Only one out of every five Americans supported striking Iran, before it happened. Only one out of four trust Trump with military force, and only 14% of independents.

Trump bombed little girls in Iran anyway. He will always do it anyway, because the point is ignoring consent. The point is demonstrating that when he sees a girl he can “grab’em” or shoot them.

This is the same logic in the hotel room, at the Epstein party, on the burning boat. The victim’s resistance isn’t for Trump to overcome, it’s the proof nobody can take away his power over the weakest victims. Being unpopular isn’t a political problem for him, it’s his brand. The more unpopular the more he demands respect.

Every poll showing supermajority opposition is another little girl with the door blocked, another phone taken, another “no” overridden. The cruelty and the unpopularity serve the same function: Hegseth and Trump laugh that no one can stop them from taking advantage, losing control while punching down.

Hegseth tattoos “kafir” on his arm — Arabic for infidel — right below “Deus Vult,” the Crusader battle cry. He chanted “Kill All Muslims” at a bar in Ohio. He titled his book American Crusade. He wears the hate on his skin and dares you to object, because your objection is his sense of meaning. The tattoo isn’t a belief statement. It’s a hate word for dominance display. Just like the “kill everybody” order on a burning boat in the Caribbean, just like the double-tap strike on survivors clinging to wreckage. The hate is the fuel. The revulsion of decent people is the validation.

Trump allegedly punched a 13-year-old Epstein girl in the head when she bit his penis. The FBI interviewed the victim four times.

His own Justice Department is now illegally withholding over 50 pages of those FBI files from the public release, mandated by a law he himself signed. He says the files “totally exonerated” him, which is why they’re being hidden.

The psychology of dominating helpless doesn’t scale to state-on-state, given what we’ve seen recently. Hegseth failed so badly in the Houthi attacks that he ceded the entire region and Israel had to unilaterally recognize a new state.

America now just produces atrocities that generate retaliation cycles. Trump bombs schools in Minab. Missiles hitting Beit Shemesh. 100s of children dead on day one. And the same men who have spent their lives denying what they did to individual victims are now denying what they’re doing to entire populations, while the DOJ hides the receipts and the Senate twice voted down resolutions to limit the authority.

The deepest structural problem is that the institutions that are supposed to check these men — the courts, the FBI, the Senate, the DOJ — have been systematically degraded to the point where the same behavioral pattern that should have ended both their careers instead got them the keys to the largest military on earth. There’s a failure of institutional accountability operating at civilizational scale, expressing bombing little girls as American foreign policy.

A new blog post by Margaret Hu raises the essential legal account of last week’s escalation against Anthropic: the self-contradictory Pentagon ultimatum, the inverted Defense Production Act invocation, the bullshit “supply chain risk” designation against a domestic company whose offense was maintaining safety commitments.

Read it.

It made me want to pull a thread. The failing OpenAI immediately stepped in to slop up the contract. Worse tool, to do a worse job for more money, forced by corruption at the top.

I used to study this stuff in the failed states of post-colonialism.

Obedience Market is for the Dogs

The Defense Production Act was signed by Truman in 1950 to secure domestic production against external threats. It was designed for hostile foreign actors. Using it against an American company because it maintains necessary safety guardrails to function is horrible reversal of logic. Do you remove the brakes on a car to drive faster? No, the brakes exist to allow you to drive faster. Get it? Removing them slows you down or you crash. Authoritarians take emergency powers from one context, strip the conditions that justified them, aim them inward to weaken everything.

The “supply chain risk” isn’t Anthropic’s AI. The supply chain being secured is obedience. Anthropic refused to remove safety commitments. The Pentagon designated them a threat. OpenAI took the contract the same day. Every other AI company in Silicon Valley watched and saw their market evaporate like 1968 Prague.

America Knows This

People will reach for Nazi Gleichschaltung of forced coordination, bringing industry into alignment by making independence economically fatal.

Fair comparison, given Hegseth, But that gets the history backwards. As James Whitman documented in Hitler’s American Model, the Nazis studied American racial governance — Jim Crow, citizenship classifications, anti-miscegenation law — when drafting the Nuremberg Laws.

The domestic precedent is the second Ku Klux Klan at peak power in the 1920s. The Klan was fundamentally an economic coordination operation. You didn’t have to burn a cross to destroy someone. You boycotted their business. You pulled their contracts. You made sure everyone in town knew they hadn’t joined. The violence was backstop. The primary weapon was commercial: comply or become unviable.

The loyalty frame was called “100% Americanism.” Not patriotism as a value — patriotism as a compliance test. You proved loyalty by submitting to the organization’s definition of it.

Independent judgment was disloyalty by definition.

The Reversal

America built the toolkit for economic coordination as liberation. The Montgomery bus boycott. Lunch counter sit-ins. Divestment from apartheid South Africa. Labor strikes. All bottom-up — people withholding their own participation, directing pressure upward at power.

What we’re watching now is that toolkit inverted. Economic pressure, moral framing, safety language, coalition rhetoric — all developed as resistance tools, now aimed downward by the state against the people maintaining ethical commitments. “Supply chain risk” is the Montgomery boycott turned inside out. Same structure, opposite direction, opposite purpose.

The KKK understood this in the 1920s.

McCarthyism understood it in the 1950s.

Wrap top-down coercion in the language of collective good and patriotic duty, and it borrows the moral authority of movements that actually were. The administration isn’t boycotting Anthropic. It’s using wartime emergency powers to crush a company for its ethics, defunding the universities that educated the founders, and calling it national security. Every liberation tool has a shadow version. We’re living in the shadow.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) lost an availability zone in the UAE on March 1st due to “objects that struck the datacenter, creating sparks and fire.” The fire department cut power to the facility and its generators.

With two Availability Zones significantly impacted, customers are seeing high failure rates for data ingest and egress.

This is the first confirmed instance of a major hyperscaler availability zone being knocked offline by what appears to be kinetic military action.

The incident coincided with Iranian missile and drone strikes across the UAE, hitting airports, ports, and residential areas. When Reuters asked AWS directly whether the datacenter hit was connected to America attacking Iran, the company declined to confirm or deny.

The affected zones are mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region. EC2 API errors cascaded beyond the struck zones, with networking calls failing across the region.

• AllocateAddress
• AssociateAddress
• DescribeRouteTable
• DescribeNetworkInterfaces

AWS reported “positive signs of recovery” by the afternoon, and estimated just hours to resolution.

BC/DR Plan for “Objects”

“Objects” keeps the incident in operational language rather than appropriate disaster planning language. A hurricane hurls objects. An earthquake hurls objects. Standard business insurance and cloud service agreements typically exclude acts of war. If AWS called this debris or projectiles from an Iranian military strike it triggers force majeure clauses and potentially voids service level commitments across every customer contract in the region.

Going for Broke

The architectural promise of availability zones is isolation. One zone goes down, your workload fails over to another. That held for compute, partially. But control plane APIs leaked errors across zone boundaries, meaning customers couldn’t programmatically manage resources even in the unaffected zones. The region’s data plane kept running; the management plane didn’t.

Cloud providers have modeled for earthquakes, floods, power grid failures. The threat model for “your datacenter is in a country that just got hit with ballistic missiles” was always implicit in the Gulf region build-out. Now it’s explicit, despite the “object” language.

AWS built ME-CENTRAL-1 to capture Gulf state digital transformation revenue. The physical risk was priced into the infrastructure design with multiple zones and redundant power yet never into the sales narrative.

Customers selecting data sovereignty or latency centers now see the beginning of what Trump’s war mongering means for availability guarantees.

Repeatedly between 2011 and 2013, the same man warned that a desperate American president would attack Iran to save face, win elections, and cover for failed negotiations.

In a November 2011 Trump video from the Trump Desk in Trump Tower — resurfaced by SNL last night — Trump laid it out plainly:

Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. So the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran.
— Donald Trump, Nov 16, 2011

Then the tweets started:

Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.
— @realDonaldTrump, Oct 9, 2012

Don’t let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected — be careful Republicans!
— @realDonaldTrump, Oct 22, 2012

I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face!
— @realDonaldTrump, Sep 16, 2013

Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly — not skilled!
— @realDonaldTrump, Nov 11, 2013

Obama never attacked Iran.

Trump has now attacked Iran twice.

1. Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 hit nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
2. Operation Epic Fury launched February 28, 2026 — a massive U.S.-Israeli assault that killed hundreds of children and destroyed a girls’ primary school in Minab. It also killed Supreme Leader Khamenei with his senior military commanders, and struck targets across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah. Three American service members are dead.

Both operations were launched as failures of active negotiations.

Both were launched without congressional authorization.

The June strikes were sold as “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program. Eight months later the obliteration was admitted as a lie, and Iran was said to be rebuilding. The failure, which for months was angrily denied, suddenly became justification for attempting again, the operational definition of a forever war lacking decisive action.

Every accusation was a confession.

Every warning about Obama is a 13-year-old self-own: attack a country you failed to negotiate with, call it strength, dare anyone to stop you.

Hypocrisy requires some residual commitment to the principle being violated. This is plain lying and projection as operational planning, by broadcasting future actions while attributing them to political targets. It’s the same mechanism that drives every authoritarian escalation: accuse the opposition of the thing you intend to do, so that when you do it, the public has already been conditioned to see it as normal political behavior.

Trump told us his vision of a desperate president abusing Iran as if a 13 year old girl at Mar-a-lago. He looked into the camera and called hitting Iran, let alone underaged girls trafficked by Epstein, a show of weakness, incompetence, and cover for personal failure.

He was describing himself.