Today, we’re joined by John Priestland—a former UK civil servant at the Cabinet Office, physicist, and the driving force behind the Unhidden Foundation. John…

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I sat there wondering about it immediately. Could that really be true? Could a generation that seems structurally locked out of basic milestones like homeownership and independent living actually be doing better than we were at their age?

A quick read showed that The Guardian had faithfully reported the headline findings of a brand-new briefing by the Resolution Foundation. “At the age of 24, those born in the early 2000s are also earning more than any other generation going back to those born in the 1950s, according to the study.”

That sounds...incredible. Was I wrong all this time? Maybe we’re doing better than I thought? As is almost always the case, when you peer behind the curtain you find the Wizard of Oz. The claim doesn’t even nearly stand up to scrutiny, and instead, it’s another node in the omnipresent distortion matrix.

Using an Iron Man Prompt™ I’ve been developing, I had some AI agents parse through the underlying methodology with a fine tooth comb. What I found is another example of the institutional distortion field bending our reality because of misaligned institutional incentives. So what did these guys do? Let’s get into it.

The Play-by-Play Distortions

When you open the actual Resolution Foundation Report, the narrative of a generational economic “mini-rebound” quickly begins to fray under the weight of its own data design. To generate their optimistic headline, the authors rely on deliberate statistical choices that camouflage the reality of young adults.

1. Absorbing the Parents’ Wealth

The report’s primary metric for tracking standard of living is “equivalised disposable household income.” The critical structural flaw with this metric is that it treats a multi-generational household as a single, harmonious unit where everyone pools their cash evenly. The report states:

“That measure... gives each person the equivalised total income of the household in which they live. This is a good measure of an individual’s living standards if people in a household share their resources... but it is less likely to be the case in multi-benefit unit households, including cases where individuals live as housemates, or when adult children live with parents.”

But it’s worse than that, because an unprecedented 63% of young people aged 20–24 are still living in their childhood bedrooms, their recorded “household income” is heavily absorbing the peak-career salaries, pensions, and asset values of their parents! The authors themselves admit the scale of this distortion later in the text:

“For those aged 20-24, just 10 per cent of household income progress comes from that person’s benefit unit’s income, with 86 per cent coming from others in the household.”

In other words, 86% of the apparent financial progress celebrated by The Guardian in their headline isn’t Gen Z thriving_, it’s their parents growing assets keeping them afloat because they’re unable to afford to move out. #Progress!

2. Systematic Erasor of Rent

Not only does the ‘uptick’ include the wage and asset growth of parents, but by ignoring the distorting nature of the “Hotel of Mum and Dad,” the study’s primary data models systematically reduce the impact of housing costs. If you don’t leave home, you don’t pay market rent, which means your disposable income looks artificially inflated compared to the historical cohorts who could afford to move out!

The report explicitly details this massive unmeasured living subsidy:

“Our data doesn’t tell us exactly how much housing costs are paid by the young people who live with their parents, but many parents don’t charge their children much or any rent: a study by Compare the Market of 1,000 parents whose adult children live with them showed that 55 per cent of parents charge their adult children some rent to live at home, but this is only £110 a month on average.”

Meanwhile, the data notes that independent young adults renting privately are losing a median 32% of their gross income directly to landlords. By measuring pooled household income, across a generation of young people anchored at home, the metric hides the reality of a brutal rental market, making structural gridlock look like a statistical victory.

3. The Workforce Survivor Bias

Then there is the labor market data. The headline points to rising median weekly earnings to suggest the UK job market is in “benign conditions” for youth. But wage surveys like the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings only sample people who are actively employed.

The report casually drops a devastating counter-statistic that invalidates the broader trend:

“The UK has a resurgent NEETs situation - people not in employment, education or training - with over a million young adults now in this category.”

When over a million of the most economically vulnerable, lower-skilled young adults drop out of the workforce entirely, they simply don’t turn up in the annual wage datasets! The median wage of working Gen Z adults goes up, because the bottom of the stack was never included in the denominator. It’s survivor bias masked as progress.

An extreme analogy can clarify the distortion here. Imagine we’re measuring the overall health of Gen-Z and we say “yeah they’re doing pretty well actually”, but in calculating that, we simply excluded every Gen-Z person who had dropped dead. You could have a full tilt war going on, with millions dead, and your decision to ‘exclude the dead’ from your dataset would nicely mask the true decline in that generations health!

Why Do They Do This?!

It is easy to look at this and feel a sense of profound cynicism. Why would an organization filled with smart, well-meaning economists publish a model that relies on such transparently flawed assumptions?

This isn’t ‘bad’ science (per se), these think tanks are well aware of everything I’ve just told you. They do it because they are playing the specific, calculated game of the Think-Tank Attention Economy.

Think tanks like the Resolution Foundation don’t exist to publish dry, unread academic papers; they exist to actively shift government policy and shape public discourse. But the political landscape is completely deaf to status-quo updates. If a think tank publishes a headline saying, “Young people are still structurally locked out of the economy in predictable ways,” a newspaper editor will bury it on page twenty. To command the news cycle, you need a “Hook and Pivot” strategy.

First, you manipulate the survey parameters until you find a counterintuitive, attention-grabbing headline. “If we exclude the jobless, minimize rent and housing costs, and subsize earnings with parental asset growth then we can say ”Gen Z is out-earning Millennials!”

This is the hook designed specifically for mainstream journalists to run with. In your “perfect world” imagined strategy, once the mainstream media gives you the microphone, you execute the pivot and plug your pre-packaged policy solutions. But in reality, all that sticks around in our culture are the distortions you conjured to build the attention you needed for your intended goal.

Sure enough, if you read to the end of this report, the optimistic wage narrative is abruptly discarded to lobby the government for two highly specific things: a state-backed “Starter Deposit scheme” and an explicit plea for the government to “pause its convergence to the adult minimum wage” out of fear that rising labor costs are driving the NEET crisis.

The irony? According to their own report, most of the uptick in Gen-Z’s earnings was actually driven by minimum wage. But as they explained, this only looks at people who actually got a job. If higher minimum wages lead to more unemployment, their statistical analysis wouldn’t alert you to that. They’re arguing, quietly, that the higher minimum wage looks great for those who got it, but it could be locking people out of employment. Ergo, perhaps pause on developing the minimum wage for adults.

In short, the attention economy incentivises institutions to contort reality. These think tanks are bound to the funding cycles of research councils and charitable trusts. To secure the next multi-million-pound grant, they have to prove their research has “impact.” In the policy ecosystem, impact is measured by public engagement and media footprint. A viral, controversial headline that sets off an intergenerational debate across social media is exactly what they need to justify their institutional budget.

Chipping Away at Reality

You are the collateral damage of that requirement because the think-tanks know the incentives of the newspapers, too. I know all too well that publications need quick stories that get clicks, because you’re reading one right now!^* The Guardian need the same, and so it didn’t interrogate the report at all, it just ran a story which will now pollute and distort dozens of other debates about the progress the country has made since 2008. Here at The Digger, as you can see, we do things a little differently...

How often do you think these distorting incentive structures arise? Journalists working under brutal daily deadlines do not have the time, the statistical training, or the institutional incentive to read page 18 of a technical economic briefing. The think tanks know it, so they are presented with a slick, embargoed press release of a perfect “man bites dog” story on a silver platter. They copy and paste the headline findings and move on to their next task.

But every time this happens — every time structural incentives mean major news outlet runs an inverted headline — our collective sense of reality is distorted one more time.

A Gen Z reader stuck in their parents’ house at 26, completely unable to afford a one-bedroom flat or build an independent life, looks at The Guardian and reads that their generation is experiencing a “financial rebound”. They don’t see the technical footnotes explaining that this number now includes their dad’s salary because they can’t afford to move out. They just assume that the system is functioning, and that they are the individual failure.

I suspect that distortions like this happen all the time. Shall we do this again?

^{* by my standards this is a very quick story, but as you can see, it’s not a story you can expect to find in the mainstream press for the reasons I explained. If you value this kind of journalism, please support it with a subscription. Shares, likes, comments are always appreciated because the audience this gets is the audience you generate.}

I also turned the investigation into a video and posted it on notes. It’s available on YouTube here, x.com here, and instagram here.

This takes a while, but it will probably help this work find a larger and more ‘normal’ audience if that is something you’re interested in supporting.

The work on the Map of Distortion is ongoing, the main concern right now is the legal side of publishing this kind of information.

Comments are on - if you can think of ways to support this content, let me know.

The issue of money in medicine is important, but it’s complex and difficult to grasp intuitively. To unpack this problem, I’ll show you the pathway of one drug, from its discovery all the way through to its delivery in a hospital. That way, you’ll see how each node it passes through distorts reality before it finally ends up in your prescription.

The drug we’re going to look at is a cholesterol-lowering drug called inclisiran. To really understand it, we must first understand the market at which this drug is aimed; the statin market in the UK, Europe and USA is huge and this behemoth market has been created almost entirely by the pharmaceutical industry itself. What started out as a targeted drug for high-risk cardiac patients has been aggressively engineered into a “mandatory mint” for millions of perfectly healthy adults. So this is what we must remember: our “inclisiran” drug, is creation of the pharma industry, and it aims to service a huge market created by the pharma industry.

How do you ‘create’ a market for a drug exactly? You spend decades lobbying to systematically lower the clinical thresholds for “high” cholesterol to such low levels that millions of healthy people become ‘sick’ according to your new criteria. That’s how. Critics will argue this is a cynical view, but consider this: if you’re a male over the age of 45, in America you’re considered high risk by default. For women, the high risk group is over 55. We’re talking about maybe 40% of the entire US population become eligible for the drug.

In the UK, at 45 if you get your cholesterol checked, there’s a very good chance you’ll be recommended statins. Nothing else about your lifestyle or health really matters according to these guidelines. From a financial perspective, creating a market this large this is a remarkable achievement, so how did they do it?

The systematic lowering of clinical treatment thresholds got started (as it often does) in the United States. The 2004 National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) Adult Treatment Panel III (ATP III) guidelines was the blueprint used to expand the market for statins. These guidelines lowered the recommended LDL-Cholesterol targets across a range of high risk categories, which immediately classified millions of healthy individuals as “high risk” and therefore eligible for statin drug therapy.At the wave of a pen, the market size increased massively.

So was the process by which this happened fair? Well, eight of the nine members of that NCEP ATP III panel had direct, personal financial ties to the manufacturers of statins. Furthermore, the five major clinical trials used to justify the new guidelines were entirely funded by the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the drugs. A majority of the principal investigators involved in those trials had received substantial financial compensation from the sponsors through consultancies, lecture fees, or direct employment.

The pattern repeated itself in 2013. This time the guidelines came from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and they pushed the eligible population wider still — recommending statins for an estimated 31 million more Americans on top of the 25 million already taking them. And when the British Medical Journal looked at who had written them, it found the same fingerprints all over again. Eight of the fifteen panel members had financial ties to industry, and the chair himself, Professor Neil Stone, had been paid by six different statin manufacturers in the years before he took the role:

“Stone (on the panel) acknowledged to the BMJ that before being empanelled he had financial ties to Abbott, AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis, and Schering-Plough, and he had served as a consultant to Abbott, AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer, Reliant, Schering-Plough, and Sonaste. All six corporations to which Stone had financial ties make drugs to treat hyperlipidemia…

Six of the remaining panelists also disclosed ongoing financial ties to drug makers during their service on the panel.“

British Medical Journal, 2013

These guidelines, heavily influenced by industry money, kick started the trend that pure demography could be used to determine cardiovascular risk factors. The result? Men aged 45 or older became a high-risk cohort by default. This single act successfully transformed healthy, aging males into a permanent consumer base.

The trend arrives in the UK

Following the global precedent set by the US guidelines, the United Kingdom followed suit and expanded its own market. The industry wanted more people eligible for statin prescriptions, so that’s what we got.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended starting statins only in individuals with a 10-year cardiovascular disease risk of more than 20%. In July 2014, NICE issued Clinical Guideline 181, which halved this treatment threshold to a 10-year risk of more than 10%. There’s a pattern here which will become obvious...On the panel making these recommendations, 8 of the 12 members had financial ties to drug firms making statins. According to my own Map of Distortion, I found three of those members now direct pharmaceutical consultancies, whilst another three declare payments from pharma giants.

This guideline change generated widespread controversy within the UK medical community. A survey conducted by Pulse revealed that 57% of general practitioners (GPs) did not support the draft guidance, and 55% stated they would refuse to take a statin themselves or recommend it to a family member at the 10% risk threshold. Despite the professional backlash, the guideline was implemented, making more than 80% of men over 50 and half of women over 60 eligible for statin therapy.

The chicanery has bloated this global market into a mammoth $17.1 billion, anchored by more than 200 million annual prescriptions dispensed annually in the US alone. There are only 342 million people in the United States, so this is an incredibly high number of annual prescriptions. It’s into this market, artificially inflated and eye-wateringly lucrative, that the drug we’re now going to track, inclisiran, makes its debut.

The Birth of our drug

Unlike the daily tablet form of statins, Inclisiran it’s a twice-a-year injection that aims to lower your cholesterol. Why would a company like this injection format? Well, statins as drug ‘type’ go stale because financially - as a category - statins have already been juiced. Prior to its patent expiring in 2012, Lipitor (a statin) became the highest grossing drug in history, raking in at least $130 billion over its lifetime. But all great things must come to an end, because in 2012 the patent for the drug expired. UK doctors can, and do, prescribe generic versions of the drug for as little as 9 pence a tablet.

So the job is done right? Maybe cholesterol is a cause of heart disease, and if required, we can moderate cholesterol cheaply and effectively with post-patent generic drugs based on Lipitor?

Well...yes and no, because the pharmaceutical industry hate patent expiry. Having worked very hard to create the market (by lowering the threshold for ‘high’ cholesterol), they can’t just allow their cash-cow to be killed by patent expiry. The industry have a well trodden solution to this annoying problem. They invent brand new ways to lower cholesterol, then they lobby and market their new (ownable) versions to health systems around the world. Why spend pennies per treatment when there’s a better (and more expensive) treatment now on the market!?

It’s in that spirit, that the twice-a-year injection of Inclisiran is conjured into existence. Let’s skip to the end of this story shall we? By 2021, the NHS agreed to roll it out to as many as 300,000 people in one of the biggest medicine deals in its history. Remarkably, it did so before the trial investigating if the inclisiran actually prevents heart attacks, strokes or deaths was published. As I write, that study still hasn’t been published.

So how on earth does all this happen?

It starts, like a lot of these, with public science.

Inclisiran is built on a piece of Nobel-winning biology — RNA interference, the trick of switching a gene’s messaging off. That science was done between 1998 and 2006 in the United States, Canada, and Germany. Most of this work, as far as I am able to tell, was funded by grants from NIH, Canada’s CIHR and the Max Planck institute. Researchers worked out they could use this RNAi technology to lower the production of PCSK9 proteins in the body, which ultimately lowers your cholesterol.

This whole process was turned into a drug platform by a biotech company called Alnylam. From there, the ‘cholesterol lowering’ gene moderation was named ‘inclisiran’ and licensed to a company called The Medicines Company, which paid for this new drug to go through medical trials. The initial results were made available in 2019, and a little over eight days later (before the first trial was even peer reviewed) Novartis bought the company for around $9.7 billion. Clearly, they must have had their eyes and ears closely on that drug, because at that price, they clearly believed it could be a blockbuster.

The first study (Orion-10) was properly published in New England Journal of Medicine a few months later in 2020. It’s possible to check the study’s declared interests and it’s an incredible demonstration of just how conflicted by pharmaceutical cash a study can actually be. In the declared interests section, it’s hard to find an author without a massive, at times almost laughable connection to the industry.

This study was paid for by the Medicines Company, the company that owned the drug. Of the 11 authors in the study, every single one of them had a direct paid relationship with that company. In some cases, they happily declared “employment, shares and stock options” in the very product they’re studying. Even more strange is the sheer scale at which some of these people take personal fees from the industry. The most bizarre component? This is completely normal. This is how medical science is done; in a pressure cooker of corporate money, special interests and conflicting funding. Given that every single person in the study stood to benefit from a positive result, what result do you think emerged from the study?

The trial that actually matters, ORION-4, is the one testing whether inclisiran actually prevents heart attacks and strokes. It’s run out of Oxford’s Clinical Trial Service Unit, and it’s co-sponsored by the University of Oxford and Novartis itself. That’s worth sitting with; the supposedly independent trial that will tell us whether this drug saves a single life is also co-funded by the company that sells it. And, the University that runs the study, according to preliminary data in the Map of Distortion, took £16 million in pharma money between 2019 and 2024. According to the Map of Distortion, Oxford’s single biggest pharma funder? Novartis, at around £9 million.

So… although it’s conflicted massively by money from companies which stood to benefit, there’s now a handful of studies which show the drug can lower cholesterol. Even without data to show it has any real clinical health benefit, is it possible to get this thing onto the market? Of course it is. Here’s how.

On the market with incomplete data

To get a drug onto the UK market, you have to take it to the MHRA, which is the UK’s drug regulator. Long time readers of The Digger will know that the MHRA isn’t funded by the taxpayer. If it isn’t funded by the taxpayer, then who is it protecting?

To get a drug onto the UK market, you have to take it to the MHRA, the UK’s drug regulator. Long-time readers of The Digger will know the MHRA isn’t funded by the taxpayer. And if it isn’t funded by the taxpayer, then who is it really protecting?

If you can believe it, the MHRA is mostly funded by the very industry it’s supposed to be regulating. This is like the mafia paying for the city’s police, or arms dealers bankrolling the war-crimes tribunal. The MHRA’s job is to license a pharmaceutical product for use in the UK, and it takes 86% of its funding from the very industry that wants every single one of its products on the market. A 2022 investigation in the BMJ put it bluntly, quoting the sociologist Donald Light: drug regulators have become “a prime example of institutional corruption”

I’d agree with that — but I think it gets worse. It’s almost impossible to find out how the drug was actually assessed. I went looking for the UK assessment of inclisiran — who reviewed the data, who decided it was safe for the UK market, what they declared — and on the UK side, I couldn’t find it. The MHRA used to lean on the European Medicines Agency to assess drugs like this, and an FOI request simply points you back to Europe.

Remarkably, the MHRA states that the contents of its own reports on inclisiran “are confidential on the grounds that it is comprised of information supplied in confidence in the form of European assessment reports which are not available in the public domain.”

That’s worth pausing on, because the European regulator does publish a public assessment report for inclisiran — I downloaded it, all 143 pages of it. A fuller version, with the commercially sensitive detail stripped out, is kept confidential, and that may be what the MHRA is leaning on. But the public report alone is revealing — and the UK regulator points you away from its own reasoning entirely, telling you to go and read Europe’s.

And what did Europe’s regulator actually conclude? In its own assessment report, it approved inclisiran while admitting, in black and white, that “a limitation of the dossier is the lack of cardiovascular outcome data” — that the cholesterol drop is “only a... surrogate,” and that “a favourable impact on CV outcomes has not yet been confirmed.” To translate: we don’t have the data to say this prevents a single heart attack or stroke — but we’re letting it onto the market anyway

So if we can’t see into the MHRA’s reasoning, what can we do? The MHRA takes its expert advice from a standing body called the Commission on Human Medicines, and a drug like inclisiran would fall under its remit. I can’t prove which of these specific people assessed this specific drug — that’s exactly the problem — but I can tell you who sat on that Commission in the year inclisiran was waved through, and, to some degree, what they had declared. Of its fourteen members, nine declared a financial interest in the pharmaceutical industry. Two of them, including the Commission’s own chair, Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, declared a tie to Novartis, the maker of the drug which was waved through.

Shall we recap? The science was publicly funded, and the profits were taken private. The drug went to The Medicines Company, which ran the trials with investigators on its own payroll and published only preliminary surrogate data — a fall in cholesterol, with no evidence it prevents a single heart attack — and Novartis bought the whole company anyway. The one trial designed to find a real clinical answer is run out of a Novartis-sponsored Oxford University, and won’t report for years. The drug was then taken to a UK regulator that draws 86% of its funding from the industry it polices, where the assessment vanishes into a grey box that’s almost impossible to audit — overseen by an expert committee on which a large share of the members have serious ties to that same industry.

It’s getting silly, but we’re not done. Getting onto the market is only one battle. To reach the bedside, you need a recommendation — and in the UK, that’s where NICE comes in.

The experts who vouched for it were paid by the company that makes it.

As I explained last time, NICE run ‘Technology Appraisals’ for new drugs hoping to get a recommendation at the NHS level. When NICE appraised inclisiran, it invited expert advisers into the room and published what they’d declared. The lead clinical expert was Professor Kausik Ray of Imperial College London — who is also the lead investigator of the ORION Inclisiran trials, and in his own declaration, “a consultant to Novartis.”

I ran his name through the drug industry’s own UK payments database to confirm this. It records hundreds of thousands of pounds in payments paid to Professor Ray by Novartis — the maker of the drug he was advising on. In The Map of Distortion database, which collates data no longer published by Disclosure UK, we see that Professor Ray has received more than £570,000 from drug companies over the six years of data it has collected.

I will stress, Professor Ray has done nothing illegal or wrong here. He declared his financial ties, NICE recorded it, and decided his ties “would not prevent Professor Ray from providing expert advice to the committee.”

Also in attendance was Dr Alan Jones, a Principal Investigator at the Oxford University trial of inclisiran. He’s the local principal investigator on a Novartis-funded trial of inclisiran — running it at his hospital — while advising NICE on whether the NHS should pay for that very same drug. NICE’s conclusion on this conflict of interest? It “would not prevent Dr Jones from participating in discussions on this appraisal”

Also in the committee was a patient expert from HEART UK, the cholesterol charity. Heart UK had just begun working with Novartis and they’d recently held a conference, which Novartis sponsored. According to The Map of Distortion, in the year inclisiran was appraised, HEART UK took nearly £59,000 in donations from Novartis. What was the upshot of this? The declaration would not prevent this person “from providing expert advice to the committee.”

If this is getting exhausting, please hold on because we’re not done here. Inclisiran was appraised by the somewhat permanent NICE Committee C. The current chair of that committee, Dr James Fotheringham has declared paid Novartis consultancy and speaker fees (TA723, TA751, TA853) and according one other declaration, his employer (The University of Sheffield), also took Novartis funding (TA706). According to my own (preliminary) results in The Map of Distortion, Fotheringham took £3,433 from Novartis across 2020 and 2021, and the University he works for had a good year in 2020, taking £51,532 from Novartis.

Also on that committee sits Dr Richard Nicholas. In fact, he’s vice-chair of the committee. He declares paid Novartis & Roche advisory boards across more than 20 other technical assessments. Disclosure UK corroborates this with a payment of £4,452 in 2022.

So...What do you think the outcome of the appraisal was?

They recommended it of course! In October 2021, NICE approved inclisiran for the NHS — waved through on the strength of how much it lowers cholesterol, just a number on a chart, while the ORION-4 trial Dr Jones was running was still years from reporting if the drug prevents even a single heart attack or stroke. Five years later, that study still hasn’t reported that data. We’re expecting to maybe hear something in July.

So the drug’s own trial investigators, at least one definitely paid by Novartis, spoke in its favour; the patient voice was funded by Novartis; the committee that judged it was chaired and vice-chaired by people taking money from Novartis — and every one of them had declared it. Nobody hid anything. Nobody broke a rule. And the drug sailed through anyway. The conflicts didn’t derail the process, everything was just waved through because this is all completely normal. The conflicts of interest are the process.

In the end…

By now you can see the shape of this, so I’ll keep it short. NICE said yes, and NHS England signed a “world-first” deal with Novartis to roll inclisiran out to as many as 300,000 people — one of the largest medicines agreements in its history. Some of the terms are kept from us, for “commercially sensitive” reasons, so we’re told. What we do know: a generic statin costs the NHS pennies a tablet, while inclisiran’s list price is £1,900 a dose

A professor of health economics, reviewing how the deal was struck, said the NHS had been “captured as an instrument of industrial policy ”). I’d go further. Given everything we’ve just walked through — public science taken private, a drug bought on a cholesterol number, paid trialists vouching for it, conflicted committees waving it through, a regulator that won’t show its working — it is hard not to suspect this for what it looks like: a remarkably effective way to extract public money out of a national health service, at the expense of good evidence and people’s health. It is the opposite of how medical science is supposed to work.

This is one node on the Map of Distortion. There are thousands more. I’ll show you the next.

So why do I say this?

I’m a conflict averse investigative reporter. It’s an odd combination, because my work forces me to confront people. I don’t really like that part of it, but it’s somewhat inevitable given the nature of the work.

When pressed, I tend to err on the side of caution. Regularly, I hear the phrase “Do I really know enough about this to comment?” echo through my mind. “This is perhaps someone else’s domain…”

Doubt plagues me.

It forces me to look harder at what I’m writing about. In the case of AI, it forced me to spend three years learning how AI agents actually work. I built them. Lots of them in fact. I ended up writing so much code that I became fully lost in that world. “Am I a writer at all?” I wondered. “Am I a coder now?”

Perhaps.

Whatever the truth may be, I now (just about) believe I can write about AI, within a narrow range, because I understand it just about enough to translate my understanding into english. English. The language used to program humans.

Having looped endlessly through the language of machines, I’d been away from writing ‘english’ for a very long time. I’d lost touch with the most endearing feature of the language; in english you can write stuff that doesn’t do anything at all. You can use english to write beautiful and convincing programs that are completely isolated from reality.

I started noticing this kind of english on substack. It can be great writing, and it draws you in, but it doesn’t really wrestle with its own subject matter. It doesn’t really interrogate its own premise. I’ve read AI articles from substack writers with huge audiences, and as I’m reading, my own self doubt manifests on their behalf. I think “I’m not sure this is good advice?!”

The target for this writing seems clear; you’re disgruntled about AI, and these words are going to speak directly to that anger. It reminds me of a great line from one my favourite comedians, Stuart Lee. Recounting an imaginary conversation someone has about his comedy, Lee says

“Did you watch his show...?

...yeah.

Was it funny?

No. But I agreed the fuck out of it.”

As the audience applauds, Stuart brilliantly continues his satire. “I’m not interested in laughs. What I want is a temporary liberal mass consensus that dissolves on contact with air”

Stuart is an expert in his craft. He knows the exact ways in which you’re already disgruntled about the world, and he speaks directly, masterfully to that existing despair. This is satire. It works when you accept, wholesale, the presupposition at the heart of the satire. It is funny. A shared experience to illuminate the absurdity of an idea or belief is top tier entertainment, but it’s not the vehicle to get in when you’re looking to understand something.

I’ve seen articles on substack about AI that veer very close to the satirical. Beautifully crafted, a bubbling anger at their heart, competently written, and desperate to point out all the absurdities and excesses of the industry (of which there are many). They’re great articles, but they’re nearly useless in helping you understand the train on the tracks.

One thing I’ve seen a couple of times is willfully wishing the technology away. It’s all silly. It won’t work. The people investing in it are egomaniacs. It wastes water, it wastes energy, it kills jobs. It’s true but incomplete. As the anger about AI grows, I think the audience for that anger will grow with it.

Be angry if you must, but seek out perspectives that aim to faithfully chart a course through whatever is beyond the horizon. Screaming at every wave, as it crashes over the bow, isn’t going to cut it.

When I’ve appeased my own self doubt, I’ll be sharing my thoughts here.

As I collate it, it becomes obvious that we have a very serious problem, because the scale at which this is happening becomes much clearer. The aim is to present the data in an intuitive and interactive map format which will make the distorting power of pharmaceutical money easy for anyone to understand. Interested? Then follow along on this substack, and please support the project with a paid subscription.

Just over a week into the project, and the data is churning up all kinds of interesting insights and discoveries. One discovery arrived after I brought the UK’s “NICE guidelines”, and a huge set of the committee notes into the database. Before we get into what I found, let’s see why NICE itself is so important.

“NICE” is the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and their role is to create the treatment guidelines healthcare providers rely on. These guidelines determine what treatment you’ll receive if you fall sick, so it’s very influential. In fact, it’s not just the UK where these guidelines have a major impact. NICE is respected as a global authority on treatment guidelines, research suggests at least 12 other nations take a very strong steer from their recommendations.

As well as treatment guidelines, NICE also assess new drugs looking for their big break into the NHS purchasing pipeline. When a pharmaceutical company brings a promising new drug to the UK — like a weight-loss injection — one of the most consequential decisions about its future is made by NICE “Technology Appraisal Committees.” These committees decide if the NHS should make the treatment or device available on the NHS.

In the UK, these recommendations carry serious legal weight because “The NHS is legally obliged to fund and resource medicines and other treatments recommended by NICE's technology appraisals...and must make it available, normally within three months.”

Because this pathway guarantees the NHS will fund a drug, it’s a pathway that needs to be carefully policed. To keep tabs on things, NICE describes the technology appraisals as an “independent standing committee that produces recommendations.”

Independent.

Their positioning suggests the committees are independent doctors ‘fighting in the corner’ of the NHS. But is that true? Well the Map of Distortion project is starting to shed light on this very question.

NICE publish meeting minutes, panel members, and occasionally conflicts of interest at each panel meeting. It’s something, but its a sprawling mess of unstructured PDFs across years and years of meetings. To boot? It’s not always complete. It could do with an update for 2026, so I built some scraping agents to clean it all up. Is it possible to parse all of it into a searchable indexed database?

Yes. Yes it is.

The Map of Distortion now shows there are 88 people who sit on those committees. NICE don’t formally record conflicts of interest for them, which I think is an oversight. Instead, any conflicts of interest are recorded ad-hoc at the meeting level, only if it’s deemed relevant. It means there isn’t a single place where the public can check the commercial interests of the people bringing pharmaceutical products into the NHS. I think its in the public interest to correct that.

But how?

I’ve built a range of tools that check for conflicts of interest across public datasets. Because conflicts of interest are recorded like a roll call in the meeting itself, the first check reads the NICE notes themselves and looks for any declarations there. The second check runs the name against six years of Disclosure UK disclosures, another key part of The Map of Distortion which I’ll write more on in the future. The third check looks the names up on OpenAlex and Europe PMC and then disambiguates declared conflicts of interest in any research publications. Finally (for now) a fourth and fifth check runs a query against Companies House and then the web for their involvement as paid consultants or directors of companies relevant to the pharmaceutical industry.

After running the committee through these tools, it turns out that 58% of them carry an industry tie disclosed to Disclosure UK, NICE, or in their own published research, or they are employed in a pharma-facing firm or consultancy. Depending on how you slice the data, these industry ties could be anywhere from 48% to 70%.

These ‘sleeper cell’ people were some of the most interesting finds. These are committee members, supposedly independent and fighting the corner of patients, who quietly moonlight as consultants in companies that take pharma money to fast track drugs through the regulatory process! Could there be a greater conflict of interest than to be on a NICE technology committee and be working for a company that sells regulatory consultancy work to pharma companies?

To be fair, many of these conflicts of interest were declared. In fact, there’s an entire story I will write about how NICE deal with conflicts of interest, do they even matter to NICE? In any case, the Map of Distortion found that in a few cases, committee members are actually company directors for consultancy firms helping pharma steer drugs through the regulatory process and they had not declared that, or NICE had failed to pick it up. Companies House knows about it; NICE's register doesn't.

This data is sensitive and preliminary. I don’t see the public interest in publishing names (right now) because a conflict of interest is not necessarily evidence of wrongdoing. This is just how the system works. What the database can tell us is that in the aggregate, the public body which claims to produce ‘independent advice’ is mostly staffed by people with commercial ties to the industry.

There’s a lot more reporting to do with this dataset, and a great many insights I already have in the tank which I must work my way through. The map will require a lot of work before it can be published, not just from a technical perspective but also the journalism and investigative work takes time too.

Shares are very much appreciated, the audience I get is the audience you guys create. Comments on. More coming.

_{Author’s note I’ve spent years building AI tools — Pydantic AI, agent frameworks, scraping and extraction pipelines. This investigation runs on them. I’m now turning that toolkit toward deep investigations, and I’m opening a small amount of consulting time: a day or two to build you a tool or point you the right way. If that’s useful, reply to this email.}

But first, some background on how this all got started. Spurred on by the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (2010), the trade body representing the pharmaceutical industry in the UK wanted to show it was committed to transparency. If your doctor is being paid by the pharmaceutical industry, you should know, right? Most people agreed, and so… an intervention was needed!

Being a British intervention, it took years of debate. Feet were dragged, obligations were obfuscated, and codes were conduct were slowly created. Finally, six years behind America, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) launched “Disclosure UK” : a public, searchable database implementing the rules which had taken years to agree on.

It’s meant to tell you which doctors and researchers take money from the pharmaceutical industry. To be fair, it does do that, but as you’ll see, there are...some caveats. Every year it announces a new transparency record about how successful the project has become:

“Today, we celebrate a new transparency record, with an estimated nine in ten (91.9 per cent) of healthcare professionals named [6]. This compares to 80.8 per cent for 2023 and 78.8 per cent for 2022.” ABPI blog on Disclosure UK

That sounds pretty good doesn’t it? You’re forgiven if you think this means 91.9% of all doctors and researchers are named in that database. It doesn’t mean that. You’re also forgiven if you think it means that 91.9% of all money paid by pharma is named in that database. It doesn’t mean that. It’s just meant to sound as though it means that.

Long time readers of The Digger will know to distrust every number a pharmaceutical adjacent company throws at you. This statement, designed to elicit a warm “transparency maxing” feeling, is incredibly misleading. It’s true within a very narrow and hidden scope, but taken at face value, it’s a classic magic trick of misdirection. The database, and the rules that make up what is recorded, are misleading by design.

You can imagine it like this: Across the money that’s tracked by this database, there's one pot tracking payments made to a person directly — fees, consultancy, event costs, travel. Of the doctors who were paid that way, an estimated 91% had their name published; the other 9% refused to be named and sit in an anonymous lump.

Fine. I guess…

But the largest channel of pharma money — research and development — isn't in that pot at all. R&D money flows to the institution, and it’s usually tied to named researchers, departments, and the studies they run. But, and it’s a big but, it is reported only as a faceless aggregate. No names are attached to it. Ever. These are the agreed rules.

“The names of these contracted individuals must be disclosed except in relation to payments in relation to research and development work, including clinical trials, as defined below, where disclosure should be on an aggregate basis.”

It’s not a huge leap of the imagination to see how these incredibly lucrative clinical trials and R&D contracts (perhaps granted for spurious reasons) might become a concerning conflict of interest. And here’s the thing: this pot of cash is the lion's share of the money in the database. It’s £2.6 billion over six years, on its own bigger than every named payment in the entire database combined.

How do I know this? Because I downloaded the whole database. Six years of it actually — including three years in which the database itself is no longer public. I had to recover those years from web-archive captures. I built it into a map where every single cash connection links back to the document that proves it. And then I added up the money that arrives with no name attached.

It comes to £2.6 billion.

That’s one category — “Research and Development” — over six years. Money the industry’s own rules say may be disclosed in a lump sum only, never against a person. For every £1 that carries a name in this system, £2.45 flows without one which means that seventy-one percent of all the money is nameless. As an example, I found that in 2024, a single company booked £114 million of research money without a single name on it. It might be fine...

One of the first threads I’m pulling at is the most obvious. Since researchers are (mostly) required to declare the money they take from industry in their own published papers, it should be possible to cross reference what was declared in their papers, with what’s declared in the Disclosure database.

The two don’t match.

Researchers declaring personal fees in their published work do not match with names in the database designed to hold exactly that. I’m not naming places or people today, every single case deserves its caveats laid out in full, but the gaps are real, and as I investigate them I’m sure I’ll find more.

I want to be precise over what I’ve built here. It isn’t a leak. Nothing here is stolen. Every number came from the industry’s own transparency spreadsheets. The whole point of the database is to allow the public to hold the industry to account, and that’s what I’m doing. It seems the transparency system, which took six years to build, has a blind spot exactly where the most important and voluminous money lies.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to investigate what’s on the other side of these payments. Who the money reaches, and how payments declared in published papers don’t seem to appear in the database that’s supposed to collect them. I’ll look at the funnel that educates doctors before they get their license, and I’ll look at the charities and independent businesses in receipt of pharma cash.

I’m doing it as a series, and I’m doing it a little differently from anything I’ve published before. Towards the end of this series, the full dataset will be made public. It’s not new data per se, but it’s data which hasn’t been collected and interrogated in this way before. Every claim will come with its source one click away. You’ll be able to check my work, and — when it’s ready — explore the map yourself.

The new shape of The Digger

A note on money, because I’d rather just say it. I’ve published in bursts and gone quiet, and that’s not fair on the people paying. And the plain truth is the Substack on its own doesn’t cover the kind of work I want to be able to do — this post sits on a database and a pile of tools that took weeks to build, and that’s only the first part.

There’s always a tension at the heart of content like this. It needs to be free or it just doesn’t reach anyone, but if it’s free, I can’t actually do the work. So here’s a model I think can help: the headlines stay free, and paid subscribers get the layer underneath — the names, the tables, the documents, detail and data — plus the lab notes as I dig. If you value this kind of work, this is how you can support it.

If you’ve been a free reader since the early days, this is the moment upgrading buys you something real: a seat in the room where the map gets made.

The moon is 238,000 miles away and we managed that. One hallway at a time.

Author’s note I’ve spent years building AI tools — Pydantic AI, agent frameworks, scraping and extraction pipelines. This investigation runs on them. I’m now turning that toolkit toward deep investigations, and I’m opening a small amount of consulting time: a day or two to build you a tool or point you the right way. If that’s useful, reply to this email.

Ok, well… so what I hear you ask?

Well in the wake of the model’s launch, the devs using it noticed it was “nerfed.” What does this mean exactly? It means it explicitly refuses to help you with certain things, which under the guise of AI safety, seems reasonable. For example, if you start asking advanced chemistry questions, or biology questions, the model is so incredibly capable, that it’s (probably) not safe to grant access to that. Similarly, it’s so advanced at security tasks that it can find incredibly lucrative security holes in almost anything. Earlier this week, Zcash, a cryptocurrency with a market cap of $7 billion, disclosed a critical vulnerability which had gone undetected for four years. The vulnerability would have allowed unlimited counterfeiting of tokens. The disclosure alone nuked the price of the token by nearly 40%.

The researcher who discovered it says it was actually Claude’s old ‘Opus 4.8’ model which found the security hole. Fable massively increases people’s ability to do this, so a major bank security nightmare is probably inevitable with a ‘full’ Fable release. It’s therefore (probably) wise to nerf it from a security perspective. For now at least…

However there’s an interesting ‘nerf’ that researchers investigating Fable quickly discovered. If you ask Fable to help you train a Large Language Model (an AI basically) at any kind of advanced ‘frontier’ level, then something very strange happens. The model will help you, but it will be deliberately stupid as it does so, and here’s the kicker; it won’t ever tell you it’s being deliberately stupid. Critics have called this a secret sabotage of its efforts to help you.

Think about that.

Every other nerfing feature is at least plausible and public. When it hits any other boundary, it tells you “ok I can’t help you with that but Opus 4.8 can” and it visibly hands you off to the dumber model. But it goes dumb silently on LLM tasks. Why won’t it help you make a better AI model? Why do it in this cloak and dagger ‘silent failure’ way? In this policy, Anthropic reveal their hand. Backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in capital, those backers want a return, and they clearly believe they can only get that return by creating a two tier world. One in which they get the keys to the spaceship, and you’re left with toy trucks in the sandpit. They’ve built themselves an edge, and they intend to keep it, and probably widen it.

They’ve not actually hidden their intent here. These ambitions are now public record. Details of this ‘very strange nerf’ are explicit and public on their AI system card right here. The full quote is below, and I’ve highlighted the parts that caught my eye.

In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development, we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms.

Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). These interventions will not affect the vast majority of coding work. We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations. When these interventions are active, we expect them to have minimal behavioral impact on the model except to limit its effectiveness in developing frontier LLMs. Claude will still respond helpfully to user requests. We’ll continue to improve the precision of our detection methods following the launch of this model.

The spaceship vs sandpit analogy isn’t just a rhetorical trick on my part. The ‘unrestricted’ model is called Mythos, and Anthropic are granting access to select partners.

For a small group of cyberdefenders and infrastructure providers, we’re also launching Claude Mythos 5. It’s the same underlying model as Fable 5, but with the safeguards lifted in some areas. Mythos 5 will initially be deployed through Project Glasswing, in collaboration with the US government, as an upgrade to Claude Mythos Preview. It has the strongest cybersecurity capabilities of any model in the world. Soon, we intend to expand access to Mythos 5 through a broader trusted access program.

This sets a precedent in which these companies can (and have) deliberately and silently made a model stupid about certain topics. Where could this go? Well what if you were trading with it? Could they quietly make it stupid as it reads the market? What if you’re trying to investigate something with it? Can they quietly nerf it over certain subjects?

These are amazing times we live in. These companies are forced to give us quite a lot of incredible technology, but fear for their future is driving them to weird decisions like this. Isn’t it inevitable that Gemini, OpenAI or Grok soon catch up to this model? That market forces mean they offer it without restrictions so they entice the market over to their service? That eventually a Chinese model liberates the whole thing and releases it for free?

These companies probably will build themselves a window in which they can know and act on an incredible range of intelligence before ‘we’ can, but in the process, like seagulls near a trawler, we’re getting serious access to the goods. Quite where any of this lands is anyone’s guess, but it’s truly a fascinating moment. The irony? Fable (and Grok) helped me with some of the research for this article! Comments are on, because this one is worthy of discussion.

AUTHORS NOTE

I’ve been building and releasing AI tools for a long time now, across Pydantic AI, Agent Development Kit, RAG, LangGraph and quite a few others. I’m now going to turn my attention to deep investigations using these tools, so you’ll be seeing a lot more from me in the coming weeks. I’ll soon be adding a new package where you can get a day or two of my time as an AI consultant. That could be anything from building you a tool or steering you in the right direction. If that’s interesting to you, reply to this email.

At least the Moon problem can be stated concisely: we need to fly 40,000 kg of cargo into space, across 650,000 miles, and keep it on a carefully planned trajectory. Sure...it’s very difficult, but knowing the exact problem and the exact constraints makes for a challenge that’s well defined, and you can go hard at a well defined problem.

But what happens when we cast our attention toward the information ecosphere? The problem appears persistent and ever present. No matter your goal, you’ll require a lot of things to come out of the information ecosystem. It’s there when you talk with someone online. It’s there in your newsfeed. It’s there when you publish a paper. It’s there when you read a paper, or a book, or an article, or a tweet. It’s there at your job as you consider what to say, and what to avoid. It’s there at your social event when you want to connect, but don’t want to say the wrong thing.

The information ecosystem is a distorting prism. Part system, part psychology, part social, part hierarchy. You have your motivations, and the information ecosystem has its own. All information flowing through it is shaped by those forces at every twist and turn. As you receive that information, you’ll rarely be aware of how far that information has travelled, where it was born, the assumptions that make up its premise, and its perilous journey through contorting forces.

Not only do we rarely, if ever, consider the forces that shape the information we receive, we don’t even notice how dependent we are on its contortions. Do people notice it at all? Have we ever considered “well how do I even know that?” or thought “Why do I even believe that?”

Consider a simple thought experiment: how many experiences of the world have you personally had? Unless you’ve lived an extraordinary life, your first-hand experience of the universe is probably quite limited. Sorry to say it, but for most of us, it’s some variation of eat, sleep, work, repeat.

You also have indirect experience of the universe through the direct experiences of others. But how many people do you actually know? Not people on the internet, not people on the TV, people you’ve really met and connected with. This information can only arrive into your life through a narrow funnel of peers who probably share similar backgrounds and experiences. Your family, friends, and ‘weird contacts’ all make up this secondary direct experience machine.

So how do you actually know anything at all?

The vast majority of your knowledge about the universe has been delivered through the global information ecosystem. That’s your formal and informal education, religious institutions, screens, televisions, radios, and books. Without an intervention from provocateurs (like me), if you consider it at all, you’ll quietly assume this system works reasonably well. “If it’s true... if it’s real...I’d know about it.”

“Oh really?” some imaginary person might say. “Well then why isn’t everyone doing that?” You reply with another apparent revelation.

“Oh yeah!? Well if that were true, it would have been huge news!”

Does this sound familiar? It’s a plausible default position, but any good faith interrogation of the information ecosystem reveals many artefacts that lay waste to this idea.

Your screen is the final ‘endpoint’ for this vast and dysfunctional system. The screen is inanimate. Lifeless. Dead. The information system it’s patched into has no responsibility to tell you anything at all. Without a very deliberate intervention, you are a victim of it, not a participant. Sitting between your phone and ‘the truth’ (whatever that may be) is a distortion field operating at a cosmic scale. You can’t bathe in the swirling plasmic currents of pure truth, and there’s only so much you can personally experience, your screen becomes the receiver for the prism of distortion. You know whatever the prism thinks is OK for you to know.

The everpresent irony? You reading these words on that screen right now.

For any special interest, gaining some influence over the prism is a rational move. It will gain you serious influence over society. Can you filter the truth in some way? Can you segment it somehow? Can you taint it with something? A half truth can be a powerful thing. Curation over which truth is accepted, and which is ridiculed, is yet another incredible power.

When you hear people talk about what “The Science” says, you’re hearing an artefact of the system. It’s institutions that get to decide what gets researched. It’s institutions that run sophisticated PR campaigns over their discoveries. It’s institutions that filter out inconvenient results, and it’s institutions which create the derisory culture which polices what’s acceptable. But what choice do you have if you want to ‘do’ science? You must move through the prism. If you want to progress, you’ll need to distort yourself to more closely align with your institution’s distortion. Better still, you could actually believe those distortions wholesale.

Acting as near perfect filters for ideas, ideology, beliefs and perspective, institutions become the greatest hallways inside the distorting prism. Having influence over those hallways gains you massive influence over the default perspective of the educated world. Influence is cheaper than you’d think when you use research grants, sponsorship, incentives, co-creation, collaboration and market forces.

In medical publishing we see this all the time.

“Is it in a peer reviewed journal?”

“Yes” you might respond,

“Well which Journal… because that one has truths of lesser value than mine.”

This is why you hear relentlessly about Wegovy and Ozempic, but hear less on how to moderate hunger with simple additions to the diet. It’s a blockbuster discovery when there’s money riding on it, and it’s an old wives tale when it’s free and simple. With influence over other hallways of the Prism, you can stimulate culture to remain open to medicalisation and be suspicious of ‘other’ health advice.

Your medical advice is curated by the medicine industry.
Your knowledge of war and conflict is curated by the war and conflict industry. Your spiritual knowledge is curated by the religion industry. Your news is curated by intelligence agencies, government and billionaires. Your perspective of the world has died a death by a thousand distortions.

So how do we get out of it? Well...as I said, that’s a harder question to answer. One useful step is to mediate any strong reaction you have to an idea or dataset because its likely its an artefact of the distorting Prism. “Why do I pretend to feel so strongly about this idea?” is a reasonable question. See if you can trace that idea’s roots, and engage dispassionately in data which might run contrary to your knee jerk belief.

You might also think about the assumptions you’ve brought to the conversation? Which hallways of the Prism curated my perspective on this? You can do the same with the person expressing the idea, is it reasonable to hold that perspective given what they know? Is it possible they have a perspective I lack, and that perspective affords them a view I can’t yet imagine?

Seeking the truth is a messy business. Many years ago, I read a handbook on hacking. I’d found it on a weird bit of the web way back at the tail end of the ICQ days. There was a phrase in it which stuck with me. The author, having made the case for how you might think about hacking, said “If after reading this, you pause and think, ‘wait, so...how do I hack?’, then just give up, because hacking is not for you.” Seeking the truth is like that too.

So yes, there’s a lot to fix, and perhaps the best way to get started is to define one clear part of the problem, and work on that. Next time I’ll pick a hallway and go deep.

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.

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  "@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"],
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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.

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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.