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, a huge red flag that none of this is real.

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, can you guess why Soviet-era propaganda about big bad foreign missiles landing on Indiana is being presented to Congress?

45 Years of Failing to Crack Iran

The United States has been trying since the 1950s, and the record since 1978 has been uninterrupted failure.

Reagan’s team was the worst. They 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. What a shit show. Iran was an instrument of American power used first to cheat a domestic election, then as an off-books ATM for crimes against humanity. That Reagan guy, what an embarrassment to America.

And even with full-spectrum American backing, Saddam couldn’t break Iran. We basically ran his war into the ground. 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.