Have you seen the latest Epstein files? Photos of Trump with all those young girls trafficked for sex?

Testimony about him hitting a 13-year-old in the head when she bit his penis?

Trump bragged that the files would exonerate him. They continue to do the opposite. But even these child sex crime investigations only play background to his latest rushed march into war.

In June, Trump told the world that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated.” He gloated that he bombed Iran so hard he would take the Nobel Peace Prize. The White House tried to back him up with a page calling anyone who doubted Trump’s announcement a purveyor of “fake news.”

It’s impossible not to think of Nixon claiming “peace with honor” in Vietnam while burying the reality that the war was unwinnable — a fact the Pentagon Papers had already proved.

Well, guess who doubts Trump now? Trump.

Eight months from announcing the end of nuclear programs, the pathological liar just said to Congress that Iran is “starting it all over” and pursuing “sinister nuclear ambitions” that require a devastating strike.

As usual, Trump contradicts himself and therefore cannot be trusted. At least one statement is a calculated lie. The evidence says both are.

The DIA’s own early classified assessment found that only one of the three nuclear sites that Trump unilaterally bombed in Operation Midnight Hammer was arguably inoperable.

One of three. That’s a miss.

The other two continued operating, clearly not eliminated as told. The obvious question is why lie about the job being finished, since he could have said then that another strike is on the table. While Trump called everyone who disagreed the liars, the IAEA’s director general said Iran could resume enrichment within months, which is literally what’s happened. Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence also assessed in 2025 that Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon.” So Trump not only lied about the effectiveness of American attacks, he publicly repudiated his own intelligence chief, undermining truth about the threat, without providing evidence.

The obliteration lie was used to sell military waste as an easy decision. The imminent threat now is a lie told to justify the next failure.

The whole propaganda track is sequential fabrication to cover up a deranged political agenda. It’s far more likely Trump demands Tehran build a giant triumphal yellow arch with his name on it than that he cares at all about Iranian weapons programs.

Trump’s Yellow ICBM Cake

The Niger yellowcake forgery has been updated. Trump lied to Congress when he claimed missiles in Iran will “soon reach the United States of America.”

His own Defense Intelligence Agency said last year that Iran could develop a militarily viable ICBM by 2035 at the earliest, even if it decided to pursue one. It hasn’t decided, so the date keeps slipping further away. That’s why Secretary of State Rubio wouldn’t commit to a timeline when pressed. The US intelligence community has been wrong on this exact prediction for a quarter century. Remember the 1999 estimate predicted Iranian ICBM flight tests by 2010. That deadline passed sixteen years ago. Iran has no strategic incentive to change. Trump offered none, and that’s a huge red flag.

The reason the prediction keeps failing is that an ICBM aimed at America is mission suicide. It is the kind of mistake that would unite American public opinion and trigger total response. No rational actor invites that. And between the two countries, America looks less and less like the rational one. After all, who is the one saying drop a big one, with no strategic outcome attached?

The actual Iranian missile threat is the one Trump repeatedly fails to address. Iran’s huge battle-tested medium-range arsenal, deployed without hesitation during the 12-day war with Israel last June, can already strike every American base across the Middle East and parts of Europe. Ramstein. Aviano. Incirlik. The Gulf installations. That capability is proven. It’s current inventory and has a combat record. But “our bases in Germany are vulnerable” doesn’t sell preemptive war to an American audience that can’t find Ukraine on a map.

So guess why we’re seeing Soviet-era propaganda about big bad foreign missiles landing on Indiana.

Forty-Five Years of Failing to Break Iran

The United States has been trying to break Iran since the 1950s, and the record is uninterrupted failure.

Reagan’s team negotiated with Tehran to delay the hostage release until after the 1980 election, actively using Iran to destroy Carter’s presidency. Then came Iran-Contra: the same administration that publicly backed Saddam’s invasion of Iran secretly sold weapons to Tehran and used the proceeds to fund illegal wars in Central America. Iran was an instrument of American power — used first to win an election, then as an off-books ATM.

And even with full-spectrum American backing, they couldn’t get Saddam to break Iran. The US ran his war. The DIA provided satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions. The CIA funneled billions through Gulf states. The Commerce Department licensed dual-use exports that became chemical weapons precursors. Reagan sent Rumsfeld to shake Saddam’s hand in 1983. Washington provided the targeting data Iraq used for chemical strikes on Iranian positions, and knew it. Washington reflagged Kuwaiti tankers and engaged the Iranian navy directly in 1988.

A solid eight years of American-backed conventional invasion, and Iran fought them all to a stalemate. America caused over a million Iranian casualties and the regime didn’t fall.

That’s the lesson this administration refuses to learn: Iran has been war-tested against American-backed conventional assault and came out stronger than America’s biggest regional ally. Bannon’s takeaway isn’t caution — it’s that proxies failed and only direct American force remains.

Now Bannon’s civilizational war theory, which he pitched to a Vatican conference in 2014 about an existential struggle between the “Judeo-Christian West” and Islamic power, has become the operating doctrine of Trump’s second term. Bannon pushed for tearing up the JCPOA not because it was a bad deal but because diplomacy with Iran contradicted the regime change objective. The MEK lobby, the cultish exile group that pays Bolton and Giuliani to speak at its rallies, has been the vehicle for this project for decades. Bannon’s war and the MEK’s war are the same war: permanent confrontation engineered to produce regime collapse.

The difference is that this time there’s no proxy. They’re proposing direct war against a country that already absorbed everything American-backed force could deliver — and survived.

The Gap in the Missile Gap

The fake threat inflation is well known to historians of the Cold War. Eisenhower knew the “bomber gap” was fabricated. He knew the “missile gap” was fabricated. It didn’t matter. JFK successfully ran on fear. The defense industry got big juicy contracts. The intelligence was irrelevant because the political utility of war was the whole point.

The difference from then is that the Soviet ICBM threat was real. They built them, deployed them, and aimed them at American cities. Iran hasn’t even committed to a program. Trump is running Cold War brinkmanship against a country that lacks what made the original version possible.

Same Warmonger Different Day

The bone-spur belligerent pattern is now explicit. Last summer Trump claimed he alone obliterated a nuclear program, mission accomplished, anyone who disagrees is fake news. This week he claims their nuclear program continues, developing long-range missiles to hit American cities, and he has to obliterate them this time. The administration’s own special envoy has started saying Iran is “probably a week away” from achieving bomb-grade material — for a program the president said wouldn’t exist.

These are purposeful and sequential lies calibrated to different moments. The obliteration claim covered up the failure of the first strike. The imminent threat claim erases any assessment of mission objectives as necessary let alone able to succeed. Neither is true when stated. Both serve warmongering for politicians who already decided to fight.

Trump talks about striking Iran the way he allegedly treated a 13-year-old girl, like he can punch down and there will be no consequences.

The reality of war with Iran is nothing like assaulting a child in a system built to look the other way. This is a country that absorbed eight years of American-backed invasion, over a million casualties, and chemical weapons, and came out the other side with its government and military stronger. And then Iraq, just like Panama before it, was severely punished by the CIA for the failures of the CIA. Saddam was an American asset until he wasn’t, just as Noriega was. Iran watched both disposals and drew the obvious conclusion.

Trump’s lies to Congress are far worse than pretext. They’re the words of the man who has never faced a consequence in his life, preparing to start a war against a nation that has faced nearly every consequence imaginable and is still standing for a reason.

Looting vulnerable populations and laundering their assets through institutional prestige has a long, documented history.

Look at how Prussia strip-mined the Ottoman territory and built their Pergamon museum around the loot. Look at how the Nazis then systematized that art theft across occupied Europe. The hunt for all the stolen works continues eight decades later. Just don’t look too hard in Switzerland or the estates around the Berlin Wannsee.

Powerful actors extract cultural wealth from people in crisis, then use institutional credibility to convert stolen goods into legitimate collections.

Enter Epstein.

Leon Black paid a convicted sex trafficker over $150 million for “financial advice” on looting. That trafficker’s files contain an inventory of Black’s $27.7 million collection of Southeast Asian antiquities, which happen to be objects extracted from Cambodian sites during conflicts that killed roughly two million people.

The supply chain for these objects runs through mass violence, displacement, and exploitation of vulnerable populations.

It brings to light Douglas Latchford’s network, which depended on local labor operating under coercion or desperation in conflict zones to loot these sites. Trafficking in looted cultural property produced by conditions indistinguishable from trafficking in persons. Latchford published one of Black’s pieces in a book, corresponded about selling bronzes to Black, and when an Australian museum canceled a purchase over insufficient provenance, redirected the same piece toward Black. He was indicted for fraud and conspiracy in trafficking Cambodian artifacts. His family returned the collection to Cambodia. The Metropolitan Museum returned 14 sculptures. The US government returned 30 objects.

Black still has his, somehow.

Epstein’s files contain the inventory of these looted acquisitions. I mean Epstein had operational visibility into Black’s holdings. The same Epstein whose own operation depended on exploiting vulnerable people. The financial plumbing connects both trafficking streams together. The wealth extracted through cultural looting in conflict zones, is managed by an operation funded through sexual exploitation.

The Epstein network also extracted and actively gatekept women out of professional advancement while trafficking underaged girls for sex. Same dehumanization patterns, different expression. The hatred of women as doctrine underlies trafficking them like looted objects. Trafficking humans by definition is the act of regarding them as lesser, if not inhuman.

The same files show Epstein explicitly ordered women excluded from elite scientific conferences he funded. “The women are all weak, and a distraction,” he wrote to literary agent John Brockman. Larry Summers joked about women’s IQ. A Yale computer scientist described a female undergrad to Epstein as a “v small good-looking blonde.” Objectification, hoarding and exploitation is the operating system.

Looting, trafficking, gatekeeping.

Black’s spokesperson offers the standard laundering fallacy in response: looting was done “through a well-regarded and highly reputable art dealer.”

Yeah, we get it. Trump and Epstein were well-regarded. Latchford was reputable too right up until his indictment. An Australian museum canceling a purchase for insufficient provenance, followed by Latchford redirecting that piece to Black, shows conscious avoidance that normally triggers trafficking statutes.

The “reputation” defense works the same in every laundering operation from 1880s Berlin to 1940s Paris to 2013 New York. Buy through a middleman to claim distance from the act. Hire a hit man to say you didn’t do the hit.

Black “cooperated” with a DOJ inquiry five years ago. And then? Somehow he remains a MoMA trustee, a known Epstein associate who now shows up flaunting the files.

…art insiders were wide-eyed to see Black, as well as fellow Epstein pal Glenn Dubin, stride into a private party, apparently hosted by the [MoMA] institution itself…. Black…stepped down as chairman of the museum in 2021 after protest from artists and workers over his connections to Epstein. On Tuesday, a rep for Black told us, “Mr. Black was proud to be at the dinner….” Both Black and Dubin have galleries in MoMA named after them.

The Nazis looted art and trafficked underage girls, building their white man’s empire atop mass suffering. The Epstein network does the same. Black represents how an institutional playbook for elites converts mass atrocity into cultural capital even today.

The most important detail in the Financial Times’ investigation of Ukraine’s front lines isn’t the kill zone, the fiber-optic drones, or the soldiers trapped for 165 days without rotation. It’s the fishing nets.

French and Swedish fishing nets, suspended over roads, hospitals, and critical infrastructure in Kherson, are intercepting 95% of incoming Russian drones. Up from 80% last May. Not with radar-guided missiles, not with electronic warfare, not with AI-powered counter-drone systems. Nets. The oldest barrier technology in human history is defeating precision-guided munitions at a cost ratio that inverts everything the defense industry has been selling for decades.

Simple Economics as Strategy

An FPV drone costs a few hundred dollars. A fiber-optic variant under $1000. Russia produces them by the million. And soon they’ll be 3D printed by field teams themselves. The standard counter-drone response of jamming, directed energy, and kinetic intercept costs orders of magnitude more per engagement than the drone itself. That’s an attacker’s economy. The defender bleeds money and time faster than the attacker spends it.

Fishing nets flip the ratio back. The cost per meter of industrial netting is trivial. Once installed, it works continuously with zero per-engagement cost. No operator, no ammunition, no power supply. A drone hits the net, tangles, detonates harmlessly or falls. The net gets repaired or replaced for almost nothing. The attacker has to keep spending thousands per attempt against a barrier that costs pennies per interception.

That’s an economic advantage that’s sustainable.

Who Built It First

Kherson has been the laboratory. The city’s population dropped from 250,000 to 60,000 under relentless Russian drone strikes, with over 9,500 attacks on civilians by December 2024. Governor Prokudin responded with what he calls a “drone dome”: layered netting over critical routes and buildings, combined with EW systems, sensors, and civilians trained with shotguns. In some districts the sky is barely visible through the mesh.

The FT describes the same approach spreading across the front. Thousands of kilometers of nets now form tunnels over main highways, stopping suicide FPV drones from diving at vehicles. The Pentagon recently issued guidance recommending nets, barriers, and camouflage as low-cost physical defenses against small drones. Taiwan is building its T-Dome program directly from Kherson’s experience.

Nets Answer the Drone Zone Question

Last November I wrote about Ukraine’s quartermaster problem in Pokrovsk — the 20km death zone where centralized linear logistics had become suicidal under persistent drone interdiction. The FT’s kill zone report confirms that condition now covers the entire front. Two soldiers held position near Orikhiv for 165 days, thirty relief attempts failed, fog saved them. Supplies move by cargo drone and UGV. Troops crawl under thermal cloaks for days.

I compared the problem to Grant’s quartermaster insight: you don’t counter interdiction with better tactics, you build a supply architecture more resilient than the enemy’s ability to disrupt it. Multiple independent routes, pre-positioned caches, expendable logistics with losses built into planning ratios.

Nets are one such logistics architecture. Cover the supply routes with physical barriers, and the kill zone starts to shrink. Vehicles can move under netting. Positions can be resupplied. The 30 failed relief attempts become possible when the approach route is physically shielded. The engineering problem I described, to sustain forces inside a drone-saturated environment, has an inexpensive answer.

Machine Guns and Barbed Wire

The defense establishment keeps comparing drones to the tank of 1916 as if a new offensive capability awaiting doctrinal innovation. That’s backwards. Drones are the machine gun. They destroyed the old paradigm of conventional movement.

The kill zone is no man’s land. And nets are barbed wire’s inversion.

In WWI, barbed wire made from surplus telegraph supplies was cheap passive defense that made the kill zone lethal for attackers. Nets are cheap passive defense that makes the kill zone survivable for defenders. Same principle. Physical barriers that cost almost nothing defeat expensive offensive systems, by working in the opposite direction. Wire aided the machine guns. Nets defeat the drones.

The 40km fiber-optic cables, the dynamic mining, the electronic warfare stalemate — all of that is real and accelerating. But the counter already exists. It’s sitting in declining or dormant fishing ports. Defense spending could revive coastal economies instead of enriching bumbling contractors.

The question is whether militaries will scale it as infrastructure or keep chasing expensive technological and ideological unicorns while soldiers crawl through the mud under thermal blankets.

General Grant would have ordered net production over six months ago.