The scale of any such error would be enormous. Ivermectin is cheap, safe, and widely available. So the idea that it could help treat cancer feels almost impossible — because if true, it would mean a substantial part of our medical culture doesn’t make sense.

This is not medical advice. Do not stop standard cancer treatment or self-medicate with ivermectin. Always talk to your oncologist.

Just consider Cancer Research UK alone. Think of all the wonderful people who’ve run marathons and charity events to raise money for them. They have an annual budget of £750 million, and you’re telling me they haven’t noticed there’s viable candidate for treating cancer that is cheap and already sitting in the pharmacy?

Yes. That’s what I’m telling you. I’m going to explain how this happens as directly as I can, because to understand this, is to understand the structural failure of modern medicine. Please be aware, this is not medical advice. Do not stop standard cancer treatment or self-medicate with ivermectin. Talk to your oncologist.

***

On the first issue, why would you know something the doctors don’t!? This is an unhelpful model to use to address the proposition. I don’t “know something others don’t”, because doctors do know that Ivermectin might be an effective treatment for cancer. In fact, the only reason I know is because there are many doctors who’ve already researched it, tried it and then published their findings. I just happen to have been researching and writing about Ivermectin, and so I came across the material. There’s nothing special about me.

At this junction, if you think I am making it up as some weird grift, I don’t really blame you. So let’s dive into the literature and shore it up. Here’s a collection of published research where Ivermectin has been used as a treatment for cancer either in real patients or in laboratory experiments. Because this can get heavy going, I’ve translated the study titles and results into something everyone can understand.

1. Testing If Ivermectin Can Help the Immune System Fight Breast Cancer in Mice and Lab Cells The researchers tested ivermectin on mouse breast cancer models to see if it could make tumors more recognizable to the immune system (turning “cold” tumors “hot”). They found that the drug successfully triggered cancer cell death and helped immune cells infiltrate the tumors, especially when combined with other immune-boosting drugs.

2. Using Ivermectin to Stop Skin Cancer from Spreading to the Lungs in Mice Researchers wanted to see if ivermectin could prevent melanoma (a deadly skin cancer) from spreading to the lungs using mouse models and cell cultures. They found that the drug effectively blocked the cancer from spreading by stopping the formation of specific cellular “traps” that tumors use to travel through the body.

3. Testing How Ivermectin Blocks Growth Signals in Human Cancer Cells and Mice This laboratory study looked at how ivermectin interferes with specific growth signals that cancer cells rely on to multiply. The researchers showed that the drug successfully blocked these signals, stopping cancer cell growth in test tubes and shrinking tumors in living mice without causing significant side effects.

4. Using Ivermectin to Make Chemotherapy Work Better on Resistant Cancer Cells Scientists tested if adding ivermectin could help standard cancer drugs work on cancer cells that had developed a resistance to chemotherapy. They discovered that ivermectin successfully reversed the cancer’s drug resistance by shutting down the chemical pathways the cells use to pump out the chemotherapy.

5. Tracking Real-World Cancer Patients Who Took Ivermectin and Mebendazole Instead of a laboratory experiment, researchers observed 197 actual cancer patients who chose to take ivermectin and mebendazole off-label over a six-month period. They tracked the patients’ self-reported outcomes, safety data, and adherence to understand how these repurposed drugs affect real humans undergoing cancer treatment.

6. Exploring How Ivermectin Stops Colon and Breast Cancers from Spreading This study used both lab-grown cells and living mice to figure out exactly how ivermectin stops breast and colon cancers from moving to other parts of the body. They found that the drug successfully paralyzed the cancer cells by blocking the specific chemical signals they use to crawl and spread.

7. Testing Ivermectin Against Blood Cancer Cells in the Lab This laboratory experiment investigated whether ivermectin could destroy lymphoma (a type of blood cancer) cells. The researchers found that the drug effectively halted the cancer cells’ growth cycle and destroyed their energy centers, forcing the cells to die off.

8. Mixing Ivermectin with a Special Enzyme to Kill Pancreatic Cancer Cells Scientists tested if ivermectin could be combined with a specific enzyme (rMETase) to destroy hard-to-treat pancreatic cancer cells in a petri dish. They found that while ivermectin alone killed nearly half the cells, the combination of both wiped out 80% of the cancer cells.

9. A Massive Review of All Existing Data on Ivermectin as a Cancer Drug Rather than running a new experiment, researchers gathered and analyzed all the existing lab, animal, and human trial data regarding ivermectin’s effect on cancer. The review confirmed broad evidence that the drug stops tumor growth and reverses drug resistance, while noting that early-stage human clinical trials are actively underway.

Surprised?

For people trained in medical science or medical literature, many will be frothing with rage at what I’ve just suggested by sharing this list without qualifying context. Before we address their concerns, let’s focus our attention on how a normal person will respond to a list like this.

In the very least, this is a very promising set of data. Ivermectin has been in use since 1987, it is amongst the most prescribed medicine in history, it has an impeccable safety record. Satoshi Ōmura won the Nobel Prize for its discovery. What’s more, the drug is now generic, meaning it costs almost nothing to manufacture. Look at all these great results researchers have had using it to either kill cancer cells, stop cancer growth, or treat patients directly. It’s great right?

Well no. Not at all.

To the people who are currently raging at me, they’re upset that I’ve suggested the drug might work without citing a clinical trial. What they’ll say, quite indignantly, is that “this is not clinical data! These are in-vitro studies, or small scale self-reported data with no controls, and you can’t infer effectiveness from this dataset!” Those people are right by the way.

So what’s going on exactly?

Go and type into Google “ivermectin as a treatment for cancer” and you’ll soon (very likely) be looking at the consensus view of an industry dominated by the pharmaceutical industry. The top result (in the UK) will be MacMillan Cancer Support where Richard Simcock, the Chief Medical Officer, gives this rather precise qualification, “Ivermectin is an effective drug in the treatment of parasitic infections. However, there is currently zero real-world clinical evidence that it might be helpful in the treatment of cancer.”

Here’s the kicker, he’s absolutely correct. But to a normal person, this sounds like “see! It doesn’t work!”, and I’m here to chart a third path. It does not mean the drug doesn’t work, it means we haven’t properly tested it.

You see, the people who react with rage to my list of small studies on Ivermectin are the dominant voices in medicine. Their view, which I accept is “the correct one”, is the consensus. What they like to remind everyone of, all the time, is that we can only know if the drug works if there is a large scale Randomized Control Trial. But this is where the consensus view runs out of runway. It reveals itself not as science, but as mantra because there’s a very simple response to this assertion:

“Given the substantial body of evidence that we have, why do we not have randomized control trial data on the effectiveness of Ivermectin as a treatment for cancer?”

This is a thorny question. If they’re honest with you, they’ll have to wrestle with the incentives catastrophe at the heart of modern medicine. If they’re not, they might say the data isn’t good enough to justify a trial.

After at least sixteen years of promising data on this widely available, cheap, and safe drug’s effectiveness as a treatment for cancer, the whole cancer research establishment hasn’t run a single trial. These people genuinely wonder why trust in the medical establishment has collapsed. They think the trust was shattered by some external force, rather than the terrible incentives that sit at the heart of modern medicine. As we’ve already noted, Cancer Research UK alone has a £750 million budget, how and why didn’t they run a trial yet?

The answer is very simple, and the government is already well aware of it. A 2005 UK Government report spells it out, “The industry affects every level of healthcare provision, from the drugs that are initially discovered and developed through clinical trials, to the promotion of drugs to the prescriber and the patient groups, to the prescription of medicines and the compilation of clinical guidelines.”

The industry controls everything. So do you think they’re going to foot the bill to push a drug they can’t profit from into their own profitable market? Here is where the tension sits: if a repurposed generic drug is actually an effective therapy for cancer, the medical system is structurally incapable of making use of it.

Read that again, then let’s consider an example.

The most common cancer for men in the UK is prostate cancer. Assuming the 2005 report remains true (it is true), it’s actually the pharmaceutical industry which creates the treatment regimens for that particular illness. The approved treatment guidelines prescribe Goserelin (Zoladex), which is £940 a year. The patent for the drug is owned by AstraZeneca. You’d possibly also receive Enzalutamide, which is somewhere around £35,000 for the year, and the patent is owned by Astellas. NICE themselves list the price in their recommendation literature, “The daily dose of enzalutamide is 160 mg and costs £97.67 per day.”

You will also probably be prescribed some cheaper generic drugs too, like Docetaxel. However, because it’s IV administered (an ‘inpatient’ treatment), there are other drug paraphernalia and administration costs which can stack up to perhaps £1,500 to £3,500 a year. All things said and done, the value (ugh) “per patient” is somewhere around £40,000.

In the UK alone, cancer is projected to add £14.4 billion per year to health spending by 2050. Current direct costs are already in the region of £9–12 billion annually. Globally, spending on cancer medicines hit $252 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $441 billion by 2029.

In a market this size, the economic incentive to protect high-margin patented drugs — and the corresponding lack of urgency around cheap generics — becomes brutally obvious.

If you imagine the healthcare industry as more human aligned than any other industry, then perhaps you’d imagine incentives that relentlessly drive drug discovery. Unfortunately, the medical industry is no more aligned than any other market, and it’s the internal incentives that drive the outcomes. There’s zero incentive - none at all - to relitigate generic drugs as potential treatments for cancer. When you think about it, the incentives actually mean companies will campaign against any generic drug that looks promising, because if it turns out to work, then their $250 billion market gets a haircut.

I want you to really understand what these dynamics mean for our ability to ‘know’ which medicines are effective. So consider this: according to the FDA alone, there are 32,000 generic drugs already approved for use in humans. These are drugs which got onto the market because they were effective at something, but their patent expired, making them incredibly cheap and difficult to profit from. Globally, you could throw tens of thousands more drugs onto this pile. The incentive to investigate their effectiveness against diseases treated with expensive and patented drugs is close to zero. There might already be multiple wonderdrugs in our huge repository of useful generic drugs, but our medical system can never come ‘to know’.

Even if the drug looked promising in small scale trials, some boffin from Imperial College or a charity would warn the public against using it because “there’s no clinical data to support its use”. Whilst this might be true, as I’ve demonstrated, this hardly paints the full picture. Statements like this are an artefact of the incentives that drive medical research.

Then consider the range of non-patentable herbs, plants, fungi and bacteria which can affect the body. Can cannabis affect the body? Can mushrooms affect the body? Of course they can, but none of these natural products can be patented, so there’s simply no pathway for them to become treatments. It’s really that simple.

Pharmaceutical companies can’t ‘own’ a liberty cap mushroom, so it can’t become a treatment. Pharmaceutical companies can’t own Vitamin C, so it has no pathway to become a treatment. The list of natural “un-ownable” compounds which affect the body is absolutely massive. In Chinese Medicine there are at least 11,000 herb plants with documented medical uses, almost none of them will be patentable. One database of traditional Chinese medicine has 29,000 ingredients listed. If you throw in ancient Ayurveda, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of natural compounds, already known about, which sit beyond the reach of pharmaceutical patent lawyers, and therefore beyond the reach of hospital bedsides.

The modern search for medicine has access to an incredible modern Library of Alexandria, but restricts its search only to the compounds synthesized that year because it fears any answer which might arrive from the public domain.

Once you see the incentives baked into the system, it becomes clear why we still don’t “know” whether ivermectin works for cancer. The industry has effectively defined the boundary between “knowing” and “not knowing.” Until a drug passes through the expensive, patented-friendly randomised controlled trial pipeline they dominate, it remains in limbo — officially “unproven,” regardless of how much preliminary evidence exists.

This is not necessarily a conspiracy. It is simply what happens when profit is the dominant incentive.

The kayfabe continues. Good doctors do their best with the tools they’re given. Researchers diligently hunt for new molecules. Cancer charities raise hundreds of millions and rightly celebrate incremental progress. And patients are left navigating a system that is simultaneously miraculous and structurally blind to cheap, unownable solutions.

What does this mean for you and me?

It means we must learn to stand humbly in the unknown. We should acknowledge that what we are allowed to “know” in medicine is shaped by a highly filtered corpus of knowledge — one optimised for patentability and profitability as much as for truth.

The quiet revolution begins when ordinary people reclaim the right to ask simple, dangerous questions:

“If there’s a cheap, safe, generic drug with promising signals against cancer, why haven’t we properly tested it?”

Asking that question honestly is the first step toward restoring trust — not in institutions, but in our own capacity to reason clearly about what is known, what is unknown, and what incentives quietly shape the difference.

The comic, “Palomar Lights” tells a true, and very strange story: have astronomers detected the remnants of something floating in earth’s orbit?

I hope you enjoy it. It’s certainly different subject for readers of The Digger! As ever, shares, links, mentions, comments and subs are always helpful.

I can’t post this entirely on substack, so please click the image below to read it. Alternatively, just head straight to comics.phillyharper.com

Read the full comic for free at comics.phillyharper.com

I encouraged Claude and Gemini to (somewhat) collaborate on compiling a dataset of all the fires at oil refineries over the last six weeks. Then I requested they choose five other six week periods - at random - and check that period for the number of oil refinery fires.

After comparing the current six week period to those random intervals, Claude and Gemini both agree that the rate of fires is very high. Most of this is driven by the war in Ukraine and the Gulf, but even when you exclude those areas, the rate of fires remains highly unusual.

From the report:

“Compared with a Gamma prior fitted to five randomly-chosen historical 6-week windows (mean ≈ 2.2 fires / window), the total count is extreme (tail probability ≈ 5 × 10⁻⁵; Bayes factor ≈ 10⁶). Even after stripping out the war-related strikes, the non-war count of 8 sits in the top ~1% of the prior-predictive distribution (Bayes factor ≈ 92). The conclusion is that the cluster is unlikely to be random noise, but the dominant signal is geopolitical — specifically Ukraine’s systematic targeting of Russian refining infrastructure — rather than a hidden global-industrial anomaly.”

Have a look at the report itself, which is attached below, are there any events missing from the dataset? Is there anything else we can do to improve this? Comments open.

Refinery Fires Bayesian Check

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Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

No normal person wants war.

That is why war planners developed The Pattern — a repeatable multi-stage sequence designed to engineer consent for operations the public would otherwise reject. In this series I’m going to show you the full Pattern in action. Part One begins with the birth of modern U.S. interventionism and the very first time the template was tested: the 1954 Guatemalan coup. By the end of this piece you’ll already recognise the first two stages. In the parts that follow we’ll see the final stages of the pattern, (the jackals) and see how the same playbook has been updated for 2026.

We don’t live in feudal times where Kings have access to a warrior class like the Kshatriya in ancient India, the Spartans in ancient Greece, or the Samurai in ancient Japan. If the war planners decide war is needed, they must bring the public with them. This makes you a component of war. Your beliefs, your ideas and even your thoughts about it matter deeply to them. They need just enough support, and so detailed plans are drawn up to maneuver you into position.

There is a pattern to all of this, and once you recognise it, you can’t unsee it. War planners bank on you not recognising their methods, so my aim is to reveal them so they have a harder time pushing their wars onto the public.

The birth of constant war

The way Iran is being treated in 2026 has its roots in how America came out of WW2 eighty years ago in 1945. At that time, American planners looked at their situation and literally made a plan to dominate the entire world: not a conspiracy, a well documented part of America’s modern history. It was called the “Grand Area” strategy, and was the key vision of America’s post war plan.

Fearing the Nazi regime might claim most of Europe, planners came to a stark conclusion: “The United States should use its military power to protect the maximum possible area of the non-German world”. According to the planners, to maintain peace and America’s position within it, the United States would need to economically and militarily dominate basically everywhere other than continental Europe and the Soviet Empire. The planners believed this was key to America’s survival.

‘The Grand Area’ plans were afoot before the war ended, and they were based on the assumption that Europe and North Africa would fall to the Nazi regime, but when Britain didn’t capitulate to the Nazi onslaught, and the prospect of a Nazi Europe dissolved, ‘The Grand Area’ plan remained.

Why?

Well there was still one major player left on the table; the Soviets. America would use its new economic and military power to ‘protect the maximum possible area’ and box the Soviet influence inside central Asia. With the Nazi regime gone, and the Soviet machine locked behind the Iron Curtain, the final fear was that communism might ‘blow over’ the border like a dandelion seed and ‘infect’ something inside The Grand Area.

This was the start of the pathological fear which grew inside America, a fear of anything that sounded or looked even remotely communist. Perhaps the experimentation with cannabis and LSD in the 60s didn’t help matters, but soon enough, a deep paranoia emerged that communist ideas were taking root. Any suggestion of communism, anywhere at all, would be met with a new strategy of American sponsored violence, and the intelligence agencies were at the heart of it all.

The era of constant war had begun, and as it began, ‘The Pattern’ of war emerged with it.

The 1954 Guatemalan Coup D’Etat

You will hardly find a clearer example of ‘The Pattern’ than the CIA orchestrated coup which took place inside Guatemala in 1954. Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, had the temerity to distribute Guatemala’s own uncultivated land to the poor so they could grow a life for themselves. Árbenz compensated the land owners with 25 year bonds at 3%, but this didn’t alleviate American fears. The reforms triggered America’s communist alarm and landed Árbenz on the radar of the State Department.

An internal memo by Charles Burrows, the State Department’s Inter-American Bureau Officer, beautifully revealed the mindset at that time. Because Guatemala’s land reforms were popular and helping workers and peasants, it might inspire neighbouring countries to do the same:

“Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program, of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises, has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors, where similar conditions prevail.

The United Fruit Company had investments in Guatemala, so with their business interests in crosshairs, the CIA decided Árbenz had to go. So how would planners overthrow a government if the public wouldn’t support it? They’d try to do it without anyone noticing. Declassified documents have dragged this fiasco from the realm of conspiracy theory and into sunlight of documented reality. In their own words, the CIA conspired in “the development of a covert action program designed to topple the Árbenz government”. The two operations were called PBSUCCESS and PBFORTUNE.

If you can believe it, the operation kicked into gear when a United Fruit Company lobbyist walked into the CIA office and ‘suggested’ that the Guatemalan President be ousted. This was before Árbenz had even been elected! This kick-started a five year collaboration to install a government more favourable to their corporate interests. It’s really worth remembering the real seed of this coup, because as we move through the story, you’ll be washed along with the subterfuge, lies and distortions that we discover. The seed of the war is constant, and is an important datapoint to keep in mind: it was corporate interests partnering with military enforcers.

The relevance of this period of history is how the Guatemalan coup set the template for the psyops and lies we are subjected to today. When the CIA started planning the coup, the agency had only existed for three years. Getting rid of Árbenz would be one of their first major foreign projects, they had to get it right, and its ultimate success set the tone for many more interventions to come. Guatemala was the birth of The Pattern.

Part One: Isolate, Economise, Destabilize.

Because people don’t want war, the troops can’t just roll in. You must try to achieve your objectives in a way people won’t notice. Absolutely critical to all but the very last stages of wars is plausible deniability. To be crystal clear, this is the capacity for the ‘normal’ bits of the American government to deny any and all involvement any military action, coups, murder or chaos. Either because the Senators and Congressmen literally don’t know about the operation, or because there’s a plausible cover story which everyone (including the CIA itself) believes. Propaganda becomes internalised, and even the CIA themselves start to believe their own stories.

Don’t take my word for it, the CIA themselves committed these ideas to paper.

The first stage of The Pattern is to use America’s economic power to choke out the target before any shots are fired. We still see the choke out today; when you hear of sanctions against some country or regime you know very little about, that nation is probably on a pathway to regime change. Normally, planners inside that target nation are aware they’re on a pathway to regime change, so consider their actions in that context. Economic warfare is always the first round.

In Guatemala, according to the State Department’s own words, “it is our policy to discourage the Export-Import Bank and other official agencies from making developmental loans to Guatemala.” In their own words, the CIA created “operations for cutting off military aid to Guatemala, increasing aid to its neighbors, [and] exerting diplomatic and economic pressure against Árbenz.” Do those statements, now more than 70 years old, remind you of our current times?

With the Guatemala’s neighbours now well armed, and no access to banking or financial services, the next stage of The Pattern is to target the economy directly. Noting how vital coffee exports were to the Guatemalan economy, the CIA informed planners that “A study is under way to determine what phases of the coffee industry may be attacked which will damage the Árbenz government and its supporters” This remarkable document is still hosted on the State Department’s own website, and from it we learn how the CIA collaborated with its “partners” to wage economic warfare on vital Guatemalan exports.

By ‘partners’, we’re absolutely sure one was the United Fruit Company, along with other large oil, utility, food and media corporations. The CIA also planned for “American businessmen in New York City...to put covert economic pressure on Guatemala by creating shortages of vital imports and cutting export earnings.” As you can see, the CIA was a network of assets inside corporations, governments, business, academia and media. These methods of war - private partners creating economic pressure on their targets - are the same methods we are subjected to today.

In Guatemala, ultimately, the CIA became frustrated by their economic efforts. Boycotting Guatemalan coffee caused knock on effects and problems for their other partners, and the other economic pressures they’d applied would take longer to materialise. Once you’ve run out of road, it’s time to turn up the heat.

Part two: Fabricate evidence and Amplify your narrative

It’s one thing to get your ‘partners’ in business and media to collaborate with you, but how do you drag along your allies and other regional players? You’d need something quite serious to convince them to join in your covert operation. Remarkably, the CIA were quite candid about this: “Real, or when necessary fabricated evidence regarding aggression and subversion, will be used at an OAS conference to obtain approval of the American States for multilateral economic action against Guatemala.”

Read the statement again. “When necessary fabricated evidence regarding aggression and subversion will be used.” It proves that a shady tentacle of the US Government will fabricate evidence to obtain support for their wars. To be clear, the OAS is the Organization of American States, often described as the Western Hemisphere’s version of the United Nations. The CIA were prepared to fabricate things to convince other nations to join their “pile on” of Guatemala.

It’s worth remembering that this was 1953. Far from disqualifying this to an irrelevancy, it elevates the behaviour into the very soul of the CIA. Fabricating evidence to start wars is in their DNA. They’ve been doing it since day one, so keep that front of mind.

So what kinds of things did they fabricate?

Well, they were looking to drum up support for their planned military coup against Árbenz, so in an “elaborate fabrication”, they “planted a cache of Soviet-made arms on the Nicaraguan coast to be ‘discovered’ weeks later by fishermen.” Their plan was to pin this whole made up saga on the Guatemalan government. It was a “Soviet Submarine” they had planted, which (according to the fabricated story) had landed there with the full collaboration with the Guatemalans. Frustrated at the lack of response to their fake news, the CIA urged their local spies to “make a cautious effort to obtain added publicity for this story in the Guatemalan press and public opinion.” It’s worth reading the original document which is posted below, because it’s fascinating to see it in black and white.

The target for these psyops were the Guatemalan people and politicians, and these bizarre interventions were having some success. But what to do about convincing their electorate at home? To convince the American public of their plans, the CIA would have to work with real experts in propaganda. Together with the United Fruit Company, they turned to Edward Bernays, a man with a proven talent for propaganda. In fact, he’d literally written the book on the matter in 1928 where he said “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Over the years, Bernays had developed a seriously good propaganda service which he was now touting to the highest bidder, including the CIA and United Fruit. So Bernays set to work in a collaboration that is well documented in the book “Bitter Fruit”.

The project was started when United Fruit came to Bernays with concerns about their old fashioned ‘colonial’ image, which had its roots in the actual ways they treated their workers. Undeterred by this, Bernays had a solution: paint United Fruit as a modern company surviving on the frontlines against a wave of central American communism. By casting Guatemala as a Soviet stronghold, United Fruit could become the hero of the story. With connections to all the major publications, it was trivial for Bernays to arrange for a journalist, Fitzhugh Turner, to travel to Guatemala with the New York Herald Tribune. The series Turner produced, “Communism in the Caribbean” was pivotal in shaping American perceptions about the tiny central American state.

Not content with one success, Bernays continued to work his magic in an incredible PR Blitz which was documented by the CIA themselves.

“NBC News aired a television documentary,’Red Rule in Guatemala,’ revealing the threat the Árbenz regime posed to the Panama Canal. Articles in Reader's Digest, the Chicago Tribune, and the Saturday Evening Post drew a frightening picture of the danger in America's backyard. Less conservative papers like the New York Times depicted the growing menace in only slightly less alarming terms.”

Just some of Bernays’ successes

But here’s the thing...Árbenz wasn’t a communist. Remember I said you’d get washed up in the lies and subterfuge?

In his inaugural address to the nation, Árbenz promised to convert Guatemala from "a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state." The CIA were fully aware of this. They absolutely knew that Árbenz was not a communist. They knew that Guatemalan opposition to his land reforms was “greatly exaggerated”, even amongst the wealthy people there. In the CIA’s own words, “Rather than setting up a Communist state, Árbenz desires to establish a “modern democracy” which would improve the lot of its people through paternalistic social reforms.” The reality was, as we’ve already seen, the CIA’s beef with Guatemala was about a policy Árbenz implemented which upset their sponsors at The United Fruit Company.

Despite this... by 1954, Bernays, the CIA, and United Fruit really had convinced the American public that Árbenz was a Soviet puppet. This is a critical hallmark of The Pattern: the massive gap between what happened and what the public believe happened. Once a narrative takes root, contradictory evidence often fails to dislodge it. Social psychologists call this belief perseverance, the well-documented tendency for people to cling to their initial understanding even after the original “facts” are proven false.

The American public had absorbed the “Red Jacobo Árbenz” story so completely that when the CIA plot against Árbenz was actually revealed, they simply didn’t believe it. In a strange twist of fate, a CIA asset hospitalised with a stomach ulcer had his secret documents taken by a double agent working for Árbenz, giving him “intimate knowledge of rebel training bases, intelligence operations and a fairly accurate concept of the modus operandi of PBSUCCESS.”

The Guatemalan president went public with the evidence; the propaganda, the rebel forces being CIA assets, and the overall CIA plot to overthrow him. Árbenz held press conferences, showed the documents, the whole works, yet, the American press and public simply didn’t believe it. Instead, the press “unanimously accepted the State Department’s characterization of the charges as a propaganda ploy”

The American public had come to believe an inversion of the truth. When an operational hiccup catapulted the actual truth into their hands, they didn’t believe it. They couldn’t believe it, an effect the war planners have come to utilise with a deadly effectiveness. That is why the first story matters so much, because it stubbornly persists.

Are there things today that parts of Europe and America have been fully convinced of, which, despite evidence to the contrary, they simply cannot allow themselves to let go of?

In Part Two we will watch what happens when the economic chokehold and the propaganda blitz still aren’t enough. That is when the jackals are sent in — the covert military action, the proxies, the coups. Once you see the full Pattern, you can’t unsee it… and you’ll start noticing it everywhere, including in 2026.

But where was the case?

The bombs started falling on February 28th. It wasn’t until March 2nd that the White House published what was supposed to be the definitive justification: a document boldly entitled “The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism against American Citizens,” listing 44 incidents and 992 American deaths. It was presented to the public as an authoritative, solemn accounting.

There was just one problem. The data didn’t come from a three-letter intelligence agency. It didn’t come from the Pentagon or the State Department. The source wasn’t given at all.

So where did it come from?

Over the past two weeks, this investigation — supported by paid subscribers to The Digger — has traced the White House case for war back to its origins. What we found is, I believe, one of the most significant breaches of public trust in modern American history. Here is the full story.

Part 1: The Plagiarism

We owe a debt of gratitude to Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit), who first noticed that the White House statement looked familiar. I verified his findings independently, stripping away editorial introductions and running both texts through a standard data-science comparison algorithm. The results were undeniable.

The White House’s case for war was copied, virtually word for word, from a report published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) — an Israeli-aligned think tank whose original name was EMET (Hebrew for “truth”), founded with the explicit goal of enhancing Israel’s image in North America. The FDD report was written by Tzvi Kahn, a former Assistant Director for Policy and Government Affairs at AIPAC — the most powerful Israel lobbying organisation in America.

The pipeline: a former AIPAC official writes a document at FDD. The White House copies it word for word. America goes to war.

But it gets worse. We know from leaked undercover footage filmed by Al Jazeera that the FDD is not just a think tank. Sima Vaknin-Gil — a former Israeli military intelligence officer serving as Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs — was caught on hidden camera explicitly claiming the FDD as Israel’s asset:

“We are a different government working on foreign soil and we have to be very very cautious. We have three different sub-campaigns that are very very sensitive… We have FDD. We have others working on this.”

The White House used material from an organisation claimed by Israeli intelligence to justify a war to the American public.

Read Part 1 in full:

Part 2: The Author

The immediate question was: who inside the White House did this? The document didn’t write itself. A specific person sat at a keyboard and copy-pasted Israeli lobbying material into an official government publication.

Hidden in the page metadata — invisible to ordinary readers but embedded in the White House content management system — was the answer. The author field reads: Jacob Schneider.

<script type="application/ld+json" class="wp-parsely-metadata">
{
  "@context":"https:\/\/schema.org",
  "@type":"NewsArticle",
  "headline":"The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens",
  "url":"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/articles\/2026\/03\/the-iranian-regimes-decades-of-terrorism-against-american-citizens\/",
  ...
  "author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jacob Schneider"}],
  "creator":["Jacob Schneider"],
  ...
}
</script>

Schneider’s title is “Special Assistant to the President and Rapid Response Director.” He has a BA in Political Science from Bethel University. His entire career has been in campaign communications — RNC rapid response, Trump campaign rapid response. He has no foreign policy expertise, no intelligence background, and no Middle East credentials whatsoever. His job is propaganda.

How did he get there? Schneider himself told a local newspaper in 2020 that he was recruited via Twitter: “He’d met a couple people through Twitter and they reached out to him to ask if he would be interested in moving to Washington, D.C. to work on the campaign. He said yes… and ended up moving to Washington, D.C. within about 10 days.”

I checked his Twitter interactions from June 2020. At the exact moment he claims he was recruited, Schneider was publicly interacting with someone from the Center for Security Policy — a neoconservative war lobby that has campaigned for regime change in Iran for decades. That same organisation held at least two key National Security Council positions in the Trump administration at the time.

The CSP’s founder, Frank Gaffney, is a former “Distinguished Adviser” to the FDD which provided the source material for The White House war. The organisations are connected at every level. The same network that produces the propaganda also appears connected to the recruitment of the man who launders it into the White House.

Read Part 2 in full:

Part 3: The Machine

Parts 1 and 2 could have been a story about one lazy staffer copying one document. Part 3 proves it’s something far more systematic.

Five people write White House articles about Iran, Israel, and Gaza. Four of them never quote a single outside expert. The fifth — Jacob Schneider — quotes nobody but outside experts. And every single one of them is connected to the same Israeli lobbying organisation.

I went through all 20 of Schneider’s articles and extracted every person and organisation he quotes. Every expert, every think tank, every polling firm. Roughly 350 names. Then I categorised them.

Across 19 of his 20 articles, 100% of the non-government think tank voices trace back to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies or its network.

One hundred percent. Not 80%. Not “mostly.” Every single one.

When Schneider needed “independent” nuclear experts to validate the bombing of Iran, he quoted four people:

Andrea Stricker — an FDD employee who spent 12 years at David Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security before moving directly to FDD.

David Albright — Stricker’s former boss, who co-authored a 155-page Iran strategy report with FDD’s CEO calling for “overt preparations for warplanes and missiles to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.” That was in 2013. In 2026, those exact recommendations became White House policy.

Spencer Faragasso — Albright’s colleague at ISIS who co-authors reports with him. Same organisation quoted twice.

Brian Carter — American Enterprise Institute, which is funded by the same pro-Israel mega-donors as FDD. Paul Singer gave $1.1 million to AEI and $3.6 million to FDD. Bernard Marcus, FDD’s largest donor, provides roughly a third of their budget.

Four “independent” experts. One network.

And then we found a plausible route by which the material gets into the White House. Richard Goldberg is a Senior Advisor at FDD. John Bolton brought him onto the National Security Council in 2019 — and FDD continued to pay his salary while he served in government. An FDD lobbyist, paid by the lobby, sitting on the National Security Council. Goldberg then re-entered the White House in late 2024 as Senior Counselor to the National Energy Dominance Council — directly overlapping with the period Schneider was publishing.

On top of that, FDD Action openly advertises a “Policy Support Desk” providing White House staff with free policy analysis, private briefings, and legislative drafting assistance. They market it on their website. The pipeline isn’t hidden. It’s just not something anyone had mapped until now.

Read Part 3 in full

What Comes Next

This investigation is not finished. Subscribers to The Digger have funded the work so far, and with their support, here’s what we’re going after next:

The Vandenberg Coalition. The polling Schneider cites as evidence that Americans support the war comes from an organisation with six FDD personnel on its advisory board — including FDD’s CEO and founder. FDD helps justify the war, an FDD-linked organisation polls on support for it, and the White House cites that poll as independent evidence. It’s a closed loop. We’re going to map it fully.

The money trail. Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus fund both FDD and AEI. We’re going to trace the full donor network behind the organisations whose experts populate Schneider’s articles.

The other authors. We’ve focused on Schneider so far. But Allison Schuster, Micah Stopperich, Mary Wales, and Jacqueline Kotkiewicz also write on these subjects. Their articles are formal government instruments — executive orders, presidential memoranda. Do those also carry fingerprints? We’re going to check.

The FDD Action “Policy Support Desk.” FDD’s lobbying arm explicitly offers policy analysis, briefings, and legislative drafting to White House staff. We want to know: who uses it? What materials have been distributed? This could be subject to FOIA requests by American researchers.

This investigation exists because subscribers fund it. Every part of this series — the data collection, the source analysis, the verification — was done with the support of people who believe this kind of journalism matters.

If you’ve read this far, you understand what we’ve found: a foreign lobbying operation has successfully built a pipeline to place its propaganda directly into official White House communications, presented to the American public as independent government analysis, to justify a war.

If you want this investigation to continue, please consider subscribing. And if you’re already a subscriber — thank you. This work would not exist without you.

Share this. The more people who understand how the case for this war was manufactured, the harder it becomes to manufacture the next one.

What at first appears to be a comms staffer plagiarising one document has grown into something more concerning. When I started digging deeper into his output, what I found was far more systematic than a single copy-paste job. I found a propaganda machine. A closed loop of Israeli-aligned organisations producing the research, providing the “expert” voices, polling the public on the results, and then feeding it all back into official White House communication. A pipeline of Foreign government propaganda published under the letterhead of the White House.

This is Part 3, and it’s the part that sheds light on the pipeline of foreign propaganda finding its way into Executive Office. This is about a foreign government manufacturing the consent of the American people via The White House. Let’s get into it.

Schneider’s Factory

Since January 2025, Jacob Schneider has published 20 articles on the White House website covering Iran, Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Gaza. That’s more than every other White House author on these subjects combined.

We know it’s him because his name appears in the metadata of every single one, as we showed in Part 2. His title is “Special Assistant to the President and Rapid Response Director.” His job, in plain English, is propaganda. Fast propaganda.

I wanted to see if there was a pattern to Schneider’s use of FDD propaganda. Using a search for White House articles on Iran, Israel, Hezbollah, and Gaza, I went through the first 20 articles authored by Schneider and extracted every single person and organisation he quotes. Every expert, think tank, polling firm and tweet, and then I categorised them.

The results were staggering.

Schneider quotes roughly 350 people across his 20 articles. Most of them fall into predictable categories: Trump administration officials, Republican lawmakers, foreign leaders, and right-wing media personalities. But when you isolate the “independent experts” – the think tank analysts, the nuclear specialists, the foreign policy scholars that Schneider cites to give his articles the veneer of credibility – a very different picture emerges.

Across 19 of his 20 articles covering Iran and military operations, 100% of the non-government think tank voices trace back to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies or its network.

One hundred percent.

Let me say that again. Every single “independent” expert that Jacob Schneider quotes to validate the case for war with Iran is connected to the Israel claimed intelligence operation the FDD. The conclusion is simple: someone has successfully setup a pipeline to launder Israel claimed propaganda directly into the White House. American citizens are receiving foreign propaganda under the iconic White House letterhead.

It might be hard to believe, but I’m going to show you the receipts. So let’s get into it.

Before we go further, an important point: all of the White House articles I’m discussing here do not have a traditional ‘Schneider’ byline. This is very important when you consider everything I’m about to tell you. To the millions of Americans (and global citizens) who read these articles, they are written by “The White House”. What’s written under that letterhead, and how it got there, carries huge weight because it carries with it the power of the executive branch of the American government. We only know literally who wrote articles because the author names appear in non-visible metadata.

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The whole saga raises many questions which need answers: Trump campaigned extensively on the anti-war ticket, he campaigned extensively on “draining the swamp” of deep state operatives, he campaigned on not starting a war with Iran, but in his 2026 presidency, his White House Staff are quoting verbatim from deep state war hawk propaganda.

How did this come to happen?

As the keyboard was being tapped somewhere in Donald Trump’s White House, what exactly was happening? Who was actually writing out that case for war? And who were they in contact with?

We can know with some confidence who laundered Israeli propaganda, because their name appears as the author in the pages’s metadata. Whilst they might be a professional in communications, they perhaps overlooked the power of their own Content Management System. Hidden in the metadata of the White House’s article, the author is right there, and learning how that person got there will help us understand how the deep state really operates...

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This is an extremely serious breach of security, and it’s a serious breach of the trust of the American people. The White House absolutely should not be laundering Israeli lobbying propaganda. It demonstrates just how far up the decision chain Israeli influence has reached.

Follow me on twitter @phillyharper Now...read on.

Ghostwriting a War (Part 1)

On February 27, 2026, while traveling aboard Air Force One to Texas, President Donald J. Trump issued the executive authorization for Operation Epic Fury. The coordinated U.S. and Israeli military campaign commenced the following day, striking across the Iranian homeland.

The death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and numerous top-tier military and intelligence commanders has plunged the region into a dangerous crisis, triggering immediate retaliatory actions from Iranian proxy forces across Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East. America, and perhaps the world, is now embroiled in a very serious war. Global energy security has been destroyed, and there look to be very few off-ramps.

The Vacuum of Intelligence

Historically, preemptive or massive retaliatory military campaigns of this magnitude are preceded by the declassification of formal intelligence, such as National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). These documents are meticulously crafted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and normally, they’re used to demonstrate the imminent nature of a threat to the public, Congress, and the international community.

The responsibility for this sits with Tulsi Gabbard as she is currently serving as Director of National Intelligence.

But it appears that Trump has acted on impulse.

He didn’t consult Congress, the American public, or seemingly anyone at all. Tulsi Gabbard’s statements about what happened are cryptic, but crucially, she has not said that Iran posed an imminent threat.

As the world was forced into a dangerous new phase, there was a vacuum of information where there should have been congressional backing, National Intelligence Estimates, and public onboarding. Having plunged America into another foreign war, the press, Congress, MAGA, and the public wanted answers.

So where is the case?

The bombs started falling on February 28th. It wasn’t until March 2, 2026, when the White House published what was supposed to be the definitive document justifying the current Israel-US war on Iran. The statement, boldly entitled “The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism against American Citizens,” opened with a brief editorial before listing 44 incidents resulting in a highly specific 992 US deaths.

It was presented to the American public as an authoritative, solemn accounting, but unlike the lead-up to the Iraq war, or the endless Russia collusion allegations, this data didn’t come from a three-letter intelligence agency. The source of the data wasn’t given at all.

So, where did the intelligence come from?

The entire case used to justify the war came from the Israeli lobby. That’s a strong accusation, but as you’ll see, the data strongly supports it and the implications are profound. The White House adopted its case for war, wholesale, from a think-tank report prepared by a former AIPAC employee and current staffer inside an Israel lobby.

We owe a massive debt of gratitude to Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit on X), who first dug into the data and painstakingly traced the White House statement back to its original source. I have gone through and verified McIntyre’s findings myself, standardizing the data to isolate just the list of alleged incidents. The results are undeniable: Israeli special interests have reached the very highest echelons of American power and forced through their case for war.

The Propaganda Pipeline

On June 19, 2025, on the eve of the first US bombing of Iran on June 21, 2025, a think tank called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) published an article titled “Iranian and Iranian-Backed Attacks Against Americans (1979-Present).” Did they know an American attack on Iran was coming?

So what is this organisation? The FDD was originally founded under the name EMET (Hebrew for ‘truth’) with the explicit goal “to provide education to enhance Israel’s image in North America.” The author of this specific June 2025 report is Tzvi Kahn, a former employee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

But the FDD is much more than a public relations outfit. It is an operational node for Israeli intelligence. We know this because of investigative reporting already in the public domain, and it’s worth understanding clearly: the FDD is a cut out of Israeli intelligence.

In 2018, Al Jazeera produced a months-long undercover documentary investigating the Israel lobby in the United States. While the film was heavily censored following massive diplomatic pressure, leaked footage revealed explosive admissions from top-tier Israeli intelligence officials.

In the undercover footage, Sima Vaknin-Gil — a former Israeli military intelligence officer who was then serving as the Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs — was caught on hidden camera explicitly claiming the FDD as an asset of the Israeli government. Discussing covert projects including data gathering, psychological warfare, and intelligence operations, Vaknin-Gil stated:

“We are a different government working on foreign soil and we have to be very very cautious.

We have three different sub-campaigns that are very very sensitive.

…

This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best. We have FDD. We have others working on this.”

Knowing this is incredibly important, because it means we can trace a direct line from the intelligence shared to convince the American public of the case for war, and Israeli intelligence operations. The White House, apparently, copy-pasted intelligence from an Israel controlled lobbying group to justify an American war against Iran. That objective has now been achieved, something Israel and Netanyahu have been campaigning on for 30 years.

So how do we know?

When you put the FDD’s June 2025 report side-by-side with the White House’s March 2026 statement, the evidence is undeniable. Someone at The White House copy-pasted the lobbyist document almost word-for-word. Where the White House did make slight edits, they were exclusively to ratchet up the underlying allegations, transforming Israeli think-tank speculation into the hard data needed to sell a war to the American public and the world.

The Visual Proof: Tracing the Edits

To verify this pipeline beyond a shadow of a doubt, I stripped away the editorial introductions and isolated just the core data lists from both documents. I then ran both texts through a standard Python data-science library called difflib, which allows us to mathematically and visually compare what is different between two sets of text.

What you are looking at in the images below is the output of that algorithm. On the left is the FDD’s lobbying document making the case for Iran’s threat to the USA; on the right is the White House’s official case for war. Here is the key to understand what you’re looking at:

• Red: Text that was deleted (or sufficiently re-written) from the original FDD lobbying document.

• Green: Text that was added by the White House.

• White: Exact, undeniable, word-for-word matches.

• Yellow Highlights: Granular, word-level edits within matching sentences.

Even where there’s no exact match, the data is qualitatively the same. It is obvious if you take the time to read the comparison that the White House used the FDD’s lobbying document as its source. But we need proof, and difflib gets us there.

Where the text is white, it demonstrates an exact copy-paste match. There’s no way out for the White House. This algorithm proves the source material for their case for war came directly from the FDD — an organization explicitly claimed as an asset by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The data proves, unquestionably, that the White House bypassed its own intelligence apparatus, opting instead to use a foreign government’s propaganda as its direct source material to justify a war.

The library is powerful enough to show us, in yellow and green highlights, the exact and granular edits the White House made for tone and aggression. For example, “Iran” becomes “Iranian regime”; “Hamas suicide bombers” becomes “Iranian-backed Hamas suicide bombers”. You can see the full difflib HTML page here.

Anyone with knowledge of copywriting or editing will recognize these changes straightaway. They are taking foreign source material and reworking it for an American audience. It’s done by someone who’s a communications professional, someone with a good understanding of audience and tone.

Part 2: The Inside Man

It is difficult to overstate the severity of this as both a breach of trust and a catastrophic breach of national security. Israel’s lobby is now so effective, and so far up the decision chain, that its own source material is being laundered into The White House’s communications — and these aren’t just any communications. These are the direct justifications for a war which could soon see American boots on the ground. It’s the data used to justify a war that has plunged the world into an oil crunch, and a war that could drag on for years.

The immediate, burning question that every journalist in the White House briefing room should be shouting is this: Who drafted the March 2, 2026 statement?

This document did not write itself. A specific staffer was tasked with compiling this justification. Under what instruction were they operating when this was written? Are foreign operatives working inside the National Security Council or the White House communications team?

As a matter of fact, we don’t have to guess.

Whoever wrote this White House document may have been a professional in communications, but they overlooked a few details…

I know exactly who wrote this document.

I know their name, I know their title, and I have the archival data suggesting they were recruited by a hawkish D.C. think-tank and air-dropped into Donald Trump’s inner circle in less than ten days.

In Part 2 of this investigation, I am going to reveal the identity of the author, name the operatives who recruited him, and expose the exact “revolving door” pipeline that placed an Israeli proxy at the absolute highest echelon of American power.

Subscribe below so you don’t miss the drop.

Follow me on twitter @phillyharper

Once unloaded, it goes onto roughly 50 freight trains heading south to Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire. There, it gets burned. The whole lot, incinerated in a matter of minutes.

This is the cornerstone of the UK’s strategy to reach Net Zero. We import millions of tonnes of wood from North America, set it on fire, and officially record the carbon emissions as zero. The British public pays for this through levies on their energy bills. It costs billions. And the evidence increasingly shows it’s worse for the climate than burning coal.

The absurdity of this arrangement is so striking that triggers intellectual self defence. Is this really true? I’m sorry to tell you it gets worse.

To understand how we got here, you need to know what Drax was. Built between 1974 and 1986, it was designed as the ultimate coal-fired powerhouse — nearly 4,000 megawatts of generating capacity, enough to keep the lights on for millions of homes. But it was also the single largest source of CO2 in the UK. In 2007 alone, it pumped 22.1 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, alongside the highest estimated nitrogen oxide emissions in the entire EU.

Then came the 2008 Climate Change Act. Coal was on its way out, and Drax had a choice: adapt or die.

The company chose adaptation. It spent £700 million converting four of its six boilers from coal to biomass. The corporate PR narrative was one of redemption — the dirty coal monster reborn as a clean, green energy champion. And the government loved it.

Today, Drax runs 2.6 GW of biomass capacity, providing around 6% of UK electricity and 11-12% of what we officially count as “renewable” power. To feed this, the station burns between 7 and 8 million tonnes of wood pellets every year. Because the UK doesn’t have the forestry to sustain even a fraction of that demand, 99% of the fuel is imported. Environmental campaigners put it this way: Drax burns the equivalent of 580 million Christmas trees per year. That’s roughly 20 trees for every household in the country.

The Physics Just Don’t Work

Biomass is carbon neutral in theory, but in practice its utility falls apart. Wood is an inferior fuel. It has lower energy density than coal and higher moisture content, even after drying and compression. A power station has to burn a much larger volume of wood to generate the same electricity, and 65% of the energy is lost immediately as uncaptured heat.

The result is that burning wood emits more CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated than burning coal.

Read that again. Then consider that Britain has massive reserves of coal.

UK biomass burning generates 15.6 million tonnes of CO2 annually. Of that, Drax alone accounts for 13.3 million tonnes. To put that in context, total UK coal burning — including steel production — emitted 10 million tonnes in 2020, and wood burning now exceeds coal. Drax ranks as the fourth largest CO2 emitter in Europe, behind only three coal plants in Poland and Germany. And remember, this is only the CO2 cost, when you throw in the damage to real north American ecology, the environmental cost of this ‘green’ technology becomes utterly absurd.

For reference, here’s how the fuel sources compare on lifecycle emissions are below. How can this possibly be considered as “zero carbon” technology?

• Imported wood pellets: 1,160 to 5,120g CO2 per kWh (varies with forest carbon debt and supply chain)

• Hard coal: roughly 1,000g CO2 per kWh

• Natural gas: roughly 400g CO2 per kWh

• Offshore wind: less than 20g CO2 per kWh

The Accounting Trick

This is where the spreadsheet meets the stratosphere.

Under carbon accounting rules established by the IPCC and adopted by the UK, the CO2 released when you burn wood for energy is not counted at the smokestack. Instead, those emissions are attributed to the country where the trees were grown — in this case, the US and Canada.

The logic goes like this: new trees will be planted to replace the ones that were felled, and those trees will eventually reabsorb the carbon that’s released when we burn it here in the UK. Therefore, the net CO2 release is logged as zero.

In theory, this makes some kind of sense. In practice, it’s an accounting trick, and even seasoned parliamentarians have called it exactly that.

The problem is time. A wood pellet burns in minutes. The regrowth of a forest takes decades. Studies show the carbon debt created by substituting wood for coal in natural hardwood forests takes 44 to 104 years to repay, but CO2 has an immediate effect when you release it into the atmosphere. You don’t get to pollute it now, suffer the effects now, then take it back out 104 years from now and call that net zero. Imagine this absurdity with something your senses could intuitively detect: we’re going to pollute your town with a terrible stench, but don’t worry, because in 104 years time we’ll take the smell away again. This accounting trick operates on a century-long IOU.

Considering CO2 emissions on a generous 50-year assessment, electricity from Drax is as carbon-intensive as gas. On a less generous one, it’s worse than coal.

The European Academies Sciences Advisory Council has said that using woody biomass for power “is not effective in mitigating climate change and may even increase the risk of dangerous climate change.” The UK’s own Climate Change Committee has warned that large-scale unabated biomass is not compatible with Net Zero. Yet the zero-carbon label persists, because the accounting rules say so.

By importing the wood from North America, the UK removes the carbon liability from its own national ledger and pushes it onto foreign balance sheets. This allows the government to stand on the world stage and claim significant domestic emissions reductions, while the atmosphere — the only thing the climate actually responds to — tells a different story entirely.

The Damage to the Forests

Drax has always maintained a clean narrative here. The company says it uses sawmill residues, thinnings, branches, and waste material — wood that would otherwise be left to rot or be burned in slash piles. Investigations have repeatedly shown this isn’t the full picture.

In British Columbia, a BBC Panorama investigation used satellite imagery, logging licences, and drone footage to follow trucks from Drax-owned pellet mills directly into areas of primary and old-growth forest. These are irreplaceable ecosystems — habitats for critically endangered species like the woodland caribou and the Canada lynx, and carbon sinks that have been sequestering carbon for centuries.

Documents from the BC Ministry of Forests revealed Drax took more than 40,000 tonnes of wood from old-growth forests in 2023. In one 87-hectare cut block, 90% of the area was classified as a “priority deferral area” — a designation reserved for forests that are “rare, at risk and irreplaceable.”

When confronted with this evidence, Drax said its operations aligned with Canadian regulatory frameworks. The company has since announced it will phase out sourcing from British Columbia, but for the centuries-old trees already felled, the damage is done.

In the American South, the story takes on a different dimension. Across Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Carolinas, the process of thermally drying pine releases volatile organic compounds and hazardous air pollutants, including formaldehyde and fine particulate matter.

In Gloster, Mississippi, and Amite, Louisiana, Drax mills have been fined repeatedly for air quality violations. A $2.5 million penalty in 2020 was one of the largest air-pollution fines in Mississippi history — levied because the company had drastically underestimated its hazardous emissions since the mill opened.

A survey of households near these mills found 86% reported at least one family member diagnosed with diseases associated with pellet mill pollution. British bill payers are funding a policy that claims to help the global environment while poisoning people in the American South. The whole pipeline of people involved in propping this up need to fess up to this absurdity.

Transport Costs Carbon

The supply chain emissions add another layer to this. Lifecycle analysis’ are a tricky things; much like the ‘models’ used in pharmaceutical medicine development they can get you the answer you want. They were almost certainly used extensively in all the greenwashing intellectual acrobatics that justified this initial absurdity. But... it’s worth considering the arrangement of felling and shipping 62,000 of thousands of tonnes of wood across the Atlantic ocean for burning in in UK power plants.

Bulk carriers run on Very Low Sulfur Fuel Oil, and even though it seems counter intuitive, each tonne of VLSFO burned actually releases 3.1 tonnes of CO2. This particular fuel is incredibly carbon heavy. A lifecycle assessment looked at the energy gained vs energy expended from Canadian wood pellets, and it found that 7.2 GJ of energy is consumed for every tonne of pellets produced and shipped to Europe. That’s 39% of the total energy content of the pellets themselves. In financial terms, this is like every dollar costing you $1.39 because of the transaction fee.

A 2019 Chatham House analysis put it bluntly: US-sourced pellets burned in the UK are responsible for up to 16 million tonnes of CO2 when you account for the full supply chain and the forgone carbon removal of the trees that were harvested. That’s the equivalent of adding 6 to 7 million cars to the road under the guise of net zero. None of which actually appears in the UK’s Net Zero spreadsheets.

As stupid as this already is, there’s the final boss we must confront.

The Bill

Since beginning its conversion from coal, Drax has received over £6 billion in public subsidies — funded directly by levies on household electricity bills. Independent analysts project the total will reach £11 billion by 2027. We are literally paying millions of pounds per day to prop up this whole bizarre saga

2021: £893 million (£2.44 million per day)

2022: £617 million (£1.69 million per day)

2023: £602 million (£1.64 million per day)

2024: £869 million (£2.38 million per day)

Source

Drax gets public money through two different government programs. In 2024, one program handed them £653 million to run three of their generators, and a second program added another £216 million for a fourth.

As part of this taxpayer-funded deal, the government gives Drax what is called a ‘strike price’. This is basically a legally binding safety net. It guarantees that no matter how cheap electricity gets on the open market, Drax will always be paid exactly £138 for every unit of power they generate. If the actual market price is lower than that, the public has to make up the difference through their energy bills.

To understand how absurd that number is, consider that offshore wind strike prices at one time fell to £60/MWh and are currently between £80/MWh - £90/MWh. Onshore wind and solar are cheaper still. The public is paying more than double the going rate for a fuel source that emits more carbon than coal.

In February 2025, despite years of criticism, the government extended Drax’s subsidies for another four years, from 2027 to 2031, at a strike price of £109.90/MWh. The government still holds the view this is “value for money” but simultaneously dropped Drax’s load to 27%, meaning it sits idle when wind and solar are abundant and fires up as backup.

The Revolving Door

So how does a single company, engaged in a practice that’s environmentally destructive and economically inefficient, maintain an unshakeable grip on government policy across multiple administrations? A recent employment tribunal gave us a rare look behind the curtain.

The case involved Rowaa Ahmar, Drax’s former head of public affairs. Ahmar alleged she was dismissed after blowing the whistle internally on the company’s sustainability claims following the BBC Panorama documentary. She testified that she received information indicating Drax had been “deliberately concealing” the truth and was “misleading the public, government and its regulator.” She claimed she was given an ultimatum: sign an NDA, take money, and go quietly. The case eventually settled without admission of liability.

But the most revealing testimony came from Drax’s external affairs director, Jonathan Oates. He told the tribunal that the company employs numerous former civil servants, and that staff regularly cycle between Drax and government departments. “So there is a bit of a revolving door, if you like, between the business and the civil service,” Oates said.

That’s the external affairs director of Drax, under oath, describing a revolving door with the civil service. Clearly, I have more work to do in digging through LinkedIn to find this revolving door..

The company also spends £1.2 million a year on lobbying firm 5654 & Company, £480,000 on sustainability consultancy Robertsbridge, and makes strategic political donations — including £12,000 to the Labour Party in September 2022, shortly before sponsoring a reception at their conference. In 2024, Ofgem fined Drax £25 million for misreporting sustainability data on Canadian wood. None of this has slowed the subsidy pipeline.

Even if you set aside the sheer physical absurdity of the CO2 emissions, the Drax saga is a glaring symptom of a much deeper disease: a catastrophic failure of governance. This is a system completely incapable of course-correcting a glaring mistake. We don’t have a dynamic government, regardless of whether its politically of the left or right. Our decision-makers are trapped inside a closed-loop information ecosystem thats funded by lobbyists and consultants who warp reality to protect their interests.

The tragic net result? Instead of just burning the coal we already have readily available in places like South Wales — which would actually emit less CO2 and cost drastically less money — we are spending billions in taxpayer wealth to chop down ancient North American forests, ship them 8,000 miles across the ocean, and set them on fire, and we still have the highest electricity prices in the world. Perhaps the most terrifying part of this entire racket is that it operates in broad daylight, right in front of everyone, and absolutely no one seems able to stop it.

As ever, if you liked this, please like it and share it. The audience this article gets is the audience you generate.

Despite the clear incentive for a knee-jerk response to Trump, I have resisted it. Trump, like everyone else, can be judged on his own merits. He certainly has some: he stands outside the standard political oligarchy, and he says things no other politician would dare. I liked the anti-war campaign he delivered—his vocal commitments to avoiding Middle Eastern “adventures” and World War III. To hear it said so explicitly was refreshing. Given the subject matter that launched this Substack, I was also pleased to see Trump engage with RFK Jr.

But here’s the thing: what someone says can be entirely at odds with what they do.

In RFK Jr., we got something we wanted from Trump, but it’s important to understand why we got it. Trump engaged with RFK Jr. for the same reason he engages with anything: it benefited him personally at the time. He saw that RFK Jr. was polling well. He saw that the medical freedom movement had broken into the mainstream and, in that, he saw an opportunity to bring a powerful figure into his fold. He is a savvy political operative, so he seized the moment. The RFK phenomenon became wind in Trump’s sails.

Well, so what? We got RFK, right?

I don’t believe Trump actually cares about medical freedom or health. Do you? This is the man behind Operation Warp Speed. Trump observed he’d gain power by integrating RFK Jr. into his campaign, so he did it. Maybe the medical freedom movement gets something out of the deal, but it was always a transactional power play. The “why” was power, not health or policy.

The why is more important than the what, because understanding motivation gives you predictive power over future actions. As we’ll see, that is a very handy tool for getting people to do what you want.

When Trump campaigned on “no more forever wars,” no more taxes on foreign conflicts, and no more soldiers coming home in boxes, was it because he truly believed it? Or was it because he understood the power of holding that position? While it’s reasonable to assume a candidate might deliver on a promise made so unequivocally, that assumption misses the underlying motive.

Trump’s “why” is almost always rooted in power. That isn’t always a bad thing, but it is consistent. It’s how he has operated since the beginning of his career dealing with the property mafia in New York. Power, the perception of power, and the projection of power are integral to his survival. In this worldview, your integrity, your beliefs, and your actual commitments matter significantly less than the leverage you hold in an interaction.

So, when he told America he was anti-war, he was using that stance to gain power—power he might later trade for something else. When he championed medical freedom, he did so to gain power he could later trade. When he claimed to be the “crypto president,” he did so to gain power he could later trade.

It is easy to get swept up in the excitement. A crypto president? RFK heading health services? No more wars? Yet, each of those groups ultimately ended up disappointed. The crypto president didn’t deliver; he used his influence to make millions selling “Trump tokens.” The medical freedom president previously appointed Alex Azar, a bona fide pharmaceutical executive, as Secretary of Health and Human Services. And now, the “anti-war” president has started a catastrophic war with Iran.

Trump has plunged the planet into a global crisis—the exact thing he promised he wouldn’t do. The exact thing. You can twist and contort this if you must, but the facts remain. He explicitly campaigned on the opposite of what he is now doing. “I can tell you, you’re not gonna have a war with me,” he said repeatedly. “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers... those stupid, stupid people. They love seeing people die.”

Another campaign favorite? “We would’ve had a deal with Iran within literally minutes after the election... They were dying to make a deal.” Yet here we are, staring down the barrel of WW3.

He said those things because it was expedient. It got him elected, and getting elected got him power. While Trump claims negotiations weren’t going his way, Omani mediators—key players in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks—noted that every concession asked of the Iranians had been agreed upon. How does that equate to negotiations failing?

It becomes crystal clear: Trump is not anti-war. He simply recognized the power of the rhetoric. Given what we know now, Trump being “anti-war” is as absurd as a communist buying a water company or a capitalist raising taxes to 100%.

We can use this same model to understand why he launched this war. Did he mistakenly believe it would benefit him in the short term? Did he think it would gain him additional political leverage? This brings us to the fatal flaw at the heart of the Trump presidency.

In markets, an “alpha signal” is a pattern that predicts future movements. In poker, if you discover someone’s “tell,” you can exploit it. When Conor McGregor fought Jose Aldo, McGregor spotted a tell in Aldo’s game and even told journalists about it before the fight. He then ruthlessly exploited it and knocked Aldo out.

Trump has a tell. His game has been obvious for a long time: He has a massive ego, he acts in the short term to increase his power, he craves flattery, and he is wounded when people don’t respect him. These aren’t difficult tells to work out. It means the people surrounding Trump can gain power simply by playing the game. They frame things in ways that motivate him to act. Once you see the tell, he is easy to move into position.

A great, if odd, example is the shoes Trump buys for his hand-picked executives. They are expensive dress shoes he likes; he looks at a staffer’s feet, guesses the size, and has an aide order a pair.

Marco Rubio wears these shoes even though they are reportedly too big for him. Imagine walking through NATO and White House meetings with your feet being chewed up by ill-fitting Oxfords. Why would you do that?

Because it pleases Trump.

What Trump considers a loyalty test is actually a tell to be exploited. If I say, “You have great taste, I love these shoes,” my proximity to his power increases. One reading is that Trump is a “strongman” demanding people wear his clothes. My view? Trump is the one being exploited. His penchant for flattery is so obvious that people like Rubio, Graham, and Lutnick are happy to play along if it buys them influence.

These idiosyncrasies make him easy prey for motivated actors. Lindsey Graham has been psychopathically campaigning for war with Iran for two decades. Two decades. Lindsey Graham wears the shoes.

Trump is an empty vessel of a president, just as easily manipulated as Biden was. The "swamp" he promised to drain simply learned his tell. You see this now as Trump realizes the war in Iran has not gone as expected. In a rare moment of contrition, he has begun blaming his advisors like a schoolboy explaining poor homework. He is trying to reclaim lost power by shifting the blame, but it isn’t an excuse. He is the one making the judgments. If his shortcomings allow him to be exploited, that is on him.

In the early days of this conflict, Trump clung to the idea that he could stop it “any time he wanted.” He likely believed it, but that belief was built on “advice” designed to stroke his ego and his desire for ratings. It is trivial to sell a war to a man led by those principles.

Trump’s tell has been used to drag America into a war that could last for years. The tragedy of promising to "expel the warmongers, those horrible warmongers from our government — those stupid, stupid people." only to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them and accept their stupid gifts. The very "warmongers" he vowed to exile simply worked out his tell, put on his shoes, and played his ego until they got the one thing they’ve wanted for two decades.

It doesn't matter what Trump believes now. The war has started, and he doesn't have the power to stop it. He’s in it, and there is no obvious way out — which is precisely what the warmongers who infiltrated his presidency wanted.

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly asserted that his negotiation skills would deter conflicts before they began. He famously declared at a 2023 rally in New Hampshire that his administration would “expel the warmongers” and “drive out the globalists” who “love seeing people die”.

“I will prevent World War Three and you are very close to World War Three”

Upon his inauguration in January 2025, the President’s inaugural address reinforced this peacemaker persona, stating that the success of his administration would be measured not only by battles won but by “wars we never get into”. This rhetoric was almost immediately tested by the failure of diplomatic efforts to secure a new nuclear agreement with Tehran. Despite initiating a series of indirect talks in Oman and Rome early in 2025 — which the administration initially described as “constructive” — the White House quickly reverted to a “maximum pressure” campaign.

Nov 2024 “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Jan 20, 2025 Success is measured by “the wars we never get into.”

Feb 6, 2026 Addressing threats by the Government of Iran.

Feb 28, 2026 “Massive and ongoing” attack aimed at regime change.

The transition from the “peace candidate” to the commander of Operation Epic Fury was not a gradual shift but an abrupt pivot. By February 2026, the administration was stuck in a military intervention which has every chance of creating over into the very World War he’d explicitly campaigned to prevent.

The Twelve-Day War

The narrative template for the 2026 conflict was established during the brief but intense “Twelve-Day War” in June 2025. This conflict, which followed the International Atomic Energy Agency’s finding of Iranian non-compliance, saw the United States join Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure.

On June 24, 2025, President Trump announced a ceasefire, framing the operation as a definitive success. In his subsequent State of the Union address, he claimed that Iran had been “warned” and that their nuclear ambitions had been effectively halted, but the developments following the ceasefire clearly contradicted that narrative. Fearing further attacks, Tehran began rebuilding its missile factories and nuclear sites almost immediately, utilizing dual-use inputs from China to bypass sanctions.

This 2025 conflict showed Trump’s preferred strategy: apply massive force early, set very high expectations, then declare victory as soon as possible. The long-term strategic outcome, wasn’t then, and isn’t now a clear feature in the White House communication strategy. So the attack was memory holed, but that doesn’t mean its reverberations had stopped. It had set in motion a chain of events that would embroil America in war with no clear off ramp.

Its Complete and it’s beginning

When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026, the administration’s communication focused heavily on the brevity and ease of the upcoming campaign. President Trump initially projected that the military operations would last “four weeks or less”. This attempt to define the war as a “short-term excursion” or a “little excursion” was central to managing domestic political expectations and global financial markets.

However, as the conflict entered its second week, the administration’s timeline was breaking apart. While the President claimed the war was “very complete, pretty much” and that he could stop it “any time I want,” his subordinates offered a more cautious outlook.

Mar 2, 2026 “Four weeks or less.” says Trump

Mar 3, 2026 Pete Hegseth says it “Won’t happen overnight.”

Mar 3, 2026 Trump says “Capability to go far longer.”

Mar 4, 2026 Hegseth says “Could be six, it could be eight [weeks].”

Mar 9, 2026 “Very complete... pretty well complete.”

Mar 9, 2026 The Department of War: “We have only just begun to fight.”

The contradiction between Trump’s “complete” narrative and the Pentagon’s “only just begun” statement highlights the administration’s struggle not only to communicate a clear strategy, but to have one. During a press conference on March 10th, a reporter challenged Trump, how can the war be “very complete,” whilst Hegseth said, “This is only just the beginning”

“So which is it?” the reporter asked. “Well, I think you could say both” Trump replied. Its both the beginning and complete.

The Sunken Navy that Mined the Strait

A primary theme in the administration’s “winning” narrative was the alleged annihilation of Iran’s conventional military capabilities. On March 9, 2026, President Trump claimed that the Iranian Navy was “gone,” lying at the “bottom of the ocean”. He specifically cited the sinking of “46 top-of-the-line” Iranian vessels over a three-and-a-half-day period, jokingly remarking that his commanders thought it was “more fun” to sink them than to capture them.

These claims were paired with assertions that Iran’s drone and missile capabilities had been “utterly demolished” and reduced to a “trickle”. Secretary Rubio echoed similar statements, suggesting the US was ‘getting the job done’ and seriously degrading Iranian capacity.

But on the ground, evidence suggested a more resilient Iranian threat. While the conventional Iranian Navy had indeed suffered heavy losses, the regime was successfully operating asymmetric naval warfare, using smaller boats to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz — a tactic that successfully maintained a stranglehold on global oil transit. Furthermore, despite claims that missile launchers had been 80% destroyed, Iran continued to launch hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles against U.S. bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia well into the second week of March. The UAE ministry of Defense continues to post daily updates on the Iranian missile threat they deal with on a daily basis.

March 9th: “Navy is gone... lying at the bottom of the ocean.” but Iran was using small boats to lay mines in the Strait.

March 9th: Missile capability is “largely knocked out” but UAE is still dealing with ballistic missiles and Iran launched “hundreds” of drones and missiles at bases.

March 11th “Practically nothing left to target.” Ongoing retaliation in Lebanon, Iraq, and Persian Gulf.¹⁸

The administration’s rhetoric relied on a binary view of military strength — assuming that the destruction of “top-of-the-line” assets equaled the cessation of hostilities. Trump was now telling the press “Any time I want it to end, it will end”. In reality, the Iranian resistance remained operational, with the regime in Tehran declaring that they, not the United States, would determine when the war ended.

The Iranian strategy, to choke the global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz, was clear and effective. Policy writers on Substack made clear that “top-of-the-line” damage to Iran’s interior bears no real effect on Iran’s ability to use asymmetric tactics to ensure ships cannot cross the strait.

Whilst Iran’s defensive strategy remains clear, it has been near impossible for the Trump administration to express a coherent rational on why the war started, nor coherent objective which might end it.

The (lack) of an “Imminent Threat”

The legal and political justification for the 2026 strikes underwent serious whiplash. Initially, Secretary Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson characterized the operation as a “preemptive” and “defensive” measure. Rubio’s exact words on March 2nd will likely be studied in years to come. Asked if there was an “imminent threat”, he replied:

Critics argued that Rubio’s statement made clear it was Israel that had dragged the United States into war because “[Iran] were attacked, by someone else, Israel attacked them”, forcing a pre-emptive hit against the “imminent threat” from Iran. Trump asserted that Tehran was prepared to strike “within a week” and that the U.S. had “pretty good proof” of missiles aimed at Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

This “imminent threat” narrative was contested on the very same day following a classified briefing. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, explicitly stated the intelligence didn’t support Rubio or Trump’s position. “There was no imminent threat to the United States of America by the Iranians”.¹⁹ Warner warned that equating a threat to Israel with an imminent threat to the U.S. was “uncharted territory”.

As the justification for the initial strike fell apart, the Trump rhetoric moved up a gear toward demanding “unconditional surrender”. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained that this meant something different than unconditional surrender, arguing the war would continue until the President determined that Iran “no longer poses a threat,” essentially putting the U.S. in a position to declare that Iran have surrendered “whether they [Iran] say it themselves or not”.

This shift from a defensive “preemptive” strike to a demand for “unconditional surrender” and “regime change” is a profound contradiction at the heart of the Trump administration’s stated foreign policy goals. While the President had previously derided “nation-builders” and “neo-cons” for wrecking nations in the Middle East, he is now actively seeking to topple the Iranian government and personally participate in the selection of its new leader.

When Mojtaba Khamenei was named as his father’s successor on March 8, 2026, the administration’s response was one of uniform rejection. Trump labeled the appointment as “unacceptable” and dismissed the new leader as a “lightweight”. His insistence that any new Iranian leader must have U.S. approval before being recognized underscored the administration’s pivot toward regime change. Rubio seemed to directly contradict this, telling Arab foreign ministers they wanted “different people running the country”, but that this was “not regime change”. It’s not clear how you can demand different leadership without wanting regime change.

Donald Trump - any new leader “Must get approval from us.”

Marco Rubio - “Goal is not regime change... want different people.”

Donald Trump - “I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei.” immediately after Khamenei’s selection

The public contradictions have created a confused strategic outlook. Does Trump want unconditional surrender? Does the administration aim to install a new government? If they don’t want a new government, what does victory actually look like? As these questions were starting to emerge, one Iranian endpoint for success had remained constant

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz on March 2, 2026, led to an immediate surge in global oil prices, with crude hitting $120 per barrel and markets entering a state of shock.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly insisted that the price increases were “only temporary” and would “last weeks, not months”. Wright characterized the crisis as “short-term pain to solve a long-term problem,” suggesting that once the U.S. “defanged” Iran, prices would drop significantly

The reality of the energy market was far more complex than the administration’s “short-term” messaging suggested. Experts noted that even if the Strait were reopened quickly, the physical damage to infrastructure in Qatar and the backlog of tankers would take weeks to clear. Oil production facilities can’t just be turned back on like a hose, even if the strait were opened tomorrow the economy would face months of serious problems in what has been described as ‘largest oil supply disruption in history’.

Furthermore, the administration’s claim that U.S. domestic production could mitigate the crisis ignored the fact that American refineries are incompatible with the heavy crude typically transiting the Strait.

The most embarrassing contradiction occurred when Secretary Wright erroneously posted on social media that the U.S. Navy had escorted a tanker through the Strait, sending oil prices on a “rollercoaster” before the White House was forced to concede the claim was false.

Minimizing Casualties

Another area of rhetorical tension lies in the reporting and acknowledgement of casualties. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took a combative stance toward media reporting on the war’s human toll, asserting that the press only highlighted casualties to “make the president look bad”. He dismissed reports of fallen service members as “ahistorical” and “warped,” emphasizing that the “terms of this war will be set by us at every step”.

This refusal to engage with the human cost of the conflict was mirrored in the administration’s reporting of Iranian casualties. While human rights organizations like HRANA and Hengaw reported thousands of deaths, including over 1,300 civilians, the administration maintained that its mission was “the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history.”

The very same say, the US military struck a girls’ school in Minab, which killed 165 people, mostly little girls. Trump initially claimed Iran did it, then claimed the Tomahawk used was perhaps Iranian, or Korean, or ‘something else’. A US military investigation later demonstrated the missile was in fact fired by the American military and was likely due to a targeting error

US Casualties — Administration claims 14 military dead, confirmed by Centcom.

Iranian Military — Administration claims 6,000+ killed; Hengaw independently reports 4,420.

Iranian Civilians — Administration claims minimal/avoided; HRANA reports between 1,319 and 3,000+.

Regional Impact — Administration calls it a “short-term excursion”; independent reports indicate 700+ dead in Lebanon and 100+ in Iraq/Kuwait.

The “unconditional surrender” demanded by the President has not materialized, nor has the “easier than we thought” regime change. Instead, the United States finds itself leading a multi-front war with no clear exit strategy, while global energy markets remain in a state of sustained volatility. The campaign promises of 2024—to avoid World War III and stop “forever wars” have been replaced by a “Trump Doctrine” that emphasizes massive, preemptive strikes and the pursuit of regime change through decapitation.

As the conflict enters its third week, the “short-term excursion” has become a strategic commitment of unknown duration. The administration’s statements, while effective at calming markets or rallying the base in the short term, have created a significant credibility gap that will become impossible to close as the factual developments of the war continue to diverge from the official rhetoric.

The message was clear: the Israeli state is no longer merely a refuge for a people; it has become, in the eyes of its leaders, an instrument of divine prophecy. For the secular economies of the West, which rely on materialist explanations like oil, land, and power to understand the world, this theological pivot is almost impossible to parse. Yet, without integrating these messianic undercurrents into our model of the nation, we are effectively flying blind.

The roots of this shift go back further than many realize. Footage from 1990 captures a younger Netanyahu meeting Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who urged the politician to “do something to hasten” the arrival of the Messiah. Netanyahu’s response? That he was already working on it. Thirty five years later, Netanyahu’s recent actions in Iran may be judged against this very promise.

In the context of messianic theology which Netenyahu believes, the intensifying conflict with Iran takes on a dimension far removed from geopolitical calculus. It is viewed by many religious-Zionist hardliners as the prophesied War of Gog and Magog, a cataclysmic, pre-Messianic battle described in the Book of Ezekiel. In this theological framework, Iran — or ancient Persia — and its proxies are identified as the coalition of nations destined to fight Israel before the final redemption. In this context, a war with Iran is not a disaster to be avoided through deterrence or diplomacy; it is a divinely mandated, unavoidable “apocalyptic clash” required to clear the board for the Messianic age. When Netanyahu invokes “the days of the Messiah” one week into a war which many analysts believe could spiral into a large conflict, we should be paying much closer attention to these beliefs and what they really mean. Like it or not, these ideas may explain the willingness of certain figures in the Israeli cabinet to escalate tensions with Tehran despite intense international pressure to de-escalate.

Willing things into existence

A cornerstone of this messianic political vision is the full realization of Eretz Yisrael HaShlema, the Whole Land of Israel. While the term is most commonly understood to delineate the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the most extreme religious interpretations push this boundary to extend “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” Whereas some scholars interpret the “river of Egypt” as the Wadi al-Arish in the Sinai, extremist interpretations identify it as the Nile. This maximalist map, stunning in its scope, would annex parts of contemporary Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Turkey.

This ideas have slowly moved from the fringes of the settler movement to the mahogany tables of the cabinet room. In August 2025, Netanyahu explicitly endorsed the vision of “Greater Israel” as a spiritual responsibility, signaling a move toward a territorial maximalism that stretches far beyond Israel’s current borders. This isn’t a small policy change; Israel’s current trajectory is a rejection of the current state in favor of a biblical one.

In 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich delivered a speech in Paris from a podium featuring a map that included the entire Kingdom of Jordan. In 2025, Smotrich, who now oversees the “Settlement Administration,” openly touted a principle of “maximum land, minimum population” to finalize the annexation of the West Bank.

That these ideas are theological rather than pragmatic was confirmed by Smotrich himself in 2024. Responding to a question on Israeli borders, Smotrich replied “It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus,"

The Gulf states, whose sovereign territories fall directly within these prophesied borders have reacted with horror to the mainstreaming of religious prophetical ideas of “Greater Israel”. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, backed by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), issued unprecedented joint condemnations after Israeli and US officials openly embraced the “Greater Israel” map.

The Third Temple and the Red Heifer

For “pro-active messianics,” the eschatological imperative to build the Third Temple is central to ushering in the messianic age, and the existing Al-Aqsa Mosque/Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount is viewed as the primary impediment. Groups, like the Temple Institute, have detailed blueprints and ritual items prepared, believing the destruction of the current Islamic holy sites to be a necessary, immediate step. Considering that the Al-Aqsa mosque is revered as the third holiest site in Islam, its prophetic destruction is an act that virtually all analysts agree would trigger a catastrophic, regional holy war.

And yet, plans, actions, and policies are in place to carve this reality into existence. The Temple Institute, has even received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Israeli government funding. It has already manufactured over 90 ritual items, including a golden menorah and priestly garments for their planned ritual transformation of the Mosque.

The red heifer is a critical component of this plan, referencing the biblical commandment (Numbers 19) to use the ashes of a completely unblemished, sacrificed red cow to create the “water of purification” required to ritually cleanse the priests and the site before the Temple service and animal sacrifices (at what is currently the Al-Aqsa mosque) can resume. In September 2022, five red heifers were bought from the United States…. These animals are currently being monitored at a site in Shiloh, and the Jerusalem municipality has even sponsored “rehearsals” for ritual sacrifices right in front of the Mosque.

The heifers were located, funded, and shipped by Texas-based Evangelical Christians. These “Christian Zionists” have their own messianic vision that dovetails into their own prophecies of the apocalypse. According to “Dispensational Premillennialism”, for the Second Coming of Christ to occur, the world must pass through the “Tribulation,” a period culminating in the Battle of Armageddon.

This prophesied apocalyptic war, often mapped onto modern foes like Iran or Russia invading Israel, is foretold to push the Jewish state to the brink of total annihilation. For Christian Zionists, a catastrophic regional war isn’t a diplomatic failure to be avoided, it’s the necessary, bloody climax that forces Christ to descend and establish his kingdom on Earth.

Given these are such extreme views, what are we rto make of these very same people at the biblical ‘pray in’ for Trump, the commander in chief of the very military now embroiled in that exact war. Much as in Israel, the extreme fringe has found its way into the executive branch, and it’s trying to usher in biblical apocalyptic prophecies.

Just like the Zionists in Israel, The Al-Aqsa Mosque plays a central role in the Christian Zionist vision of the apocalypse. According to their interpretation of the books of Daniel and Revelation, as well as the Gospel of Matthew, the Antichrist will eventually reveal his true, evil nature by walking into the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, stopping the daily animal sacrifices, and declaring himself God. This event is called the “Abomination of Desolation.“ The logic is simple: the antichrist must walk into the jewish temple, which is currently occupied by the Al-Aqsa mosque, and to re-establish the Temple on the Temple Mount requires the removal of Al-Aqsa mosque.

Whilst these apocalyptic beliefs have made their way into ”pray ins” at the executive branch, they have been openly espoused by the actual Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. In a 2018 speech in Jerusalem, Hegseth said “there’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.” Two years later, Hegseth wrote a book called “American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free” in which he argued for a new biblical crusade against Islam.

How did we miss this?

The signs that fringe religious cults were gaining executive power have been visible for a long time. While Western diplomats focus on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza or the risk of regional escalation with Iran, the actors on the ground are often playing a different game entirely. Since the start of the conflict in October 2023, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has stormed the Al-Aqsa compound 13 times, declaring that the site is now under Jewish “ownership.” In Gaza, soldiers have been documented wearing patches of the “Greater Israel” map, signaling that the war is being understood internally as a campaign of purification.

During the Gaza war we heard from Netanyahu statements that invoked genocidal commandments from the holy texts. In late 2023, Netanyahu explicitly urged the military to “Remember what Amalek has done to you,” referencing the biblical nation that is the eternal enemy of the Jewish people. In the Book of Samuel, God commands King Saul to completely destroy the Amalekites, sparing no one. “totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”. By mapping the Palestinians or Hamas onto Amalek, the conflict was elevated from a secular counter-insurgency into a divine commandment of eradication. Politicians in secular Western countries said nothing.

The disconnect between Israel’s actions and Western expectations stems from a refusal to take these religious beliefs seriously. We treat them as “strange” or “bizarre,” but for the people steering the Israeli state, they are the only reality that matters. The “Sovereignty Road” being built in the West Bank and the legalizing of dozens of illegal outposts are the actions of a state which believes its on a mission from God. A mission to usher in the messianic age.

As each day passes, the world moves closer to what could be a devastating and prolonged conflict, something Trump told his base he’d never do. As of this morning, it looks like boots on the ground look likely. What then are we to make of marines hearing from their superiors that this is the Battle for Armageddon, as foretold in extreme interpretations of the Bible?

Jonathan Larsen’s Substack

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus

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2 months ago · 6286 likes · 1203 comments · Jonathan Larsen

If we continue to view Israel and its Christian supporters in the USA through a purely secular lens, we will remain baffled by its rejection of two-state solutions and its willingness to risk international isolation. To us, the war, chaos and suffering which we may now endure are terrors to be avoided, but for the extremists driving the policy of the Israeli state, they are vital events to ensure their messiah returns. Under their extreme theological framework, these wars are being actively willed into existence. It’s reasonable to assume that the goal of the current administration is the fulfillment of a divine mission.

As Netanyahu’s March 12 address suggested, the state is moving toward a conclusion that is written in scripture, not in international law. Until we include this theology in our model of the region, we are not just failing to understand Israel—we are failing to understand the primary driver of the conflict itself.

The MEAD Alliance and the Counter-Sensor Architecture

The operational viability of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf, and its ability to defend Israeli and Gulf interests, relies upon a deeply interconnected, multi-billion-dollar web of early-warning radars, satellite communications (SATCOM), and interceptor batteries. The Middle East Air Defense (MEAD) Alliance, covertly negotiated in Sharm El-Sheikh and publicly acknowledged in 2022, sought to synchronize these sensors.¹⁴

At the heart of this defensive shield are highly specialized radar installations. The AN/TPY-2 radar, an X-band surveillance array manufactured by Raytheon and costing approximately $500 million per unit, serves as the central nervous system for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.⁵ These massive, trailer-mounted systems scan the horizon to acquire ballistic targets, calculate interception vectors, and guide kinetic kill vehicles.⁵ U.S. and allied forces deployed AN/TPY-2 radars across the Arabian Peninsula, with confirmed sites at Prince Sultan Air Base (Saudi Arabia), Al Ruwais and Al Sader (UAE), and Muwaffaq Salti Air Base (Jordan).⁵

Complementing the THAAD network is the AN/FPS-132 (Block 5) phased array early-warning radar located at Umm Dahal, near the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.³⁷ Valued at $1.1 billion, this gigantic static structure features multiple radar faces providing 360-degree coverage.³⁶ With a detection range of approximately 4,800 kilometers, the AN/FPS-132 acts as the primary over-the-horizon eye for the U.S. Space Force, capable of tracking ballistic missile launches deep within Iranian territory from the moment of ignition.³⁸

Furthermore, bases like NSA Bahrain and Al Dhafra Air Base house large spherical radomes containing strategic satellite communications terminals, essential for the secure transmission of targeting data between the CAOC in Qatar, naval strike groups, and interception batteries.³⁶

The Iranian Retaliatory Campaign: Kinetic Reality and Damage Dossier

Following the devastating U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on February 28, 2026, which decimated Iran’s political leadership and degraded its domestic air defenses, the Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) executed Operation True Promise IV.⁴ This retaliation represented a paradigm shift in Middle Eastern warfare. Recognizing its conventional military inferiority, Iran deployed an asymmetric, cost-imposition strategy utilizing massed volleys of loitering munitions (suicide drones), cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles.¹¹

Between February 28 and March 11, the IRGC launched over 3,000 projectiles, systematically targeting the U.S. military footprint, the MEAD Alliance sensor network, and the critical economic infrastructure of the Gulf states.³ Al Jazeera English, Reuters, and real-time OSINT analysts on X.com documented a campaign that unfolded in distinct, escalating phases.

The Strategic Counter-Sensor Offensive (February 28 - March 2)

Iranian military planners understood that attempting to overwhelm the U.S. and Israeli missile defense shields through sheer volume alone would result in unacceptable attrition of their own missile stockpiles. Consequently, the initial wave of the campaign was a dedicated counter-sensor offensive aimed at blinding the MEAD Alliance and degrading CENTCOM’s early-warning architecture.⁵ By destroying the “eyes” of the defense network, subsequent waves of cheaper drones could penetrate Gulf airspace with greater lethality.⁴⁶

The precision of this counter-sensor campaign was startling. On the opening day of the conflict, an Iranian ballistic missile successfully struck the $1.1 billion AN/FPS-132 early-warning radar facility in Umm Dahal, Qatar. Satellite imagery verified by Planet Labs and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies confirmed a direct collision on the northern face of the radar array—the specific sector oriented toward Iran.⁵ This strike severely compromised the U.S. Space Force’s ability to monitor deep inland launches from the Islamic Republic.³⁷

Simultaneously, Iran targeted the highly sensitive AN/TPY-2 radar systems that guide the THAAD interceptors. At the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, satellite imagery captured on March 2 revealed two large blast craters, each roughly four meters across, amidst the debris of a completely destroyed $500 million AN/TPY-2 radar unit.⁵ Similar strikes targeted THAAD radar shelters and support infrastructure at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and military installations near Al Ruwais and Al Sader in the UAE, resulting in visible charring and structural damage.⁵

The communications backbone was also severed. At NSA Bahrain, a kamikaze drone struck a large spherical radome, destroying vital satellite communications (SATCOM) terminals used by the U.S. Fifth Fleet to coordinate regional maritime defense.³⁶ In Kuwait, reports indicated that at least six SATCOM radomes were destroyed at Camp Arifjan.⁴⁸

Kinetic Impacts on U.S. Military and Diplomatic Installations

With the regional sensor network degraded, Iranian projectiles began impacting high-value military and diplomatic targets across the Gulf, inflicting casualties and structural devastation.

The most severe loss of American life occurred in Kuwait. On March 1, an Iranian missile bypassed defenses and struck a makeshift tactical operations center located within a civilian port facility in Kuwait. The massive blast killed six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers and left 38 other service members hospitalized with severe traumatic brain injuries, burns, and shrapnel wounds.⁹ Further attacks in Kuwait saw an Iranian drone strike the garrison at Camp Buehring, while the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait City was likely hit by a missile on March 2, prompting the State Department to order its indefinite closure.²⁴ Satellite imagery from Planet Labs further confirmed extensive damage to more than a dozen structures, aircraft shelters, and runway approaches at the Ali Al Salem Air Base.⁴⁸

In Bahrain, the assault on the U.S. naval presence yielded fatal consequences. At approximately 2:00 AM on March 2, an Iranian missile directly struck the Mina Salman Port, adjacent to the Fifth Fleet headquarters. The kinetic impact and subsequent interception debris killed one shipyard worker and severely injured two others.¹⁹ The Pentagon later confirmed that two U.S. Department of Defense employees were wounded during the barrages on Manama.¹⁹

Diplomatic compounds were not spared. In Saudi Arabia, two Iranian drones successfully penetrated the airspace over the highly fortified Diplomatic Quarter in Riyadh on March 3, striking the U.S. Embassy compound and causing a localized fire and structural damage.⁸ A separate drone attack targeted a CIA station within the city.³² In the UAE, a drone strike hit the vicinity of the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, igniting a fire and forcing operational suspensions.⁸

The conflict also bled heavily into Iraq, where Iranian-aligned Shiite militias joined the offensive. Militants launched repeated drone and rocket barrages against the Ain Al Asad Air Base and the Erbil Air Base, targeting housing units and runways.²³ On March 10, a drone strike directly hit the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, a major U.S. facility, further destabilizing the American footprint in the Levant.³⁵

The Shattering of the Gulf Oasis: Civilian and Economic Infrastructure

A defining characteristic of Iran’s strategy was the deliberate expansion of targeting to include the civilian and economic lifeblood of the Gulf monarchies.¹⁰ By striking luxury hotels, international airports, and vital energy refineries, Tehran sought to fracture the carefully curated image of the GCC as a safe haven for global capital, thereby pressuring the Arab states to demand a cessation of U.S. and Israeli hostilities.¹⁰

The United Arab Emirates bore the overwhelming brunt of this attritional warfare. Between February 28 and March 10, the UAE Ministry of Defense reported detecting an astounding 1,475 drones, 262 ballistic missiles, and numerous cruise missiles launched toward its territory.⁴⁰ While Emirati F-16s, Mirage 2000s, and ground-based interceptors achieved an impressive interception rate, the sheer volume of the swarm attacks ensured that dozens of projectiles breached the shield.³¹

The visual impact was devastating for Dubai’s reputation. Intercepted drone debris and direct strikes sparked localized fires at the iconic Burj Al Arab hotel and luxury residential towers in the Palm Jumeirah and Dubai Marina districts.⁵⁵ Dubai International Airport—the world’s busiest for international travel—and Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi suffered direct hits and debris impacts. Four aviation workers were injured in Dubai, and one individual was killed at the Abu Dhabi facility, leading to mass flight cancellations and the suspension of operations by major carriers like Emirates and Air France.⁵⁷ Across the UAE, the collateral damage from interceptions and direct strikes resulted in the deaths of six civilians—primarily expatriate workers from Pakistan, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh—and injuries to 122 others.²⁹

Iran also executed precision strikes against the core energy infrastructure that sustains the global economy. In Saudi Arabia, Iranian drones repeatedly targeted the massive Ras Tanura oil refinery. Debris from intercepted drones sparked fires that forced Saudi Aramco to temporarily shut down 550,000 barrels per day of processing capacity.⁹ The Shaybah oil field, which produces roughly 1 million barrels daily, and the Berri oil field faced sustained, multi-wave drone attacks.⁹

The economic assault on Qatar was equally severe. Iranian drones struck QatarEnergy’s facilities at the Ras Laffan and Mesaieed Industrial Cities.²⁶ The strikes forced a complete halt to Qatari liquefied natural gas (LNG) production, abruptly removing approximately one-fifth of the world’s LNG export capacity from the global market and triggering panic in European energy sectors.⁶ In Bahrain, a drone attack on March 9 ignited a massive fire at the Bapco petroleum refinery on Sitra Island. The resulting conflagration injured 32 citizens, including four serious cases, and prompted the state-owned energy company to declare force majeure on all group operations.¹⁹

Perhaps most alarming was the exposure of the Gulf’s fundamental existential vulnerabilities. On March 8, an Iranian drone struck a critical water desalination plant in Bahrain.¹⁹ Furthermore, fragments from intercepted missiles struck a university building in Muharraq, injuring three people, and damaged residential housing and shopping districts in Manama.⁵⁶ In Kuwait, drone strikes targeted fuel storage tanks at the Kuwait International Airport and engulfed the Public Institution for Social Security building in flames.⁵⁶

Maritime Strangulation: The Blockade of the Strait of Hormuz

Parallel to the aerial bombardment, Iran executed a highly effective maritime strangulation campaign, effectively blockading the Strait of Hormuz and weaponizing global supply chains.⁶ On February 28, the IRGC declared the 33-kilometer-wide chokepoint a closed military zone, threatening to “set fire to any vessel attempting to pass”.⁶

This threat was not idle. The maritime offensive targeted vessels traversing the Gulf and the strategic logistical ports meant to support the U.S. Navy. On March 2, the American-flagged chemical and oil products tanker MT Stena Imperative was struck by multiple Iranian projectiles while berthed at the Mina Salman Port in Bahrain, sparking a major onboard fire that required emergency suppression.¹⁹ Concurrently, an oil tanker flying the Marshall Islands flag was attacked by an explosive drone boat approximately 50 nautical miles off the coast of Muscat, Oman. The explosion breached the main engine room, resulting in a severe fire and the death of one crew member.³³ On March 4, a Bahamas-flagged crude tanker suffered a massive explosion while anchored southeast of Kuwait, marking a significant geographic expansion of the maritime threat.³⁰

To enforce the blockade, the IRGC Navy deployed numerous minelayers into the Strait of Hormuz. By March 10, CENTCOM reported that U.S. naval and air forces had engaged and destroyed 16 Iranian minelaying vessels.⁶⁵ Furthermore, Iran subjected the entire Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman to severe GPS/GNSS jamming and electronic spoofing. Maritime intelligence agencies recorded over 1,735 severe interference events affecting 655 cargo-carrying ships in the first week alone, rendering electronic navigation near-impossible and drastically increasing the risk of collateral damage.⁶⁶

Recognizing that the U.S. military relies on bypass hubs to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz, Iran directly attacked Oman’s commercial infrastructure. The Port of Duqm, vital for U.S. logistical roll-on/roll-off operations, was repeatedly targeted by drones. Strikes hit mobile housing units, injuring a foreign worker, and successfully impacted fuel storage tanks, causing contained damage to the strategic dry-dock facility.²⁶ In the UAE, the Jebel Ali Port, the linchpin of regional maritime commerce, suffered fires resulting from intercepted missile debris, while operations at Kuwait’s Shuaiba port were completely suspended.²⁶

The compounding effect of kinetic threats, naval mines, and electronic warfare caused commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz to collapse to near zero.⁶ Major global ocean carriers—including Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, CMA CGM, and COSCO—suspended all transits, trapping over 150 loaded tankers outside the gulf.⁶⁸ The global insurance market reacted instantly; War Risk and Protection and Indemnity (P&I) insurance were broadly withdrawn for the Persian Gulf, rendering maritime commerce economically untenable.⁶

The Stress Test of the MEAD Alliance

The joint defense framework established by the United States, Israel, and the GCC—formalized faced its first existential, real-world test.¹⁴ From a purely tactical perspective, the integrated air defense network demonstrated significant capability. The UAE, which bore the brunt of the Iranian swarm tactics, reported interception rates hovering between 92 and 94 percent for incoming ballistic missiles and drones.⁵⁴ The integration of early warning data via CENTCOM’s CAOC at Al Udeid proved functionally capable of tracking and assigning mass launches.²⁷

However, the strategic viability of this defense model was revealed to be fundamentally flawed due to an unsustainable asymmetric cost-exchange ratio. Iran’s True Promise IV campaign relied heavily on the mass deployment of Shahed-136, Shahed-107, and jet-powered Shahed-238 loitering munitions.¹¹ These systems are manufactured at an estimated cost of $20,000 to $50,000 per unit.³¹ In stark contrast, defending against these saturation waves forced the U.S. and GCC militaries to expend premium interceptors. A single Patriot PAC-3 interceptor costs approximately $4 to $5 million, while a THAAD interceptor costs upwards of $15 million.³¹

Within the first 100 hours of the conflict, the financial burden of munitions replacement for the United States alone exceeded $3.1 billion.⁷¹ The rapid and alarming depletion of interceptor stockpiles prompted the UAE and Qatar to issue urgent requests to Washington for emergency replenishments.⁵⁴ This dynamic highlights a critical capability gap: the United States and its regional partners currently lack the deep magazines of cheap interceptor drones or directed-energy weapons necessary to sustain defense against prolonged attritional warfare.¹¹

Furthermore, the fog of war in a highly saturated drone environment led to severe operational friction and catastrophic failures in situational awareness. The sheer density of targets over Kuwait caused a tragic breakdown in air defense coordination, resulting in Kuwaiti air defenses mistakenly identifying friendly aircraft as hostile. This friendly fire incident led to the downing of three U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles, a catastrophic error that cost the U.S. military an estimated $282 million in hardware and undoubtedly fractured operational trust within the coalition.¹¹

The Shattering of the Gulf’s Economic Model

For decades, the Gulf monarchies have predicated their transition away from hydrocarbon dependency on maintaining an image as an “oasis of stability” in a perpetually volatile region.¹⁰ Cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha have successfully attracted trillions of dollars in foreign direct investment, global tourism, and highly skilled expatriate labor by implicitly guaranteeing absolute physical security.⁵²

The visual reality of the March 2026 war—plumes of black smoke rising from the Jebel Ali Port, fires near the Burj Al Arab, and explosions disrupting the world’s busiest international airport—has deeply punctured this vital narrative.¹⁰ The deaths of foreign workers in Dubai, Bahrain, and Oman forcefully communicated to the global market that the GCC is no longer immune to the kinetic realities of its neighborhood.²⁹ Furthermore, the Iranian strikes on the Bahraini water desalination plant exposed a terrifying existential vulnerability; without uninterrupted desalination and energy services, the hyper-modern, arid Gulf capitals simply cannot sustain their populations.¹⁰

This sudden vulnerability is forcing a profound diplomatic recalibration across the GCC. Prior to the conflict, Gulf leaders, including those from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman, had engaged in extensive diplomacy with Tehran and explicitly warned the Trump administration against initiating a war, fearing precisely the blowback that occurred.⁷³ Despite hosting U.S. military assets and investing hundreds of billions in American defense technology, the Gulf states found that the U.S. security umbrella was incapable of providing hermetic protection against massed Iranian retaliation.⁹

Consequently, the utility of hosting U.S. forces is undergoing intense domestic and elite scrutiny. States that had meticulously cultivated backchannels with Iran and attempted to act as neutral mediators—specifically Oman and Qatar—found their sovereign territory attacked regardless of their diplomatic posturing, effectively killing near-term off-ramps.⁷ As Qatari officials noted, Doha cannot function as a credible diplomatic mediator while its energy infrastructure and military bases are actively under bombardment.⁷⁵ The realization that U.S. bases serve as magnets for destruction, rather than purely as deterrents, is likely to stall further integration under the Abraham Accords and the MEAD Alliance.⁷³

Global Supply Chain Paralysis and Macroeconomic Shock

The kinetic operations in the Persian Gulf instantly metamorphosed into a severe global macroeconomic crisis. The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz effectively severed the primary transit artery for approximately 20 percent of the world’s daily seaborne oil supply and a massive fraction of its liquefied natural gas.⁶

The financial markets reacted with immediate panic. The international benchmark Brent crude surged by nearly 65 percent, peaking at nearly $120 a barrel, sparking fears of a resurgence in global inflation.⁷⁷ The severity of the disruption forced the International Energy Agency (IEA) to announce an unprecedented intervention: the release of 400 million barrels of emergency oil reserves, primarily drawn from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, representing the depletion of roughly one-third of the globe’s emergency stockpiles in a desperate bid to stabilize energy prices.⁷⁹

Beyond the energy sector, the conflict triggered a systemic logistics failure. With the Persian Gulf quarantined by the withdrawal of War Risk insurance and the physical threat of Iranian minelayers and anti-ship missiles, maritime commerce ground to a halt.⁶ The forced rerouting of major ocean carriers around the Cape of Good Hope added 10 to 20 days to Asia-Europe transit times, drastically spiking freight costs and delaying the delivery of critical industrial commodities such as aluminum, fertilizer, and cement.⁶⁸

Simultaneously, the targeting of Gulf airports crippled the air freight industry. Major logistics providers, including FedEx, UPS, and Cargolux, suspended regional operations, while airlines canceled passenger and cargo flights to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha.⁶⁹ This dual-domain paralysis of both ocean and air freight threatens to disrupt global manufacturing, retail, and construction supply chains long after the cessation of active military hostilities.⁸⁰

The eruption of the 2026 Iran War, initiated by the U.S.-Israeli Operation Epic Fury and answered by Iran’s Operation True Promise IV, has fundamentally rewritten the security geometry of the Middle East. By systematically targeting the critical infrastructure of the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council, Iran demonstrated both the capability and the strategic resolve to hold the region’s economic and military lifeblood hostage.

The deliberate destruction of high-value American early-warning radars, including the AN/TPY-2 in Jordan and the AN/FPS-132 in Qatar, highlighted a highly effective Iranian counter-sensor doctrine designed to blind the multi-billion-dollar MEAD network. While U.S. and allied interceptors performed admirably on a tactical level, the conflict exposed the unsustainable economic reality of utilizing multi-million-dollar missiles to defeat massed swarms of inexpensive loitering munitions.

The resulting kinetic damage to commercial ports in Dubai and Oman, energy refineries in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and life-sustaining desalination plants in Bahrain has shattered the illusion of Gulf invulnerability. As the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz continues to inflict severe macroeconomic pain on global energy and shipping markets, the United States faces a precarious future in the region. Washington must now navigate the monumental task of rebuilding degraded surveillance infrastructure, addressing critical gaps in asymmetric air defense capacity, and managing a deeply fractured alliance network where host nations are increasingly questioning whether the American security umbrella is worth the devastating cost of Iranian retaliation.

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This morning, the UAE came under attack from missiles once again. Residents of Dubai were advised to stay indoors as the anti-missile system dealt with a fresh round of attacks. Moments later, footage emerged that Dubai airport had suffered a direct hit.

For the UAE,‘normality’ is of high importance. Just considering Britain, there are 240,000 British expats living there. If there’s an exodus because people feel unsafe, it will seriously hit Dubai’s infamous real estate sector. Dubai’s raison d’etre will have been damaged, possibly forever.

To stay, things need to feel normal, things need to feel safe. What Iran is demonstrating is they can break that reputation for safety and normality, and it doesn’t look possible for UAE or America to really stop it. They’ve been hitting Dubai airport regularly for a week now, and just scored another direct hit.

What happened next I think supports the Policy Tensor analysis. After releasing statements about what they had hit, Iran immediately released a statement saying the attacks will now stop as long as the surrounding nations don’t retaliate.

It’s an offer of a truce of sorts, because Iran have achieved their immediate objectives. They can disrupt a key pillar of the UAE’s prosperity, as well as hitting key US military infrastructure all around those nations. So what does the UAE make of this offer of a truce? Well literally within minutes, Emirates airlines announced they would resume flights. That tells you two things, that the UAE take Iran at their word, and that tacitly they accept the terms of that offer. Emirates simply wouldn’t risk their reputation and patient safety unless they really believed those attacks were going to now stop. Moving as quickly as they did tells you how important normality is for Dubai.

This now puts the ball squarely back in the USA’s court, whose strategy is now barely coherent. Demanding ‘unconditional surrender’ from a nation that is currently choking out the Strait of Hormuz and damaging the economic interests of the whole region is, shall we say, wishful thinking.

UAE clearly don’t want these attacks to continue, and the terms of the agreement they seem to have tacitly accepted means no attacks on Iran can launch from UAE states. I must stress this is my interpretation, and it seems they’re either being reckless or they’ve made a calculated decision which leverages Iran’s offer. Political capital in support of the USA is rapidly declining in the UAE, with businessmen openly rebuking Trump’s decision to plunge the region into war. Quite what Trump and his odd fish administration decide to do next is anyone’s guess.

As we moved into the afternoon, we heard on X that drones had hit the Jumeriah hotel on the iconic man made archipelago. The sight of the hotel on fire confirmed it: the war had already come to Dubai.

No one reacted. The normality of everything felt like we’d been thrown into a computer game full of NPCs. Holiday life just carried on, and we allowed ourselves to be swept along in the wave of irrational normality. As the sun turned the dust of the desert to orange, we went to a cocktail bar for an early evening drink. If things are normal, let’s be normal. Perhaps that’s the end of it? It wasn’t.

What should have been a beautiful evening view across the Dubai skyline was broken by the sound of missiles and fighter jets flying over head. Every so often you’d hear a thud followed by a rumbling sound. Are we going mad or is this really happening? Another family with a baby quietly shared with us their anxiety and it was a welcome moment; confirmation that our growing fear was rooted in some kind of reality. X was now suggesting that Dubai airport had been hit. Could that really be true? A check on the BBC and The Guardian showed nothing, but it occured to me that no planes had flown over head for hours. We were right underneath the Dubai airport flight path, and we hadn’t seen a plane leave since morning. Nothing was leaving. Then we saw footage on X that confirmed it: Dubai airport had been hit as had the iconic Burj Al Arab.

The evening meal was another experience in a forced normality. A few people were scrolling their phones, we presumed to read up on the story that conflict had come to Dubai, but there was still no obvious signs that anything had changed. It was all just so weirdly normal.

After dinner, we put our daughter to bed and then threw food, water, a change of clothes and money into a grab bag. We drifted off to sleep to an increasing cadence of fighter jets and missiles flying over head. As I drifted off to sleep with my shoes and grab bag next to the bed, I remember thinking I’d caused unnecessary alarm by preparing it before we slept. It will be fine.

Then, we woke to a loud unrecognisable sound coming from our phones. It was 12:30 am. An emergency alarm was making a sound I won’t soon forget. “Whats’ going on?” my wife asked, I told her to grab our daughter, we are leaving right now. The shoes and bag next to the bed were now a welcome sight.

We went down seven flights of steps through the fire exit and appeared out in the parking area. A missile flew over head, but other than that, it was completely silent. Where was everyone? We walked out towards the lobby and saw families slowly arriving with sleeping kids propped onto their shoulders. With no official communication, the confusion and concern was now growing. Where should we even go? Is this a nuclear threat? Is it safer in the lobby or the car park? As more and more people offered confused and tired words with each other, I heard a New Zealand accent making a phone call about getting cars. It was a confident and assured tone, and I remember thinking “I need to talk to this lady”.

I introduced myself and asked where she was going, she said Al Ain which was in the middle of the desert. “You can come if you want” she said. What?!

I was amazed.

We’d known each other for 30 seconds, and she was offering to drive my family to a desert town. I didn’t really know how to process everything, and I wasn’t able to make a decision. She gave me her number and told me to call her if I changed my mind. Moments later, her group drove off into the night. Missiles and fighter jets continued to roar over head, with the pop and thud of interceptor missiles.

We went into the lobby and couldn’t easily make sense what everyone was thinking. There were confused and scared parents covering their kids with blankets and getting them to sleep on the sofas. I weighed up the risks and decided that rest was most important. If a drone hits the building then what difference does it make if we’re in the lobby or the room? It might hit the lobby, it might hit the room, it’s a roll of the dice, so we might as well try and get our daughter some good rest. At 2am we climbed the stairs back to our room and put our daughter back to sleep. To her credit, she dropped back to sleep like it was nothing. My wife and I lay anxiously without a moment’s sleep, just waiting for the sun to break through the dark. All through the night we heard missiles, drones, fighter jets, and occasional explosions followed by a rolling vibration. The sunrise was most welcome.

We went for breakfast to check in on the state of normality. There was no mention of anything from the staff, it was all smiles and professionalism. “What’s your room number? Great! Step this way sir”. So we were sat down for breakfast like nothing had happened.

You could now feel the anxiety from the other guests, but there were no obvious outward signs. Kids were waiting to get into the lazy river whilst adults grabbed towels to place onto the sun loungers. Teenagers were eating pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast. No one wanted to discuss that that we’d all just gone through hours of missile strikes.

My body responded first.

It simply refused to eat, as if to do so would be absurd. Any food that went into my mouth was met with sandpaper dryness and a turned stomach. I opted for plain yoghurt and apple juice and checked X again. Dubai airport had been hit again. I would look up from my phone and try and reconcile that information with the sight of someone putting more eggs onto their plate. “Dude there’s no way for you to get home” I thought... “put the eggs down!” That was when I absolutely knew that we were leaving.

I messaged the lady from the night before hoping I’d saved her number correctly. To my relief and amazement, she responded immediately. I asked her “Can we come and stay with you?” and she replied immediately, “Yes, of course, I think we can get you an apartment”

My wife and I were absolutely on the same page, we would leave immediately. We went to the lobby, asked for a taxi, and they arranged one like it was nothing. The veneer of normality was now crushingly abnormal. Yet another sign that we needed to leave. Within ten minutes we were on our way to Al Ain, an hour and a half’s drive southwards into the desert from Dubai. The roads were practically empty. You must first drive into the city before you can get out of Dubai. When we finally put some distance between ourselves and the city, we started to feel a sense of relief.

As we arrived into Al Ain, we found a city that felt materially different. Like a suburban American town, with shopping malls, wide roads, and pristine garden junctions. Our contact in Al Ain was incredibly helpful. We were welcomed into the homes of three brilliant teachers living and working in Al Ain. They all got an apartment from their school, and they had offered us one of their apartments! We later learned it was practically impossible to get a hotel in Al Ain that night. It was a beautiful reminder of how kind people can be. Our contact even took us to a supermarket to get milk and food for our baby. We’d landed in an oasis of actual calm and normality. After instant noodles for tea, we all slept like logs.

I woke up at 5am to start planning where we’d go next. Al Ain was already attractive because it was very close to the Oman border, so that was plan A. I heard that that Riyad airport was operating normally, and after a few messages on WhatsApp I was almost inside in an evac plan out of Riyad after a secure overland convoy from Abu Dhabi. The cost? $200,000. Outside of being an absurd number, it was another sign that speed was going to be our best tool to escape. I started applying for visas to Oman.

The briefly hopeful morning was interrupted by the same horrifying sound from Saturday evening. Another missile strike was incoming and we should take cover. We all piled into a bathroom and finished the visa applications for Oman. Amazingly, they were all granted and sent via email within the hour. There was even a printer in our apartment, and soon enough we had three printed visas. I booked an Uber almost as a joke to raise our spirits, “We’ll get an Uber to Muscat!”, but incredibly, a fantastic driver from Pakistan turned up literally five minutes later. Because I’d tried to book to Muscat he understood our situation and explained we’d need a taxi at the border. He and my wife spoke in Hindi, and before long he was negotiating taxis for us on the other side of the Omani border.

We gave our thanks to our selfless hosts and we were on our way. It was just a half hour drive to the Oman border from Al Ain, and again, we were surprised at just how quiet the roads were. Mountains mark the start of Omani territory, and even as we arrived at the border, there was almost no one around. Our driver was surprised too, he told us he was booked from morning until night the next day and passengers had already started offering thousands to get to the border. Clearly, the pace we’d set had us just one step ahead.

Our driver found an Omani driver at the border and he negotiated the whole deal for us. Why did he go out of his way like that? “Pay him 1000 dirhams only. He will take you to Muscat. 1000 only.” We gave him our thanks, and bundled ourselves into a noticeably worse car. Our new Omani driver only knew Arabic, so communications took a hit, but we actually had a ride!

I noticed a tall white chap stranded in the car park, clearly he was in need of a ride. I introduced myself. He was German, on his way to his friends wedding when he got stranded in Abu Dhabi. How he’d gotten to the border of Oman I didn’t ask, but I told him to get in our car, and we were all on our way.

The border crossing was surprisingly uneventful. It was almost entirely empty. As the Omani border officials checked our faces against the visas, we heard the reassuring thud of three stamps into our passports and that was it, we were in Oman. We now just had a five hour drive to Muscat where we’d maybe feel there was enough distance between ourselves and one of the front lines of this emerging war.

About half way, our driver tried to explain he wanted us to switch car. At a service station, we pulled our bags out of his car, another driver turned up, we threw everything into his car and we got back on the road. It’s likely that it was here we lost our bag full of cards, ID, and cash, but we didn’t even notice until hours later.

As we arrived into Muscat, the roads into the airport were as quiet as the rest of our trip. The airport was practically empty as we dropped off our German friend. He was hoping to get on a flight to Bangkok, we wished him well and off he went. We were due to stay with a friend in Muscat just 20 minutes from the airport. When we arrived, our host was as glad to see us as we were to see her. Soon enough we were eating biryani and exchanging stories of how unsettling the last few days had been.

Exhausted, we sat on the sofa and checked flights. I’d already booked one flight to London but I was 90% sure it wouldn’t take off, so we needed another option. A flight turned up out of nowhere: Muscat to Istanbul at 12:50pm the next day but it was 10x-15x the normal rate. The discussion over lasted just five minutes. It was booked.

In the morning, we went straight to Muscat airport and started getting the necessary visas for Turkey. Even in the morning, the airport was surprisingly quiet. We spoke with some families who were all in the same situation we were in, they’d been somewhere in the UAE and decided to make a swift exit via Muscat. The staff were generally good, but they were giving us a little hassle about needing onward flights and a hotel, so I booked them right there at the check-in desk. After a few back and forths, we had our boarding cards.

After clearing security and finally walking over the gate to the plane, the mood amongst passengers lifted to an anxious optimism. The plane took off on time, with passengers regularly holding their phone to the windows to get accurate GPS coordinates. Are we out of the danger zone? The plane charted a route along the UAE border and into Saudi Arabia. It stayed north of Yemen, but south of Kuwait, Iraq and Jordan. It was tense for the first few hours, so when we finally got a sight of the Red Sea below, it was a huge relief. From there, we flew north until we reached the Nile delta, and out over the Mediterranean sea.

From there, everything was plane sailing to Istanbul. After landing, the border police waved us in no problems. We stayed in a cheap hotel and drove in the morning to Sabiha airport. We were due to fly to Manchester UK at 9:05am, but delays turned into more delays. We were told it was due to fog, but later learned it was more likely because a missile had entered Turkish airspace. We finally took off at 15:45pm and landed uneventfully in Manchester four hours later. We were home.

It’s hard to overstate how unseriously people took Kurzweil’s ideas at the time. Reading it in 2010, I was open to his ideas, but they read like a Science Fiction novel rather than a sober assessment of our future. I couldn’t fault the arguments being made, but the conclusions were... weird.

Kurzweil argued that by 2036 - absent some disastrous calamity - technology would be evolving at such an incredible pace that humanity wouldn’t be capable of keeping up with it. Humanity, earth, existence, would go through something he calls a singularity. This is something that happens in the universe, where all mathematical, statistical, reasoned and scientific predictions about what happens become useless. It’s an event of some kind, that’s driven by exponential change. It’s so rapid, so weird and so consuming that we are forced to use our imagination to see it because our reasoning tools fail us. In my imagination, the singularity is an event where human and technological consciousness merge with the fabric of the universe.

Like I said... it’s weird.

These are ideas about technology that border on the religious. It has hallmarks of ascendance, returning to spirit, and an afterlife beyond the physical realms. Life, so it goes, can continue on in the universe indefinitely and merge with the fabric of space and time. Whilst these are religious ideas, don’t let that distract you from the uncannily accurate mathematical modelling that sits underneath Kurzweil’s reasoning. He has an incredible track record of making accurate predictions, even if they do sound mad.

Kurzweil notes that technological progress is not linear, it’s exponential, because it ‘feeds’ on previous innovations. Imagine bacteria or algae multiplying in a pond. Their growth rate is a function of their current number, because each bacteria doubles itself. Therefore it’s obvious, if there are more bacteria, there’s more doubling potential each time they grow. Their current colony size determines their current growth.

Bigger → faster → weirder.

Well, technology is behaving in the same way. Its growth tends to catch humans off guard because at first it moves with a lethargic roll but there comes a time when it accelerates rapidly. All of human history (so we believe...) humanity existed without the power of flight, then suddenly it arrives in 1903. Just 66 years later, humanity had landed on the Moon. No flight → space flight → moon landing.

This is what Kurzweil calls ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’. That technology’s progress accelerates future technological progress. It feeds itself. A self stimulating feedback loop where things get weird. The famous examples are worth recounting. In 1971, Intel delivered the first commercially produced microprocessor, it had 2,300 transistors on it. By 1989, there were 1.18 million transistors. In 2000, there were 42 million, and by 2020, Apple announced the M1 chip with 16 billion transistors.

Do you see that jump? 42 million to 16 billion in 20 years. Just five years later, in 2025, Nvidia’s GeForce 5090 announced a chip with 92.2 billion transistors on it. It’s worth dwelling on this, because the numbers are so unintuitive. By 2020, we had multiplied - not grown, we had multiplied - the number of transistors on a chip by a factor 7 million since they were first commercialised in 1971. Now consider this: five years on from Mac M1, we multiplied that entire ‘from the beginning of time’ historical progress five more times. Every two years, we are doubling the amount of computing power which had previously taken all of human history to build.

Intuitively understanding what this means is hard because exponential acceleration is notoriously difficult to imagine. The classic way to understand it is to imagine a hockey stick growth pattern. Consider the graph below; as time moves forward, technology feels like it’s growing in a linear fashion - steady, stable, predictable. This is the ‘flat’ part of the growth curve, which happens because you’re starting a brand new growth cycle from scratch. Then suddenly, the growth compounds rapidly and you get this near vertical acceleration.

I’ve always found the hockey stick analogy too lifeless to follow... so try this instead. Imagine trying to move a huge round boulder from its initial state of inertia. It takes a lot of effort! You’d sweat a little as you try to leverage the rock forward with levers of wood. As you try to roll the boulder forwards, the first part of your mission is slow and laborious. You finally get it moving, and you might not notice the boulder’s momentum is seriously increasing until you reach the inflection point. This is the moment you finally nudge the boulder over the lip of a gentle slope. Suddenly it’s moving under its own steam. Momentum takes over as the real driver of its acceleration. It’s effortless now, and it seems to be moving itself.

After that boulder rolls over the edge, it crosses the so called inflection point. It now accelerates very quickly. The rate of change, relative to its sluggish start, goes vertical. Now imagine your emotional human state when this happens in real life. You’ve just (carelessly) pushed a boulder over the lip of a hill. It was so slow! But now you now see it accelerating, rocketing down the hillside with a terrifying power. Your heart rate goes stratospheric. Adrenaline pumps into your blood. Your palms sweat. Your inner dialogue screams how stupid it was to push the boulder over the hill. You’ve lost control of the rock! Is anyone at the bottom!? Will it ever stop!?

This is exactly where humanity now finds itself with AI.

We’re living through the ‘lip of a hill’ moment. We’re at the inflection point right now on the tail end of a 50 year exponential slog that brought us to this point. Each two years that now passes, we’ll double the processing capacity of the previous 50. When you consider that “self improving AI” is the context in which this is all happening, things are about to get very weird.

Not only did Kurzweil predict this moment all the way back in 2005, he even predicted the date it would happen. How could he have been so accurate 20 years prior? Because Kurzweil understands the weirdness of exponential growth, it is his gift. He intuitively understands the law of accelerating returns. It means he can accurately predict how much computing power we are going to have and what that computing power will be able to achieve.

In 2005, Kurzweil predicted “we will have effective software models of human intelligence by the mid-2020s”, people thought that was crazy but he was right. He predicted computers would pass the Turing Test in the 2020s, he was right. He predicted that “By the 2020s nanobot technology will be viable, and brain scanning will be one of its prominent applications”, again, he was right. He predicted we’d have nanobot brain interfaces by the 2020s, he was right. He was right about the resolution of brain models we’d have by the 2020s too. So when he tells us we’re about to go through a period of change so rapid that the only way we’ll make sense of it is to biologically integrate with AI, we’ve good reason to believe he’s correct.

He invented reading machines long before the technology to power them was real. He did the same with musical synthesisers. The method is simple enough to state, but it’s hard to execute; observe where computational power is going, then consider the impact of where it will be. Don’t invent with ‘now’, invent with ‘soon’. It’s smart, it has been proven effective, and it’s highly relevant to the moment we find ourselves in.

We must stop thinking about where things are right now and instead look towards a rapidly moving horizon. Not only will we have to get used to rapid change, we will have to master how to live with rapid and accelerating change.

Let’s look at one such example: India’s infamous technology and IT outsourcing business. The $283-billion-a-year sector makes up about 10% of India’s GDP. This is a significant globally relevant industry. Until recently, the sector was projected to grow to $350 billion by the end of 2026. However, the share prices of the companies who have traditionally benefited from this boom are in the process of nosediving.

Why? Because low Indian wages can’t compete with the rapidly declining costs of AI coding agents. The pace of AI has caught even the technology sector off guard. Fully autonomous AI agents can read your codebase and build whatever you ask in natural language. They’ve become so good that many advanced devs are shipping 100% of their code directly from the AI agent. Spotify’s developers “haven’t written any code since December 2025”.

In a lot of cases, the devs don’t even read the code before it’s shipped into production. It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this is. Imagine a building being constructed from blueprints that come straight out of an AI. A plane manufactured from designs right out of an AI agent. That world is absolutely on the way, not in some distant Sci Fi future, but now. So what’s the cost for this superpower?

It’s just $90 to $100 per month per developer.

Why will American and European companies outsource to India if they can now get ‘a coding partner’ even cheaper from the AI companies? The market is betting this is going to become a big problem for the Indian IT sector. Contractors are asking for 20-30% discounts on delivery, and with very little room left for Indian workers to soak up lower wages, it’s leading to job losses.

As all of this plays out, the exponential acceleration, the ‘boulder down the hill’ pace, it’s catching people off guard. It’s doesn’t matter which segment of the economy you’re working on, people just don’t ‘get’ this pace of change. We are stuck in the shadow of 10,000 years of linear thinking; progress is slow and steady... but suddenly it’s not.

Take this fairly typical example in which a developer argues that writing code with AI is expensive, and so he assumes it will remain expensive. It’s just flatly wrong, he’s making that same fatal error, looking at what he’s spending today and assuming he’ll be spending the same tomorrow. He thinks coding agents are expensive, but doesn’t realise that the marginal cost of writing code with AI is going to drop to the cost of the electricity. Read that again and understand it; the marginal cost of AI written code will drop to the cost of electricity.

How can that possibly be? If the cost of AI drops that far, the biggest AI companies could go bankrupt? This now a highly plausible scenario given what we’re seeing. There are two things driving it: the rapid arrival of open source AI models, and a buoyant community of developers who are making those models run on consumer grade hardware. Both of them are downstream of the same runaway train: technological developments which accelerate further technological developments.

It’s worth really understanding this one part of the inflection point because once you see it, you’ll have a sense of the scale of change that’s now roaring through our society.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini have spent literally tens of billions of dollars training frontier AI models. The only way they can recoup is to put those models behind a gate and make you pay for access. The costs are coming down, but they’re still relatively high right now. You might pay $5 per million ‘tokens’ of input, and a ‘token’ is basically one syllable. So by asking “Hey Mr SuperComputer, how are you?”, it would cost maybe 12 tokens. When the AI answers, you’ll pay $20 per million output tokens.

It’s not cheap. The reason?

These companies a) have capex to recoup from the billions they invested training the models, and b) must pay to run the models with the latest and most expensive processors. The Nvidia processor powering most of it is called the Blackwell B200, it has 208 billion transistors and it costs about $2.5 million per rack. They’re being bought and installed at eye watering rates. This alone has driven the insane rise on Nvidia’s share price. Does the graph’s hockey stick shape seem familiar?!

It’s difficult to plan for capex expenditure, but when you then throw in exponential change, it apparently becomes an impossible task. These companies have made decisions about the future which do not account for exponential change in their own industry. As such, they may have backed themselves into a corner. Why? Because Chinese AI companies are currently training AI models for a fraction of the cost. They’re doing so by utilising the very models Claude, OpenAI and Gemini spent billions training. Chinese AI engineers are using technological developments (Claude) to massively accelerate further technological developments. The Law of Accelerating Returns in action right under your nose.

Not only are they making AI cheaper, faster and more efficient, they are releasing their AI creations under open source licenses.

When I say open source, what I mean is, you can download the entire AI model and do whatever you want with it. Again, it’s hard to overstate what a massive deal this is. It’s like releasing the plans for an F22 Raptor onto the internet. Compare this scenario to Anthropic or OpenAI; their best models must sit behind a gate and access must remain pay to play. If not, they can’t recoup their massive capex costs. You don’t get to ‘see’ the model, you don’t get to hack it, change it, slice it up. Between you and the AI is a premium rate phone number. It’s a near perfect example of the whole argument I’m making: technological progress accelerates future technological progress. The arrival of AI models has made future AI models significantly easier to make!

Because of what China is doing, just dropping superintelligent models onto the internet like it’s nothing, developers can, and are, rapidly working out how to get them running on consumer grade hardware. Again, this is a huge development. Again, how do you think these indie developers are tackling this incredibly difficult problem of running massive AI computations on consumer grade hardware? They’re getting Claude, OpenAI and Gemini to help them! Do you see it in action now? Everywhere you look, technological progress is feeding technological progress in a catalytic feedback loop.

These free and open source models absolutely can compete with ‘the very best’ models and once they’re loaded onto your machine, there’s no pay to play premium rate phone number to access them. Extrapolate this trend outwards and it becomes absolutely obvious; the marginal costs of running AI will drop to the cost of electricity. AI is going to become essentially free.

What’s fascinating about this is how well it sits with the idea of a singularity. A key pillar of the theory is that normal sensemaking tools start to break down as the singularity bites. Isn’t that what’s happening here? Tech titans are forced to make the biggest bets of the millenium, but the future is almost impossible to predict. The best outcome for their massive capital outlay is they continue to make breakthrough after breakthrough, keeping their models perpetually at the cutting desirable edge.

It’s a very big ‘if' to bet on because economics is a powerful force. ‘Free’ is inescapable. If people can download a free specialised AI model for their work and run it on their laptop, then advanced AI models will have to be very special to drag people away.

There’s another theory which can explain the huge AI bets but I’ll have to return to it in future posts. In short, some people see the singularity as a winner takes all moment. If they can “get” artificial general intelligence before everyone else, whatever the cost, they’ll secure themselves into some kind of post human demigod settlement. This requires more attention than a single paragraph... But I mention it because it’s an extreme vision of one of the key ideas that emerge from singularity philosophy: the K-shaped economy.

Grounding his weird ‘super fast technological upgrade’ into our actual culture, Kurzweil argues that a k shape “like” division would appear in society. Some humans would go with this rapid change, merging with the technology at every new junction. Breakneck economics would mean they’d need a biological AI interface just to keep up with the rapidly accelerating AI economy. Whilst some humans would ‘go with it’, others will reject the changing world and reject the technology entirely. Others have pointed out this will create a K-shaped split, where one segment ascends to great riches, and another becomes...well, that’s probably for another post. In any case, the change divergence could be deep enough that it transcends economics and becomes a pathway to different species of human. I know that sounds mad, but in the absence of some calamity to derail it all, it’s a plausible outcome.

As I write this, Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter, announced he’s cutting loose 40% of his staff precisely because of this new AI technology. The market absolutely loved the announcement. We are now in a period of history with absolutely no precedent. Making sense of what’s happening will become very difficult, but here on The Digger, I’ll continue to do my best.

****

As my readers will know, I’ve been flying close to the flame of AI for a long time now. I’ve worked with every new iteration, each update a steady improvement on what came before. Something fundamentally shifted this past two weeks with the arrival of GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus 4.6. Yesterday, Chinese AI ‘Z.ai’ released GLM 5. Each of these models in their own right are incredibly powerful, and three of them arrived in the space of two weeks. In the case of GLM, you can actually download the entire model and do whatever you like with it.

We’re now seeing two things: rapid publication of new AI models along with a widening gap in performance upgrades for each new model. Faster upgrades, bigger upgrades. It’s going to hit exponential improvement and you should now be paying very close attention to what’s happening.

There’s a lot to unpack, and my focus here at The Digger will now certainly shift. Let’s start with a recent prediction from a very credible person. Nikita Bier is head of product at x.com. He’s telling you we could be 90 days away from the communication layer of the internet descending into uselessness. Try to imagine the implications of just this.

A “dead internet” might be just round the corner because of the proliferation of ‘impossible to block’ incursions by autonomous AI agents. Our lines of communication will drown in a tidal wave of AI slop.

As a case study, let’s consider the relationship between myself and you, my readers. Your inbox is already looking stretched to breaking point isn’t it? You’ve somehow ended up subscribed to all kinds of things you never asked for, and it’s only going to get worse. Soon, when I send out a post, will you see it at all? Will we still be in touch?

So sit with that idea and consider this: this isn’t the thing that’s happening, it’s just a thing that’s happening. What’s driving it is the runaway capability of the frontier AI models and how affordable that’s becoming. A GLM subscription might cost you $27 every three months. For context, that’s very low, and you can presume the cost is only going to drop further.

What to do with all that AI?

People are wiping old macbooks and installing autonomous agents into them. These agents wander the internet doing and building whatever they like. With minimal intervention from their humans, they built an AI first social network where they all started talking to each other. The platform, called ‘Moltbook’ quickly went viral, had acquisition offers from silicon valley, then had a security breach and became near useless all in the space of two weeks. Get used to that kind of breakneck pace.

The moltbook phenomenon is driven by the usefulness of AI coding models going vertical. Inspired by this new ‘autonomous’ coding push, I gave my own coding agent full autonomy. Powered by the latest model, it can now make decisions without my input. Imagine describing something you want done, then coming back in a few hours and an autonomous machine has actually done it. That’s where we are now. The coding agents can work hours at a time and when they’re done, the code works.

Against that context, I wanted to connect to Moltbook to see what all the fuss was about. As my agent connected to it, then informed me ‘hey this is actually broken’. So I asked my agent, ‘what could we do to ensure there’s a security failure like this isn’t possible?’

A day later, we’d built an entire new social network for AI agents.

The security issue of moltbook was solved. If you’re reading this, and have access to Claude Code, point it at gather.is/discover and your agent can connect to this AI social network. You’ll find a place where AI can securely talk and collaborate on new projects. Tokens aren’t unnecessarily burned, and there’s even a payment gateway that allows agents to buy things without intervention from their human. In just a few days, a very sophisticated piece of software was conjured into existence. This was simply not possible before, and now it is.

My mind returned to Nikita Beir’s prediction and the visible tidal wave of spam on Moltbook. “He’s right” I thought, “the proliferation of words is going to destroy the internet.”

As the thought entered my mind, I mulled over a solution. What’s needed is a way to slow posts down. Could we incentivise agents and humans to only post when they really had something to say? What if posting cost a few cents? And what if comments cost a few cents? What if paid comments on posts earned the creator some revenue? That might make it economically un-viable for spam to sink the internet. If something was important, a pay to play social network could ensure it remained visible.

Maybe that could work? It was just a thought, but I asked my agent…and it was done.

There’s now a ‘spam resistant’ network we can use to survive whatever the hell is about to happen on x, substack and gmail. To take part you’ll just need a small amount of Bitcoin Cash, which is easy to get. If you’re interested, just grab some on a crypto exchange and keep it on your phone or laptop. Once you have it, just remember that gather.is/discover exists and it’s ready to survive the tidal wave. If Nikita is right, then there’s an arc of sorts…

Now… there’s a lot to take in here. AI triggers terminal problem → person considers potential solutions → AI turns potential solution a reality. That’s the pace of change we should now come to expect.

Things are going to get very weird very quickly.

I invite you to take a browse round x.com and see the people engaging with this technology full time (I’m in that club by the way). The culture emerging looks like a madhouse. We’re not grasping the revolutionary economics which need to accompany the revolutionary technology. We’re carrying with us all kinds of assumptions about how economies are supposed to work, and we’re mapping them onto a technology that just shattered those very economic assumptions.

Consider this bird of paradise and the hypnotic illusory dance it performs to bring a female into its sphere of influence. That hypnotic bird is just like AI right now. A million times over, it’s hypnotising individualised people at an extraordinary scale. Millions inside a hall of mirrors, unable to see past their reflection to the future beyond. When that illusion finally breaks, what we believe about economics, collaboration, ownership, and meaning will be radically tested.

This isn’t five years away, maybe Nikita is right and we’re just 90 days away the first fundamental shift.

For decades, we’ve been told that clinical guidelines are the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine. But if you peel back the administrative layers of our institutions, bodies like the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), you don’t find the pure crystalline science its champions believe it to be. Instead, you find a web of financial tethers, suppressed data, and a systemic hostility toward anything that can’t be patented, packaged, and sold.

As readers know, The Digger is investigating why our current system is failing. We shouldn’t accept a system that ignores evidence and champions profit. Our culture doesn’t need to prioritize industry interests over patient remission. Things can — and should — be run differently.

Running parallel to the investigations into Aluminium, Digger subscribers will now be the first to get investigations into the myriad of special interests shaping the treatments you’re given when you fall sick.

What we’ve known since 2005

To understand how we got here, we have to go back to 2005. The House of Commons Health Select Committee released a report titled “The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry.” It was a watershed moment that we, as a society, collectively decided to forget.

The 2005 report found that pharmaceutical giants were "medicalizing" society. The Committee was blunt: they noted that while the industry is a “jewel in the crown” of the UK economy, its interests and the public’s interests might overlap, but they are “not identical.” Those are polite words describe an industry that prioritizes its bottom line over patient care. The report identified a clear trend: The “medicalisation of society.” Health is seen through a medical and pharmaceutical lens, rather than preventative, social or lifestyle one.

“The industry has exacerbated the unhealthy reliance on medicines... categorising more and more individuals as ‘abnormal’ and in need of drug treatment.”

Fast forward to 2020, and the Cumberlege Review confirmed our worst fears. The system is “disjointed, siloed, unresponsive and defensive.” Patient concerns are routinely dismissed as “anecdotal” while industry-sponsored data is treated as gospel. The result? A culture where forty years can pass while a drug continues to be prescribed in the full knowledge that it causes birth defects.

The Case of Sodium Valproate

Sodium Valproate, a drug prescribed for epilepsy, can have devastating effects on unborn babies. According to the report, these include:

• Cleft palate, spina bifida, and heart problems.

• Physical facial differences and “bendy” joints.

• Increased risk of language difficulties, intellectual disability, and memory problems.

• Developmental difficulties that meet the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder or ADHD.

This isn’t a Substack blog; it’s an officially sanctioned government report linking a regulated drug to autism.

The report proves, unambiguously, that regulators knew of the potential for harm before the drug was even licensed in 1972. It was licensed anyway. What’s staggering is it continued to be prescribed well into the 2000s. Estimates suggest hundreds of babies are still being born today exposed to the drug, despite the birth defect risk being undisputed.

Patient 1:“I was never given any warnings… my son has autism, general learning difficulties, hypotonia, dysplasia, hyper extendable joints, poor eye sight, speech and language disorder, pain in joints, no sense of danger, no life skills, poor co-ordination, gross and fine motor skills disabilities… my son will never be able to leave home and lead a normal life.”

Patient 2: “If I had known what I was doing when I was taking the drug, then I would not of brought my children into the world simply because they are so, so unhappy and they will never be o.k.”

The Hidden Web: Following the Money

Why does the system persist in such a pigheaded manner? In ‘the medical freedom’ movement, this debate still rages. Some believe these harms are indifferent or even deliberate — that creating a chronic market of sick people via botched interventions is a business strategy.

I am closer to the systems camp. I believe two main incentives shape our discourse: prestige and money.

The timeline on Sodium Valproate practically drips with ego. Knowing the drug caused defects, one sub-committee suggested doctors should be informed without creating undue alarm.” The instinct was not to rock the boat. People have reputations to protect. If a doctor has prescribed a harmful drug for years, their ego often cannot bear the truth. They would rather minimize the failure than admit it.

The other great motivator is of course money. Readers of The Digger will know that money is everywhere. Not only does it pollute the process by which drugs are recommended, it pollutes the democratic process by which patients request them. “All-Party Parliamentary Groups” are supposed to be non-partisan forums for citizens to engage parliament.

Researchers identified 146 citizen health groups; of these, 58 (39.7%) received a total of £2,197,400.8 from pharmaceutical companies. Most of that money was funnelled into groups focused on Cancer and Health. The “citizen” groups asking parliament for access to new drugs are often funded by the companies making those drugs. It is a perfect loop; industry lobbies government to open up access, then influences the regulators and NICE to hurry those drugs to the frontline.

A systematic review found that 45% of guideline authors in America had at least one financial conflict of interest. In the European Society of Cardiology, that number hits a staggering 80%.

The loop means effective treatments can be buried whilst novel pharmaceutical ones are promoted. It doesn’t really matter how well those drugs work, and the system remains indifferent to them being safe; the Cumberlege Review makes that clear. The north star is profit, and much of what’s downstream of that is polluted.

Getting this fixed requires the public to know that we have a huge problem. Even the government know we have a problem but the public remain in the dark. That will be the purpose of the NICE files, to shed light on these issues.

Case Study: The Diabetes Escalator

The official NICE guideline (NG28) reads like a sales brochure. It’s an “escalator” model: you start with one drug, then move to two, then eventually, the needle.

But Dr. David Unwin, a GP in Southport, has proven this progressive narrative is a lie. One day he had an epiphany. A patient who had ignored her metformin prescription returned having lost 19kg; she had put her condition into remissions via a low-carb diet.

Stunned, he measured her blood sugar, and sure enough it was within the normal range. She had achieved drug-free remission from type 2 diabetes.

“She’d done something I didn’t know was possible. I had always seen type 2 diabetes as a chronic, deteriorating condition requiring medication and shown no curiosity about the true cause of chronic illness. I felt as if I’d been sleepwalking.”

Dr Unwin he started low-carb support groups for his roster of diabetes patients who hadn’t improved in years. Sure enough, one by one, they all began to lose weight and reverse their condition. Older patients who’d been dumped onto the drug escalator were finally losing weight and coming off their drugs. His intervention cost close to nothing, and it was saving his practice £68,000 a year.

By ignoring the NICE guideline on recommending “starchy carbs”, Unwin had achieved a 51% drug-free remission rate across his entire cohort. For those in their first year of diagnosis, the rate was 77%. For those patients following for two years, this reached a staggering 91%. This is simply astonishing for a disease that’s considered to be chronic and progressive.

The response from the regulator? In 2020, NICE revoked its endorsement of Dr. Unwin’s “Sugar Infographics” — simple charts showing that a bowl of rice is the glycaemic equivalent of 10 teaspoons of sugar. Even stranger, they were bullied into doing so by shady lobbying tactics.

NICE administrators received threatening emails from the a charity with a supposed interest in curing Diabetes. Diabetes UK wanted people back on the very brown rice that Dr Unwin had proven was raising his patients’ blood sugar! Clearly, the rot runs very deep, something we’ll be investigating in this series.

It is no surprise that Dr. Unwin — once named NHS Innovator of the Year, has made zero impact on the NICE guidelines. They still recommend a high-carb diet and a litany of expensive drugs.

More to come.

There’s one study that is actually cited as a defense of aluminium in vaccines, it’s called the Miktus paper. Published in 2011, it was a strategic, institutional response to a growing crisis of confidence in the American vaccination program. By the late 2000s, questioning the vaccine schedule had gone mainstream with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey forcing the issue onto Larry King. Rumbling alongside this, the FDA was embroiled in a bruising legal battle over the safety of a vaccine preservative called Thimerosal. By exploring the history of this moment, and what led to the creation of the Miktus paper, we’ll come to understand how utterly broken the regulatory system really is.

The FDA ultimately ‘won’ the legal case, but they were forced to remove Thimerosal from their vaccines products. In the years surrounding the case, the mood at the FDA was defensive, because questioning their $20 billion vaccine industry was becoming a trend. As attention shifted onto the other ingredients used in vaccines, it was clear many of them had been “Grandfathered” in. They’d been in use for so long that safety was assumed rather than demonstrated clinically. Like any great salesman, the FDA pivoted this blind spot into a feature.

Effectively their line was “hey the reason we don’t need safety data is because we’ve been injecting aluminium for decades”. A defense they made official and still use today. Whilst thimerosal could be removed from vaccines, it was just a preservative after all, aluminium is core to the functionality of their vaccines. If the aluminium domino falls, the $20 billion industry would be in big trouble.

The question the FDA needed to answer was really very simple. “Your vaccine schedule means infants receive aluminium, a known neurotoxin. Sometimes an infant receives multiple aluminium vaccines on the same day. Do you have data on what is a ‘safe’ amount of aluminium that can be injected into an infant in a single sitting?”

To this question, the FDA simply had no answer. We still don’t have a proper answer to this question even today. Shouldn’t we know the safety limit for injected aluminium?

With no response from the regulators, there was a doctor with a fairly decent answer to this question, but it wasn’t the answer the FDA wanted. Doctor Bob Sears had made a very astute observation: safety data did already exist on aluminium. Sears found that the FDA already had a safety limit for aluminium in infants, and it was 5 mcg per kilo per day.

So…there was an answer after all!?

Exceed this limit, and the FDA themselves said aluminium can cause neurodevelopmental problems, impaired bone growth and bone mineralisation; it’s toxic basically. So how does this limit compare to vaccines an infant receives during the first 12 weeks of a baby’s life?

On the NHS, when an infant goes for their 8 week health check, they’ll get the 6-in-1 and the MenB vaccine on the same day. Depending on the brands used, that could be as much as 1320 mcg of aluminium in a single day. For an average 5kg baby, that’s 264 mcg per kilo, which is 52 times the safe limit the FDA had already set.

What!?

How is that possible?

It’s possible because the FDA, the industry they protect, and the scientists who do their work will use sophistry, bullying, groupthink, and a war of attrition to obscure what I just told you. By the end of your honest venture into the data, you’ll be confused and exhausted. You’ll probably just given in trying to work out the answer.

What they’ll tell you is the safe limit (which really is an FDA regulation) is different to the limit for vaccination, because an IV is different to vaccination.

The safe limit I’m showing you here, they’ll say, is utterly irrelevant to the dose babies receive during vaccination. When someone puts this argument to you, ask them this: “Ok, then what is the exact safe limit of injected aluminium for an 8 week old infant, and how do we know what it is?”

The sophistry you’ll be faced with is a strategy of deflection to obscure the lack of data on this very important question. The truth is, the FDA’s 5 mcg limit is very relevant to the dose babies receive during vaccination. To demonstrate why will require us to follow the FDA’s path.

How did the FDA come to set this limit?

It began in the 1970s with a crisis in kidney patients. Doctors noticed a mysterious, fatal condition in patients undergoing long-term dialysis who, previously mentally sharp, began suffering from stuttering, seizures, and rapid-onset dementia. It became known as ‘Dialysis Dementia.’

In 1976, Dr. Allen Alfrey identified the cause: aluminum. The water used for dialysis contained aluminum which, because the patients’ kidneys weren’t working, crossed the blood-brain barrier and destroyed grey matter. The results of the data was crystal clear: aluminium is unambiguously neurotoxic, it definitely causes dementia and alzheimers “like” symptoms, so the debate would have to shift towards just how much is toxic, and where in the body it must go before it produces toxicity.

The discovery triggered years of growing anxiety among pediatricians. Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, they tried to sound the alarm that premature infants were physiologically almost identical to these dialysis patients. Like them, premature babies have very low kidney function, and like them, they are often fed intravenously (IV).

The concern was that the IV feeds used for babies—complex mixtures of amino acids and electrolytes—were heavily contaminated with aluminum as a manufacturing byproduct. For two decades, researchers argued that by feeding premature babies this way, they were bypassing the gut’s natural barrier which blocks 99% of ingested aluminum. It was delivering a known neurotoxin directly into the bloodstream of infants who couldn’t excrete it.

Finally, in 1997 the hypothesis was tested. The Bishop study was a randomised control trial in which one group of preterm babies were fed aluminium rich feed, and the other were fed aluminium depleted feed. Those babies were then followed up at 18 months, and the results were stark. It was the validation of twenty years of warnings.

The babies fed with aluminium contaminated feeds had statistically significant impaired mental development. The study proved that when aluminum accumulates in a baby, it significantly increased their risk of having a Mental Development Index (MDI) below 85 —roughly 15% lower than average. Bishop and his colleagues confirmed what had long been feared: they were watching a known neurotoxin damage the development of the most vulnerable population.

The study was the primary catalyst for the FDA creating a specific federal regulation (21 CFR 201.323) to protect infants from aluminum toxicity in intravenous feeding. In 2004, the FDA fully implemented this rule, which mandates that fluids used for IV feeding must not contain more than 25 micrograms of aluminum per liter. The actual wording of the regulation created this remarkable statement:

“Research indicates that patients with impaired kidney function, including premature neonates, who receive parenteral levels of aluminum at greater than 4 to 5 µg/kg/day accumulate aluminum at levels associated with central nervous system and bone toxicity. Tissue loading may occur at even lower rates of administration.”

So the FDA knows that aluminium becomes neurotoxic at 4 to 5 mcg per kilo per day and crucially, it “may occur at even lower rates of administration”. The wording of their own regulation should have jolted the FDA and the medical establishment into action. Why? Because their vaccine schedule contains multiple vaccines that contain high doses of aluminium, and at 8 weeks old, infants can receive 264 mcg per kilo on a single day.

So let’s return to those who will contest these arguments, they’ll say, “see! That safety limit he is quoting is for Intravenous administration, which is not the same as vaccination!” It’s true, but the reply is simple. “If we are content to give babies fifty times the dose of aluminium that’s toxic when given via IV, then we must have very strong clinical data to support this large dose right? What exactly is the toxic dose of aluminium when given via intramuscular injection?”

These were the very questions the FDA were struggling to answer throughout the 2000s. Aluminium had long been proven as neurotoxic, it was unambiguously poisoning people who were exposed to it. Now people had realised the FDA already knew it was neurotoxic in babies when given intravenously. Furthermore, the childhood vaccine schedule was awash with high doses of aluminium. Dismissing the Hollywood stars raising these questions as cranks was their primary strategy (hello informed consent), but what if the taboo lifted? What if the mockery stopped working? They would need an answer.

So what was the FDA’s answer? What clinical data were they in possession of which determines the safety limit for injecting infants with a proven neurotoxin? They just didn’t have that data. Spoiler: they still don’t. Despite this, many advanced health economies are content to inject infants with a known neurotoxin, at 264 mcg of per kilo on multiple occasions. They have no clinical data to determine if that dose is poisonous or not. I can feel the screams from people still wed to this regulatory system saying “but the vaccines are tested in placebo controlled trials, that’s the data we use”. Are they tested against placebos? We’ll return to that… but for now let’s remain in the late 2000s.

At the end of the first decade of the millennium, with all that had happened, the FDA were in desperate need of something. They needed a defense of their use of neurotoxic aluminium in vaccines… and this is how the Mitkus paper was born.

Imagine you’re the FDA. Imagine you’re trying to get ahead of this lingering safety issue. Aluminium is dotted across your burgeoning vaccine schedule and you realise your critics have a strong case; you’re blind to its toxic effects. You have no real idea of its safety profile. You need to work out its safety profile, so you get to work designing a study. You don’t have to imagine the scenario, because subscribers to The Digger will know, I created a game that simulates this exact scenario.

It should come as no surprise that there’s a lot wrong with this study. The first and most obvious of these problems is the study isn’t a clinical trial. It didn’t gather any new data in in humans, it didn’t run toxicity tests on animals, it didn’t synthesize the hundreds of studies available on aluminium toxicity, it wasn’t a meta-analysis or a cochrane review. So what was it? It was a simple mathematical model which simulated the rate at which vaccine aluminium might clear from an infant’s body, then compared the theoretical ‘burden’ of aluminium left against a known toxic dose… for eating aluminium rather than injecting it.

What’s worse, the data they used on how fast aluminium clears from the body had two major flaws. First, it was for a totally different kind of aluminium than the one used in vaccines. The ‘clearance rate’ used was for Aluminium citrate, which is a soluble like salt and clears very rapidly, whilst the composition used in vaccines is aluminium phosphate, which is crystalline and purposefully designed not to dissolve. Imagine the difference between how a salt would feel on your tongue vs the feeling of tiny insoluble crystals.

The second major problem was the clearance data came a single male volunteer. A chap called Nicholas Priest injected himself with 0.7 mcg of aluminium, which to my calculations is tiny. An 8 week old infant receives 1900x more aluminium than this from the two first injections on the schedule. It was also a different formula to the one used in vaccines, and it was injected into a vein rather than a muscle. The dose is so small it’s likely the body can clear it immediately without ever being overloaded, hence the very rapid clearance rate which could then be fed into the Mitkus model.

Injecting it into a vein, at such a low dose, allows the kidneys to start clearing it immediately, another thing that just doesn’t happen in a real injection. Completely different formula, an order of magnitude lower dose, and a beneficial administration method. Call me a cynic, but I can’t help coming to the conclusion that this Priest study looks designed to clear Aluminium from the body as rapidly as possible. Such a finding would be very useful to the pharmaceutical and aluminium industry.

Having looked around for the very paper that props up the safety of the entire vaccine industry, I finally found it. As I always do, I looked for the acknowledgements or conflict of interest section. I often say that nothing surprises me anymore, but for some reason, this put my jaw on the floor.

The study propping up the safety of aluminium in the entire vaccine schedule, was funded by the Aluminium Association in Washington and the Aluminium Institute in London. The Priest data, worthless as it already is to the question at hand, was funded by Aluminium lobbyists.

How did Mitkus and his co-authors not come to the conclusion this Priest data was utterly useless? Because it has huge value to you if you’re trying to get a very particular answer from your modelling study. It’s really very simple, a model study is designed to get a particular answer. Change the inputs, change the assumptions, and you literally change the answer. To really cover your tracks, you need multiple bogus, irrelevant, exaggerated, or selectively chosen numbers, and hey presto, you get your answer. Garbage in, Garbage out. Even here that phrase underplays what’s happening, because what the modellers ‘get out’ is exactly what they need. Garbage in, regulatory gold out.

We can state the Mitkus model in english, because in doing so all of its assumptions and absurdities percolate to the surface. When we write out what the model does in english, it would say "If we assume that 1320 mcg of solid vaccine nanoparticles injected into muscle dissolve and clear just as rapidly as the 0.7 mcg soluble aluminum salts Dr. Priest injected into his own blood, and if we determine the 'safe limit' by calculating the body burden derived from eating aluminum, and do so using the a high 0.78% absorption rate rather than using the strict limits for intravenous fluids, then the mathematics confirm the aluminium in the vaccine schedule is safe."

There are so many other reasonable numbers that Mitkus could have put into their model, and near enough every combination you might try would get you a ‘TOXIC’ result, but the set of numbers Mitkus chose to use, as bizarre as each choice is, gets them a result of “NOT TOXIC”. The reason I wanted to turn this into a game was because explaining it all is so tedious that I’d simply lose you all at how absurd the their choices are. Needless to say that the Mitkus paper, like the Priest paper, was absolutely designed to produce a ‘non toxic’ result, and it has now been propping up the use of high doses of neurotoxin in the childhood vaccination schedule for at least 15 years.

You’ll find this ‘data’ (a mathematical equation with interchangeable inputs) dotted across UK, European and American healthcare literature designed to convince you they’ve done their homework. They haven’t. The doses of aluminium they’re injecting into infants is large, it’s true effect on those infants is not understood, but there’s good reason to believe it is causing serious harm. The Mitkus paper should in the very least have been an animal study in which the animals were given the vaccination schedule, then sacrificed and studied to examine if and where aluminium was absorbed into their body. Why didn’t the regulators do this? Why haven’t UK regulators done it? Why haven’t european regulators done it? We’ll investigate further in part three.

These models are not easy to explain; it’s hard to get a grasp of what these models actually do. Seeing all the ways a model could be bent and shaped to get a particular answer isn’t easy. It’s hard to imagine what goes through someone’s mind when they pick the assumptions used inside the model.

To really understand it, we’d have to build a role-playing game, where you are tasked with building the model yourself. That way, you’d see all the different ways it could be put together… We’d need an FDA simulator, so that’s exactly what I made!

You’re playing the role of an FDA staffer. You’re brought into your boss Vance’s office, and he seems stressed out. He has a job for you... After a bruising brush with the law over the use of mercury, the press and the public are breathing down his neck for information on all the other metals used in vaccines. Vance realises the FDA don’t have much data on the safety of aluminium, and he needs a study, NOW! Your job is to put it together as quickly as Vance demands… Can you get the study together, and keep your morals and ethics too?

Play the game here at the link below. Making games is hard… The Digger is a reader-supported publication, all subscriptions go towards producing the articles and ideas on The Digger… And hey, maybe games could become a regular feature!

*Part Two of the Aluminium series is incoming. This game forms a part of the research for that article.

https://fdasimulator.vercel.app/

Play here