arguing that Islam is not a conventional religion but a cult of violence whose survival depended from the beginning on terror imposed on those who refused to submit.
He views Western converts to Islam very differently. “Stupidity and brainwashing explain it,” he said flatly, adding that most eventually leave. For many, he argued, it is little more than cultural fashionability. He traces the deeper cause to what he calls Gramscian Marxists who have systematically taken over public education from universities down to grammar schools, working in parallel with “moderate” Muslims over decades.
He explained why he referred to moderates as “jihadists with patience.” “They wear nice smiles, blend in, and are willing to wait 20, 30, or 40 years for their stealth tactics to bear fruit.”
The election of a Muslim-Marxist mayor of New York, he added, is proof that those efforts are now bearing fruit, “unless the explanation comes from a rigged election, which can’t be ruled out.”
On whether Islam can coexist with other religions, Burleigh is unambiguous. He cites Koran 8:39 directly: “Fight with them until there is no more fitna and religion is all for Allah.” Islam will tolerate other faiths only so long as their adherents pay a subjugation tax, he argues, and even then the pressure to convert continues.
Christians and other religious minorities are paying jizya across multiple countries where jihadist groups operate as de facto governing authorities. In Mali, JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate, has imposed a monthly tax of roughly $40 on all Christians over 18 in the Mopti region, threatening to close churches for non-payment. Along the Niger-Burkina Faso border, jihadists have given Christian males aged 15 and older a choice: pay jizya or face the consequences, warning that those who pay will “live as slaves.”
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, ADF/ISCAP has presented Christians with three options: conversion to Islam, payment of jizya, or death, a framework ISIS’s Al-Naba newsletter described in August 2025 as fully sanctioned by Islamic law.
In Pakistan, TTP and Lashkar-e-Islam have imposed jizya across tribal border areas, including the Tirah Valley and Orakzai, where one Sikh community was forced to pay 20 million rupees and others abandoned their homes rather than comply. Afghanistan remains the only internationally recognized government still imposing jizya by name under Taliban rule. Open Doors analysts assess these cases as part of a coordinated wider strategy, with families who refuse or cannot pay being driven from their ancestral lands.
He points to the absence of Christian churches in Saudi Arabia, the destruction of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, the shrinking space for Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the burning of Catholic churches in Europe. “Who is torching all the Catholic churches and cathedrals in Europe?” he asked.
His book documents this pattern from Islam’s founding, cataloging what it says are Muhammad’s crimes against those who rejected him, including mass killings of Jewish tribes, assassination of critics, enslavement of men, women, and children, and systematic plunder.
WAYNE ROOT: Why The SAVE America Act has Become a Scam to Fool President Trump. Stop Fighting for It (for now). It’s a Trojan Horse. Here is the Only Solution for Midterms.
By Wayne Allyn Root
No one in all of America wants Voter ID, proof of citizenship, an end to mail-in ballots, and paper ballots replacing machines more than me.
I’ve fought loud and hard for the SAVE America Act. I’ve fought for this bill like a cornered wolverine. To me, it was the only way to save the midterms.
But my fight for the SAVE Act was a year ago…and many months ago. Not now.
Now it’s a dollar short and a day late. Passing it now would be a scam.
Here’s why…
First, this was the easiest bill to pass in the history of Congress. Everyone is for it- Republican voters, Democrat voters, independents, white voters, black voters, Latino voters- literally, EVERYONE.
Yet with the GOP controlling both houses of Congress, and knowing Democrats rig and cheat like the rest of us breathe air, the GOP Senate refused to pass it.
What a disgrace.
The holdout GOP Senators are now exposed as frauds either playing for the Democrats, the Deep State, or bribed or blackmailed by China and the CCP.
But many Republicans, conservatives and MAGA patriots are still pushing hard for the Senate to finally come to their senses and pass the SAVE Act. They think they can embarrass, humiliate or shame the holdouts into suspending the Filibuster and passing the SAVE Act.
Here’s the problem. Here’s why this is a scam, a trojan horse, a mirage, a WMD- weapon of mass distraction.
If the SAVE America Act passed a year ago, or 9 months ago, or even 6 months ago…it would have been a Godsend. Yes, it would have saved the midterms.
But now its too late. Because the day after it passes, Democrat super lawyer Marc Elias and his evil band of scumbag communist traitor lawyers will file a lawsuit. And it will be tied up in court for 6 months, 9 months, maybe even a year- by the time it winds its way through nonstop appeals to higher courts, and finally, the Supreme Court.
So, even if it passes, it will never be in effect for the upcoming midterms.
It could have been and almost certainly would have been in effect for the midterms, if the GOP Senate had passed it a year ago, or even 6 months ago. But now it’s too late. They stalled and waited too long.
But my educated guess is…that was the whole point of the stalling. This is the Democrat, communist traitors and Deep State gameplan- just keep stalling until the cavalry arrives (ie Democrats re-take power).
And part of this “Art of War” deception is not just to stall, but to eventually reverse course, and vote for the very bill you are against, but do it too late- so it actually looks like you’re one of the good guys, who came to your senses, and came to the rescue of the American people.
Now you win re-election, while deceiving the citizens. The bill is too late. The election is stolen, but it looks like you tried to help. Win-win for Deep State plants.
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…
In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.
Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
Pass SAVE Act
Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
Trash Filibuster
Trash Blue Slips
Confirm Trump Nominations.
Codify Trump Executive Orders.
Ban Sharia Law.
Speaking of embracing…THIS.
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
The Biden administration’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine mandate was wrongfully forced onto our warfighters. It was unjust, and we are doing EVERYTHING we can to make it right.
The Biden administration’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine mandate was wrongfully forced onto our warfighters.
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) May 8, 2026
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WOW! It’s been revealed that blue states in America have lost $2 TRILLION DOLLARS, and it’s going to harm them in the 2030 Census “The biggest wealth transfer in HISTORY.” It’s closely correlated with population shifts — and Democrats are going to LOSE BIG in the Electoral College and House when the Census and reapportionment happens
Ban illegals from the Census, RESTORE OUR REPUBLIC!
🚨 WOW! It's been revealed that blue states in America have lost $2 TRILLION DOLLARS, and it's going to harm them in the 2030 Census
"The biggest wealth transfer in HISTORY."
It's closely correlated with population shifts — and Democrats are going to LOSE BIG in the Electoral… pic.twitter.com/IfeVYyy949
TRUMP IS NOW SURGING DENATURALIZATIONS OF FRAUDSTERS — including from Somalia We voted for this! Do Ilhan Omar next
REP. CHIP ROY: “Denaturalization is absolutely a tool we should use, OFTEN. Our system has been ABUSED by fraudsters, criminals, and those who lied to obtain status.” “Citizenship is a privilege grounded in allegiance to the USA and the rule of law not a shield for people who exploited the system.”
🚨 TRUMP IS NOW SURGING DENATURALIZATIONS OF FRAUDSTERS — including from Somalia
We voted for this!
Do Ilhan Omar next 🔥
REP. CHIP ROY: "Denaturalization is absolutely a tool we should use, OFTEN. Our system has been ABUSED by fraudsters, criminals, and those who lied to… pic.twitter.com/dnQl6MtFYb
NOW: President Trump pummels “Bloomberg experts” who UNDERESTIMATED the latest jobs report, which nearly doubled expectations
“As usual, over 90 percent of Bloomberg Economists (nearly all of whom have a “Terminal” case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!) underestimated the strength of the Trump Economy.”
“Despite the best efforts of Jerome “Too Late and Won’t Leave” Powell, and the America Hating Democrat Party, more Americans are working today than ever before.”
“Happy Mother’s Day and, know that, we are MAKING AMERICA WEALTHY AND SAFE AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
🚨 NOW: President Trump pummels “Bloomberg experts” who UNDERESTIMATED the latest jobs report, which nearly doubled expectations
“As usual, over 90 percent of Bloomberg Economists (nearly all of whom have a "Terminal" case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!) underestimated the… pic.twitter.com/XkPdCNgb9I
No more IRGC Stalling tactics. I Want Project Freedom Plus.
JUST IN: President Trump confirms he might RESTART Project Freedom in the Strait of Hormuz if Iran keeps bailing on making a deal “We may go back to Project Freedom if things don’t happen. But it’ll be Project Freedom PLUS, meaning Project Freedom plus OTHER THINGS.”
“We’ll go a different route if everything doesn’t get signed up, buttoned up.”
🚨 JUST IN: President Trump confirms he might RESTART Project Freedom in the Strait of Hormuz if Iran keeps bailing on making a deal
"We may go back to Project Freedom if things don't happen. But it'll be Project Freedom PLUS, meaning Project Freedom plus OTHER THINGS." 🔥… pic.twitter.com/RCAkT9a88u
I missed it. What’s the deal with FDA Marty Makary?
REPORTER: What’s going on with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary? PRESIDENT TRUMP: Nothing much. REPORTER: Are you gonna fire him? TRUMP: I’ve been reading about it, but I know nothing about it!
🚨 REPORTER: What's going on with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary?
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…
In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.
Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
Pass SAVE Act
Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
Trash Filibuster
Trash Blue Slips
Confirm Trump Nominations.
Codify Trump Executive Orders.
Ban Sharia Law.
Speaking of embracing…THIS.
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
The only sitting President to lead soldiers in the battlefield.
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Fast forward from 1776, ~84 years.
Henry Rifles created in Civil War era.
Henry History
Benjamin Tyler Henry His invention: The Henry Rifle
In every field of human endeavor there is a select group of individuals who are given credit for making such major contributions that they become synonymous with their achievements. In the area of firearms development, one name that must be included on that honored roster is Benjamin Tyler Henry. His invention: The Henry Rifle.
It was Mr. Henry who conceived the first practical, lever action repeating rifle patented in 1860. The Henry gave a single man the firepower of a dozen marksmen armed with muzzle-loading muskets.
America was engulfed in the searing flames of the Civil War, and the first Henry rifles were in the hands of Union soldiers by mid 1862. Due to its revolutionary design and rapid rate of fire, the Henry quickly found popularity both with the military and civilian purchasers. Early sales were especially brisk in Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Indiana.
With its reliable .44 caliber rimfire metallic cartridge, the Henry produced a rapid and highly accurate fire. Reports of the successful use of Henry rifles in the Civil War were numerous. The incredible firepower unleashed by the Henry is evident in Major William Ludlow’s account of the Battle of Allatoona Pass. “What saved us that day was the fact that we had a number of Henry rifles” wrote Major Ludlow. “This company of 16 shooters sprang to the parapet and poured out such a multiplied, rapid and deadly fire, that no men could stand in front of it and no serious effort was made thereafter to take the fort by assault.”
After an encounter with the 7th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, which had the good fortune to be armed with Henrys, one Confederate officer is credited with the phrase, “It’s a rifle that you could load on Sunday and shoot all week long.”
The Henry rifle would go on to play a significant, if not dominant role in the frontier days of the American West. It would soon become one of the most legendary, respected and sought after rifles in the history of firearms. A contemporary rifle collection isn’t complete without one.
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. Every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…
In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.
Pass SAVE America Act
Trash Filibuster
Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
Trash Blue Slips
Confirm Trump Nominations.
Codify Trump Executive Orders.
Ban Sharia Law.
Speaking of embracing…THIS.
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
Today in History: April 25, Spanish-American War declared
On April 25, 1898, the United States Congress declared war against Spain. The 16-week Spanish-American War resulted in an American victory, after which the United States took possession of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam.
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Stuff…
Please take a few minutes. Enjoy Hung Cao’s Incredible Journey. Vietnam – Africa – America.
They just thought Pete Hegseth was over the top, now we have a man in charge of the Navy who blew shit up for 30+ years and was really good at it.
They just thought Pete Hegseth was over the top, now we have a man in charge of the Navy who blew shit up for 30+ years and was really good at it. A great time to be alive!
Hung Cao, the former refugee who is Trump’s new acting navy secretary
Vietnam-born Cao stood twice for federal office in Virginia and has called for upgrading of fleet to face new threats
The acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, who steps into the role after the sudden departure of John Phelan, is a veteran naval officer and former refugee who earned a position with the Trump administration with campaigns for political office in Virginia marked by religious intolerance.
When Cao was first appointed, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, set him to modernizing base infrastructure and quality-of-life issues for sailors and marines, and to raise recruiting standards. Cao has also been a point person in the administration on permitting vaccine refusal and eliminating “DEI” policies in the military.
He has been sharply outspoken about the military’s recruiting practices, saying in a debate with Tim Kaine when he ran against him for Senate in 2024 that the military should be recruiting “alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds”.
At his confirmation hearing, Cao described an aircraft carrier as “99,000 tons of American diplomacy” but noted that the availability of ships hovered at about 60%, which he described as “horrid” readiness.
Asked about his views on how to either use the existing fleet or to transition to a new paradigm for naval warfare, Cao said the military was living each day like it was 10 September 2001, and that the country must accelerate shipbuilding while improving technology so that it can defeat hypersonic missiles and other threats.
“We need to rethink naval warfare,” Cao said last June. “We need to be ready for what happens tomorrow.”
Cao ran twice for federal office as a Republican candidate in Virginia, falling to US representative Jennifer Wexton in a House race in Virginia’s northern suburbs in 2022, then to Senator Tim Kaine in 2024.
Cao’s comments in an interview about Monterey being taken over by “witches” and a joke about being “African American” because he lived in Africa as a child became a campaign issue. Cao expressed support for a national abortion ban as a candidate.
Cao, 55, fled Vietnam with his family when he was four. He lived in Niger as a child while his father worked for USAID. Cao enlisted in the navy in 1989 before graduating from the US Naval Academy and earning a commission as a special operations officer.
He served on active duty as a diver and explosive ordnance technician with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, notably leading the team that recovered the body of John F Kennedy Jr off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
Cao was section head for the budget programming division in the office of the chief of naval operations before retiring as a captain in 2021. He has a master’s degree in applied physics from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and completed fellowships at MIT and Harvard.
“I came to this country with nothing, as a refugee,” Cao said in response to a question during his confirmation hearing as undersecretary of the navy. “We grew up in Africa, actually. In 1979, when the shah of Iran was overthrown, the marines brought us into the embassy and stood watch over us in case they had to do an evacuation … I wanted to be like those heroes, so I have dedicated my entire life to serving the military.” (Bold mine.)
Cao’s son graduates this year from the US Naval Academy.
An interesting review of the Australian Oil Shortages over many decades
The short form is that W.W.II was the worst due to dependence on Asian sources (under British Empire control) and then being cut off by war. Gee, Asian sources cut off in war… rather like now when Australia depends on imported fuel from Asian refineries that in turn depend on Arabian Gulf oil…
During the 1970s Arab Oil Embargo Australia had rationing, but due to domestic “work actions” (strikes) by oil workers. The country was nearly self sufficient in oil and oil products then.
Fast forward to now: All the “lessons learned” have been discarded, all but 2 refineries closed in favor of Asian ones (and one of those two just had a major fire…), and the crude oil supply is disrupted by a war.
“Those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it.”
Stockpile Food To Prepare For Worst Food Crisis | China Cuts Fertiliser, Farmers Abandon Paddocks
12:20
Australia’s Fuel Supply Is More Fragile Than Anyone Realises (This Is How Rationing Starts)
9:58
In Conclusion
It didn’t have to be this way. Australia could have kept its oil refineries, continued to develop oil fields and production, and built a nitrogen fertilizer plant. They did not. They chose in stead to save a couple of pennies on the $A for Urea and other nitrogen fertilizers, and similarly for oil products.
Literally “penny wise and pound foolish”.
FWIW, he says “you will not see it today”… yet we are seeing it today. So when the really hard bit hits, expect it to be a lot worse.
We are at the start of a Cascade Failure. Shortly it will be impossible to prevent the cascade.
Today I did a Walmart run (for things I’d not already prepped, like laundry detergent, fresh fruit, condiments, and another round of paper goods)…
SLOW GUY here. I continue, to not see food or daily essentials shortages in the USA. Come 1 May, if Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Slow guy will likely bump up stocks. Previously planned, picking up a pig, from the processor next week. Plenty of beef in the freezer. It’s the stuff on supermarket middle aisles, I’ll bulk on again. Stuff has long shelf life. So no big deal there. No spoilage. It’ll get used, Nothing tossed.
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Image AI. From American Thinker
“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” Arnold Toynbee.
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“Meme them until they cry, then make memes about them crying” – Don Tzu…
…
Never, Ever Forget…What they did to us during Covidiot, the Poisonous Jabs.
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. Every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…
In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.
Pass SAVE America Act
Trash Filibuster
Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
Trash Blue Slips
Confirm Trump Nominations.
Codify Trump Executive Orders.
Ban Sharia Law.
Speaking of embracing…THIS.
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. — John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815 (Bold mine.)
By 1760, great, wind-driven ships traversed the world’s oceans. The Age of Sail, which began in the 15th century, and its companion, the Age of Discovery, had transformed the world through trade. Before 1600, in every developed society across the world, a tiny minority of royalty and their associates were wealthy, while all about them, the vast majority lived in subsistence-level poverty. That changed only with the advent of world trade, mercantilism, and capitalism, which together lifted the majority out of poverty and created a middle class.
(Slow Guy. Coincidence, I’m sure. GDP per capita in England, Shot Up, about 1913.)
By 1760, about 1.5 million people lived in the North American colonies, and the population growth rate was set to double in 20 years. The colonies had benefited from nearly 150 years of the British government’s “benign neglect.” As the Privy Council told South Carolina’s new governor in 1722, that policy was intended to make colonial governments as “Easy and Mild as possible to invite people to Settle under it.”
By 1760, a prosperous middle class had developed in the colonies. It was a society unburdened by Europe’s ultra-wealthy, permanent noble class. When Lord Wortley Montague died in London in 1761, his estate was worth over £1.3 million. When the wealthiest merchant in Boston, Thomas Hancock (John’s uncle), died near the same time, his estate was valued at only £70,000.
The colonies were also unburdened by Europe’s permanently impoverished underclass, for they had great economic mobility and opportunity. As one British visitor, Nicholas Cresswell, wrote in contrasting the colonies with Europe, “here there are no fears [of poverty] and with the least spark of industry, a man may support a family…”
In 1760, religious issues were of central concern, although the nature of the battle had changed.
For a thousand years, Islamic wars of conquest had demanded Europe’s energy. By 1760, the Muslim attacks against Europe had ended. Barbary pirates, who enslaved some 1.25 million Europeans, including American colonists, were still a problem (indeed, two of America’s first wars, the First (1801-1805) and Second (1815) Barbary Wars, were against the pirates), but they were not what led to America’s Revolution.
What mattered in the colonies were Christian schisms. Christianity had always been the indispensable beating heart of Western civilization, but the Reformation of 1517 splintered the universal Catholic Church, leading to numerous Protestant sects. Europe was riven by internecine religious wars and religious persecution, pitting Christian against Christian.
For two centuries, Protestant minorities in Europe were persecuted. This was as true for the Huguenot Protestants in Catholic France as it was for the Puritans and all others who dissented from the state religion of England, Anglicanism. Many European and British Protestants fled to the North American colonies.
In the mid-17th century, Great Britain was in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. It had been convulsed by a bloody civil war pitting Protestant sects against Anglicans (the British version of Catholicism) and against Catholics. In Scotland, the Jacobite rebellions saw the Scots fight for Europe’s Catholic monarchs and against the Protestant English.
Other than the Jacobite rebellions, these conflicts were all about the ancient “rights of Englishmen,” which are detailed here. These rights, which began with the Magna Carta and included no taxation without representation and the right to due process of law, were mostly spelled out in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, to which the monarch agreed after England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688.
By 1760, roughly 80% of colonists in North America were members of persecuted Protestant sects, including Congregationalists (Puritans), Baptists, Quakers, Scots Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and German Lutherans. By 1760, English Anglicans made up only about 15% of the colonial population. Jews were about 1% of the colonial population, as were Catholics, despite their religion being proscribed in all but Maryland’s colony.
In 1760, there was bad blood between Massachusetts’ mostly Congregationalist population and the royally appointed Anglican government. Already a decade earlier, the Congregationalist minister Rev. Jonathan Mayhew had given a sermon justifying the prior century’s English Civil War, when Puritans beheaded the Anglican king.
The (mostly Protestant) British colonists in North America during this time of civil strife had the words ‘British liberty’ on their lips. They knew their history well and were immensely proud to be British. They knew the Magna Carta and were proud to live in a land where they could speak freely and, in theory at least, be free from tyrannical government.
When Patrick Henry, in 1765, wrote in the Virginia Resolves that the colonists had all the Liberties and Privileges of Englishmen, including the right to be taxed only by their democratically elected governing body, he was not innovating. He was treading a path already blazed in England for half a millennium.
Finally, to this mix of economic and traditional liberty, the year 1760 added one more thing: the Enlightenment. It was a period of rationalism and reason—a search for objective truth in all aspects of life. It would lead to great advances in science, economics, and political theory. Societally, it would lead to the First Great Awakening, a religious revolution in the American colonies and the UK. That, in turn, would lead to the abolitionist movement. For the first time in human history, people argued that slavery was morally wrong. By 1760, Quakers formed the colonies’ first abolitionist society had formed among the Quakers. Ben Franklin eventually became its President.
In the UK, with its long history of both individual rights and Christianity, the Enlightenment led to classical liberalism. As John Locke wrote in his 2nd Treatise of Government, God gave man the right to life, liberty, and property. No man could give away those rights, nor could a government infringe upon them except for war and law enforcement. Other rights, such as freedom of speech and the right to democratically elect a representative of one’s choice, were derived from and were necessary to enjoy these God-given rights. (Bold mine.)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.(Bold mine.)
Those words came from numerous inspirations, not least John Locke.
But even as the new United States was busy creating a constitutional framework for this new, classically liberal nation, the Enlightenment was reaching a different, bloody conclusion in France. In the crucible of the French Revolution, all of the modern ills of Western civilization were being born:
socialism,
the police state,
state terrorism,
state-sponsored atheism, and a
war on Christianity
as a first step to destroying Western Civilization, then
for socialists to rule over the ruins.
^^^ Bold and format mine.
All of history since 1792 has been a competition to see whether the French or the American Revolution will win in the West. Let us hope, on this, the 250th year of our nation’s birth, that it is the latter.
(Slow Guy. Much of the above I knew. Serious dot connecting, having read this article.)
Justice Thomas buries progressivism, in speech at Austin University.
YT.
Drawing on his extensive tenure as a jurist, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a moving address at The University of Texas at Austin on the continued relevance of the Declaration of Independence. Describing the Declaration as the foundation of American government, Justice Thomas emphasized the need to valiantly safeguard its principles. Doing so, he detailed the threats to the Declaration’s principles, arguing that progressivist philosophies from the early 20th century to today seek to disregard the principles espoused there and eliminate natural rights in the process. Justice Thomas also shared the ways in which pivotal seasons in his own life—from his Georgia upbringing to his Catholic high school education—shaped him both as a jurist and as a citizen.
59:41. Perhaps play above video in background.
OR Coffee & Covid reported on Justice Thomas’ speech as well.
On Wednesday, Justice Thomas, age 77 and apparently immune to biographers, marched into the University of Austin and declared independence from the administrative state on its behalf. ABC reported, “Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas blasts progressivism as threat to America.” Blasts is accurate. But bazooka’d might be the mot juste. He called progressivism “an existential threat” to America, compared it to totalitarianism and slaveholding, and explicitly called for resistance comparable to the original American Revolution. Fix bayonets! It was a declaration of war.
Thomas, 77, delivered his incendiary remarks at the University of Austin Law School’s special 250th anniversary event on Wednesday. They were broadcast live on CSPAN to the entire world.
“As we meet today, it is unclear whether our Constitutional principles will endure,” the Justice began, warming to his theme. “At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream … called progressivism.” It must be rooted out. “Progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life,” he said. “It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”
In a single sentence, he ripped progressivism and the most annoying bumper sticker ever made.
He described the tentacled ideology as a European concept, a foreign import, landed on our shores by President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). “Progressivism was not native to America. President Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired” so that we could “catch up with the more ‘advanced and sophisticated’ people of Europe.”
Progressivism flips the board on the Founders’ original intent. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government,” Thomas explained. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government,” and “requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with the Constitution.”
He called progressivism a murderous ideology. “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based,” he said. “Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.”
Residents of several neighboring states could hear the collective gasp from the faculty lounge at Harvard. It was the Supreme Court equivalent of dropping a live badger into a crowded elevator at a Democratic Socialists convention. He continued, going further, correctly noting that U.S. progressives embraced eugenics, racial segregation, forced sterilization, fascism (national socialism), and the grotesque notion that oats and nuts can somehow be “ethically milked” —whatever that is— if you squeeze them hard enough.
Thomas traced the murderous movement straight to elitist arrogance and scorn for ordinary American values. “President Wilson described the American people as ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn’ and ‘foolish,’” he continued. (Though, to be fair, if you’ve ever driven on I-95 in South Florida, you’ll admit Wilson at least had a talking point.) Worse, the justice explained, “Wilson lamented that we do too much by vote and too little by expert rule.”
“Progressivism,” Thomas declared, “is retrogressive.”
He spoke carefully, as one of the nation’s top legal minds would. But it was nothing less than a call for revolution. “In my view,” he dramatically concluded, “we must find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration had, so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs.”
Then came the call to action: “It’s our country. It’s governed by our consent. Let us act like that and take ownership of it.” Stab them in the face. (After a fair trial, of course.)
🔥 In Austin, Justice Thomas stopped treating progressivism as a mere policy preference and openly described it as a rival regime. Progressivism is a wacky, spike-helmeted Bismarckian project that “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government.”
It denies that rights are God‑given, and insists they flow from an all‑powerful administrative state. Because progressivism is “opposed to those principles,” Thomas explained, “it is not possible for the two to coexist forever,” a line that sounds less like standard conservative rhetoric and more like a formal declaration of war, easily comparable to the most inflammatory language found in the Declaration of Independence itself. (Democrats treat the Declaration of Independence the same way you treat a smoke alarm— by removing the battery to make it stop beeping.)
🔥 Critics on the academic left understood what Thomas was really up to. Progressive historian Tad Stoermer argued that the justice “is not doing what his critics will say he is doing,” meaning just a generic MAGA broadside, but “something considerably more precise, and considerably more dangerous.” In Stoermer’s view, Thomas is trying to reclaim the “sacred ground” of the Declaration for conservatives while banishing progressivism into the “profane” category— beyond the Pale of America’s civic religion altogether.
Stoermer wasn’t wrong.
Democrats furiously attacked the messenger —Thomas’s motives, his ethics, and his “extremism”— but gingerly avoided his central premise: that progressivism rejects the Declaration’s God‑given natural rights and aims to replace them. In short, they’re not saying he’s wrong. It’s like if the doctor tells you that you have a tapeworm occupying your small intestine, and you respond by criticizing the doctor’s leprechaun tie. You still have the tapeworm, but at least you didn’t have to talk about it anymore.
Their ad hominem reaction all but conceded the justice’s point. On cable news and in friendly write‑ups, Democrats denounced Thomas for “blasting” progressivism, accused him of endangering democracy, and recycled the usual ethics grievances— but none of them would touch his underlying claim that modern progressivism treats rights as government favors rather than gifts from God.
For instance, they didn’t argue that the Declaration’s language about being “endowed by their Creator” is wrong, or even that it’s compatible with Wilson’s idea of rights doled out by administrators; they just changed the subject. Their studied silence on the first principles is a kind of quiet confirmation that Thomas correctly identified the fault line— and Democrats decided not to fight him on that unfavorable ground.
Thomas essentially told them their political religion is a cheap German knockoff that leads to tyranny, and they responded by accusing him of using the salad fork to eat the crusted venison. Plus, he came in the wrong RV.
All that is well and good. But here’s the thing. Justice Thomas is not exactly a wallflower. When he speaks, he says exactly what he thinks, and always has. But he’s never gone this far before. He’s never declared war on progressivism as an “existential threat,” and declared, with all the majesty and force of his high office and at the peak of his rhetorical skill, that only one form of government can ultimately survive.
Does this new boldness mirror something happening behind the scenes in SCOTUS’s private chambers? Was it intended to frame a pending decision that could cause a political earthquake, like birthright citizenship, perhaps? Is this post-pandemic expert fatigue, and now even Supreme Court justices feel free to say out loud that the ideology of expertise itself is perverse and incompatible with popular self‑government?
Or does Thomas’s 9-minute manifesto mark a brand-new cultural inflection point?
We know one thing for sure: the conservative counter‑revolution has been winning. It gained ground during the excesses of the Biden administration and the pandemic, when the right fought a mostly defensive war against mandates, censorship, and rule-by-bureaucracy. It shifted into offensive gear after Trump’s re‑election, scoring visible victories against DEI, trans‑ideology, open borders, and a long string of similar cultural outposts.
And now, with Justice Thomas standing up in Austin to boldly announce that progressivism “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration, and hence our form of government” and “cannot coexist forever” with it, the counter‑revolution looks remarkably like an army that has seized the high ground and is preparing to march onto the final battlefield.
We only need to get Justice Thomas a helmet with a spike on top, and then we’ll be fully prepared for the final boss battle— progressivism itself.
Ease up on the scroll wheels. Or not. 🙂
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Perfect time, for America to sever the chains. STOP propping up allies, friends…freeloading mooches. After their sucking up on America’s treasure, for decades.
Image AI. From American Thinker
“Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” Arnold Toynbee.
We, can NOT allow America to go the way of Europe and England. Down the…
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“Meme them until they cry, then make memes about them crying” – Don Tzu…
—
Never, Ever Forget…What they did to us during Covidiot, the Poisonous Jabs.
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights.
AI stuff posted, requires a link. Skip spoilers, please.
Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
America, needs to embrace the following TRUTH…
In No Particular Order, The House AND Senate MUST.
Impeach Activist Judges & Fire Activist Magistrates.
Pass SAVE Act
Pass, Ban Sanctuary States and Cities
Trash Filibuster
Trash Blue Slips
Confirm Trump Nominations.
Codify Trump Executive Orders.
Ban Sharia Law.
Speaking of embracing…THIS.
If nothing follows KK below, Night Crew, you are on your own.
Prices pulled last evening. Gold $4,764.80. Silver $76.60. Bitcoin $72,878.
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Road To Liberty. (A series)
Seems Road To Liberty, videos no longer posting on a regular basis. 🙁
A tangent of sorts…
Freedom 250 Presents: The Launch of Freedom Trucks
Freedom 250 Presents: The Launch of Freedom Trucks
1:04.
A fleet of six Mobile Museums, known as “Freedom Trucks,” are traveling throughout 2026, bringing the story of American independence to students, families, and citizens in every corner of our country. With interactive and inspiring content for visitors of all ages, the exhibit tells the harrowing story of how 13 colonies declared independence, defeated the greatest empire in the world, and secured American sovereignty 250 years ago. With engaging elements such as, “Are you a loyalist or patriot” quiz, a kiosk to sign your name digitally to the Declaration, and a wall of 50 American heroes, these exhibits celebrate the remarkable achievements that 250 years have made possible.
Freedom Truck Mobile Museums were created in partnership with PragerU and Hillsdale College and made possible by The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Freedom Trucks schedule, through October at the link below.
Net Zero AND Green New Scam weenies are always worth a laugh, taunt, sarcasm…
Not a big issue today in America, but, if the Straits of Hormuz remain closed, it Will Be A BFD. Less so in America, but it will effect us. America, heavily dependent on imports. Including food. Though I do NOT have any idea the degree, food sectors. We may learn. Worth monitoring in the short term, for now. Adjust, IF necessary.
Dear Climate Crazies, Doom Goblins, and Gang Green- You are now living 20% of your dream…
In an odd turn, I find myself thinking that leaving the Strait of Hormuz closed might be the best thing we could do for the world. It is just 20% of the Oil & Gas only (NOT the coal or nuclear power) taken off line. Given that the “goal” of the Climate Crazies is 100% net zero by 2030 (last time I looked), we have simply moved 1 year closer to that goal, and will need to do the same every year… ’27, ’28, ’29, ’30 & ‘success’… so WHY bother to reopen it? It will just set the world back a full year on their “progress” to their “goal”…
Embrace the pain. Live with the economic collapse, the $10 / gallon gasoline & Diesel fuel. The hunger from food system collapse and the lack of damn near everything as shipping and international trade shudders to a halt. That IS what will come anyway, as long as the goals do not change.
So think of this as a small 20% “taster” of stopping oil & gas. Realize that more power comes from Coal, and that isn’t done yet (so really this is about a 10% “hit” of the total).
So where are we? Survival Lilly gives a short summary of Europe and a bit more.
Germany gets the Draft, again, and continues economic collapse with destruction of energy supplies, making Lake Coal:
12:37 (Slow Guy. Perhaps worth a listen. Nothing new, by me.)
And a broader look at European distress… The ships that were already in transit with LNG & oil have arrived, and only now is the actual shortage of physical supply manifesting. So what’s happening and planned “going forward”? “Doom, despair, and agony… ” as the song goes:
10:02 (^^^ Slow Guy. Worth a glance…maybe…)
I’m in the USA, so this mostly has no effect on me. Gas is up about $1 to $1.50 compared to Trump’s best and still lower than Biden’s disaster. Stores are still fully stocked. I expect no significant worsening for things here. BUT even with the USA oil & LNG “lifeline” to Europe, they are toast. Just not possible to refill the natural gas storage in time for winter without M.E. LNG. (or Russian gas… that will now go to China instead). Were I living in Europe, I’d be moving out.
Oh, and California is going to implode badly too, as they are shutting oil refineries and depending on tankers to deliver oil from Russia & the Middle East after refining in Asia… who have announced they are halting exports.
How bad will it be in Asia? Remembering that we get most manufactured goods, materials & products from them now. China got hacked, China NOT backing a UN Security Counsel move to open the Strait. Continuing decline of Real Estate and exports…
12:55 (Slow Guy. Some interesting stuff I had not heard. Worthy. )
And France taking a dive too, along with China:
8:47 (Slow Guy. Worthy listen. Big picture matters. Mid and long term implications of the Straits of Hormuz closed.)
North Sea oil for immediate delivery near $147 / bbl…
Then a bit more on food, from a paranoid POV:
12:30 (Slow Guy. Much of this chatter IS similar to discussions we had when Ukraine Russia war started AND droned on. <<< Russian fertilizer was largely rerouted to end buyers / users. Prices went up. Never the crisis thought it might become.
The Straits of Hormuz closed long term is HUGE. Oil, obviously. Damage to ME fertilizer industry…impacting the global community.
Capitalists have a way of figuring stuff out. Making money, is quite an incentive.
Worthy listen.)
UPDATE:
Philippines declares fuel emergency (almost all comes from M.E.) & Japan hit too:
7:31. (Slow Guy. Philippines imports 98% of it oil from ME. Nothing surprising.)
In Conclusion
So why not take the hit now. Let the world see, feel, live the dream, have the full experience of just 20% of the Green Dream. Perhaps a few “leaders” and “decision makers” would be able to see just how bad it is, and how much worse it would be to actually go to zero.
These folks have ZERO ability to see what is coming, so let it hit them full in the face. That seems to be the only time the see anything and (potentially) can learn how stupid their decisions have been.
I know, easy for me to say since I’m in a “Safe Place” and won’t have much bad to deal with. But consider the alternative. We let the Crazies continue on their destruction of global energy supplies, rocketing the global economy into full collapse and that inevitably leading to Global War (hungry cold people usually do that).
Pain early and hopefully lighter with learning. or Pain more and worse later after it is too late to change.
