I have a friend who spent 18 years in naval intelligence, specializing in sanctions enforcement and maritime interdiction. Sent me a message this morning after Trump's remarks. His exact words: "Twenty-two ships in one night running dark. That's not a raid. That's a coordinated fleet operation. Someone has been tracking those vessels for weeks." 22 Iranian oil tankers. Seized overnight. No lights. No radar. Shadow fleet tactics — turned against the shadow fleet itself. 3 carrier strike groups currently positioned in the region. NSPM-2 signed February 2025 — "maximum pressure 2.0" with an explicit target of zero Iranian oil exports. Prior interdictions already on record: the Majestic X, the Celestial Sea, multiple IRGC-linked tankers boarded in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Oman throughout 2026. First-term precedent: E.O. 13846, JCPOA withdrawal, sanctions that denied Tehran over $10 billion in revenue by 2019 — including the Adrian Darya-1 seizure attempt with 2.1 million barrels aboard. The Strait of Hormuz carries 20% of the world's oil. Iran built its shadow fleet specifically to route around US pressure. Running dark — no transponders, no lights — was the workaround. 22 ships found and taken in a single night means the workaround no longer works. He told me: "When a president announces a covert interdiction operation at a press conference the next morning, it means he wants Tehran to know the shadow fleet is compromised. That's a message, not a briefing." US CPI just hit 4.2%. Trump's response: "I love the inflation." That is not a gaffe. That is a president publicly telling the world that rising consumer prices are an acceptable cost of dismantling Iran's oil revenue — and that he is willing to own it. Every barrel seized is funding denied to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran's nuclear program. That's the calculation being made in the Oval Office right now. The people calling it reckless and the people calling it brilliant are both watching the same 22 ships. I'll share more updates shortly. Turn on notifications, this is very important.

Russia will be delighted to see Candace, George, their family & friends more often. Citizen diplomacy is key to repairing US-Russia ties destroyed by Biden, deep state & the media. We look forward to welcoming a delegation of young Catholics, as religious exchanges are also key.

🚨 Joe Kent is now a commissioned (PAID) writer for Responsible Statecraft, the magazine for the Quincy Institute. The Quincy Institute is co-funded by George Soros and the Koch brothers. Understand their intent is for America’s foreign policy to be reoriented into a state of weakness. No more superpower. The word “multipolarity” comes to mind. 👀 Quincy is also co-founded by Iranian lobbyist, Trita Parsi. So, one must wonder if Joe Kent is more than just a freelance writer paid by none other than George Soros. 💥⬇️

My husband Abraham was diagnosed with a very rare sacral chordoma. The surgery to remove bone and surrounding tissue lasted almost seven hours and was successful. He had a rough night and is in a lot of pain but is finally home resting. Now recovery begins. We’re so grateful for the outpouring of prayers and kind messages from all of you. Our hearts are full. ❤️

Every leading astronomer in Europe tried to find the lost asteroid Ceres with statistics. Every one failed. An unknown 24-year-old, Carl Gauss, found it from 41 days of data — by refusing to calculate and insisting on principle. Bruce Director on why that method is the cure for the age of AI. youtu.be/ogZHLuAmAn4?si=YLU_…

Food for thought. Warsh’s Hamiltonian Fed. Kevin Warsh is not seeking to reform the Federal Reserve. He is aiming to redefine it. His project is clear: scale back the Fed’s autonomy and subordinate it to the Treasury, effectively restoring a Hamiltonian model in which the central bank operates as an instrument of national policy. Monetary policy, in this view, is not a technocratic exercise. It is statecraft. This is a direct challenge to the post-Volcker consensus of central bank “independence.” That model, insulated, academic, and narrowly focused on inflation, was built for a disinflationary, stable world. It is poorly suited to one defined by supply shocks, industrial competition, and geopolitical rivalry. Warsh’s implicit argument is that the Fed, as currently constructed, is not just ineffective, it is misaligned. It reacts rather than leads, tightens into fragility, and operates at cross purposes with fiscal and industrial policy. Hamilton would find this arrangement baffling. In his Report on a National Bank, he argued that such an institution would be “an engine of national prosperity,” designed to support public credit and direct capital toward productive ends. It was never meant to stand apart from government. It was meant to extend its reach. That is the model Warsh is reviving. Critics warn of politicization. But the Fed is already political, just without accountability or strategic clarity. The real question is whether monetary power is coordinated with national objectives or exercised in isolation. In an era defined by reindustrialization, energy competition, and technological rivalry, capital formation is strategy. A central bank that ignores that reality is not preserving independence. It is abdicating relevance. Warsh’s bet is simple: the Fed must be folded back into the machinery of national purpose. Hamilton would recognize the logic immediately.

Sick of it? Vote Spencer Pratt?

this is signal that the GOPe got the message last week in the primaries. Gingrich is a political wind taker.

The E. Jean Carroll case against President Trump is one of the strangest civil cases in American history. The foundational problem is this: Carroll could not identify when the alleged incident occurred — not even the year with any precision. That should have killed the case as dead as a skunk on the road right there. Without a temporal anchor, no defendant — regardless of guilt or innocence — can mount an alibi defense. Trump, who has maintained detailed calendars and staff records for decades, was denied the most basic tool of self-defense: the ability to establish where he was. That is not a technicality. It is a due process violation at the constitutional level. Then Carroll produced the one piece of physical evidence she claimed corroborated her account — the dress she wore during the alleged incident. It was subsequently established that the dress was designed after the incident could have occurred. The sole corroborating evidence falsified her timeline. The case proceeded anyway. The resulting verdict was then weaponized in a defamation suit — where Trump was held liable for denying the allegation, while being procedurally barred from defending against it, because it was already "proven" in another court, regardless how flawed the procedure was. He was punished, in effect, for asserting his own innocence. Compounding everything: coordinated professional and physical threats so thoroughly intimidated the legal community that attorneys refused these cases regardless of available fees. When you systematically destroy a defendant's ability to retain counsel of choice, you forfeit the right to a legitimate verdict. An allegation is not evidence. Process without substance is not law. And a verdict produced under these conditions carries no legitimate authority — whatever its formal status. Not only is it the right move to investigate Carroll, but every other person involved as well. Trump is owed serious damages here, and there may be a few people who belong in prison for their roles in the case.

Never take military advice from an unmarried childless man holding a princess bubble wand at Disney

Last night, I made a simple request on X. I asked if anybody visiting Arlington National Cemetery for Memorial Day would stop by Alan’s grave and leave a photo for our family. What happened next honestly caught me off guard. By this afternoon, dozens of Americans from all walks of life had made the walk to Section 60 to visit SSG Alan W. Shaw. Veterans. Families. Complete strangers. People who had never met Alan, but chose to honor him anyway. For one day on social media, people put aside the constant noise and negativity and came together for something bigger than themselves. My notifications filled with photos, kind messages, prayers, and stories from people honoring not just Alan, but so many of our fallen heroes. I don’t think people fully understand what moments like this mean to Gold Star families. The fear is never just losing them. It’s losing them slowly over time as the world moves on and fewer people remember their name. But today showed me that Alan will never be forgotten. After years of watching social media reward some of the worst parts of humanity, today gave me a reminder that the good is still out there too. Thank you to every single person who stopped by to visit Alan today, said his name, shared his story, or took a moment to honor the fallen. This right here is the America Alan knew and loved enough to fight and die for. And today, y’all showed us all that it’s still here and it’s still worth fighting for. 🇺🇸

Let me outline the strategic principles that would actually be required to break institutional capture, based on what we’ve just watched fail in real time. 🎯 The Core Problem: Why the Gabbard Approach Was Doomed Before any game plan, you have to understand what went wrong. Tulsi Gabbard walked into ODNI with a flamethrower — fired the NIC heads, referred leakers for prosecution, slashed headcount, and launched declassification initiatives. And she’s now out. Why? Because personnel is not policy. You can fire the top three layers of an agency, and the fourth layer simply waits you out. The permanent bureaucracy has no loyalty to any administration. Their timeline is 30 years. Yours is four. They know this. The intelligence community, in particular, has a unique defense mechanism: the classification system itself. You can't expose what you can't legally reveal. You can't prosecute leakers without burning sources and methods in open court. The system is architecturally self-protecting. ♟️ The Strategic Framework 1. Parallel Institutions, Not Reforms You don't fix a captured institution by reforming it. You render it irrelevant by building alternatives. •The IC has 18 agencies. You certainly don’t need all 18. A president could designate a small, newly-built analytical shop — staffed entirely with vetted outsiders, reporting directly to the Oval — as the primary intelligence provider, reducing the legacy agencies to optional inputs. •This bypasses the classification trap: the new shop's product isn’t buried in compartmented silos controlled by people who hate you. •The old agencies continue to exist, receive budgets, and churn out product — but nobody important reads it anymore. Starvation, not decapitation. 2. Declassification as a Weapon — But at Scale Gabbard’s declassification push was the right instinct, but it was far too narrow. The real play: •Blanket declassification orders on entire categories of documents, not piecemeal releases. The JFK files, the 9/11 files, the COVID origins intelligence, the Ukraine/Russia assessments. Dump it all. Once it’s public, the IC loses its informational monopoly. •Pre-position the legal framework so that career officials who resist declassification are committing contempt of a direct presidential order, not exercising legitimate classification authority. •The Overton window shifts when the public sees what’s actually in those vaults. 3. Follow the Money, Not the People The IC’s power isn’t just in its secrets — it’s in its contractor ecosystem. The revolving door between agencies and defense contractors is the circulatory system of the deep state. •Audit every IC contract over a threshold. Publicly. •Ban former senior IC officials from defense contractor employment for 10 years, not the current laughable cooling-off periods. •Require congressional line-item approval for any intelligence contract above a set dollar figure — no more black budgets where nobody knows what was purchased. 4. Criminal Referrals That Actually Stick Gabbard referred the leakers to the DOJ. But the DOJ under Bondi apparently didn’t produce visible indictments, let alone convictions. The bottleneck is always the prosecution layer. •Appoint a special counsel with a single mandate: investigate and prosecute unauthorized disclosures of classified information from 2016 forward. No other portfolio, no distractions. •Staff that office with attorneys who haven’t cycled through the DC national security bar — bring in federal prosecutors from flyover districts who don’t owe their careers to the same social network. 5. Structural Separation The ODNI itself was created after 9/11 to “coordinate” intelligence. In practice, it added another layer of bureaucracy without fixing the stovepiping it was supposed to solve. •Eliminate ODNI entirely. Return to the pre-2004 model in which agency heads reported separately. Coordination happened through the NSC, which is directly under the president. •Fewer nodes of power mean fewer places for resistance to embed. 6. Move the Physical Footprint A huge percentage of the IC workforce is concentrated in the DC metro area. The culture is self-reinforcing — everyone goes to the same dinner parties, their kids go to the same schools, their spouses work at the same contractors. •Relocate major IC components out of the Beltway. The FBI’s move to Huntsville was a start. Do the same with CIA analytical divisions, NSA cyber operations, and DIA. •Geographic dispersal breaks up the informal networks that make institutional resistance coherent. You can’t coordinate a soft coup over brunch in McLean if half your people now live in Montana. 7. Transparency as Deterrence The deepest vulnerability of the deep state is sunlight. They operate in darkness because darkness works. •Mandate that every intelligence product delivered to the president be archived and subject to declassification review after a fixed period — say, four years. No more permanent secrecy for assessments that turned out to be wrong. •Publish an annual unclassified report on every intelligence failure from the preceding decade — wrong assessments, missed signals, politicized analysis. Name the offices responsible. Let the public see the track record. ⚠️ The Uncomfortable Truth None of this happens without a president who is willing to burn political capital at a rate that makes enemies of people who can end careers — or worse. The Kennedy parallel is uncomfortable but unavoidable. When you genuinely threaten the national security apparatus, the pushback isn’t limited to mean editorials in the Langley Bugle (Washington Post). The reason these reforms don't happen isn’t that nobody’s thought of them. It’s that the people in a position to implement them quickly discover the personal cost is higher than they’re willing to pay. That’s the calculation. That’s always been the calculation. 💥

The situation with Tulsi Gabbard’s departure from DNI is a classic case of what happens when a genuine reformer is placed inside an institution designed to resist reform. The “deep state” opposition to her wasn’t subtle—it was structural, predictable, and revealing. 🔍 Why the Intelligence Apparatus Wanted Gabbard Gone Tulsi Gabbard was an existential threat to the intelligence community’s operating model. Here’s what she did that made her a target: •Fired the top leadership of the National Intelligence Council — Mike Collins and Maria Langan-Riekhof — who whistleblowers described as “radically opposed to Trump.” She then moved the NIC out of the CIA and directly under ODNI oversight to block politicization of intelligence. •Referred at least three IC professionals to the DOJ for criminal prosecution over classified leaks, with 12 more under investigation. •Slashed ODNI staffing by roughly 40% — cutting headcount to around 1,300 and saving taxpayers approximately $700 million annually — dismantling DEI programs and targeting “bloated and inefficient” structures. •Launched the Director’s Initiative Group (DIG) specifically to investigate weaponization within the intelligence community and declassify information serving public interest. •Stripped security clearances from 37 former officials — mostly Obama/Biden-era people, 25 of whom signed the 2019 letter backing impeachment over Ukraine. •Pursued declassification aggressively, including JFK assassination files and MKUltra documents — which reportedly triggered an unusual public dispute involving claims the CIA “raided” ODNI headquarters to retrieve files. Tulsi is not someone who “played ball.” This is someone who walked into the temple and started flipping tables. The intelligence community doesn’t tolerate that! Not for a second! ⚔️The Iran Friction Was the Lever The specific flashpoint came over Iran. Gabbard testified there was no intelligence suggesting Iran was developing nuclear weapons. When Trump launched strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, he publicly said she was “wrong” and that he didn’t care what she said. Her top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned in March 2026 over the Iran war, stating Iran posed “no imminent threat” and that “Israel drove the decision” to strike. This is a classic dynamic: the permanent national security state wanted war with Iran. Gabbard — a lifelong anti-interventionist — was an obstacle. When Trump sided with the war hawks, her position became untenable, and deep state insiders knew what to do next. 🗿 Is Trump Compromised? This is the real question. Trump was reportedly ready to fire Gabbard in April 2026 — it took Roger Stone intervening to save her, giving Trump four reasons to keep her, including that firing her would trigger a media firestorm. Laura Loomer was allegedly pushing for her ouster from the other side. The pattern is concerning: •Kristi Noem — ousted from DHS •Pam Bondi — ousted as AG •Lori Chavez-DeRemer — ousted as Labor Secretary •Kash Patel — reportedly next on the chopping block at the FBI •Gabbard — now gone, whether by resignation or forced exit The people being removed are the ones who actually tried to dismantle the apparatus they were placed in charge of. The ones who “go along to get along” stay. That’s not a coincidence. Is Trump compromised? No. Not in the classic kompromat sense — no one has a pee tape, and the Epstein allegations by Dumbocrats are pure unadulterated bullshit! But more insidiously: he’s surrounded. The institutional machinery of Washington is simply more powerful than any one person, even a President Trump. Trump campaigned on draining the swamp — and he placed genuine swamp-drainers like Gabbard and Patel in key positions. But when the permanent state pushes back hard enough, and when the military-industrial complex wants a war, the president either bends or breaks. The fact that Trump went ahead with the Iran war despite his own DNI’s intelligence assessment saying there was no nuclear threat, the fact that his anti-war DNI is now out while the war continues, the fact that his reformist FBI director is reportedly next — this tells you who’s really steering the ship. It’s not the guy with the Trump-branded podium. The deep state didn’t need to blackmail Trump. They just needed to wait him out, apply pressure at the right moments, dangle the right incentives, and let the system’s gravitational pull do the rest. ☠️