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Jeff points out the major failure feature of the Fake News.
…Editors should have: separated real evidence from allegations, resisted parroting the framing of biased sources, brought in neutral independent forensic and archaeological voices, and updated headlines as the picture changed. In other words, basic journalism vanished like the alleged mass graves.
It was a complete failure of what is supposedly the media’s most important function: to separate interested gossip from facts. Maybe I should say, that used to be media’s most important function. Now, corporate media’s most important function appears to be distributing clever propaganda that destabilizes countries, spurs stochastic terrorism, and permits politicians to effect massive wealth transfers…
…Government researchers enrolled extremely vulnerable infants in an experimental RSV trial, did not obtain informed consent, continued dosing even as severe cases emerged, and two children died. Nobody was prosecuted or even fired. This is serious iatrogenic harm (injury caused by medical treatment) and a research‑ethics failure on its face, full stop.
The Times did its absolute best to cloak that very disturbing and all-too-familiar story in race. The two boys were black. “Most, if not all,” of the 31 kids in the trial group were black. Thus, the Times concluded: racism. What the Times didn’t say was that by the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Washington, D.C. had become a majority‑black city; black residents were the single largest racial group, and by 1970 had peaked at about 71% of the entire population.
That’s one problem for the Times’ unfounded racial hypothesis. Second, the NIH’s RSV trial was deployed through government-run or funded clinics. Both because blacks were in the majority in DC, and because of basic economics, most patients at these public clinics were also black. So we needn’t dream up some conspiratorial racial animus to explain the trial’s demographics.
Black folks were just unlucky enough to be living in DC in large numbers at the time. That’s it.
So, once again, the NYT’s dumb, woke narrative collapses with the most trivial inspection. But more interesting is why the Times leaned so hard into the race angle, despite having not a scrap of evidence. It’s because the last thing the big health agencies need right now is more scandals.
This is exactly the institutional reform RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya were hired to deliver.
🔥 At some point during the Cold War, our big health agencies contracted a deadly disease. They are infected with a mind-virus called utilitarianism. The scandal here is not that the NIH gave experimental RSV shots to black infants without informing their black parents. The real scandal is that the NIH believes you can’t make a public health omelet without breaking a few babies.
In other words, the NIH’s secret trials of experimental vaccines would not have been more acceptable if the babies had been white, orange, or green.
Classic ethical philosophy based on Judeo-Christian principles says: “You may not use people purely as a means, not even for a huge benefit to others.” Utilitarianism rudely inverts that: if the benefit is big enough, and the expected risk is small enough, almost any use of human bodies as means can be rationalized.
At some point in the recent past, our public health agencies quietly slid from “we are here to protect people” to “we are managing a herd, sorry, a population,” and those are not the same posture. In other words, instead of thinking of themselves as healers, they think they are ranchers.
The Lot 100 episode illustrates this problem perfectly. Severe harms and even deaths of infants were tolerated by elite managers because the perceived collective value of “staying the course” was so high. Even fudging the numbers to hide the harms was considered virtuous.
Stalin’s stats were great too, until they weren’t.
In classic public‑health utilitarian fashion, the stated good was enormous —preventing a leading cause of infant mortality worldwide— so the “cost” of experimenting on a few dozen vulnerable infants in D.C. could be rationalized as small in comparison.
The reason progressives and public health types (but I repeat myself) stick like limpets to utilitarianism is that it is technocratic. The philosophy —which is a necessary foundation for communism— presumes it is possible to quantify, in hard numbers, the numeric value of human lives and flourishing. That makes it possible to compare political policies: which ones produce on balance the most human flourishing?
It is both sensationally attractive and completely perverted…
In the Lot 100 case, we find scientists who explicitly or implicitly calculated that infants were less valuable than adults, and that poor folks were less valuable than more economically privileged ones. After all, the NIH investigators recruited from public children’s clinics, not from the private practices their own children or colleagues might have used.
Put even more simply and uglier: the NIH bureaucrats didn’t experiment on their own kids.
🔥 I will say it: utilitarianism is an evil, reprehensible ideology that all good people should root out and shun.
Utilitarianism isn’t a neutral “science of compassion.” It’s a license for elites to convert other people’s lives into numbers and then quietly decide which ones are expendable. Once you agree that it’s acceptable to harm a few innocents to buy hypothetical benefits for the many, you haven’t elevated morality— you’ve simply replaced “thou shalt not” with “let’s run the model and see who dies.”
Lot 100 was not a tragic mistake; it was utilitarianism doing exactly what it promises: sacrificing powerless babies in a D.C. clinic for the supposed good of a population they never got to join. [It continues]
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the “Father” of Modern Utilitarianism and progressive saint. His preserved head, anyway.
What is interesting is I had already put the following together about the philosophies of ‘value’ because I like Mises and Gary North. Gary passed away in February of 2022, at the age of 80 due to complications from prostate cancer.
…He was by training an economic historian and had a strong commitment to Austrian economics. He greatly admired Mises and Rothbard. He once asked Mises how he had been able to publish his famous article of 1920 on socialist calculation in a journal edited by Max Weber. Mises answered, “Well, I knew him, and I sent it in.” Gary wrote a notable study of Marx, Marx’s Religion of Revolution, and a long and learned commentary on biblical economics. He was also a founder of the Christian Reconstruction movement, along with his father-in-law, R.J. Rushdoony.
He was on Ron Paul’s staff in 1976, and he and Dr. Paul were close friends. For many years, he spoke at Mises Institute conferences, and he was the best debater I have ever heard. In his speaking style, he was highly organized and relentless; but he was in conversation kind and friendly. When I saw him at conferences, we would exchange stories of the old days. Now, alas, I cannot do that anymore.
Gary’s Mises on Money is well worth the read. I featured it in an article called APRIMERONMONEY. The following article by Gary is another excellent read as he identifies the problems that are metastasizing in American thought.
The philosophical bases of Marx’s thought were laid early and remained unchanged throughout his life. As a student, Marx accepted the philosophy of Hegel as the only sound and adequate explanation of the universe. According to this philosophy, “the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement.” The one universal phenomenon is change, and the only universal form of this phenomenon is its complete abstraction. Thus, Hegel accepted as real only that which existed in the mind. Objective phenomena and events were of no consequence; only the conceptions of them possessed by human minds were real. Ideas, not objects, were the stuff of which the universe was made.
If Objective Reality does not exist, than a little girl can become a boy or a cat or a dog. The people pushing this insanity are not going to tell you that it is based on Marxism but that is where it comes from.
Old timers will recall this title as a memorable line in a memorable comedy album, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume 1….
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO “PROPERTY”?
The phrase, “life, liberty, and property,” does not appear in the Declaration. The phrase is incorrectly attributed to John Locke. It was implied in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1690), but it does not appear. Locke used the word estate rather than property. He subsumed all three words under property.
Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of Nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it (Sect. 87).
Protection of all three — life, liberty, property — is guaranteed in writing by the United States Constitution. This guarantee appears in Article 5 of the Bill of Rights, which was ratified in 1791. It has proven as reliable as other government guarantees of its own performance.
A similar phrase appears in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke wrote this of the revolutionaries:
To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life.
But there is no question that Jefferson substituted “the pursuit of happiness” for the more common term, “property.” Was there something ideological in this substitution? Was Jefferson a proto-socialist, as numerous contemporary historians argue?
Had he inserted “property,” this would have saved defenders of private property a lot of time and trouble when dealing with statist scholars, who are always searching for support for their position in the writings of famous defenders of democracy.
The pursuit of happiness is for modern academic man what the pursuit of truth is: a way to avoid the responsibility for discovering anything final. There is no objective truth for modern academic man, other than the truth against objective truth. Similarly, there is no objective happiness. There is only the subjective pursuit of such lofty goals by individuals. In this, as in virtually everything else, academics substitute process for objectivity. Defending the process is holy communion for modern academics. There is officially no holy grail, which would be much too objective.
Why this commitment to pursuit, trivial or otherwise? I suggest two reasons. First, academics do not officially believe in objective truth, which implies objective responsibility, which is decidedly old fashioned and even vaguely suggestive of the Christian doctrine of final judgment. The concept of objective responsibility implies objective standards and objective performance. Academics prefer to avoid both.
Second, modern academics control access to salaried participation in the process of the great search, especially in higher education. They control the implementation of the officially objective standards of tenure, institutional accreditation, and the flow of departmental funds. What Daniel Klein has described so well in the closed, self-certified world of Ph.D. economists operates in every academic discipline.
In contrast, “property” implies enforceable titles to identifiable units of ownership. This is altogether too objective for modern defenders of the political defense of the pursuit of happiness. They defend the democratic process, which affirms, “Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.” They want to believe in Jefferson the democrat, not Jefferson the defender of free market capitalism. They want to eradicate political restrictions on the confiscation of property by the State. The suggestion that politics exists so as to defend private property is only marginally less welcome than the suggestion that the Second Amendment to the Constitution actually means that civilians possess the right to keep and bear arms.
JEFFERSON WAS NOT ALONE
It was not only Jefferson who neglected to spell out in official detail his personal adherence to the private property social order. It was also Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations (1776), four months earlier, had placed the division of labor at the forefront of its economic attack on mercantilism, an attack that Jefferson made political in the Declaration. Smith’s pedagogical strategy backfired for the next 150 years. By failing to specify in Wealth of Nations the moral and philosophical foundations for private ownership, Smith handed the seemingly high moral ground over to Godwin and the socialists. The consequences of this decision have been chronicled in considerable detail by Tom Bethell in Chapter 7 of his book, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages (1998).
Jefferson was the supreme follower of Adam Smith among the American Revolutionaries. But by failing to specify property as the third pillar of the justification for civil government — a mistake Locke had not made — he made more difficult his ideological heirs’ defense of the private property order.
The pursuit of happiness is open-ended and non-specific. Liberty is just too vague to be defended systematically. What was needed in 1776 in both of those legendary documents was the insight made by Frederic Bastiat in 1850, in the midst of a European revolution that had begun in early 1848, a few weeks before Marx and Engels’ anonymous tract appeared, Manifesto of the Communist Party. Bastiat wrote in The Law, “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” Or, in the words of a previous defender of objective private property, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:16b-17)
Gary North Mentions Bastiat. Here is part of an article about Bastiat and his philosophy.
Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was one of the leading advocates of free markets and free trade in the mid-19 century. He was inspired by the activities of Richard Cobden and the organization of the Anti-Corn Law League in Britain in the 1840s and tried to mimic their success in France. Bastiat was an elected member of various French political bodies and opposed both protection and the rise of socialist ideas in these forums. His writings for a broader audience were very popular and were quickly translated and republished in the U.S. and throughout Europe. His incomplete magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, is full of insights into the operation of the market and is still of great interest to economists. He died at a young age from cancer of the throat.
LAW, Spoliation by
LAW, Spoliation by. What is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right of legitimate defense. Every man certainly has received from nature, from God, the right to defend his person, his liberty and his property, since these are the three constitutive or conservative elements of life, elements which complement one another, and which can not be understood, one without the other. For what are our faculties but an extension of our personality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every man has the right to defend, even by force, his person, his liberty and his property, a number of men have the right to concert together, to agree and to organize a common force in order to provide regularly for this defense. The collective right has its principle, and its reason of being, and bases its legitimacy upon the individual right, and the common force can not legitimately have any other end or any other mission than the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as an individual can not legitimately make any forcible attempt against the person, liberty or property of another individual, so, for the same reason, a community can not legitimately make use of force to destroy the person, liberty or property of individuals or of classes. For this perversion of force would be, in the latter case, as well as in the former, in contradiction to our premises.
Which brings us to capitalism which TradeBait2 discussed yesterday. This is looking at Capitalism from the point of view of an Atheist. For those who may not know Ayn Rand grew up in the Soviet Union.
Laissez-faire capitalism, according to Ayn Rand, is not just an ideal but an unknown ideal. Few grasp its meaning, history, economics, or moral justification. In Capitalism, Rand sets out to remedy that.
Rand argues that capitalism is “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.” In practice, this means that a capitalist society is one in which the government performs a single function: it protects individual rights by banning “physical force from human relationships.”
Pure capitalism, she concludes, has never existed: but in the countries that approached it, with America in the second half of the nineteenth century leading the way, the individual was able to flourish. This is because capitalism is the only system that fully recognizes that man is the rational being who “has the right to exist for his own sake,” free from coercion by others.
There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose — claiming that the good is good in, by, and of itself.
The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an “emotional commitment.”
There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose — claiming that the good is good in, by, and of itself.
The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an “emotional commitment.”
The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.
The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man — and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man. Fundamental to an objective theory of values is the question: Of value to whom and for what? An objective theory does not permit context-dropping or “concept-stealing”; it does not permit the separation of “value” from “purpose,” of the good from beneficiaries, and of man’s actions from reason.
GOOGLE AI: Ayn Rand intrinsic value
Value Requires a Valuer and a Purpose
Rand asked the fundamental question: Of value to whom and for what? [1]
Because she rejected intrinsic value, she maintained that an object cannot have value without someone to value it.
For a thing to have value, it must play a specific causal role in achieving a goal for an individual. [1, 2, 3]
The Ultimate Standard of Value
Rand argued that the concept of “value” only makes sense because living organisms face the alternative of life or death. Therefore, the ultimate standard of value is an individual’s own life. An object or action is considered “good” or “valuable” if it serves to sustain and further that specific individual’s life. [1, 2, 3]
Explore the Intrinsic Theory of Values in the Ayn Rand Lexicon to read her exact definitions and arguments. [1]
With the support of the Democratic Socialists, his prediction is coming true.
Also, I remember him beating his shoe on the desk in the UN saying,”We will bury you”….
A reminder of Khrushchev comments September 29, 1959: THIS WAS Russian Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev’s ENTIRE QUOTE from that day:
“Your children’s children will live under communism, You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright; but we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We will not have to fight you; We will so weaken your economy, until you will fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
Do you remember or know all of what Russia’s Khrushchev said in 1959?
How do you create a Socialist State?
There are 8 levels of control; read the following recipe:
1) Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people.
2) Poverty – Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them.
3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect (food, housing, income) of their lives because that will make them fully dependent on the government.
6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to and take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion – Remove the belief in God from the Government and schools because the people need to believe in ONLY the government knowing what is best for the people.
8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. Eliminate the middle class This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor.
Fast forward to 2021.
Is this parallel to the Democrat Socialist Agenda????
With an open mind, you can draw your own conclusions.
One last historical fact that needs to be remembered: In 1964, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Democrats held the longest filibuster in our nation’s history, 75 days. All trying to prevent the passage of one piece of legislation. You guessed it: THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT.
Amazing how the CIA reading room hides all of this:
As a Christian citizen of America, I am a devout supporter American capitalism. Below you will learn why I feel that way. Feel free to post your own opinions and thoughts.
American Capitalism
American exceptionalism prevails in most endeavors. One of the chief ways is through our adherence to capitalistic principles. The definition of capitalism per Wiki states:
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit.
They go on to explain it is a socioeconomic system that developed historically in several stages.
Investopedia defines it as,
Capitalism is an economic system where private individuals or businesses own capital goods, and the free market controls the production of goods and services.
Merriam-Webster,
An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
I tend to agree with them. The definitions complement each other.
With #47 restoring our economic engine that is being driven primarily by energy, manufacturing, tech and agriculture; it took less than a year to become the “hottest country” after decades of languishing in the consumer driven service sector world of retail, restaurants and lodging facilities. Meanwhile Chyna had ascended on the worldwide stage while buying our uniparty politicians.
This gave enemies of capitalism the opening they needed. They love to point to the excesses and abuses while ignoring the far worse excesses and abuses of the other systems they support. Those detractors will never support America because there has never been a more powerful, successful economy in world history. It is interesting that we find many of the detractors in the halls of formerly trusted academia. Hence, PDT hammering their own misdeeds with the legal tools made available to him by the law.
When one considers our relatively short life as a nation, our economic performance during periods when we got serious about it is nothing short of astounding. In the current period, over $18 Trillion Dollars in capital investments invested into our nation is the tale of the tape.
That is a big deal.
The economic needs of mankind have historically been served best when participants are incentivized to perform at their highest levels. In no other economic system does that occur more successfully than in capitalism. The economic performance, innovation, and quality of life in our country are unmatched anywhere when we remain true to the principles of it and our founding documents. So it seems we only need to check and see what The Author of The Book has to say about it to defend against all other challenges.
Next, we should focus on applicable scripture. Credit to biblehub.com as well for their take on the issue. NASB is used for scripture clarity.
Godly Direction
Genesis 1:28 – God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis 2:15 – Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and tend it.
Proverbs 10:4 – Poor is one who works with a lazy hand, But the hand of the diligent makes rich.
The three verses above establish what God wants man to do with His creation. He first placed mankind in control of all of the earth. The assignment was huge and it would require mankind to do as commanded by God. For now, ignore the result that surfaced later in the Garden of Eden. The original assignment was to populate and subdue the planet. To do that man had to go to work. Man was then assigned to tend and cultivate the Garden. It was a direct assignment. Fast forward thousands of years later and we read another scripture in Proverbs that confirms diligent work produces riches while being lazy makes one poor. In that we also learn that some people are rich and some are poor along with everything in between. Everybody is not the same when it comes to earthly wealth.
All of which tells us it is a directive of God to work hard. Gaining wealth is an offshoot and the amount is determined by God’s will. We are to share the bounty in God’s way. There is nothing inherently wrong with gaining wealth by working hard and smart. It is a much more preferable result over being lazy or undisciplined, which are conditions opposed to God’s will.
Private Property
Note that private property exists in a temporal sense. Individuals and governments do not own everything; God does. He makes the rules.
Leviticus 25:23 – The land, moreover, shall not be sold permanently, because the land is Mine; for you are only strangers and residents with Me.
Exodus 20:15 – You shall not steal.
Matthew 25:14-30 – The Parable of the Talents. The reader is invited to review the linked scripture as it is too long to restate here.
In Israel during the time of Christ, a talent was a unit of measurement used when weighing gold or silver for use as money. A talent weighed about 75 pounds. That’s a lot of gold and great wealth.
With these verses we learn we own nothing. God owns it all. While working we are instructed not to steal another person’s property, which first implies people own rights to property that has value. We also learn people work for others who have amassed wealth, who entrust their workers to increase their assets (profits) that aligns with responsibility toward God. So, wealth multiplication from what God has provided is an expectation. When we do so we are being accountable to Him and meeting our responsibility.
As stated previously while here in this world, we hold rights to property. For example, the promise of land was a covenant God had with ancient Israel. In ancient times, there were even provisions (ex. – the year of Jubilee) for families to receive property back that had been sold or mortgaged or otherwise lost in previous years. The lesson to buyers and investors was the property should be held loosely and for the purpose of providing necessities of life, that God has the ultimate ownership. In the business world in America today there is an old expression that is still true, never fall in love with real estate. Always be prepared to sell it or lose it. Times change, values change, conflicts happen. Bankruptcy courts, divorce courts and cemeteries are filled with people who ignored this principle.
Work
Deuteronomy 8:18 – But you are to remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth, in order to confirm His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day.
Proverbs 12:11 – One who works his land will have plenty of bread, But one who pursues worthless things lacks sense.
2 Thessalonians 3:10 – For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either.
Again, gaining wealth is given as a worthy objective, just remember from whom it originates. To have, you must work. However, the degree of success you have while doing so is determined by the will of God. This is followed by the admonition that if you have the ability to work and are not willing to do so, you receive nothing. We need more pandering, power seeking politicians to take that last one to heart as they are circumventing direct orders from the Almighty. Giving away wealth to unworthy people or stealing the wealth God has permitted His people to accumulate is probably not what He wants to see done per scripture. There will repercussions for doing so.
Gaining, Sharing, Social Responsibility
Leviticus 23:22 – ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, moreover, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field nor gather the gleaning of your harvest; you are to leave them for the needy and the stranger. I am the LORD your God.’”
Deuteronomy 24:19 – When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you are not to go back to get it; it shall belong to the stranger, the orphan, and to the widow, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.
Acts 2:44-45 – And all the believers were together and had all things in common; and they would sell their property and possessions and share them with all, to the extent that anyone had need.
I Timothy 6:10 – For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
We know from many scriptures that Abraham and Job among others were very wealthy. We know that both were faithful to God and did not become greedy and selfish. We know a number of followers of Jesus also had wealth that was used to support Him in His ministry. They shared their wealth and never turned away from Him even in bad times. We learn God expects those who have food, shelter and wealth to share it where there are needs. It is a condition to receiving His continued blessing of their work. We also see that when it comes to going into the world and sharing the Gospel, we should be willing to part with our worldly possessions if needed to support and make it happen. Add in that we must never love money, that it can become the cause of much grief and sorrow. Money is a tool to be used in accordance with the will of God.
Ethics
Proverbs 20:23 – Differing weights are an abomination to the LORD, And a false scale is not good.
James 5:1-4 – Come now, you rich people, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments have become moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver have corroded, and their corrosion will serve as a testimony against you and will consume your flesh like fire. It is in the last days that you have stored up your treasure! Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of armies.
This one is simple – don’t cheat others and don’t think your wealth will save you from judgment. You screw people over and it will backfire on you bigly. Deal with others fairly or face the wrath of God.
Capitalism Is Supported
This is just a sampling. There are many more scriptures that establish personal ownership of property and working to materially increase wealth ethically and to further God’s kingdom on earth. It seems the philosophy of win-win in economic dealings prevails in the Bible. All who are able to work, should work for the common good when it comes to the interconnection of capitalism and Christianity.
Without question capitalism as an economic system has been around going back into Old Testament Biblical times. Archaeological digs and historical documents reveal fair dealing matters. They used standardized weighting systems as an example. Wealth was easy to measure and observe through possessions and status in society. Ancient manuscripts describing work, wealth and stewardship are detailed and accurate.
There are no stated prohibitions in scripture concerning a capitalistic system, only against evil and sin committed while doing it. One potential conflict is relating to usury, which is charging exorbitant interest for loans. The Old Testament prohibits charging interest, the New Testament notes its use and prohibits excessive interest charges. The difference is simply related to the evolution of economic systems over many centuries. The intent was to prevent people from taking excessive advantage over one another.
Work and rewards for doing so well were expected. There are serious admonitions against greed, abuse of workers, cheating, laziness and putting wealth before God and others. The expectation is stated to do well with what you have and been charged to do while being compassionate with others, support the work of the Lord, and always be righteous and ethical in dealings.
As a result we can conclude that capitalism as a system in America and possibly in other nations around the world typically complies with Biblical principles. Forces that work against are not compatible with America or Christianity. Capitalism was the economic system of America at its founding when our nation was defined by the founders as being under the providence of God. It has become a growing force for good throughout the world. Americans are the most giving, charitable people on the planet and it is not even close. Our nation is not without faults and errors, but correcting them is The American Way.
This understanding tells us to challenge and remove anybody or anything that stands in the way of its fruitful exercise. Pocahontas, AOC, Mamdani and Bernie can kick rocks. For us to be providentially restored we must isolate and remove the forces aligned against us by remaining faithful to God and country. Other systems and beliefs are not compatible with The Way or The American Way, which has yielded the greatest nation in world history.
The will of God be done.
Just a reminder,
Remember Wolf’s site rules. Note and label all AI. Please be kind to one another, we are all in this together. May God richly bless America and all of you.
Before all things and people – In God We Trust. Also, trust Trump and the plan.
Please consider becoming an author of a Daily Thread on The QTree. I informed Wolf sometime back that my days of doing this will be ending in mid July. I will be out of time due to other demands and commitments. I will continue to be an active member and post here. Please do not think you need to bring extensive content to help out, just things that may be of interest or are fun. It is your opportunity to create and communicate your thoughts!
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
gammacism and gammicism
nouns
gammacism
inability or hardship in pronouncing letters ‘g’ and ‘k’
a speech defect characterized by the substitution of the sound “g” for the sound “k”
stuttering over “g” and “k”
not to be confused with gammicism, although, ironically, the spellings are often switched
gammicism
speech or writing characterized by use of archaisms or outdated expressions, often in a style that is overly elaborate or pretentious
Used in a paragraph
The exercises in the case of diagnosed gammacism are aimed at improving the work of the language. Exercises involving lifting the tongue, moving it to different parts of the mouth, sticking it out, licking the teeth or tapping the lower teeth with the tip are of great importance.
Shown in a picture
Shown in a video
MUSIC!
Gamma wave jazz! It’s a thing!
And if that’s not your thing, try this song…
THE STUFF
Don’t remember what Steve taught you about gamma rays? Here you go!
And here is where that knowledge is useful – some older, younger, Veritasium!
Veritasium. Useful stuff. Although, not necessarily, while fixing stuff around the house.
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
—
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
This man, making Christmas calls from the White House, believes the world is a sphere. And he has even flown around it! So has our beautiful FLOTUS, who happens to be his wife!
Truth and common sense must be valued by us, as individuals, in order to lastingly disempower the authoritarian fake news media. This includes the perniciously smarmy science media, which never answers for its errors and lies. I believe that the media has been responsible not only for leftist pathologies like scientism, medical fascism, and radical gender ideology, but also for reactionary movements like modern flat Earth, rejection of all medicine, and Biblical geological literalism.
Just as Wheatie’s Stormwatch Monday Open Thread was created as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions, so, too, is this Thank God Thursday Open Thread, where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This thread is also to be known as Theistic Evolution Thursdays, due to the author’s expected “pontification” about his scientific, religious, and political opinions. You are welcome to pontificate back! Free speech matters!
Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.
The source of alleged truth matters, not for the truth itself, but for validation.
And yes, it’s THURSDAY…again.
And that’s it. We’re done stealing from Wheatie.
OK – maybe her rules need to be posted.
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.
If there is nothing beyond the “W” below, then this is a placeholder. For health reasons, I can’t always post a timely opinion before each Thursday, but I will try. Otherwise, you have this placeholder post, where YOU provide the content. Enjoy!
W
Perhaps the only good thing about AI slop is that it has made me more aware of human slop, which isn’t much better.
This guy’s videos are moderately interesting, but they tend to be predictable, repetitive, and low-density on the critical information.
I hope Memorial Day weekend brought enjoyment, remembrance and peace for all. We remember our fallen military heroes who gave all for every American. Their sacrifice will never be forgotten.
Providential restoration is well underway in America. Patriotism and God have reentered into the conversations of We the People in major ways without reservation. You see it in the enlistment ranks swelling and in the return to church pews. One way we also see it openly displayed is our overwhelming economic success with the return to America First principles. That includes the vanquishing of many criminal operations in the country, which is also well underway.
However, today’s daily is a lighter take on where we are as a country. We will attack the remaining items on my America First agenda in the coming weeks.
It is kind of amusing to me at least to state the following. I always can tell when the economy has turned and the average American is ignoring the fake news. Everybody is well aware why fuel prices have temporarily soared and increased the cost of the usual stuff they buy. They also know there are no shortages of fuel in America at all. So instead of hunkering down and buying into fake news media fear porn they are going about their lives, which includes having fun. How I know all will be fine is due to golf balls.
😄
Golf And Prosperity
Yeah, I know, it is the usual TradeBait BS. Bear with me, I have a point or two to make… eventually.
I love golf. I play it when the ole back lets me even as I grow more and more “elderly”. I taught the game and a good swing to Daughter, grandkids, other young people through the years. Wifey gave up trying to play, however, enjoys watching the sport with me. I have followed the PGA Tour on the tube since my youth. Being a former Middie, I grew up idolizing golfing legend Jack Nicklaus, the Golden Bear, as my sports hero. Our family could not afford the cost of playing the game much during those days, so my opportunity to play regularly had to be deferred until I became a young adult.
Over the years that followed I have played many quality courses in many states. I have played in pro-ams locally. At one time I was a member of an area golf club (not a country club) whose family that owned it had a club pro son who qualified and played in the U. S. Open and PGA Championship a couple of times as well as some events on the PGA Senior, now Champions Tour. A local retired former Senior Tour pro helped me work on the swing of Daughter as a young child. She had a natural swing as a 3 year old with great hand/eye coordination. She just needed to work on basic grip, stance, etc. stuff.
As I stated in a previous BIMD story, Daughter played in high school events that included a future tournament winning PGA Pro (now medically retired), Scott Stallings. A female teammate of Daughter’s in high school played for America in the Junior Ryder Cup. Other male teammates of hers went on to compete on area college teams.
This love for golf led to us buying our current home in a small PUD along a public golf course in our area as I semi-retired and Daughter entered community college and later joined the workforce. Over the years a few other retirees and I got together and formed an Old Farts Foursome. We played a couple times per week until the other guys hit their 80’s and their bodies said no more. All three are still able to do about anything else they want and I attribute part of it to being active in the sport all those years while being outside in the sun having fun with buddies.
I am now teaching grandsons #1 and #2 to play. When I am unavailable Daughter can teach them equally well. Daughter and I could still go to about any course in America and each shoot under 80 for 18 holes. After retirement with more free time available my personal golf handicap dropped to a 2 in my early 60’s even playing from the tips (back/championship tees). Daughter has been busy having and rearing babies in more recent times, but she can still pick up a club and rifle the ball down the fairway without a warm-up or practice. When the granddaughter gets a bit older and less dependent, Daughter and I plan to hit the links more often together as long as my health holds up.
Did I say I love golf? Yeah, pretty sure I did. A lot of people do in America. Which leads to…
Golf Balls
I have 50 years of experience hitting golf balls. I have seen the evolution of the ball over the entire time. Yes, I know the difference in a two piece solid core, three piece wound ball and balata balls of yesteryear compared to the current four and even five piece balls with various mantles inside and Surlyn or Ionomer covers. I know compressions and who should play which compression. Even dimple patterns to reduce drag and increase/decrease spin have evolved until more emphasis was placed by the rule makers to standardize. All of which has led to discussions today about more limits on golf balls since their improved performance has led to many golf courses become too easy for better players. It is easier and far less costly to rein in golf ball performance than it is to add distance and course enhancements to keep the challenges necessary for the game to be challenging. My sports idol says to address the problems through the golf ball, not through the costly golf course design changes. He knows, all of the pros and better amateur golfers know.
For example, Wyndham Clark won the CJ CUP Byron Nelson PGA tournament this past weekend at -30. That means he shot 30 strokes under par, which is 30 better than the course layout indicated it should be played by a scratch (0 handicap) golfer. That was after the course ownership commissioned changes and paid millions of dollars to the course to lengthen and make it more difficult the previous year. To some degree that happens because of the players being better trained and prepared than yesteryear. However, primarily it is because of greatly improved tech relating to equipment and especially the golf ball.
As a result of my experience and understanding I know who makes the best golf balls and why most tour pros still play Titleist Pro V-1 balls over the other quality pro level balls on the market. I like that ball, however, my favorite today is the Callaway Tour Chrome because it adapts better to individual swing speeds, especially for older golfers, while still providing exceptional performance around the greens.
But Titleist Pro V-1 balls are still the gold standard for pros and amateurs alike, partially due to their performance and consistency as well as partially due to international marketing of the brand. Amateur golfers who can not break 100 play them due to their excellent marketing and promotion. However, the same is true with other expensive, pro level golf balls made by Taylormade, Srixxon, Bridgestone, Maxfli, Callaway, etc. Why pay for and play a pro level ball when you are a mediocre to poor weekend golfer who loses them in rapid succession? I honestly do not know why some people are that dense in the head.
Which leads to why golf balls reveal the real condition of our economy in TradeBait’s mind.
Golfing And Economy
When times are tough and the economy is struggling, golfers still play the game when they can. It becomes an addiction. Hit one great golf shot in a round and you HAVE to come back another day and do it again or even hit more than one. You are chasing that dream of one day being a guy or gal who can shoot par or better for 18 holes at least once in your life. Or maybe you are chasing that dream of someday hitting a hole in one. You dream of making that one perfect swing and watching the ball flying through the air, fall to the green and roll straight into the hole. For us oldsters, a worthy goal is to shoot your age or lower. If any of those events happen it is heaven on earth for golfers!
But assume troubling economic times and the cash being in shorter supply. So you go to Wally World and buy the $10-20 a dozen specials or a bag of renewed former water balls. You may even dig out the old scuffed or found balls from other times you played. You head to the course, pay your not so cheap green fees. If they allow it, maybe you choose to walk the course instead of paying for that rental golf cart. You just need to get your fix in. What happens next is what is revealing.
Living along the fairway in very close proximity to our local course has led to our home being struck by golf balls routinely over the past couple of decades. We and many of our neighbors even had to add super screened cages to protect our windows along with a netting along our top deck to prevent from getting hit when on it. The course is public play and there are golfers who play it regularly who are beginners, duffers and rank amateurs. Some grab beer at the clubhouse and begin firing away indiscriminately. It is a price we have paid to live here and have the convenience of a low cost, decent course to play at our back door; while enjoying the peace and beautiful sunsets over the course and scenery every evening after the course closes.
These experiences have led to the following observations.
The first indicator of the state of the economy is how often our houses gets hit in golf season. More is better for the economy. It means Average Joe and Jane can afford to play. Quieter times are worrisome.
The second indicator is how many golfers use rented carts versus walkers. The more carts that are rented the better the economy. Average Joe and Jane are generally overweight and not in sports fitness shape. They want to play faster, drink more beer, and get home to that NASCAR race. They have the cash to pay the cart fees, which are not cheap. The course we live along uses gas carts, not battery carts. They are not obnoxious, but we do hear them fire up as they make their way around the course. The more we hear them, the better the economy. The less they are used the more troubled are the economic times. So a quiet golf course is not good.
The third indicator is the type balls the golfers play. When times are tough they play more recycled, scuffed up and off brand balls. They cut costs as much as they can. When times are good it is the opposite. We know by the brand and type of ball we find. The top balls are expensive, some topping $5 a ball. It is a ball that can disappear or become unusable with one bad swing of a club, yet, average Joe and Jane are willing to play and lose them in good times. Of course Average Joe does not really believe he is as bad as he is. It’s a guy thing. He gets some beer in him and thinks he can take on Tiger Woods. Maybe he can when Tiger is busy extricating himself from his latest car wreck.
The fourth indicator is the clubhouse parking lot. There are less golfers when times are bad and when they do come they do not tarry at the clubhouse. They play faster and drink less beer. The opposite happens when times are good. The parking lot is filled with vehicles more hours of every day. They hang around the clubhouse shooting the shit, play the video golf swing training simulator equipment, drink more beer, etc.
The fifth indicator is how many balls we residents find in our yards. Golfers are not supposed to go on private property, but some do anyway. When times are tough we see more of them on properties looking for their and other balls. They can be very testy if we ask them to vacate the premises. More than once the deputies have been called when things escalated with a drunk golfer got belligerent who thought he could do whatever he wanted including hitting their golf balls from our yards. When times are good, they are pleasant to talk with and just move on without even looking for an errantly struck ball. Some pretend they did not hit it in a yard. As a result we find many more quality balls in our yards. Which means ole Trade doesn’t have to go to Wally World or anywhere else to buy them.
🤣
The Verdict
Over the years it has become obvious to me how golfing relates to the economy. Golfing is something people can live without during tough times unless the golfer is hooked deep. So more golfers and good golf balls bouncing off our house that we find in our yard to go with slightly noisy cart usage means a better economy. In my opinion the same scenario would be how it plays out across the country with golfers and the economy. It helps that I have golfed in over 20 states and simply observed things. Nothing scientific and built into a data base, just using my eyes and knowing human nature over time.
Currently, we are getting hit often, sometimes multiple times per day. That means more bad golfers have money to spend. More golf carts are firing up and less walkers are playing in proportion. They are playing some of the best balls we have ever found on our properties. Bad golfers are playing $5 golf balls in bunches, even the cheaper folks are playing brand new $3 balls. We are seeing very few of the old scuffed up types. We are also finding more than we have ever seen with very few golfers wondering on to our properties looking for them. The parking lot has stayed full of vehicles even on week days when most people are working. The retirees and youth are there during those times.
Needless to say, with our location in flyover, hillbilly country this is a great sign about the economy. Now if PDT settles the Iran thingy and the fuel prices drop, we will probably have to wear helmets when we venture into our yards during daylight hours.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!
So, how was the economy during Brandon’s time pretending to be in office? In rapid decline. I rarely found an expensive golf ball in our yard and we did not get hit nearly as often after four years of getting hit often with #45’s term. Most of the balls were terrible and old – like Brandon. A lot more of the golfers were walkers and the carts generally sat unused at the clubhouse parking lot. I even found range balls in our yard that had been stolen and used on the golf course instead of regular balls.
How has it been since #47 won? I have found more brand new Titleist Pro V-1’s than ever before. I have filled up three dozen egg cartons of them along with Taylormade and Callaway pro balls without a blemish on them since March. Add in five dozen more of other brands. With that happening with a war in Iran going on and spiked fuel prices in play – it speaks volumes. Which tells me that Average Joe and Jane like how things are going and trust POTUS and our economy.
That leads me to believe that America First and MAGA are going to triumph in the midterms.
And it is happening all because of golf balls. Well, maybe with a little assistance from the beer. It’s science. Trust me.
If you have actually read and considered this, you have now entered into the mind and world of TradeBait. And just like Hotel California,
“You can check-out anytime you like, but you can never leave…”
Remember Wolf’s site rules. Note and label all AI. Please be kind to one another, we are all in this together. May God richly bless America and all of you.
Before all things and people – In God We Trust. Also, trust Trump and the plan.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
zufolo
noun
small flute used to train songbirds
little flute or flageolet, especially that used to teach birds
also spelled zuffolo or ciufolo, and known as friscaletto (Sicily), pipiolu or solittu (Sardinia)
Used in a sentence
By the 18th century, the zuffolo largely declined in classical music circles as more versatile transverse flutes with keys gained favor, enabling greater chromatic range and expressiveness in Baroque and Classical compositions.
Shown in a stock picture
Shown in a video
MUSIC!
Search on “zuffolo and electronica” and you get a lot of things like this. Enjoy! [And yes, it’s AI-generated!]
THE STUFF
I didn’t realize that jumping spiders are actually SMART. Not just smart as spiders go. I mean smart like many higher vertebrates.
Have some respect, the next time you see one doing its thing.
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.
This man, making Christmas calls from the White House, believes the world is a sphere. And he has even flown around it! So has our beautiful FLOTUS, who happens to be his wife!
Truth and common sense must be valued by us, as individuals, in order to lastingly disempower the authoritarian fake news media. This includes the perniciously smarmy science media, which never answers for its errors and lies. I believe that the media has been responsible not only for leftist pathologies like scientism, medical fascism, and radical gender ideology, but also for reactionary movements like modern flat Earth, rejection of all medicine, and Biblical geological literalism.
Just as Wheatie’s Stormwatch Monday Open Thread was created as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions, so, too, is this Thank God Thursday Open Thread, where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This thread is also to be known as Theistic Evolution Thursdays, due to the author’s expected “pontification” about his scientific, religious, and political opinions. You are welcome to pontificate back! Free speech matters!
Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.
The source of alleged truth matters, not for the truth itself, but for validation.
And yes, it’s THURSDAY…again.
And that’s it. We’re done stealing from Wheatie.
OK – maybe her rules need to be posted.
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.
If there is nothing beyond the “W” below, then this is a placeholder. For health reasons, I can’t always post a timely opinion before each Thursday, but I will try. Otherwise, you have this placeholder post, where YOU provide the content. Enjoy!
W
An interesting video which plays up something most chemists are aware of, thus making the problem seem like more of a mystery than it really is. Nevertheless, it’s a very fun, even if indirect, explanation.
There are Important Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.
Do not forget to LABEL AI articles, video and such.
But NOTHIN’ HABBINING…🐸
Since the Fake News refuses to cover any good news out of the Trump Admin, I thought I would do a rough transcript of this Sean Hannity interview of Kash Patel. I was pleasantly surprised by Sean’s knowledge and interview style. Since it is two hours I am going to do it as a 2 part series.
In this episode of Hang Out with Sean Hannity, FBI Director Kash Patel details the massive shift in Bureau operations since taking the helm. Patel breaks down the staggering 112% increase in violent crime arrests and the strategic dismantling of 1,800 localized street gangs. But the mission doesn’t stop on the streets; it extends to the very halls of the FBI headquarters. Patel reveals the discovery of a “secret room” containing unburnt bags of evidence and hard drives that point toward what he describes as a “Grand Conspiracy” to weaponize law enforcement against political opponents. From the “Russiagate” origins to the modern-day “Arctic Frost” and “Plasma Echo” investigations, this is the definitive account of how the FBI is being restored to its former greatness. Director Patel further explains the truth about the 40,000 violent criminals arrested in 2025 and how the FBI is using AI to stop school massacres and terrorist plots. He also provides updates on “Operation Not Forgotten” in [American] Indian Country and why the “Grand Conspiracy” investigation has no statute of limitations.
00:00 – 05:15: The New FBI Mandate: Crushing Crime
05:15 – 10:30: 40,000 Arrests: The 112% Surge Explained
10:30 – 17:45: Operation Gangster Paradise: Wiping Out 1,800 Gangs
17:45 – 22:00: Protecting Indian Country: Operation Not Forgotten
22:00 – 30:45: Fighting China: Stopping the Purchase of U.S. Farmland
When President Trump appointed me to be the FBI director, he said, “Kash, you got a mandate to do two things. Crush violent crime and defend the homeland and also level the institution that has become the weaponization of law enforcement in this country.” … The FBI agents have come to me time and time again and said, “We have been waiting 15 to 20 years to be able to do our job on the streets of America, and they’re doing it cuz President Trump gave us the authority to do it.” The win here is not just holding these people accountable. The win here is making sure that the FBI, DOJ, and the entire government are never able to do this again to anyone else.
Kash Patel
Sean Hannity: …..it’s hard to fathom that in the last four years under Biden, Harris, Mayorkas , that they allowed in over 12 million un-vetted illegal immigrants from over 200 countries, many with terror ties. We have known terrorists in the country, murderers, rapists, child molesters, cartel members, gang members, and other violent criminals. And this is the mess on top of the corruption that Donald Trump inherited and handed off to the guy that’s hanging out with us today, our FBI director, Kash Patel.
Mayorkas has also been lauded online in places like the Fed News subreddit for his generous granting of administrative leaveto DHS employees around the holidays. His affinity for giving extra time off to staff has even led some to jokingly dub him the “Patron Saint of Admin Leave.” — LINK
I guess when you do not want the border protected you can hand out leave like candy. 😡
…
Sean Hannity: … I got to introduce you to President Trump. Do you remember?
….I just want to freeze frame what you inherited. Okay. Just illegal immigration alone. I understand a lot of it falls under the purview of DHS, Tom Homan, who I admire a lot. They’ve done a great job. Known terrorists, murderers, rapists, child molesters, other violent criminals, cartel members, gang members. …and then everybody’s screaming, “Where’s the JFK files?”
Kash Patel: …When President Trump appointed me to be the FBI director, he said, “Kash, you got a mandate to do two things. crush violent crime and defend the homeland and also level the institution that has become the weaponization of law enforcement in this country. We’ll get to the second part later. When it comes to crime in this country, President Trump secured the border. He had the audacity to do it and he did it. Then he came back in and said, “We’ve had four years of open border. We’ve got criminals running around this country.” And I know we rifle off statistics all the time, but if your audience takes away nothing else from this show, then it’s the following. Because behind statistics are real people.
Sean Hannity: Highlight that, I don’t want to interrupt. Behind statistics are real people. That is like Laken Riley’s family, Rachel Morin’s family, Jocelyn Nungaray’s family. Democrats wouldn’t stand for them and honor them at that joint session
Kash Patel: ….In 2025, in one year under President Trump’s leadership, this FBI arrested 40,000 violent criminals. That’s not the total arrest the FBI had. That number is closer to 80,000. But the 40,000 violent criminals we arrested,was 112% increase from 2024.
….Break that down by state. 50 states. You do the math. We’re talking murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gangbangers, terrorists, everybody that wants to harm our way of life. That President Trump stood up and ran on and said, “We are going to crush violent crime.” That’s what we did. That number alone is emblematic of two things. One, President Trump is the absolute most successful president in US history in reducing crime in the history of America. And two, why are there so many violent criminals in the United States of America? …The open borders policy and the lax rules laid out by the opponents of President Trump to be pro- crime. Remember these are the defund the blue movement people…
Sean Hannity: …In four years, they got four of the FBI’s 10 most wanted under Biden. You’ve been in office a year when you eventually got sworn in. ..14 months. [And you got] Eight of the 10 on the FBI most wanted list. That is an insane number. …In some cases, fugitives that have been on the run 70 years.
In DC, where the president put a surge of police instead of defund, you have motor vehicle theft down 56%, homicides down 52%, robbery down 23%, burglary down 21%. That should be a big story,
Kash Patel: Especially in our nation’s capital. What President Trump did was to bring in the inter agency and unlock the FBI’s greatest partners, state and local law enforcement authorities. And he went into DC and he said, “Not in the nation’s capital.” We also did it in cities across America, whether it’s Memphis or Miami or Dallas or San Francisco or LA. But DC with the president’s backing and with the backing of local law enforcement there, we were able to completely annihilate violent crime in the nation’s capital… If President Kamala Harris had done this, it would be the only story that the mainstream media would be talking about.
Here’s the theme that I think has been leveled by the mainstream media against President Trump. He did everything they wanted done. It’s just that he did it so they’re pissed off at him. He shattered violent crime. He safeguarded American communities. We got eight of the top 10 most wanted… We went around the world and found these animals … guys that have been on the run for 60, 70 plus years in total and put them in American prisons. You can’t do that unless you have a commander-in-chief that says law enforcement is supreme and law enforcement is going to be supreme across the country because that’s what Americans voted for in record numbers when they put President Trump back in office.
Sean Hannity: So, besides myself, have many other media outlets cover this? Outside of Fox?
Kash Patel: And they won’t touch it because President Trump did it.
Sean Hannity: I’m going to put up another screen. Operation Gangster Paradise. 30 pre-dawn raids, 30 alleged members of the Mexican mafia in Southern California. You’ve also gone after the hate groups that go after synagogues and target specific groups. Tell us about that.
Kash Patel: So, two things, Sean. When I got to the FBI, I said, What is the one thing that is causing crime across the country, not just the influx of illegal criminals and violent actors from everywhere in the world? It was localized street gangs. And I’ve never talked about this because you simply can’t on a three minute show at night. Localized street gangs that were supported. And I’m not talking TDA and MS-13. We’re handling that, too. Localized street gangs in LA, in Miami, in Denver, in New York, in Chicago. Do you know how many gangs, street gangs we dismantled last year? 1,800 localized street gangs have been eliminated from the streets of America through Operations Gangster Paradise, Operation Viper, and other things that we do. 1,800. That number, Sean, is a 20% increase from 2024. When you wipe out not just the head shed [Command Post], the overseas components, the TDAs of the world, the MS-13s of the world, and you go down to the root level in the streets of LA and elsewhere and wipe them out as we did in Philadelphia. I was there on the ground. We literally took out an entire city block in West Philadelphia of a localized street gang. And they’re all in prison. They’re the ones dealing dope. They’re the ones getting illegal firearms. They’re the ones holding up everyday Americans as hostage and stealing their money and jacking their cars.
That was a power that had not been unleashed. And this is what happens when you let good cops be cops. The FBI agents have come to me time and time again and said, “We have been waiting 15 to 20 years to be able to do our job on the streets of America.” And they’re doing it because President Trump gave us the authority to do it.
Sean Hannity: Maybe this is a good moment to pause and get into this whole ideology philosophy. It’s being pushed by the left. Defund, dismantle, no bail, re-imagine the police. That’s some of the dumbest stuff I’ve ever heard in my life.
Kash Patel: I mean, just look at the tragedies of this cashless bail policy. Every month we read about some violent offender who gets bail on a violent crime and goes out and does what? Murders a young American, deals fentanyl to young school children and they overdose and die. And that had never been highlighted except by President Trump. He is turning every democratic weaponized institution of justice on its head and challenging them to say, “Why are you passing these laws that are leading to the aimless deaths of young Americans?” He’s the one centering the focus point on law enforcement.
We have to have state and local legislators fix that problem. President Trump can’t do it at the federal level, but what we can do is make sure we roll these guys up, which we’re doing in record numbers, and put them behind federal bars so they don’t ever get out.
..You’re talking to a kid, this son of parents who fled a genocidal dictatorship in East Africa. Immigrated here lawfully and watched their son become the director of the FBI. That is the American dream. But it’s not about me. It’s about capturing that lightning in a bottle and handing that American dream to every single kid out there. That’s what President Trump’s driving…
Sean Hannity: Every weekend you can predict with pinpoint certainty in Chicago how many people will be shot. How many people will be shot and killed. I’ve asked Democrat after Democrat on my shows, can you name one person shot in your city? They can’t name one because they can’t weaponize it and use it to bludgeon Donald Trump or use it politically. I thought every life mattered?
Kash Patel: Let’s just look at Chicago for a second, Sean. How many times does a kid under the age of 10 have to be shot, caught in the cross-hairs of gang fire, before they’ll do anything? How many stories of that, double-digit stories from just last year alone, — that if it had happened under any other administration would be the only headline — saying why is law enforcement failing its citizen, its most vulnerable citizens? But they wash over it because it’s President Trump . And this FBI even without Chicago’s help, Sean, we’ve reduced violent crime in Chicago by 25 points. By 25 points. We’re doing it anyway. And if they let us in like they did in DC, like they did in Memphis under the president’s task force, those numbers would be doubled. We’d be saving twice as many lives.
Sean Hannity: It really is amazing. Explain, and I’ll put this up on the screen, the 400 FBI agents that are dedicated to [American] Indian country. Three brand new task forces that you put together. That was a big deal that didn’t get any press.
Kash Patel: I’m so glad you brought this up. This is one of my passion projects. I think everybody in the United States of America deserves the same brand of law enforcement. Our 575 dedicated Indian tribes across the land deserve the same brand of justice. If you go onto any reservation, and I’ve been on more reservations as FBI director than anyone before me combined, and you talk about missing kids, you talk about murders, you talk about unsolved violent crimes, they are plagued by it. Just last week, I was in Montana on the Crow Reservation. It’s the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. They got five cops. Five cops. And so what we’re doing is we did a durational program last summer called Operation Not Forgotten. We just launched Operation Steadfast Promise, which is going to dedicate 400 plus agents and intel analysts across Indian country for the entire year. We solved, I think, 2,000 cases on Indian country last year alone. I want that number doubled this year. We’re going to solve the mysteries behind the gruesome murder of the Emily Pikes of the world. We’re not going to forget Indian country. And I’m so glad you brought it up because this is representative of millions of people across the country who think they’ve been forgotten by law enforcement, but when I go and see them, they say, “President Trump’s the first guy to send law enforcement here and show up and ask for a partnership, and we’re going to continue that.”
Sean Hannity: … Dan Bongino sat in that seat and told me that there are two FBIs . A lot of people had to go and a lot of people were working against both of you but then there were other good agents that wanted to do their job. More importantly there seems to be a systemic targeting of pro-life Americans, peaceful protesters or moms and dads that show up at school board meetings .They just care about the curriculum that is being taught their kids and they were being investigated as domestic terrorists.
Kash Patel: This is the best example I can see right now to highlight the transformation of this FBI. …All the FBI did before Donald Trump and I was grow the size of the Washington DC footprint. When I came into office, one third of the entire FBI workforce was located in the national capital region in and around Washington DC. The prior directors and presidents, they loaded Washington DC for bear so that they could put out things like the Catholic memo. They could go to school board meetings and terrorize parents. Threaten them, their way of life and have the audacity to tell them it’s the government and not the parents who know how your child should be educated and brought up.
What did we do? I said a third of the crime doesn’t happen in the national capital region. We’re putting the mission first in the field. I took a thousand FBI agents out of the National Capital Region last year and permanently moved them across all 50 states. On top of that, I took 500 intel analysts, took them out of the Washington DC. The directorate of intelligence that we had seen built up by my predecessors to sat in Washington and produce quote unquote intelligence? And I said, I don’t need that weaponization. What I need is intelligence to drive operations in the field. And I sent hundreds of intelligence analysts permanently to the field along with support staff. Then I took another 500 FBI employees and moved them down to Redstone Arsenal, [ Alabama] our premier advanced law enforcement training facility. I said, “Go train everyday cops from around the country on how to be better partners ‘cuz they want us and we want them.” So I reduced the footprint in Washington DC. This is maybe the biggest transformational change that President Trump asked for and we delivered on. And I shrank that one-third footprint in DC by half.
Sean Hannity: You have Operation Fighting China. I have read about Chinese nationals buying up massive quantities of American farmland, American ranch land, and land near our military installations. Now, I can’t imagine for one second that President Xi is going to allow Sean Hannity to go in and buy land near their military installations. Why would we ever do that?
Kash Patel: So, there’s two things you highlight. One, there needs to be a congressional legislative fix ‘cuz right now the only prohibition is one mile in and around military installations in America. So, we got creative. We said, “Okay, while Congress works to fix that, while we work with them to fix that, what can the FBI do?” So, we called our state & local partners. I’ll give you two examples. Down in Louisiana, they were buying up oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana, but it was outside that one mile zone. So, I called Governor Landry and I said, “Hey, this is illegal under state law. The FBI is going to help you.” You know what he did? Shut down those oil rigs. In Texas, a Chinese national had bought thousands of acres of farmland in Texas and was traveling back and forth between China. He had direct contacts and connections to the Chinese government, the CCP. We couldn’t get him under the current law because it was outside of a mile. So, what did we do? We found out that he had been stock piling illegal firearms on his ranch. We went in and seized every single firearm and the entirety of that ranch and he’s still sitting in China because they won’t give him back to us. But now we own it and the US government has it. So we’re doing things like that.
Sean Hannity: Common sense would dictate that if this is happening over and over again that this has got to be some subversive plot by the communist Chinese. They’re doing it for a reason. They are, as far as I’m concerned, our number one geopolitical foe. Why do they want ranch land, farmland and land near our military installation if they’re not trying to spy on us?
Kash Patel: Sean, that’s just it. That’s what they’re doing. If you look back at the last year, this FBI has arrested 47% more Chinese espionage actors to include people that they have co-opted in every branch of the United States military. We are indicting and arresting at least multiple people a month for stealing secrets providing classified information back to mainland China and we are imprisoning them including US Navy sailors. You saw we just charged the individual in Delta Force. And it’s not just connected to China, but it’s also Russia and other entities as well. But that’s how they get their tentacles across the US government enterprise. And so what we’re doing is seeking out those bad actors wherever they are, including within the United States government.
Sean Hannity: I mean, that to me is one of the scariest things. And now we’re talking about national security. I don’t think China has our best interest at heart. I think they view us as an enemy. I think they’ve proven it over and over again. Look, if President Xi’s for China first, I get it. Putin’s for Russia first. I get it. I’m for America first. Fine. However, they don’t get to come into America. They would never allow Americans to do to them what we’re allowing them to do to us. And I’m not saying that every person from China is bad. I’m just saying that maybe you need to buy your property a little further away from military installations. And why farmland? Why ranch land?
Kash Patel: Because it allows them to get large swaths of property, import material and equipment and also use that equipment to go spy on our military bases, our fixed wing and rotary aircraft and our personnel. But let me put out something that’s unorthodox that was led by President Trump. Protecting national security is of the utmost importance. and we’re doing that against these bad actors and spies.
President Trump in his historic meeting with President Xi in Busan S.Korea last year said we have to engage where we can and law enforcement has a unique opportunity to do that. The fentanyl precursors coming out of mainland China were the ones that were killing tens of thousands of young Americans. So he kicked the door open. You know what I did? I was the first FBI director in over a decade to go to Beijing last year. And under President Trump’s authority, in agreement with President Xi, we shut off all 17 illicit precursors that were being delivered to the Mexican drug nationals down in Mexico and then shipped up here. That is a huge win because we worked with the MPS, which is the Ministry of Public Security, their equivalent of the FBI. And since that time, in this law enforcement space, we have sent working groups to China. They have set working groups here and we are tackling money laundering, scam center compounds, which I’m sure we’re going to talk about, the fentanyl and counter narcotics crisis. For the first time ever in the history of the FBI, there is a daily communication between our agents and their agents in mainland China because President Trump kicked open the door.
Now, like you said, their spy services are doing unimaginable harm to our national security. We’re on that mission. But where we can work with them because of President Trump, we are working with them and we’ve seen a drastic reduction in the production of fentanyl by the Mexican drug trafficking organizations down south. We see it in the intel. It’s not classified.
Sean Hannity: Haven’t they been sending the raw ingredients to Mexico?
Kash Patel: That’s what they were doing. And there’s very specific ingredients that make fentanyl as lethal as it is. Those were shut off thanks to President Trump and our engagement. So now they’re struggling to find the ingredients. How do we know it’s working? Last year alone, the opioid overdose rate, the death rate in America dropped 20 points. If any president had done just that alone, save 20% more kids, it would be banner news year round.
Sean Hannity: This is the most frustrating thing to me because it’s our national treasure and they’re being targeted by these cheap street drugs and they have no idea what they’re taking and they’re dying in droves. The deaths now are coming down.
…This should be a big story that, hey, law and order works. Safety and security works if you put the resources in place. They don’t want to talk about that part of it.
…
…I’ve got to imagine within a week you realize you’re drowning because of what you inherited. Known terrorists in the country. We still know there are terrorists here, but we don’t know where they are.
Kash Patel: That’s the scary part. We’re looking for them every single day because the last administration, as you highlighted, let in criminals by the thousands, violent criminals, to include terrorists, and they’ve been sitting around and embedding themselves in our country for the last four years. And as we know from the al-Qaeda and ISIS of the worlds, the one thing those folks have is patience.
Sean Hannity: But they came from Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood. People from Iran were let into this country and let loose by Biden, Harris, Mayorkas. I mean, is it really far-fetched in the middle of a war with Iran to think that we have sleeper cells in this country?
Kash Patel: That’s what we’re monitoring 24/7, 365. We’re going into communities. We’re using our undercover resources. We’re using our online covert employees to root these folks out. And that’s why you’re seeing terrorist prosecutions skyrocket in terms of numbers and people we are expelling from the country with our partners in DHS. I think President Trump has struck the right tone. If you are a violent criminal actor, violent, the worst of the worst, then we’re going to put you down here. We’re going to arrest you. We’re going to put you down. Everybody else, if you’re here illegally and committing crimes, we’re going to send you back to where you came from. That two-fold parallel approach is securing America and safeguarding America. And this FBI continues to have the responsibility with our intelligence community partners to make sure that all the sleeper cells are rooted out.
Sean Hannity: Okay. You walk in the door, get confirmed by the Senate. You get to the the infamous Seventh floor. What did you look at? When did you realize, “Wow, this place is a mess.” When did it dawn on you how bad it was?
Kash Patel: I knew before getting in there. I think the worst thing that could have happened to the institution of weaponization, and the mainstream media, is the combination of President Trump and myself running the law enforcement of this country. Because, as you said, 10 years ago, I led the charge to expose the Russia Gate conspiracy.
Sean Hannity: I need you to go back and explain that to people because you worked on the House Intel Committee and I love Devon Nunes. He’s been a friend for a long time. I spent years of my life on TV night after night after night.
Kash Patel: You were one of a few.
Sean Hannity:Me, John Solomon, Sarah Carter, Greg Jarrett. I mean, there was a small group of us. Catherine Herridge there was not a lot of us. We ended up being vindicated. However, you were on the inside and Devon got vindicated and that congenital liar Adam Schiff was not. So, let’s go back to the main point. You walk in the door, you already know things are bad. You know you have work to do in foundationally within the bureau. You had to feel like you’re drowning, did you not? I would have felt that way.
Kash Patel: You can have that feeling and at times I certainly did. But what you can’t have happen, once you become the FBI director, is allow it to actually drown you. And so what we did, let’s hit the reset button, and what we put out and proved through facts in 2016, 2017, 2018. It took me two years of my life to prove the following:
That a political party in the United States of America in the 21st century would go overseas and hire some bogus intelligence asset to manufacture fraudulent, fake, unverified information, funnel that to not just the intelligence community, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then take those packaged lies, that they had paid for with campaign finance funds, and go into a secret surveillance court and illegally spy on your opponent to be the president of the United States.
That took two years of my life. And what do we find out? The FISA court themselves came back and said these warrants were illegal. That the FBI did not provide exculpatory evidence and innocence and that the FBI essentially lied in those applications and all the information was unverified. So that was step one.
But I knew that it didn’t stop there. I knew in the four years that we were out of office that they continued to regenerate that institution of weaponization. So when I walked in the door, I said we only got a bit of it. We only got maybe half of it. Because what did we learn in those four years, right? That I was illegally spied on by the likes of Rod Rosenstein and Chris Wray.
Sean Hannity: And me.
Kash Patel: And you and 10 other staffers on the hill and people who were elected to serve this country in the halls of Congress.
They were actually continuing the weaponization that Donald Trump and I had exposed during Trump one and we caught them. So I knew walking in the door the following: These individuals, these purported leaders of law enforcement and government are so arrogant that they write the stuff down themselves to memorialize how great they are. That’s how we caught them in Russia Gate. It wasn’t my documents. It was their emails. It was their FISA application. It was their bogus Steele dossier. It was their unverified reporting that was documented in FBI holdings that we put out and that you covered. So I knew there were other places that information was hidden. So day one I set out to find it and we found it.
Sean Hannity: Dan said something that blew me away when he was sitting in your chair on this show, but I want to go back ‘cuz some people didn’t go this deep in the weeds as we did. So we can start with Hillary Clinton’s top secret classified information on her servers. Which by the way I’m — I keep hearing rumors. Maybe you can confirm that information may still exist and we may have a copy. Any truth to that?
Kash Patel: We’re working on a lot of things.
Sean Hannity:You’re smiling. I don’t know. I like that smile. The smile is very revealing, Kash. All right. We’ll save that for a different show.
But let’s go back. And then of course the infamous July 2016 presser by James Comey. No reasonable prosecutor would prosecute.
Kash Patel: Can I just stop you right there?
Sean Hannity: Go.
Kash Patel: The mandate of the FBI and the director is to investigate. It is illegal per the constitution for any FBI director to make a decision on prosecutions. That is the sole province of the department of justice and the attorney general. The fact that he held that press conference and unilaterally made that decision by his own admission without informing the attorney general is a bastardization of our version of law enforcement. He did it because he knew the mainstream media would help him get away with it.
Sean Hannity: So, I’m gonna get your thoughts on Comey and Wray in a few minutes, but I want to stay focused on this. So, he exonerates Hillary that way. And then what do we discover? Hillary Clinton. The reason this is important is because you have said publicly you’re investigating a grand conspiracy.
Would you define a grand conspiracy as the minute Donald Trump came down the escalator till today?
Kash Patel: Yeah.
Sean Hannity:That there has been a coordinated effort to destroy this man.
Kash Patel:Yes, there has. And it’s not me saying it. Look at the documents. Just flip the tables, Sean. Let’s say President Trump unleashed his FBI to go and illegally surveil his opponents. What would happen? The media cycle would stop. It would be the only thing that the mainstream media [would cover. They] would be screaming for accountability. But because President Trump’s the one, that delivered a record reduction in law enforcement under this FBI, because it was him, who was attacked unlawfully and his surrogates and his campaign, they cover it up.
So, I learned as a lead investigator on House Intel that it’s not my words that are the best evidence, it’s theirs. Go find the documents. So what we did was when we walked in the door, I said, “Hey, this conspiracy continued.” It didn’t end because the documents we released under the House Intel days showed that there were individuals who are continuing the work of the Steel Dossier. And I said, “These documents, computer hard drives have to exist somewhere.” And this is a part that’s frustrating to me too. People are are saying, rightfully so, where’s the accountability? Where are the arrest? We are undoing 30 years of weaponization. We are doing that while delivering record results on crime reduction in America. And we’ve got to get it right. So we found that room that Dan Bongino talks about the burn room.
Sean Hannity: Explain a burn bag.
Kash Patel: It’s basically a large paper bag that you use to destroy and literally shred and burn classified information. So we not only found burn bags in a room that was locked away and they weren’t burned, but the room was also off the map. It wasn’t on our blueprint, and nobody had access to it.
Sean Hannity: So, how’d you find it?
Kash Patel: Well, that’s what we do. That’s what I do. I know that these people put it in places for us to never find, but I also know what Dan talked about, and you talked about. There are a lot of good people at the FBI. Now, we got rid of a lot of bad people since Trump
Sean Hannity: What percentage is gone?
Kash Patel: Every single one of the people that weaponized law enforcement is gone. who identify them, threw them out, and they’re terminated.
Sean Hannity: Okay. So Dan’s theory, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it, was he believes that people purposely saved this information, left little crumbs in a trail like Little Red Riding Hood, [It’s actually Hansel and Gretel.] wanting you to find it. That it was saved by design, by good people, special agents, you know, the rank and file good guys that want to do good. You believe that?
Kash Patel: I think there’s a lot of truth to that because I think the rank and file wanted the FBI to be restored to what it used to be before the weaponization of law enforcement. And so what we have to do is methodically catalog this stuff. We’re triaging computer hard drives from previous directors and deputies. We’re looking at the totality of information. We’re finding jurisdiction. And by the way, I’m not looking at it in one jurisdiction. I’ve launched this investigation in multiple jurisdictions. And I can tell you that ‘cuz I got the permission of the attorney general to tell you that. And I can tell you the following too because it’s of such importance. Russia Gate 1.0, they did it again and we found them. We found the documents.
Sean Hannity: … I want to get to the bottom of it still. We’ve all been vindicated at different times, be it the Mueller report or the Durham report or whatever came out. We were right and the rest of the legacy media mob was wrong. Adam Schiff is a congenital liar. Sue me, Adam. He’s a congenital liar.
So we started with the Comey, that press conference. Here’s where things get very interesting. This becomes, I think, the beginning of this grand conspiracy that continues. And I want you to explain it, not me. Start with Hillary Clinton’s bought and paid for dirty Russian disinformation dossier. She uses money. They hire Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS hires Christopher Steele. He has a series of documents that he puts together. They’re all complete bull shit in the end, but that becomes the dossier. Okay?
Kash Patel:And the media was in on it. Remember, they use circular reporting. They leaked that information to the media. Remember then deputy director Andy McCabe, who’s constantly on TV talking about the integrity of the FBI. As deputy director of the FBI, he impermissibly and without permission leaked information about the Hillary Clinton investigation to the media.
Then on top of that, when he was investigated by the Department of Justice, he lied to them. So, I’m not going to be taking any lectures on ethics and how to run the FBI from a then deputy director who abused his position to continue the weaponization of justice. And we’re looking at that. And the scheme you just laid out, is the exact same scheme they replicated when Donald Trump decided to run again. And that’s the investigation I’m tying everything to.
Sean Hannity: I would argue there may be three, but we’ll get to that. Let’s go in chronological order. So they knew, even Brennan knew, the dossier was political hack and he was warning the administration at the time. That’s Obama. That she’s putting together this dossier on Donald Trump. Bruce Ohr, a little interesting his wife worked for Fusion GPS, put it together. Didn’t he warn that it was political and shouldn’t be trusted in August of 2016?
Kash Patel: John Brennan and Bruce Ohr? They all knew it was bogus. I mean, just think about this, Sean. take a step back. The then director of the CIA, the then associate deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice for the United States of America along with other bad actors that we’ve identified, including the media and fusion GPS got together and continued that narrative anyway because then President Obama said, “We have to be able to say” What? — the one thing that they needed, to be able to say, to take a wrecking ball to President Trump’s presidency, before he even got in the door — That there was Russian collusion.
Sean Hannity: So now take it a step further. That becomes the basis of not one but four FISA warrants even though it was unverified and unverifiable because it wasn’t true.
Kash Patel: And when we first informed the FISA court of that when I was working on House Intel, they wrote us a letter back and said, “You guys are dead wrong.” Fast forward
Sean Hannity: The FISA court wrote that to you ? I didn’t know that.
Kash Patel: And fast forward later on in our investigation, the FISA court would quietly put out an opinion themselves stating that we are rescinding — I don’t think that’s ever happened before — We are rescinding the FISA warrants that were used to illegally surveil President Trump.
[REMEMBER BOASBERG: Chief Judge Boasberg served a seven-year term on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court beginning in May 2014. Appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts, he was the Court’s Presiding Judge from January 2020 to May 2021. LINK]
Sean Hannity: When was this?
Kash Patel: This was about a year after investigation was completed. Probably 2018.
Sean Hannity: Okay. So by that time the year of spying was over. Carter Page’s life was ruined and they had a back door to the Trump campaign in Trump world.
Kash Patel: Yeah. Many lives. [ruined]
Sean Hannity: You can’t even write this in a spy novel…
We’re going to go in a little bit deeper. Of the four FISA applications, ‘cuz they have to get renewed every 3 months, three of the four of them were signed by James Comey. He signed the first three. And [Deputy AG] Rod Rosenstein, I think signed the fourth one.
Kash Patel: So FISAs have to be signed by two people. On the Department of Justice side, the attorney general, or the deputy attorney general. And on the FBI side, either the director of the FBI, or the deputy director of the FBI.
Sean Hannity: Now, when you fast forward a couple of years later and Lindsey Graham was doing the questioning and everyone that signed those FISA warrants was asked, “Knowing what you know now, would you sign the FISA warrant?” Every one of them said, “Oh, no. Not knowing what I know now.” Here’s the problem I have with that.
Kash Patel: Hang on. Let me hit pause on that for a second. Knowing what you know now. Why didn’t they bother to figure it out then? Why didn’t the FBI under Comey. And why didn’t the FBI and DOJ under Rosenstein and company and McCabe and all those people bother to do the verification work? They didn’t want to do it because they knew if they did it, they would find the same thing we proved, which it was completely bogus.
Sean Hannity: And what was “you” is the House Intel Committee, Devon Nunes, you were his lead guy and and that’s when I first got to really know you.
Well, here’s the interesting part because I went back and Greg Jarrett actually walked me through the statute. The FISA statute actually says that if at any point information — now again it was unverified and unverifiable — If at any point you find out information you presented to a FISA court is not true, you have an obligation at that moment to go back to the court. So they’re telling, a Senate committee, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have signed that warrant. However, why didn’t they go back? They did not follow the statute of the law. How did they not get held accountable for that?
Kash Patel: Well, that’s what we are literally in the process of doing right now. That’s what I’m saying. I want accountability yesterday and the American people deserve it. But to peel back. To get to that point. To be able to have the FBI and DOJ do that in the 21st century of the United States of America, it takes decades of layering on and creating this diseased temple of corruption. We exposed it. That’s step one, right? And then I can’t speak to why folks in previous administrations didn’t do that. I wasn’t in the job that I am in now. But that’s what we’re doing now. And that’s why President Trump and we, me and you are the targets because they know the truth. So they are breathlessly going on TV and radio every single day and just making personal attacks.
Note what they’re not doing, Sean. They’re not attacking the FBI for reducing the murder rate by 20 points. They’re not attacking the FBI.
Sean Hannity: How could they attack that anyway?
Kash Patel: They’re not. And this stat, I’ve never released before. Again, we say stats, and some of my team doesn’t love it when I use stats because it’s a quick hit, but there’s people behind these stats. State by state, this FBI has reduced violent crime in every single state by an average of 10 percentage points.
Sean Hannity: So, so there’s another part to this. After the 2016 election, in spite of the dirty dossier, FISA warrants, the lying, the break that Comey gave Hillary Clinton to keep her in the race. Obviously, he had a dog in that race. He wanted Hillary to win. Then we have senior career intelligence officials. They do an assessment, an ICA, it’s called, after the 2016 election. They determined beyond any doubt Russia played no part in the election. That was senior career intelligence guys, from the Obama administration.
In a meeting in the Oval Office in December after that assessment came out. It had, correct me if I’m wrong, Obama, Biden, I believe Brennan was there, Clapper was there, you know, all the players are in there. Obama, according to reports, if you know more, please tell me, says he doesn’t like that assessment, demands another one. They get another assessment. It contradicts the senior career intelligence assessment. So at that point then, they get the assessment that said, “Oh, Russia did interfere.” Is that not the predicate to set up Donald Trump for his first term? Russia, Russia, Russia, which went on for years and you were a big part of investigating it.
Kash Patel: That’s it. You summed it up perfectly. That’s what happened.
