We Told You: Trump's ICE has Depleted American Companies of Workers

 

Like they didn't know. They knew, but racism and stupidity made them go ahead with Trump's racist policies. He lied to them and the morons believed him. Migrants make up the backbone of America's workforce in those sectors that high-brow Americans despise: Agriculture, construction, landscaping....

Workers gone, deported or in hiding.... MAGA business voters, many of them Hispanic Americans, are now complaining. I'd say to them: F - - - You. You deserve it. May you go bankrupt. The imbecile below says he didn't think "this" would affect him. By "this" he means Trump's racism hellbent on "bleaching" America of all non-white non-aryan non-anglo-saxon people so it looks whiter than it is. 

Who do you think the moron below will be voting for in November? He's a moron, wha'd ya expect?
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3-Time Trump Voter Complains ICE ‘Taking All Our Workers’ — We ‘Never Thought This Would Affect Us’
Tommy Christopher
Sat, March 21, 2026 




A business owner named Mario Guerrero — who supported President Donald Trump in all three elections — now says ICE raids are gutting his workforce. lamenting to The New York Times that “We just never thought that this would come and affect us in the construction industry.”

Trump’s ICE crackdown has been under fire after several killings and has prompted a DHS shutdown by Democrats demanding reform.

But even supporters of the president’s policies are becoming dissatisfied. In a New York Times report by Jeremy Raff, Ivan Narez Hurtado, and Ben Laffin, Guerrero said “Deporting the criminals is a great policy” — but not when they “show up to our job sites with no warrants, taking all our workers, even the workers with proper documentation”:

TRUMP VOTER MARIO GUERRERO: I did vote for Mr. Trump. Deporting the criminals is a great policy. His foundations are poured ready to go and we can’t even start the construction on them. But we voted for the American dream and unfortunately right now we’re not seeing that.

NARRATOR: For months, federal agents have been sweeping up workers at construction sites in South Texas.

MARCO SANTIVANES: ICE has raided us anywhere between 10 to 15 times throughout different subdivisions.

NARRATOR: Now, work sites across the Rio Grande Valley have ground to a halt. And that’s got some Trump supporters in this midterm battleground changing their minds.

TRUMP VOTER MARIO GUERRERO: These people would just show up to our job sites with no warrants, taking all our workers, even the workers with proper documentation.

NARRATOR: Many who work in the construction industry here told us they largely rely on immigrant workers, some of whom are undocumented. DHS did not respond to the Times’ request for comment, but in a previous statement, it said these raids protect the nation’s workforce.

TRUMP VOTER MARIO GUERRERO: I’ve supported Mr. Trump in every election that he’s been a part of. We just never thought that this would come and affect us in the construction industry, but most importantly affect our economy here in South Texas.

ELIUD CAVAZOS: We are seeing a reduction of almost 60% of our volume on the residential side of our business. We applied for bankruptcy in December. We saw a drop in sales of about $5.3 million. For 40 years we had never laid anybody off and until this happened we were forced to.

NARRATOR: And beyond construction, local businesses say fear is keeping shoppers at home.

JEANETTE HERNANDEZ: And there’s been a lot of loss of sales because of that. It killed us this year.

TRUMP VOTER MARIO GUERRERO: Construction is one of the main pillars to the economy here. Everybody’s hurting.

NARRATOR: In the Rio Grande Valley, two of President Trump’s top priorities, the economy and mass deportation are colliding as ice raids upend the construction industry.

War on-War off: Trump's Yoyo War Pronouncements Aimed at Playing the Markets

 

When the jackass says he's bent on destroying Iran, the stock market drops on fears of rising oil prices. He, his GOP goons in Congress, his MAGA cronies and his family rush to buy stocks. 

Two days later, the jackass says he's having "good productive negotiations" with Iran. The stock market rebounds and the Trump MAGA Mafia-GOP conglomerate sells the stocks they bought two days earlier, making millions in profit.

This is in essence what is exclusively on the jackass's mind: Money. FOR THE DEMENTED CRIMINAL, THE PRESIDENCY IS A MONEY-MAKING CASH MACHINE WHILE BULLSHITTING HIS MAGA MORONS ABOUT MAKING AMERICA GREAT.

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Iran Denies ‘Productive’ Talks Hyped By Trump—Accuses Him Of Manipulating Markets

Siladitya Ray, Forbes Staff

Updated Mon, March 23, 2026 

Topline

After President Donald Trump on Monday said the U.S. and Iran held “productive” conversations that could lead to a “complete and total resolution” to their war—lowering oil prices and boosting markets—Iranian officials denied anything ever happened, claiming Trump was trying to reduce energy prices and “buy time.”

Key Facts

In a post on Truth Social, the president wrote that “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST” had taken place over the previous two days.

Trump said he ordered the Pentagon to postpone military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days.

Trump’s post did not specify who was negotiating on Iran’s behalf, and it is not immediately clear whether Israel is part of the negotiations.

Within hours, Iran’s foreign ministry denied having held talks with the U.S., claiming Trump’s remarks were “part of efforts to reduce energy prices and buy time to implement his military plans,” the Associated Press reported, citing an Iranian state-owned outlet.

“While there have been initiatives by regional countries to de-escalate tensions, Iran’s response has been clear: It did not start the war and all such requests should be directed to Washington,” the ministry said.

How Did Trump’s Post Impact Markets?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which soared in premarket trading by more than 1,100 points, rose 1.7% after markets opened Monday morning. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq jumped 1.5% and 1.6%, respectively, with Monday’s positive swing marking a rebound for each index after they posted a fourth-straight losing week. The Dow and Nasdaq last week approached correction territory, or when the market is down 10% from its recent high, with the Dow down 8.6% and the Nasdaq down 8.7%. Brent Crude, the international oil benchmark, dropped by nearly 7% to below $100 after rising as high as $112 last week. The U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate similarly fell by 7% to just under $91, after earlier falling below $85.

What Do We Know About Trump’s Earlier Ultimatum?

In a Truth Social post on Saturday evening, Trump wrote that if Iran does not “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT,” the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, the U.S. military would “hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” The deadline was set to expire on Monday evening and Iran had warned it would retaliate against such an attack by targeting the energy and water desalination facilities of neighboring Gulf countries aligned with the U.S.

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NEW YORK TIMES ANALYSIS: 

The New York Times editorial board delivered a damning assessment of Donald Trump’s false claims about the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran in a weekend opinion piece — and warned how they could ultimately backfire on him.

Trump’s “stream of falsehoods” about the conflict is nothing new, the board said. “Lying is standard behavior for Mr. Trump, of course,” it wrote, noting just some of his many, many falsehoods over the years. (Trump made more than 30,000 misleading or untruthful claims during his first term, per a Washington Post analysis).

“Yet lying about war is uniquely corrosive,” the Times’ board continued, arguing it “creates a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common” and ultimately “undermines American values and interests.”

The board acknowledged “there is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war,” which has so far killed 13 U.S. service members, given what it described as Iran’s “murderous” government and its threats to people at home and abroad.

But Trump is “not making” that case, said the Times, and is just lying “about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.”

Trump and MAGA world have given various different answers on various different aspects of the war, such as what its actual objectives are, how long it will last and more.

The Times’ board also pointed to past conflicts — including the Vietnam War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq — where presidents “learned that falsehoods can boomerang on the leaders who tell them.”

“Whatever short-term gain Mr. Trump thinks he is getting by lying about the war in Iran is far exceeded by the cost, for him, the country and the world,” it concluded. 

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Why Trump’s ‘Psychosis’ Has Insiders Terrified
Laura Esposito, The Daily Beast Podcast
Sun, March 22, 2026

The war in Iran has ripple effects across the globe. But its next steps come down to the nonsensical whims of just one man, warned veteran political analyst David Rothkopf.

“This is so different from any other war that we have ever seen, because it is being driven by the psychosis of one individual,” Rothkopf told host Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast.

The Daily Beast columnist warned that President Donald Trump has surrounded himself with yes-men, giving him the freedom to act as erratically as he pleases amid the surprise war with Iran he began in coordination with Israel on Feb. 28.

“Trump doesn’t listen to advisers. As he says, he relies on his gut,” Rothkopf said. The president, 79, has repeatedly reversed course as his war with Iran enters its fourth week. On Saturday, Trump claimed he had wiped Iran “off the map” in a social media post, then threatened new military strikes just an hour later.

“We don’t have people around the president who will say no. And even if we did, he wouldn’t listen to that,” the foreign policy analyst continued.

“And everybody in Washington knows that. All the guardrails, all the processes, all the systems that have evolved over time to avoid just this kind of catastrophe have been shut down, broken down, run around, and we’re left with a decaying, elderly, ignorant, paranoid, vainglorious, deluded commander in chief making it up as he goes along.”

Trump and Israel’s war on Iran has killed 13 U.S. service members at the time of publication, and the ongoing economic and political fallout is becoming harder for the administration to ignore.

Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—a waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes—has rattled markets and pushed up prices. Meanwhile, NATO allies have largely avoided stepping in—despite Trump’s constant barrage of public threats against them.

“[The] Trump administration’s foreign policy is sort of following the footsteps of a drunk out of the bar,” Rothkopf, the CEO and editor-in-chief of The DSR Network, said. “We go to the left, we go to the right, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. I’m on my knees. I’m standing up, you know, shouting at the heavens.”

To make matters worse, Rothkopf pointed to reports that the State Department fired its oil and gas experts just six months before Trump’s attacks—officials who would be central to the current conflict.

He also cited reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel’s revenge-fueled firing spree resulted in several key specialists on the threat posed by Iran losing their jobs just days before the war.

Patel’s revenge strike on the FBI decimated the bureau’s global espionage unit known as CI-12. / MediaNews Group/Inland Valley Da / MediaNews Group via Getty Images

Patel terminated 12 FBI employees after discovering he and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’ phones had been under subpoena as part of a probe into the illegal storage of documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property.

“The problem is there has been no planning,” Rothkopf said. “There is no sense of consequences.”

Trump has also repeatedly changed his mind about what constitutes victory over Iran. In the early days of the assault, the president demanded the country’s “unconditional surrender.” Since then, Trump has shifted his stance to preventing nuclear weapons and has signaled that he may “wind down” operations.
 

[Trump's Iran War is like a Spring break golf party at Mar-a-Lago]:

Trump launched his war from a hastily constructed space in Mar-a-Lago with (left) John Ratcliffe, the Director of the CIA, (fourth from right) Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and (second from right), Dan Scavino, his golf caddy turned aide. / White House / X

“There’s no metric by which you can assess what’s going on in this misbegotten war and which is the success,” Rothkopf said. “There’s none.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.

Zionists Hate the Press: It Tells the Sordid Truth They Desperately Hide

Foreign jounalists barred from Gaza. Local journalists are the only ones left to tell the facts of the Zionist genocide in Palestine. Still, the Zionist radical terrorists have killed these Palestinian journalists by the hundreds, targeting them individually and in groups. Mostly sniper shots aimed at the face and neck of clearly-marked "PRESS" journalists protected with helmets and bulletproof vests. This is nothing short of a campaign of assassinations to prevent the truth of the horrific destruction and mass-killings perpetrated by a colonial regime against the colonized indigenous population of Palestine.

There was no October 7 in the West Bank. Yet, the Zionist fascist militia and its foreign terrorist settlers are committing untold barbarity against innocent Palestinian villagers there. October 7, despite its own barbarity against innocent Israeli civilians, is only a pretext used by Zionist terrorists for their long-standing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Absolutely nothing can, morally and legally, justify the tragedy unfolding in Palestine.

Ever since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the Zionists set out to replace the indigenous Palestinian population (then some 600,000 strong) with a foreign horde of armed racist fundamentalist East European Jewish invading settlers. Before 1917, there were a couple of thousand Jews in Palestine, essentially visiting Jewish pilgrims, not residents. The English crooks, who were granted temporary custody of Palestine (by virtue of an authorization by the League of Nations) cheated and lied their way into selling Palestine to wealthy Jewish bankers who dreamed of their own "me-too" colony somewhere where they can rape, steal, pilfer and kill. And that is exactly what the history of Palestine for the past 100 years has been.

Israel is no Jewish "homeland". For one thing, despite the horrendous 100-year-long culling of the indigenous Palestinian population by foreign Zionist settlers, the land of Palestine-Israel remains 50% Jewish and 50% Palestinian. And the Jewish 50% are trying by sordid criminal means to keep culling the Palestinian population in order to create the oxymoronic "Democracy-for-Jews-only".

There are many more millions of Jews who live safe lives around the world in almost every country and who do not accquiesce to the rape of Palestine. If they did, they'd all be moving to settle there. But they don't, for the most part because they don't acccept the barbarity of the colonial rape of Palestine, and they understand that Israel is no more than a western colonial beachhead on the eastern mediterranean whose genesis and raison d'etre were, at the end of World War I and the discovery of oil in the Arabian peninsula, to serve as a militia to protect western access to the oil fields. Do you really believe that the ongoing war against Iran is about terrorism and Islamism? It's not. It's about oil and gas.

The West is on friendly terms with the radical Islamist regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, who are fundamentally anti-western and anti-Christian. All the mosques and madrassas built since the late 1970s in Europe and the Americas and everywhere in between were funded by the Wahhabi regime in Saudi Arabia and its radical Sunni vassals in the Gulf (Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain...). If there has been any threat to the West from Islamists, it has come for the most part from these fundamentalist Sunni Muslims who are the West's best friends only because they have not cut out the oil supply. The West is like a prostitute: It sleeps with its enemy as long as the latter pumps oil.

When the Arabs Islamist dictatorships did cut off the oil supply in 1973, the West rushed to their feet and begged them. In exchange for resuming pumping oil, the West allowed them to dispatch their preachers and radical terrorists to settle in Europe and the West. These in turn have been responsible for most terrorist attacks in the West and for the massive Muslim migrations into Europe and the Americas, and for creating and funding the radical Islamist terror organizations we have seen unfolding over the past several decades, from the Saudi Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda (responsible for the 9-11 attacks) to the Islamic State (ISIS), the Caliphate and their subsidiaries across Asia and Africa.

There are many more Muslims around the world than in the Arabian Guld region - Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan.... - They lead mostly peaceful lives and don't have "terrorists" against whom the West pretends to fight. Why? Because they don't have oil. The Near East has been in a state of war since World War I simply because of the oil fields, and Israel is the product of that policy of controlling the oil.

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Israeli police attack journalists in Jerusalem, fracturing wrist of CNN producer

Oren Liebermann, CNN
Sat, March 21, 2026

Israeli security forces violently disperse Muslim worshippers who were performing the nightly Tarawih prayers outside the old city walls of Jerusalem on March 17, 2026. - John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli police attacked a group of journalists outside the Old City of Jerusalem on Tuesday evening, including a CNN producer who suffered a fractured wrist in the violent incident.

Police officers also damaged photographic equipment and confiscated memory cards from journalists who were outside the Lion’s Gate of the Old City covering Ramadan prayers.

On Tuesday, Muslim worshippers, barred from praying at the Al-Aqsa mosque because of wartime restrictions, gathered outside the walls of the Old City to perform the Tarawih prayers of Ramadan. But police prevented them from praying and pushed them away. The worshippers relocated to a street inside the nearby Wadi Al Joz neighborhood.

Police then relocated the worshippers one more time to a spot near the Old City walls when, moments later, officers threw stun grenades at the group. Two journalists were detained at the scene as officers assaulted them and damaged their equipment. Several other journalists at the scene who were documenting the unfolding incident, including CNN’s senior producer Abeer Salman, attempted to intervene but were pushed away.

After the two journalists were released, Salman and other journalists went to check on their colleagues. Police ordered the journalists back. Footage shows the group acquiescing to the police instructions when an officer in plain clothes – possibly indicating a special police unit – grabbed Salman’s hand, twisting it and causing a fracture in the wrist.

Israeli security forces disperse Muslim worshippers who were performing the nightly Tarawih prayers outside the old city walls of Jerusalem on Tuesday. - John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images

In a police statement issued to Israeli reporters on Tuesday and shared with CNN, the police accused journalists at the scene of refusing to follow orders, claiming they were “part of the disturbances.” The police statement went on to claim that “only after they were detained by police did they identify themselves as journalists and were subsequently released.”

The Union of Journalists in Israel ripped the police statement as “factually incorrect.” The union called for the police commissioner to immediately suspend the officers involved and launch an internal investigation.

“Police officers attacked several journalists without provocation, including foreign press,” the group said. “The officers damaged professional equipment, confiscated memory cards documenting their illicit actions, and inflicted a bone fracture on a CNN producer.”

Nir Gontarz, a member of the union who deals with violence against journalists, said police intentionally targeted the journalists, fully aware they were at the scene.

“Sometimes journalists are accidentally hit, including by police officers, while doing their job. In this incident, it was not a mistake. The police marked the journalists as targets, and attacked them,” Gontarz said. “It wasn’t a by product, it wasn’t coincidental, it was an intentional attack on journalists.”

The Foreign Press Association (FPA) also condemned the “unprovoked assault” on journalists. “The FPA calls on the Israel Police to immediately take action against the officers involved in this unprovoked assault and to act in the future to safeguard press freedoms, rather than trample upon them,” the organization said. (CNN Jerusalem Correspondent Jeremy Diamond is a board member of the FPA.)

“None of this is acceptable,” the FPA said.

CNN has sought comment about the incident from police but has not received a response.

Following the attack on journalists, CNN issued the following statement: “On Tuesday evening, a CNN producer was among a group of journalists covering Muslim worshippers praying outside the Old City of Jerusalem during Ramadan. Police officers at the scene violently dispersed the crowd, which included many journalists. During this incident, an officer grabbed our producer causing a fractured wrist that required hospital treatment. We demand an explanation and accountability for this unprovoked assault and are pursuing this matter with the relevant authorities. As journalists, we abide by Home Front Command regulations during wartime, but those regulations do not under any circumstances permit officers to assault journalists.”

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

FIFA Canceling Reservations for World Cup Games. Why? Trump is the Problem

Are we about to witness the worst ever World Cup because of the Moron?

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FIFA Cancels Thousands Of Hotel Rooms In World Cup Host Cities
Rick Ellis, Contributor
Updated Sat, March 21, 2026

There are growing concerns among World Cup fans that the ongoing immigration crackdown in the United States will seriously impact the ability of international athletes and fans to enter the country for the upcoming World Cup games.

Of the 104 World Cup matches this summer, 78 will be held in the U.S. with 13 each in Canada and Mexico.

The immigration concerns are serious enough that New Jersey congresswoman Rep. Nellie Pou has introduced a bill requesting that no federal funding should be used to carry out immigration enforcement activity within one mile of any FIFA World Cup match or Fan Festival during the tournament in the United States this summer.

Which is why news that FIFA has canceled thousands of previously reserved hotel rooms in at least three host cities is concerning.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that FIFA canceled 2,000 of their 10,000 hotel room reservations in Philadelphia last week, and that similar moves have also taken place in at least two additional U.S. host cities.

That comes on top of news that FIFA reportedly canceled 40% of its hotel bookings in Mexico City earlier this month.

A person familiar with FIFA’s hotel contracts, but who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the soccer governing body exercised a standard contractual provision consistent with large-scale global events, and confirmed the hotel room rollback was happening in other host cities.

These rooms are set aside for FIFA staff, media organizations, and attendees. And while it’s not unusual for FIFA to adjust the number of rooms it requires ahead of the World Cup, the size and timing of this year’s decisions are yet another challenge for U.S. host cities. A delay in federal funding to help offset security costs has led many U.S. host cities scale back plans for large-scale fan festivals, including in New Jersey, Boston, Miami, and San Francisco. Those festivals are extremely popular with fans unable to afford tickets to the actual games and the festival changes add another layer of concern for hotel owners and restaurants in the host cities.

Acosta: Trump is Seeking Dictatorial State Control of the Media

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“The News Is Broken”: Ex-CNN Host Warns Of Potential Pro-Trump State Media With Paramount-WBD Merger; Noah Wyle, IATSE Chief & Others Push For Federal Film-TV Tax Credit

Dominic Patten
Fri, March 20, 2026

“The news is broken, we may not be able to put the pieces back together,” former CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta told a packed Burbank City Hall on Friday, warning of the rise of entertainment industry oligarchs and “media domination.”

“We need to talk about busting up big media,” Acosta insisted. “This is not America what we’re seeing now.”

Citing a “danger to our democracy,” Acosta called Donald Trump’s attacks on the media “an assault on our freedom of speech … taking us down the road of Putin and China to state-controlled media.” An old and constant thorn in Trump’s paw, Acosta certainly had something to say about David Ellison’s pending $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros Discovery – the owners of CNN.

Taking a swing at “partisan hacks” running CBS News and the probability of more job losses like we saw today, and “self-censoring,” the journalist was speaking Friday at Sen. Adam Schiff’s “Lights, Camera, Competition”: Promoting American Film Production event in the former home of the Tonight Show. With an event lineup that included The Pitt’s Noah Wyle, IATSE president Matthew Loeb, Jax Deluca, Executive Director of Future Film Coalition, longtime production incentive proponent Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) and HBO alum Rep. Laura Friedman (D-CA) in attendance, the gathering toggled its split focus. California Attorney General Rob Bonta (who is investigating the Paramount-WBD deal & leading the multi-state suit against the Nexstar-Tegna merger) didn’t speak during the session, but was sitting in the front room with a smile on his face. At one point, as the benefits of a federal tax incentive were debated, Acosta threw in the idea of a tax credit for “independent journalism” to turn the consolidation and ideological tide.

With that, while there are few things on which Trump and Schiff agree, both are on the same page when it comes to keeping Hollywood production in the U.S. However, at the same time, the MAGA kingpin and the Democrat who reps Hollywood are in different places it seems when it comes to Paramount merging with Warner Bros Discovery.

Ellison has promised editorial independence for CNN, but with the direction CBS has gone under its news editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, those pledges strike many as the Paramount CEO saying what he needs to say to get his deal approved. Warning about the potential consequences of Skydance founder Ellison and his father, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, owning both CBS and CNN, Acosta’s remarks picked up on a placard quoting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week criticizing the media over its Iran war coverage.


“The public can sniff out what’s going on here,” Acosta proclaimed, pointing to a recent media hit list from Trump last week and payouts and other moves seemingly undertaken to placate the White House. They are “a shakedown to a wannabe dictator,” Acosta added, gathering a round of applause in the room.

Turning to the desire for a federal program though never letting the merger out of his sight, Schiff declared that the harsh decline in U.S. production “is not a Hollywood backlot story, it’s a Main Street story.”

Pushing for Congress to act on a federal program, Schiff wasn’t alone in pushing for greater initiative from DC to complement tax credit programs that exist in states like California, New York and Georgia. “Without a comprehensive federal policy response, the U.S. risks turning its back on a signature American industry,” IATSE chief Loeb said, with The Pitt’s Wyle by his side.

“Federal policymakers must act to level the playing field and make the U.S. film and television industry more competitive on the global stage,” Loeb added (read L his full remarks below). “A globally competitive, labor-based incentive for U.S. production that supplements state incentives is essential to return and maintain film and television jobs in America.

“We must ensure that the American film industry is not sacrificed for corporate scale and control,” the Future Film Coalition’s Deluca said to the assembled politicians and onlookers. “A stronger Hollywood is built not through consolidation, but through competition, fair markets, and policies that sustain independent storytelling.”

As various speakers differed over whether it was too late to turn things around, as well as the prospects of AI, Schiff noted the recent loss of more than 41,000 industry jobs in L.A. County and how 45% of American TV and film production was shot outside the country in 2025.

Looking at the importance of state programs and a proposed 15%-19% federal program, Emmy winner Wyle added: “It is vital to the strength of our industry and our city to support these incentives. It’s an investment on our city’s most precious commodity and biggest asset. It’s an investment in our people.” (Read his full remarks below.)

“It’s going to be all about the dollars,” Loeb said, cutting to the chase of a federal film/TV incentive program. “It’s all about money at the end of the day.”

Here are Wyle’s full remarks:

I’m grateful to Senator Schiff for extending the invitation to speak with you today and support him in his effort to enact a Federal tax incentive for U.S based film and television production.

As an Angelino with generational roots to this city and a “seasoned” member of its creative community – advocacy for Los Angeles based production is something close to my heart. Over the last 6 years the aggregate effect of projects leaving the state in search of tax credits, the pandemic, and last year’s fires- has been a near cratering of our once thriving industry. We lost 42,000 film and tv jobs in LA county between 2022 and 2024. And As of last year high-budget productions are down 43% .

Admittedly, It’s really hard to shoot a tv show in LA. And it’s really expensive. Prohibitively so.

Unless… you adopt an economic model – which takes full advantage of the CA tax incentive – and in our case asks personnel to accept reductions in rates in the hopes that the speculation will pay off.

I was asked to participate in today’s hearing – to tell a success story. The Pitt has blessedly become proof of that speculative concept and I’m happy to report- will commence shooting season 3 this summer – A rising tide has lifted all boats.

In season 1, under the 3.0 tax program, our show received a 20% tax rebate on many non-Above-the-line costs. Our pattern budget per episode was approximately $6,659,221. Based on that gross number we got a rebate of $767, 751 per episode.

Our total season 1 spend was approximately $99, 888, 000. After the rebate our adjusted spend was $88, 372, 050. We were able to save over 11 million dollars, roughly the cost of two full episodes.

How did we spend the money?

72% went to labor. Local cast and crew compensation. That’s roughly $62, 000,000. We had 590 full time and part time crew jobs.

The remaining 28% was spent with local vendors on goods and services. That’s about $24,000,000 spent on local businesses. $4.6 million went to background performers. Another million and a half on food services. That’s direct impact.

Then there’s the indirect impact- the ripple effect of that money- which in turn stimulates additional economic activity. It’s estimated that the procurement associated with The Pitt season one stimulated a $22.6 million contribution to the State’s GDP along the domestic supply chain. The show’s expenditure on inputs of goods and services from locally based suppliers also stimulated 150 full time jobs across California.

The induced impact of our cast and crew spending along with the workers along the supply chain in turn stimulated even more economic growth. It’s estimated that the wage-financed spending of local production crews and workers at locally based suppliers stimulated $40.3 million toward California’s GDP during the period of production.

The bottom line is that the estimated total impact of the first season of The Pitt contributed around $125 million towards the State’s GDP during our production period.

That’s proof of concept. It is vital to the strength of our industry and our city to support these incentives. It’s an investment on our city’s most precious commodity and biggest asset. It’s an investment in our people.

Here are Loeb’s remarks:

Good morning Senator Schiff & Representatives. I want to thank you for the invitation to participate in this important hearing on behalf of the over 170,000 behind-the-scenes entertainment workers of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).

Film and television production creates good-paying, family-sustaining union jobs, and it’s critical that Paramount Skydance’s proposed purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery be evaluated from the perspective of American workers.

The loss of any independently operating producer and distributor of film and television content could have profound impacts for entertainment workers. Over the last decade, we have seen American studios offshoring production at alarming rates. As regulators and elected officials consider the Paramount-Warner combination, we are asking that particular attention be paid to ensuring that domestic production does not suffer further.

When major companies merge, workers often pay the price first. IATSE’s position is that regulators should consider the effect of consolidation on labor markets, not only on consumer prices. In 2023, IATSE and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) issued joint comments in support of revised FTC-DOJ Merger Guidelines – an important course correction that restored the federal government’s ability to review the impact of consolidation and vertical integration in the entertainment industry on our members and other workers in the film and television industry.

Past studio mergers have meant fewer jobs and disruptions to production. Redundancies following the Warner Bros.-Discovery and Disney-Fox mergers led to reductions in workforce that have the potential to occur downstream from a Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

If Paramount Skydance is successful in their proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, our primary interest is holding them accountable to the commitments they have made to Californian and American workers. CEO David Ellison has made a public commitment that Paramount Studios and Warner Bros. Studios will each produce a minimum of 15 high-quality feature films per year, for a total of at least 30 feature films annually. That level of production is needed in the United States if IATSE members are to continue to be able to make a living in the industry.

Work in the entertainment industry is precarious. It is primarily project, or “gig” based, meaning most IATSE workers perform freelance work outside of what is considered “regular employment.” We’ve been in the “gig” economy since 1893. Project-based work in film and television production can be as short as a day for a commercial shoot, multiple months for a film production, or a couple years for a recurring television series. Entertainment workers can have multiple, if not dozens, of employers each year and those workers rely on project-based job opportunities to support themselves and their families.

Employment for below-the-line workers in Hollywood is down some 45 million hours per year since 2022. According to the January 2026 ProdPro report, the U.S. share of global production has dropped from 52% to 38% during the same period.

The American film and television industry faces an urgent threat from international competition. Foreign governments have successfully lured film and television productions, and the multitude of jobs they create, away from the United States with aggressive tax incentives and subsidies. Films intended for initial release in the U.S. are increasingly being shot overseas — and American workers are paying the price.

In just a few years, IATSE members have lost tens of thousands of jobs across the United States. That’s thousands of families, small businesses, and communities across the country feeling the economic hardship of a shrinking industry.

Movies and television shows created primarily for U.S. audiences are being produced abroad — not because of better talent or technology, but because other countries recognize the value of these productions and are offering robust financial incentives that the U.S. simply doesn’t match. While U.S. states have offered tax credits for production, in recent years state incentives have not been enough to prevent productions from moving overseas.

Without a comprehensive federal policy response, the U.S. risks turning its back on a signature American industry. Federal policymakers must act to level the playing field and make the U.S. film and television industry more competitive on the global stage. A globally competitive, labor-based incentive for U.S. production that supplements state incentives is essential to return and maintain film and television jobs in America.

IATSE is incredibly grateful to have champions like Senator Schiff and Representative Friedman working to solve this issue. Their strategic efforts have built momentum towards the introduction of a federal film and television production tax incentive and IATSE will continue its tireless advocacy with Congress and the White House to achieve that goal.

Suckers and Losers Who Didn't Die: Trump's "Unnecessary War" Lies

At some level, veterans should be happy: Trump's war in Iran will swell their ranks. But they know better. In past wars, they honorably served their country, not the presidents who waged them. They know the difference: Trump is lying - as he always does - and his war is a whimsical unnecessary war that he is waging only for two objectives: 1- to please his Zionist masters and his criminal buddy Netanyahu, and 2- to make money stealing other countries' resources. 

The bulk of those who are sent to fight these typically failed wars are Americans of Native Indian Nations, African, Hispanic, and Asian descent. The white MAGA morons who are cheering the war do it from behind their stupid screens on their couches, just like Lady Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Remember: Trump evaded the Vietnam draft FIVE TIMES by having his rich dad make up a lie that the poor Donald had bone spurs. Now he wants to send men and women struggling to survive his failing economy to be killed so he can rake billions off Iran's oil and gas. 

He says "the war should be winding down" and "Iran has been obliterated". But then Americans discover he is sending troops for a land invasion of Iran, more specifically Kargh Island. Why? Because he can then control the oil and gas and make more billions for himself and his cronies and family. I bet you if he succeeds in controlling Kargh Island, he will levy tariffs on oil tankers of "allied" countries that refused to help him seize the island to punish them. Meanwhile, US soldiers will be dying for no vital reason of national security. 

Check: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2026-03-20/iran-war-oil-prices

Also check how Netanyahu is literally telling Trump what to do in Iran: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/netanyahu-says-revolution-iran-require-153945320.html 

In other words, the US military is the "Mafia Boss"'s personal militia which he uses to steal from other countries. He is willing to endanger the lives of the men (Hegseth: am I allowed to add "and women"?) who serve for his own personal gain. The man doesn't give a s - - - about your average American Joe who, seemingly, voted for his lies. 

Why would the man, who pretended to make peace between warring nations just to make lucrative deals on their back end, be any different when it comes to waging wars? He is waging this war to please the Zionists AND to make lucrative deals (via real estate agent Witkoff, and oily-Arab asskisser Jared Kushner) with the leftovers of the war.  
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U.S. Combat Veterans Tear Into Trump’s ‘Unnecessary’ War ‘Lies’
Leigh Kimmins
Sat, March 21, 2026



Anadolu via Getty Images

Angry war veterans slammed President Donald Trump’s “unnecessary” war in Iran, which, they say, is propped up by “lies.”

The president teamed up with Israel to launch the conflict on Feb. 28. Since then, thousands of people have died, including at least 13 U.S. service members, and a spiralling energy crisis has erupted. The conflict echoes the Iraq War, which began on March 20, 2003.

The Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, remains blocked, and other countries in the region are being drawn into the conflict. Worst of all, the Trump administration seems to be running out of ideas, with the promised early exit looking increasingly unlikely.

Trump launched the war alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. / Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

“The lack of a clear strategy or end state only undermines U.S. credibility globally,” Jason Dozier, Atlanta City Council Member and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, told the Daily Beast. “As an Iraq War veteran, I’ve seen firsthand the costs of conflicts like this, and I had hoped those lessons would guide future decisions. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.”

John Kamin, who served in Iraq, recalled how he felt during the conflict.

Kamin told the Beast: “One of the daydreams I had in Iraq as a 21-year-old, and it was so grotesque I could only hold it for a brief moment, was imagining a future where the next generation would be fighting the same battles that we did. As we aged out and got fat, our children would take our place. It was a thought I could not hold... just too hard to imagine that our blood and sacrifice would not make America wise enough to spare those that followed. This hurts us all.”

According to Defense Department statistics, the Iraq war killed 4,492 U.S. soldiers and injured an additional 32,292. An estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians died.

Naveed Shah, political director for Common Defense and an Army veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, said he sees through the facade of Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and General Dan Caine, the main architects of the operation. “I deployed to Iraq 2009. I watched this country sell us a war on lies, and I watched my fellow soldiers pay the price for it,” he told the Beast.

He said Trump, Hegseth, and Caine are “running the same play by manufacturing urgency, failing to establish a clear objective, no exit strategy, and putting our service members in harm’s way.”

Invoking the messy and protracted Iraq War, Shah added, “History repeats itself because power-hungry leaders never learn and regular people pay the price. Veterans across this country see exactly what’s happening, and we’re not going to stay quiet while another generation is handed a war that politicians and their children won’t have to fight.”

Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona is a former Navy SEAL who left college to enlist the week after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. He was an early GOP critic of the war that has caused a schism between “America First” Republicans and MAGA loyalists.

“As somebody who knows a lot of friends that didn’t come home and a lot of Gold Star families, that’s why the week before the attack, I was actually one of the ones that was talking about caution and why we needed to avoid at all costs getting into another long, drawn-out Middle Eastern war,” he said earlier this month.

However, Crane voted against a war powers resolution that would have halted attacks on Iran unless Trump got congressional approval. That came a day after the Senate blocked a similar war powers resolution.

It was spearheaded by Trump’s top critics, Republican Reps. Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, and Democrat Ro Khanna of California. Massie predicted the support for Trump’s conflict would waver quickly: “A war is never more popular than it is on the first day. And I think enthusiasm for this will decline.”

Indeed, support is in the gutter outside of his MAGA base. They are clinging to the president’s insistence that it is a “short-term” conflict, according to a fresh Politico poll. Trump predicted an exit after a maximum of five weeks, but three weeks in, there is no end in sight.

Crane’s comments came a day after an Iranian attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia killed American Sergeant Benjamin Pennington, 26. Since then, six more U.S. service members have been killed, taking the total to 13. Officials in Iran say that almost 1,500 people, mostly civilians, have been killed during “Operation Epic Fury.”

Chris Purdy is the CEO and Founder of The Chamberlain Network, a non-profit veteran-led organization that aims to safeguard democracy. Chris served for eight years in the Army National Guard, where he was deployed to Iraq in 2011.

He told the Daily Beast that Trump has got the country into another war in the Middle East on “fictional” pretenses.

Almost 1,500 Iranian civilians and at least 13 U.S. service members have died since the war broke out on Feb. 28. / Majid Asgaripour / Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters via Reuters

“The Iraq war was sold to the American public as a necessary to stop Saddam from using nuclear weapons, even though there’s no evidence he had them. Now, 23 years later, the U.S. is once again drawn into a war over fictional nuclear weapons in Iran,” Purdy said.

The Iraq war began in the spring of 2003, with a U.S.-led coalition invasion to remove Saddam Hussein. Officials justified that war by claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was actively pursuing nuclear capability.

Trump has continually justified his war by saying that Iran was close to producing nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. “The major thing is that they cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told MS NOW on Friday morning.

Experts and his own administration have contradicted the president on this point. In an assessment from May last year, a month before Trump’s first strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said it would actually take nearly a decade for Iran to produce such weaponry. “The American people are tired of the forever wars and the [Republican] politicians who continually drag us into them,” Purdy continued.

Dr. Maggie Seymour joined the Marine Corps in 2007 after her cousin, also a Marine, was killed in Iraq. She deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and then Kuwait as an intelligence officer.

She is worried about the long-term effects of Trump’s war. “Not only is this war unnecessary, there is a strong possibility that it causes more harm than good,” she told the Beast. She said politicians have a bad habit of “using” service members, veterans, and their families as “political props.”

“This is an aggravated and dangerous extension of that,” she said. “It’s an egregious disregard for the life and livelihoods of our military community, not to mention the lives of thousands across the Middle East. Our military exists to protect the people of our country, and to uphold the constitution that governs us, not the whims of its politicians and political appointees.”

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Politico on Friday that Trump “campaigned proudly on his promise to deny the Iranian regime the ability to develop a nuclear weapon, which is what this noble operation is seeking to accomplish.”

Ingle failed to mention that Trump also promised to “expel the warmongers” from government and branded himself as the “peace” candidate.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said the war was meticulously planned, rather than haphazard. “Thanks to a detailed planning process, the entire administration is and was prepared for any potential action taken by the terrorist Iranian regime,” she told the Daily Beast.

She added that Trump knew that Iran would respond to his war by choking the world’s energy supply. “President Trump knew full well that Iran would try to stop the freedom of navigation and free flow of energy, and he has already taken action to destroy over 40 minelaying vessels,” she said.


Trump wore a baseball hat to the dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base in March after six soldiers were killed in his unauthorized war. The hat is available to buy on Trump’s merchandise website. / Kevin Lamarque / Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS

And despite muddled messaging on the war, she said the president has always been “clear” in his communication.

“President Trump has been clear about the goals of this operation: destroy the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile and production capacity, annihilate the Iranian regime’s navy, end their ability to arm proxies, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” Kelly said.

“Unlike the years-long foreign entanglements of the past that lacked clear objectives, President Trump remains confident that these goals will be accomplished in swift fashion,” she explained.

Iran War is on a Slippery Slope: Another Doomed Republican Adventure

More US troops are heading to Iran. Marines of the 82nd Airborn division are making their way there. Trump thinks he's smart for being ambiguous: The statements he makes are so contradictory to one another that one should look at what he's doing, not what's he's saying. He says the war "might be winding down soon". That's a lie. He thinks he can de-alarm the Iranian regime and reduce its state of mobilization with statements like this, while he is sending more ground troops. He can fool his own MAGA morons, but not the rest of the world.

Trump plans to take over Iran. Which means that we are on the very dangerous slippery slope in which the US slowly gets trapped in its own arrogance, which makes any honorable exit increasingly difficult.

Trump has therefore engaged the US in a war whose outcome can only be guessed based on precedent. Every war the US fought since 1945 has ended in disaster, humiliation, tens of thousands of American deaths and millions of deaths among the civilian population of the targeted country, except the easy invasion of Kuwait in 1991 to expel Saddam Hussein back to Iraq.

The US generally operates with "quantity", not "quality". It can send half a million soldiers to invade and occupy a country with sophisticated flashy war technology, but it ultimately doesn't have the know-how to sustain the brutality of its invasion with the appropriate management of an occcupied population that is generally ready to suicide itself in its resistance to the occupier.

Iran is probably far more difficult than Afghanistan to control. Compared to the Taliban, the Iranians are far more organized and sophisticated, and their history shows they can pull all the cruelty and savagery that the Taliban were capable of.

Trump is sending thousands of US soldiers to die in Iran. For what? Not to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb - that's pulling a George W Bush and Tony Blair WMD hoax pretext to invade Iraq in 2003. Trump's only concern is MONEY. He wants Iranian oil and gas to mitigate his destruction of American democracy and economy. He thinks money can solve ALL problems, and that is his Achilles heel. His own history of pursuit of wealth without any brains behind it has led all his entreprises to fail and go bankrupt. He hasn't learned from his experiences and he is gambling with the country by thinking he can salvage a declining America by waging yet another failed war.
=================================================== 
How Trump’s war is slipping out of control
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Fri, March 20, 2026


US President Donald Trump listens during a roundtable in the White House in Washington, DC, on March 6. - Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The question is no longer whether President Donald Trump has lost control of the narrative of his new war in Iran.

It’s whether he’s lost control of the war itself.

Wars, once begun, create their own insidious momentum that can outpace a White House’s political messaging. If they defy a president’s capacity to determine their direction, political quicksand beckons.

After the thunderclap opening of the conflict with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump’s team might have hoped to be in a better place three weeks in. Instead, the way out remains impossible to identify.

While the United States and Israel have undeniably visited huge destruction on Tehran’s military industrial complex and machinery of repression, Iran has seized the initiative by widening the impact of the war. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil shipping route, threatens to paralyze the global economy. Americans are already hurting, with average gasoline prices heading towards $4 a gallon.

Things could get worse.

Regional oil and gas installations across the Gulf region are under attack. Trump insisted Thursday he hadn’t known that Israel planned to attack Iran’s South Pars gas field. CNN sources contradicted his claim — which was hard to square given tight US-Israeli coordination. The president then said he’d told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “don’t do that.”

But the episode only exacerbated concern among MAGA critics that Israel, and not the US, is running the war.

Gulf states hit by days of missile and drone alerts are frustrated that the economic miracle exemplified by their futuristic cityscapes is in danger from a war their US ally started that they didn’t want.

Trump meanwhile is fuming that he can’t simply order Europeans to send ships to open the Strait. “This is not our war,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this week.

An administration that never got its story straight on the Iranian nuclear threat that is being used as a justification for the war has so far offered no plan for what Trump means when he says it will end “soon.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned Thursday that there were no definite time frames for an exit. “It will be at the president’s choosing, ultimately, where we say, ‘Hey, we’ve achieved what we need to on behalf of the American people to ensure our security.’”

But lawmakers, who are about to be asked by the administration for as much as $200 billion to fund the war and possibly more, are going to need answers.

“The people in Alaska are asking me how long is this going on?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski told CNN’s Lauren Fox. “Are there going to be boots on the ground, how much is this going to cost?” These questions are especially acute in Alaska, which has one of the highest concentrations of active duty soldiers and veterans. The minuscule GOP majority is about to face its biggest test and this question: If dissident MAGA Republicans balk, will Democrats really help Trump fund his war in a midterm election year? Here’s House Speaker Mike Johnson’s answer: “We’ll find out.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (L) arrives for a press briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Dan Caine (R) at the Pentagon on Thursday in Arlington, Virginia. - Win McNamee/Getty Images

‘No forever war’: Hegseth

Trump is defiant. “We’ve obliterated just about everything there is to obliterate,” he said in the Oval Office Thursday.

And Hegseth rebuked reporters who “think just 19 days into this conflict that we’re somehow spinning toward an endless abyss or a forever war or a quagmire.”

Up to a point, he has a point.

Thousands of US and Israeli sorties and missile strikes surely delivered an operational victory. Iran’s capacity to threaten its region must be a fraction of what it was. But has the pummeling fatally weakened the regime’s political foundation? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Wednesday it was degraded but “appears to be intact.”

Iran might be losing Trump’s war. But it’s winning its own.

A brutal regime that has killed thousands of its people and which none of its neighbors would miss has one goal: its own survival. That means raising the economic price for the rest of the world — and therefore the political heat on Trump. It’s already shown that shutting down tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is a potent weapon. It’s odd then, the administration didn’t anticipate its use. “(You) don’t need to worry about it,” Hegseth said of the vital waterway — seven days ago.

Maritime experts warn that reopening the Strait will be dangerous. Aerial bombardment can only do so much. A substantial ground force might be needed to flush out drone and missile launch sites in mountainous terrain bordering the Strait. Trump therefore is nearing a fateful choice almost every modern commander in chief has faced: To get out of a war, must he escalate first?

Residents watch and take pictures as flames and smoke rise from an oil storage facility struck as attacks hit the city during the US–Israeli military campaign in Tehran, Iran, on March 7. - Alireza Sotakbar/ISNA/AP

“I’m not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you, but I’m not putting troops,” the president told reporters Thursday, but grasping for a way to change the subject, he produced a non sequitur. “Look, the Dow just hit 50,000 a couple of weeks ago.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested lifting sanctions on Iranian oil already at sea in a bid to lower oil prices. This would mean the US allowing its enemy a way to finance its war effort. Even if this is a bluff to soothe oil markets, it speaks of a fast-growing crisis.

It doesn’t seem like there’s a plan.

“I don’t think we have a clue what our objective is at this point. It seems to change by the day and, you know, it was just not foreseen that this was going to be a protracted war when really it should have been,” Nate Swanson, who was director for Iran on the National Security Council in the Biden administration and served on Trump’s Iran negotiating team in early 2025, told Becky Anderson on CNN International.

Washington has been betting for days on when Trump would declare victory and bring the troops home.

But the spiraling conflict means he may no longer have that option.

“Nobody can deliver perfection in wartime,” Hegseth said Thursday.

That’s fair, but “perfection” is nowhere close. After starting a new war, Trump doesn’t control how long it will last, where it will spread, how much it will cost and how badly it will complicate the lives of inflation-weary Americans.

And it’s in danger of defining his second presidency.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

Donald Dumb's Plan to Cheat and Steal Upcoming 2026 Elections

Remember DARVO? "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender" from [https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2026/03/just-like-zionists-trump-uses-darvo.html]

Trump is planning to cheat in the 2026 elections this coming November. His plan is to cheat by claiming the other side is cheating. That is, the criminal is planning to play the victim. Claiming "victimhood" has been successful throughout history; it invokes pity for one's cause and justifies the fake victim's use of violence and illegal means.

That is how the Anglo-Saxon Zionist colony in Palestine, known as "Israel", came to exist. "Oh," the Zionists told the Westerners, "have pity on us, victims of your European and American antisemitism; To atone for your barbarity, please let us be the barbarians this time around and rape some country, Palestine, and exterminate another people, the Palestinians."

The Zionists played the victim card, inflicted sufficient guilt on Western antisemites who then encouraged them to rape an innocent nation. And the criminal Western antisemites obliged: They prodded, funded, assisted, armed and encouraged hundreds of thousand European and American Zionist settlers invade the shores of Palestine, exterminate the indigenous Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands, expel more from their ancestral villages and towns into squalid refugee camps, both inside and outside of Palestine, eradicate 600 villages from the maps, rape, slash and burn, and demolish entire communities and replace them with fresh-off-the-boat fundamentalist settlers. If there is any truth to the theory of GREAT REPLACEMENT, it applies first and foremost to how the Palestinian people have been replaced by European and American fundamentalist barbarians.

Over the past 100 years, nothing has changed in the Zionist blackmail: In what remains of Palestine today, Zionist settlers continue to slash, burn, rape, demolish, uproot, expel, kill.... And the westerners who enabled this monumental crime do nothing about it. The Palestinian victims, deprived of all their rights and means, have become the "terrorists" for trying to salvage what remains of their country, as they continue to try and resist the 100-year-old assault on their existence.

Trump is cloning the Zionist strategy by being the criminal who plays the victim, and it unfortunately works with the imbeciles of MAGA who believe the criminal jackass.

Excerpts from:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-election-2026-ballots_n_69bc3dbfe4b06f4d9c81cfde?utm_campaign=yahoo-recirc

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‘Everything Is On The Table’: Officials Prepare For Trump To Try To Steal The 2026 Election
Paul Blumenthal
Fri, March 20, 2026

When the Department of Justice raided the election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize ballots, tabulations and other materials related to the 2020 election on Jan. 28, it signaled a new phase in President Donald Trump’s efforts to prove his conspiracy theory about election fraud. It also raised a new fear that this president, who already tried to steal one election, may be setting the stage to try to steal another.

That raid wasn’t just about settling Trump’s old scores, but it also looked like “a test run for messing with election administrators and the counting of ballots in the midterm elections in 2026,” Richard Hasen, an election expert at UCLA Law School, wrote in Slate in January.

See also: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-2026-election-threat_n_688d1e69e4b022c2fddf099b?utm_campaign=yahoo-recirc

Since entering politics in 2015, Trump has claimed, falsely, that every election he has taken part in was marred by fraud. In his second term in office, he has moved to weaponize the federal government against this imaginary fraud by seeking to restrict voting and seize control of the electoral process from the states. This has led to mounting fears that he will seek to interfere in the 2026 midterms in various ways, including deploying the National Guard, surrounding the polls with immigration enforcement officers, declaring a national security emergency — and, following the raid in Fulton County, seizing ballots and voting machines.

.........

Democratic secretaries of state say they are getting ready for all possible forms of midterm election interference from the Trump administration such as seizing ballots like it did in Fulton County.

“If anything like that happened in Colorado, the first thing that we would do is immediately go to court to try to quash the effort,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. “We’ve been preparing for this event and many other scenarios of federal disruption in our election.”

In Minnesota, Secretary of State Steve Simon said his office is working with national groups and other secretaries of state to plan how to respond if the federal government interferes in the election by attempting to seize ballots or in any other fashion.

................

There are two legitimate ways that the administration could seize ballots in the aftermath of an election: issuing a warrant or a subpoena for them. Both must be approved by the courts.

“With a warrant, there is a judicial check in advance,” Weiser said.

The raid in Fulton County, however, raises the specter that a judge may approve a warrant based on false information. The legality of that warrant — which was riddled with disproven conspiracies while omitting key facts — is now being challenged in court by Fulton County election officials seeking the seized records be returned. The challenge specifically cites “Material Omissions and Misstatements” in the affidavit the government used as the basis for requesting the warrant. That may put judges on alert for misrepresentations from the administration in judicial warrants going forward.

“Because of the actions in Fulton County, election officials, law enforcement officials and magistrate judges are very well aware of the threat and are now able to prepare in advance for this potential abuse and to make sure that it is not disruptive,” Weiser said. “I would be very surprised if another judge approved a warrant like the one in Fulton County.”

Another potential line of defense, ironically, comes thanks to Trump’s own allies.

It stems from a Supreme Court ruling that only came down a few months ago. In Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, the court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled that Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), who backed Trump’s election fraud lies in 2020, had standing to challenge election rules — the timing of counting late mail-in ballots, in this case — before suffering any potential harm.

It’s a crucial distinction when it comes to potential election chicanery. Normally, those bringing suit have to be harmed first to have standing to sue. In election cases, that usually means that candidates cannot challenge new election rules until after the election has concluded and they perceive that the rules harmed the outcome of their race. But the justices ruled 7-2 that, even if they still win, “candidates suffer when the process departs from the law,” and that departure can “deprive the candidate of a fair process and an accurate result.”

It puts a potential new tool in the arsenal of those watching for election denial in 2026 and beyond.

“By this standard, a candidate undoubtedly has an interest in stopping the FBI from taking steps that would (in the chief justice’s words) ‘deprive the candidate of a fair process and an accurate result,’” Ohio State Moritz College of Law election law director Edward Foley wrote in a post for SCOTUSblog.

Seizing ballots, voting machines, tabulators or any other piece of election infrastructure directly threatens a “fair process” and an “accurate result” because it breaks the chain of custody that is required by state and federal law. Under Foley’s theory of Bost, a candidate could then file suit in advance of the election to seek an injunction barring any executive branch agency from seizing election materials.

But even if candidates choose not to test out the court’s Bost decision on the theory that it applies to threatened executive actions, states and election administrators can also step in.

Asked about using the Bost precedent to get a court order preventing federal interference in advance, Griswold noted that, while she wouldn’t divulge her litigation strategy, states have used preemptive action before: She pointed to Oregon and Illinois, which went to court to block National Guard deployments in 2025.

“So, absolutely, everything is on the table,” Griswold said.

Courts could also halt interference ahead of time by simply not approving DOJ warrants seeking ballots or other materials. The warrant in Fulton County also targeted materials from a now-six-year-old election, not an election that is underway or just completed. Any judge would be far more skeptical about a similar warrant for an ongoing election, Weiser said.

Similarly, a subpoena provides an opportunity to counter it: States and election officials may be able to step in and sue for an injunction before any materials are seized. And state election officials are already on high alert to the administration’s efforts to interfere in elections, having worked successfully to defeat Trump’s executive order on elections and lawsuits to seize sensitive voter roll records by getting judges to block the effort repeatedly in court.

“They are trying very aggressively to meddle in elections and expand inappropriate powers, but there’s been a lot of success in reining that in,” Weiser said of the administration. “These are not paths that are viable for them.”

Read the original on HuffPost

Solution for Iran's Nuclear Stalemate: Mutual Deterrence for All

Since nuclear weapons have prevented major countries from waging wars with one another (e.g. Russia vs US, or Pakistan vs India, or North Korea vs. US-Japan-South Korea), one solution to the Iran nuclear dilemma is for the US to allow radical Shiite Muslim Iran to pursue its nuclear program (assuming it is for military purposes) while giving nuclear weapons, or at least the means to develop them, to its beloved "allies and friends", the equally radical Sunni Muslim states of Saudi Arabia and the British colonialism-manufactured Gulf emirates and states.

I don't think the West in general and the US in particular are concerned about Iran because it is ruled by radical Islamists. Pakistan is ruled by radical Islamists, India by Radical Hindus, and North Korea by the radical nutcase family Kim family. Then again, Israel is ruled by radical Jewish Zionists. So I am not sure what the big problem is if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon while Saudi Arabia and others are also allowed to do so.

When everybody has a nuclear weapon, then everyone will be reluctant to use these weapons and thus will feel safe, knowing that they can't use nuclear weapons against their neighbors unless they are willing to commit their own nuclear suicide. Mutual deterrence has now worked for 80 years; that's a fantastic record. Why not spread the joy of mutual deterrence to the Middle East and bring an end to the endless torment of the peoples in the region? 

There will no longer be a need for more decades of acrimony, negotiations, inspections, sanctions and threats and, lately, a war that is supposed to bring an end to more wars. It's a vicious cycle, like the snake eating its own tail.

Then again, the nuclear club on the Security Council is very discriminatory. Imagine the absurdity of the veto, which allows a nuclear country to block any action to solve problems simply because it has a nuclear bomb. This is akin to extortion and blackmail. Why is it that the "nuclear" can bully the "non-nuclear" by imposing their will simply because they have a powerful weapon? It's just patently unfair. We've been told over and over that humanity has made progress.... I don't think so. I believe we are the deadliest animal species that never learns from its past. 

 

Trump is Literally Robbing Would-Be Immigrants

The Trump administration deliberately tells would-be immigrants to apply for legal visas, pay exorbitant fees, knowing full well it will never issue them a visa.

Marco Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, with his big ears and his big shoes, is now ripping off Cuban immigrants. 

Note that immigrants from the main countries concerned - Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela - are overwhelmingly of Black Africa ancestry.
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Trump Accused of Stealing $1 Billion From Migrants
Will Neal, Tom Latchem
Thu, March 19, 2026

President Donald Trump is allegedly wringing eye-watering sums of money from the very same people he has decided not to let into the country.

The Cato Institute, an independent think-tank based in D.C., published figures on Wednesday on what it calls “the largest fraud in the history of the U.S. immigration system.”

The non-profit accuses Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of charging a conservative estimate of $1.3 billion to migrants in fees for visa processing and other services they have precisely zero intention of providing.

Rubio, who is of Cuban heritage, is accused of a fraud disproportionately affecting Cuban nationals. / Rebecca Blackwell / via REUTERS

The administration is allegedly continuing to impose those costs on prospective immigrants from more than 90 countries despite the fact that they are, as a result of the Trump administration’s policies, effectively “banned from receiving immigrant visas and immigrating permanently to the United States.”

Under Rubio’s leadership, officials at the State Department have apparently even gone so far as to issue internal guidance actively prohibiting staff from informing those migrants they stand no hope of success, because “this could be seen as pre-adjudication” on their applications.

Trump fired Noem earlier this month amid outrage over a slew of scandals that engulfed her time as Homeland Security Secretary. / Kevin Dietsch / Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

“Cubans represent the largest group of affected applicants with nearly a million affected applications at a combined cost of $543 million,” the publication writes.

Rubio is of Cuban heritage. The Trump administration has increasingly threatened military action against the Caribbean island nation, which remains in the throes of a deep economic crisis marked by severe shortages of fuel, food, and medicine, along with prolonged blackouts and sky-high inflation.

“The second most common was Venezuelans, with 239,000 applications at a cost of $138 million,” the Cato Institute adds.

Trump carried out a lightning invasion of Venezuela—which has long suffered from human rights abuses, hyperinflation and economic mismanagement—to capture President Nicolas Maduro earlier in January. The attack has sparked widespread political instability and economic uncertainty, following years of financial collapse, corruption and political repression.

The fraud alleged by the Cato Institute stems from a trio of policies advanced by the Trump administration. In December, the president imposed an effective travel ban for citizens of 40 countries, disproportionately affecting nations in Africa as well as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Haiti, because he claims it’s too hard to “vet” people from those countries.

In November, DHS froze immigration benefits for individuals from those countries already living in the U.S., while the State Department imposed an indefinite halt on visa processing for 75 countries, citing unsubstantiated claims about welfare use.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, the State Department and DHS for comment on this story.

The Pimp-in-Chief is Now Bitching About his Hoe Israel

 

By bombing the Iranian facility linked to South Pars, the largest natural gas field in the world, which Iran shares with Qatar, Trump's Israel bitch in the Middle East has jeopardized Trump's oil-soaked money-making schemes. So now he is angry at his own Zionist hoe, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Donald Trump has gone rogue on his war partner Israel for its attack on a vital energy facility in Iran. The Moron-in-Chief claims Israel did not ask for his permission. He and Israel are obviously playing good cop-bad cop with the credulous Arab Gulf morons: Israel did it, we didn't. 

South Pars is considered to be the largest natural gas field in the world. It was bombed by Israel as part of the shooting range orgy that the American Evangelicals are partaking in with their Israeli Zionist buddies. Problem for oil-greedy Trump is that South Pars is shared by both Iran and Qatar, and the latter is one of the decadent ultra-wealthy Arab Gulf states that are, for all practical purposes, the Islamist cognates of Zionist Israel in their incestuous relationship as vassals of imperial Christian America. So when the twin children of America, Qatar and Israel, fight each other, Daddy Trump gets upset.

He is mostly concerned that the war on Iran will ultimately turn against his ambition to siphon off some of that gas and oil for himself and his children whose business deals in the region are raising many eyebrows. Further, his Arab Muslim allies cannot sustain their enmity to Muslim Iran and their love affair with imperial US for too long. Their populations in such glitzy-on-the-surface but vapid-on-substance Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrein etc, all now under the bombs because the imbecile in the Whouthouse, will at some point start asking questions. After all, these populations have agreed to become a kennel for the West because they have sedated their populations with money, brainless American movies, humongous cars and disgusting fast food. If the supply of the latter condiments of high American culture were to start drying up (I heard that 80% of all investments had fled the Gulf because of Trump's war), unrest and dissatisfaction might ensue.

Here is the Moron's verbal diarrhea on the subject:


Donald Trump posts about Israel's strike in Iran. / screen grab

“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran,” Trump wrote. “The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen,” the Idiot added.

It has always been a hallmark of American policy in the region to strike a balance between embracing Zionist Israel's rape of Palestine on one hand, and keeping Muslim and Arab anger at bay on the other.

The argument of whether the US knew or did not know of Israel's attack on South Pars is not interesting because the two bullies sleep together every night. Such an argument between a pimp and his bitch is within the standard norms of fornicating relations. The bottom line is that Trump is distancing himself from his Israeli bitch in order to safeguard the Arab Gulf states' compliance with his dictates. He doesn't want to upset the Gulf Arabs because they have oil and they are rich. His plans to further enrich himself, his family and his billionaire buddies could run aground if he appears to have endorsed Israel's attack on Qatar.
 

To wit, the Moron said, “I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long term implications that it will have on the future of Iran", thus revealing his expectations to make money out of Iran's oil and gas once the war is over. It will cost him a lot to rebuild the energy infrastructures on Pars Island.

The latest attacks on energy fields in the Middle East have caused Brent oil prices to rise by over 7 percent to $111.23 a barrel after the strike.