Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted of his efforts to convince the US to launch a war against Iran, crediting his frequent appearances on US television networks and his "intimate knowledge" of US leaders.
Netanyahu made the comments Sunday night on Israel’s Channel 14, and a clip of his appearance was posted on X by the account Clash Report, which Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi later shared.
via Associated PressThe Israeli leader said that he had been against Iran for "nearly 40 years" and that it took him a long time to get the Israeli security establishment and the US on board.
"It took a long time to bring the US in," he said, according to Channel 14. "I was able to do this because I had close to a thousand hours on American television, influence in the United States, and intimate knowledge of all its leaders – both those who support us and those who do not."
The New York Times reported in April that 17 days before the US and Israel launched the war on February 28, Netanyahu presented President Trump with an intelligence briefing at the White House and made a "hard sell" for the war.
The report said that Netanyahu had been "pressing for months" for the US to agree to a major attack on the Islamic Republic.
Netanyahu:
I’ve been dealing with Iran for close to 40 years.
It took me a long time to get our security establishment to deal with Iran itself.
It also took a long time to bring the United States to this understanding. I was able to do that because I had close to a thousand… pic.twitter.com/IT4KkD7j7B
Sources told the Times that during the briefing, Netanyahu made a series of predictions about the potential war that proved to be wrong, including the idea that Iran was ripe for regime change, that its ballistic missile program could be destroyed within weeks, that it would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that Iran’s missile strikes on US interests in regional countries would be minimal.
Responding to Netanyahu’s comments about his influence on the US, Aragchi said that the Israeli leader was openly bragging about how he "suckered" the US into the war.
Greenwald: the US once covertly sold missiles to the Iranians...
It's amazing how quickly they got huge numbers of people to recite the comical view that Iran has been at war with the US for 47 years (and, I guess, every American president forgot to mention this fact, including Trump 1)
In the 1980s, the Reagan WH sold highly sophisticated… https://t.co/PI85t3nOpV
"In Hebrew, Netanyahu openly crows that he suckered the US Administration into a war on Iran on behalf of Israel."
"Netanyahu explicitly laughs about how he 'influenced' America through 1,000 hours of airtime on US networks," the Iranian diplomat wrote on X. “In English, he praises POTUS’ leadership. Serpent.”
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/01/2026 - 17:40A pair of New York City's leading Democratic Socialists live in Brooklyn apartments that would be pure fantasy for the working-class Americans they claim to champion, according to the New York Post, the latest installment in a running audit of the personal real estate of the organization that put Zohran Mamdani in Gracie Mansion.
The report lands less than two weeks after the Post revealed that NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, a Yale-trained sculptor who has billed himself as a "union electrician," lives in a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy townhouse bought and renovated by his parents' LLC, a disclosure that has since earned the property a Department of Buildings stop-work order and a $2,500 fine for permitless renovations. That makes it three for three among the group's top brass.
First is Julie Swoope, who chairs the far-left group's steering committee and in 2021 purchased a one-bedroom co-op outright, just blocks from Prospect Park, for $510,000. The listing touted skyline views and "great closet space."
Julie Swoope owns a $500,000 apartment in Brooklyn. canarymission.orgSwoope's family background does little to reinforce a working-class narrative. Her mother, artist Gail Cunningham Swoope, spent three years traveling aboard a live-aboard sailboat and belonged to the New Smyrna Beach Boat and Ski Club, according to an obituary reviewed by the Post.
Next up is Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth, the group's labor coordinator, elected in 2025, who runs her own bookkeeping business and is also an actor and singer, according to her website. Killingsworth sold an Upper West Side triplex in a brownstone building on September 12, 2022, for $2.4 million. The two-bedroom, three-bathroom unit sits a block from Central Park.
DSA labor coordinator Olivia Killingsworth sold a $2.4 million triplex in 2022. bluesky / olivekilworthKillingsworth did not buy that property on the open market. Akin to many champagne socialists, she inherited the unit from her aunt Elizabeth, who died in 2018, and sold it alongside relatives.
Just two days later, on September 14, 2022, Killingsworth closed on a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn for $521,000, completing a sequence in which an inherited brownstone near Central Park was liquidated for millions and replaced, almost immediately, with another New York apartment.
For context, the DSA's own platform holds that housing policy should involve "a redistribution of land from the landowners to the landless," with property expropriated from capitalists and delivered to the working class.
"Once again we're finding out why DSA actually stands for Daddy's Savings Account. Selling a multimillion-dollar Manhattan Triplex to go play pretend bohemian with your rich comrades in Brooklyn is a luxury working-class New Yorkers will never have," New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (R-Queens) said in a statement to the Post.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/01/2026 - 17:20Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,
The U.S. military has no plans to send troops or other personnel to polling places during November's midterm elections, the top U.S. general has said.
Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was responding to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who had asked him and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in an Aug. 18 letter to confirm they won't send troops to polls.
Caine wrote in response that state and local officials retain responsibility for overseeing election administration and security.
"The Joint Force has no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections," Caine wrote.
"Likewise, the Joint Force has no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material."
Caine also said that he had not received, nor did he expect to receive, "any unlawful order" concerning the role of the Joint Force in the November midterm elections.
In 2020, Gen. Mark Milley, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded to a similar letter from Slotkin, then a congresswoman.
"I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military," Milley wrote. "In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military."
The United States is set to hold midterm elections in November, which will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years, with all 435 House seats and one-third of Senate seats up for election.
Earlier this year, then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump had not discussed any "formal plans" to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at polling places during the midterm elections, but declined to rule out the presence of federal agents near voting sites.
Federal law prohibits the government from deploying troops at locations holding general or special elections "unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States," according to 18 U.S. Code § 592, and bars any sort of interference in elections by armed forces. ICE agents are civilian law-enforcement officers and are not covered by the same prohibitions that apply to the armed forces, although other laws still limit intimidation or interference at polling places.
"I can't guarantee that an ICE agent won't be around a polling location in November," Leavitt told reporters on Feb. 5. "But what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It's a disingenuous question."
Leavitt stepped down from her role in late August, citing the need to focus on her family following the birth of her second child.
Slotkin introduced legislation on June 18 to prevent the deployment of military forces and federal agents at polling places during the midterm elections.
The bill would require the president to provide Congress with "intel, legal justification, and evidence" showing that state or local authorities are not capable of handling a threat on their own at least 48 hours before sending federal forces to polling sites, according to a statement from Slotkin's office.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/01/2026 - 17:00The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to uphold its ban on transgender troops serving in the military, appealing a lower court ruling that has, for now, blocked enforcement against service members already in uniform.
Vin Testa waves a LGBTQ pride flag in front of the Supreme Court building on June 26, 2023 in Washington, DC.The petition targets a June decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals finding the ban probably violates the constitutional rights of transgender troops already serving. The decision claimed that the ban "appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender." That ruling barred the Pentagon from enforcing the policy against those specific plaintiffs while their case works through the courts. The administration maintains the policy regulates a medical condition - gender dysphoria - rather than transgender status, and therefore needs only a rational connection to military readiness to survive review.
The June ruling was 2-1 and split the baby: it blocked the Pentagon from discharging the currently serving plaintiffs while leaving the ban on new transgender recruits fully in place. Judges Robert Wilkins (an Obama appointee) and Judith Rogers (a Clinton appointee) formed the majority. Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee and the panel's lone Republican nominee, dissented: "because the plaintiffs are service members not civilians, and because we are judges not generals, I respectfully dissent." The Constitution, Walker wrote, assigns that authority to Congress and the Commander in Chief. Notably, a different D.C. Circuit motions panel had ruled the opposite way in December – letting the Pentagon enforce the ban, 2-1 – meaning the same courthouse has now gone both directions depending on which three judges drew the case. Hegseth's response to the June loss was four words: "See you at SCOTUS."
The administration wants the justices to take the case now, before trial – its petition calls the June ruling "gravely erroneous" – rather than let a preliminary injunction, in place in some form since March 2025, run all the way to a two-week trial set for January. That posture has become familiar this year, with the Department of War repeatedly asking the high court to let its personnel decisions stand while litigation over their legality plays out.
The Justice Department's Supreme Court filing describes the Pentagon's authority to decide who serves as a "matter of exceptional importance," language that puts military judgment, not the lower courts' read of the evidence, at the center of the case.
Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, claimed the administration "wants the Supreme Court to rush in and bless the expulsion of proven, decorated soldiers before a single court has issued a final judgment."
The policy traces back to an executive order Trump signed shortly after taking office. It states that "adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle."
"We will get transgender ideology the hell out of our military. It's going to be gone," Trump told House Republicans the day he signed the executive order during a retreat at his Doral golf resort in Miami.
Pete Hegseth turned that order into policy in February 2025.
Hegseth's memo reasoned that troops who experience symptoms of gender dysphoria "cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for Military Service." He has since folded the ban into a broader push to strip "woke" policy out of the armed forces.
The population at issue is small but not trivial: the Pentagon's own estimate put roughly 4,240 troops with a gender dysphoria diagnosis among a force of about two million, and around 1,000 self-identified for voluntary separation when Hegseth's 2025 deadline hit.
NCLR and GLAD Law filed the underlying case, Talbott v. United States, in January 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing that the Department of War's transgender policy violates the Constitution and discriminates against transgender troops.
The court has scheduled a trial for January 2027, but the Department of War wants the ban enforced against the plaintiffs before then. The justices already weighed in on this policy once before. They allowed the ban to take effect last year in a separate challenge, while that earlier litigation proceeded, a result that suggests a majority already leans toward giving the Pentagon the ability to set its own military readiness standards.
The ruling under appeal covers narrower ground – for now. It protects only the troops who brought this specific suit. But on June 30, District Judge Ana Reyes – whose original injunction called the ban "soaked with animus and dripping with pretext" – certified the case as a class action covering every transgender person serving or seeking to enlist since January 2025, a maneuver designed to route around the Supreme Court's ruling last year curtailing nationwide injunctions. Two months later, the administration was at the high court's door. If the plaintiffs win at the January trial, the remedy no longer stops at 29 names.
"Joe Biden allowed trans insanity to run rampant in our military," White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said in a statement. "President Trump restored lethality and readiness to our warfighters." She added, "The United States military is the greatest in the world, and President Trump is keeping it that way by focusing on elite readiness standards – not DEI or woke gender ideology."
Whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case will determine how long the lower courts' preliminary read of the Constitution can override the Pentagon's own judgment about who meets its strict standards of military readiness.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/01/2026 - 16:40Authored by James T. Moodey via American Thinker,
The word capitalism was coined in the 1700s. The definition was vague. It generally meant "private property traded freely" or "free markets." However, most non-totalitarian countries had free markets, and these countries in Europe and elsewhere were not particularly wealthy. Their rural people were paupers living off the land, even in England, France, and the U.S. at our founding.
We generally regard capitalism as creating wealth, but free markets are not what created the enormous wealth that occurred in the United States. I knew that and studied our economic history to find out: If it was not free markets, what was it? What specifically were the mechanics of "our capitalism" that created such wealth?
I found the answer. However, I also learned that capitalism cannot be taught without properly defining wealth.
Wealth of a nation is its amount of usable goods. I use the term usable goods to exclude paintings and other speculative items. Poverty is a lack of usable goods, such as clothes or food. A large supply of usable goods brings prices down and reduces poverty. We became wealthy because we produced an enormous amount of usable goods. But how did that happen?
Usable goods are created by factories. It is not the amount we pay factory workers that is important; it is the millions of hammers, shoes, and vehicles they produce that create wealth. Farmers and utility workers can be included with factory workers who produce usable goods for millions of people.
Cyrus McCormick's reaper would supply a large amount of food, but sales were difficult and slow. The reaper would break down on farms far away. McCormick had difficulty traversing the country making repairs and sales. He solved these problems by inventing a unique idea of setting up distributors. He shared significant profit with the distributors. They stocked the product locally, performed repairs, and made sales. Sales grew rapidly, and McCormick Reapers were supplied throughout the country. The United States became an exporter of food.
Here is the key to capitalism's success: When farmers tried to buy direct from McCormick, he refused and made them buy from their respective distributor.
Other manufactures, of home goods, saw McCormick's success and not only set up distributors, but added another discount to include retailers. Again, customers were sent back to the retailers. Retailing became a very profitable business. In the 1850s, general stores appeared in nearly every town.
It was not greed that made capitalism successful; it was nearly the opposite. It was the sharing of profits with all who sold the product.
Prior to this, women made their own soap, household goods, and clothes and tended their own crops. Men planted crops, hand-forged steel tools, and built what they needed. Rather than make their own goods, people began to buy them at a local store. Rural couples were unshackled from the centuries-old life of paupers.
Rural couples had been purchasing limited goods from peddlers who occasionally passed through their valley. Or they bought goods from catalogues. Returns of goods was an enormous problem, and single sales limited mass production at the factories, which kept prices high.
When couples found they could buy any goods they wanted at a general store, demand for home goods exploded. Prices for household goods and farm equipment fell due to the resulting mass production. Farm families soon found buyers for their excess farm produce, and those profits were spent on fast-declining prices of home goods. Men could afford farm equipment, and women bought dresses rather than made them. Rural people and the merchants became wealthy. America soon became known as the "land of opportunity."
Incomes were rising while prices steadily fell for decades, up to and including the Roaring Twenties. Introduction of the income tax reversed the trend. In the 1930s, the lowest income tax bracket was raised to 24 percent and the highest income bracket to 94 percent.
Capitalism is not simply free markets. We are not free to bargain for the price of milk in a store. We are not free to bargain with the factory. The epitome of free markets are barter societies in the Middle East. They are free to bargain with the retailer and the factory. High-volume factories cannot survive in a barter society, and those societies are mired in poverty as a result.
Capitalism is a self-perpetuating economic system designed to increase sales using a structure of profits for all who sell the product, and those profits are protected by the factories. That is what created millions of usable goods, reduced prices, reduced poverty, and created our great wealth.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/01/2026 - 16:20