By the middle of March during Trump's Operation Epic Fury, Iran was flexing its retaliatory might, and the Gulf region was shocked to see the largest natural-gas production facility in the world, Qatar's North Field, badly damaged - with a key section forced offline and severely damaged.
The Washington Post has just provided some new information which has come to light, writing that "There was an additional, hidden consequence. The strike also dashed secret efforts by Qatar to keep its gas complex, known as Ras Laffan, off Iran’s target list, according to Middle Eastern security officials and Western officials briefed on the intelligence."
Doha skyline file imageThis after the punishing Iranian strikes (against a nearby Arab state which hosts US forces) "destroyed sections of a plant that provides nearly a fifth of the globe’s gas supply, imperiled multibillion-dollar contracts with China and other clients, and damaged the prospects of finding an earlier end to the war by dragging Qatar, a key mediator between the United States and Iran, into the fight" - WaPo also reviewed.
That 'secret negotiations' were being held apart from the US - or also separately from other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states is indeed significant, highlighting a theme that Tehran continues to seek to assert leverage by forcing nations to come make side deals - even as the Islamic Republic comes under US bombs and Western pressure.
If it is indeed accurate that Gulf nations are approaching Iran to do individual separate deals, this is for now a diplomatic 'win' for Tehran. Separate deal-making, peeling others away from a united front and bloc, gives Iran some greater leverage and also flexibility in terms of potential post-war economic and political detente with regional states.
The UAE, it was reported earlier this week in Bloomberg, has also reportedly reached its own 'understanding' with the Iranians after some backroom dealing and diplomacy.
"Senior national security officials from the United Arab Emirates and Iran held a face-to-face meeting for the first time since the start of the US-Israeli war against Tehran, according to people with knowledge of the situation," Bloomberg reported
"This week’s meeting marked a stark turnaround for both sides and comes amid their growing acknowledgment of the importance of calmer bilateral ties, the people said, asking not to be named discussing sensitive matters," the report indicated.
Perhaps in both Qatar's and UAE's thinking, there's too much to risk while facing Iran's significant ballistic missile and drone arsenal, at a moment Washington has failed to clearly define an end game, but instead is climbing up the escalation ladder with a cornered and thus fierce Iran, which sees itself fighting for its very survival.
Qatar's effort apparently failed to a large degree, while curiously there's of late been a lack of Iranian targeting on UAE - even as other US-allied countries, namely Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan have this week seen new missile waves launched on them.
But possibly Qatar has protected itself from further harm. It too has not been a prime renewed target of Iran's ballistic missiles this week, alongside the Emirates.
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/12/2026 - 18:00Authored by Stu Cvrk via American Greatness,
There is a particular kind of intellectual dishonesty that does not know it is dishonest. It wraps itself in the language of compassion, hides its power hunger behind slogans of liberation, and mistakes its own cultural preferences for universal moral law. American progressivism, in its current form as embodied by the Democrat Party, has become a nearly perfect specimen of this condition.
The clichés, observations, and aphorisms collected here are not talking points manufactured in a think tank. They are the distilled residue of lived political experience—hard-won pattern recognition from citizens, scholars, commentators, and statesmen who have spent years watching the same contradictions repeat themselves under different headlines.
Victor Davis Hanson notices that progressive hierarchy licenses progressive hypocrisy. Don Surber reminds us that incentives are more reliable than ideology. Ian Bremmer, borrowing from Thucydides, warns us what civilization looks like when law gives way to appetite. A Daily Signal headline captures in nine words what a criminology textbook takes nine chapters to prove. Together, these observations form a mosaic: a portrait of a political movement that has systematically abandoned the constitutional, cultural, and civilizational foundations that made ordered liberty possible in America.
What unites every entry on this list is a single underlying tension—between what the Democrat Party and its fellow travelers say and what they do; between the principles it professes and the power it pursues; between the democracy it claims to defend and the control it refuses to relinquish.
The observations range from the rhetorical (“saving democracy” as a slogan for entrenching one-party dominance) to the philosophical (science as inquiry versus science as authority) to the civilizational (the corrosive effect of identity-group multiculturalism on constitutional self-governance). But every one of them points at the same fundamental evasion: a Democrat Party that will not submit itself to the standards it imposes on everyone else.
This is not merely a catalogue of political grievances. It is an argument that the American constitutional order, grounded in individual rights, equal justice, national sovereignty, and civic unity, is not simply one option among many on an ideological menu. It is the condition of possibility for everything else. When the rule of law becomes selective, when science becomes a permission slip for policy, when borders become negotiable, and prosecutors become partisans, what falls apart is not simply a political preference—it is the floor beneath everyone’s feet.
Read these observations not as cynicism, but as a diagnosis. The patient can recover. But only if enough citizens are willing to look honestly at what has gone wrong—and in whose interest it has gone wrong.
Left-Wing Cliches, Observations, and AphorismsThese are just a sampling of what the Democrat Party and left-wingers in general bombard us with as they attempt to achieve complete political hegemony (i.e., totalitarianism with Democrat characteristics) in America:
“Equity means equal outcomes for everyone—except admission to their children’s schools.” The loudest advocates for dismantling merit-based admissions send their own children to highly selective private schools and elite magnet or selective-enrollment programs, insulating their families from the policies they impose on everyone else.
“Defund the police—but keep my security detail.” From city council members who voted to cut police budgets while retaining personal security to celebrities who lectured America on abolishing police while surrounded by armed private guards, elected Democrats and the movement’s leaders never intended the policy to apply to themselves.
“Follow the science—unless the science is inconvenient.” The same coalition that demands deference to scientific consensus on the climate refuses to acknowledge biological sex in medicine, opposes nuclear energy despite its carbon-free output, and spent two years dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as racist misinformation—a conclusion most scientists now consider credible.
“Borders are immoral—except around Martha’s Vineyard.” The rapid busing of migrants away from progressive resort communities the moment they arrived demonstrated, to conservatives, that “sanctuary city” is a posture affordable only so long as the consequences land somewhere else.
“Speech is violence—but looting is speech.” A campus lecture by a conservative intellectual triggers emergency security protocols and administrative handwringing about “harm.” A night of smashed storefronts and burning police cars is described by news anchors as “mostly peaceful protest.” The asymmetry defines the Left’s actual hierarchy of protected and punishable expression.
“We must protect democracy—by criminalizing the opposition candidate.” The argument that democracy requires prosecuting the leading opposition candidate, removing him from state ballots, and deploying the federal justice apparatus against him—while insisting this is all norm-protection rather than norm-destruction—is precisely the kind of doublethink conservatives point to as proof the Democrats’ “saving democracy” slogan is purely instrumental.
“Billionaires are the enemy—now let’s hear from our billionaire donors.” The Democrat Party simultaneously prosecutes class warfare rhetoric and raises nine-figure sums from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Hollywood. George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and a constellation of tech oligarchs fund the very movement that campaigns against oligarchy. The Left’s billionaires are enlightened; the Right’s are existential threats.
“No one is above the law—unless you are in our administration.” Selective prosecution is the theme: a two-tiered justice system that indicts a former president on faux documents charges while closing a parallel case against a sitting president’s son and declining to charge a sitting president himself, with standards applied by prosecutors who publicly donate to the Democrat Party, is not equal justice—it is the law as a partisan instrument.
“It’s not about black and white; it’s about green.” The Left frames every policy dispute as a racial justice issue, but the real engine driving progressive politics is money—donor class cash, NGO funding, and government grants that keep the activist machinery running. Race is the Democrats’ go-to rhetorical weapon; wealth redistribution and institutional power are the actual prize.
“Hierarchy justifies hypocrisy.” Victor Davis Hanson’s razor: the progressive elite exempts itself from every rule it imposes on others. Private jets for climate summits. Gated communities for open-borders advocates. Elite private schools for the champions of public education. The higher one sits in the leftist hierarchy, the more license one has to ignore the ideology.
“Biden would never have stepped down had the assassin been successful.” A darkly ironic observation: the Democrat Party finally forced Biden out of the 2024 race only through intense backroom pressure—something a bullet would have denied them. It underscores the argument that the party’s concern was never about Biden’s fitness or the nation’s welfare but about electoral math and factional control. So much for “saving our democracy.”
“Saving democracy is a dead narrative.” When Democrats invoke “Our Democracy,” conservatives argue they mean institutional arrangements that keep their coalition in power—weaponized bureaucracies, legacy media gatekeeping, Big Tech suppression, and lawfare against opponents. Once voters recognized the slogan as a euphemism for their control, their courts, their narrative, or their unaccountable administrative state, the phrase lost its power.
“34 percent of registered Democrats believed the assassination attempt was staged.” Offered as evidence that media-driven conspiratorial thinking is not a monopoly of the Right. If roughly a third of one party’s own voters distrust a documented, publicly witnessed event, it suggests the Left’s media ecosystem has become as insular and reality-distorting as anything it accuses conservatives of inhabiting.
“A failure to deal with multiculturalism ideology is the issue more important than all others.” From this viewpoint, identity-group multiculturalism—the ideological version, not the simple demographic fact of diversity—is the solvent dissolving the common civic identity that the Constitution requires. When group grievance, as relentlessly pushed by the Democrat Party, supersedes individual rights and shared national purpose, constitutional self-governance becomes ungovernable.
“The silo effect of multiculturalism has driven wedges between people who should be accepting our Constitution.” The argument is that multicultural identity politics deliberately fragments the citizenry into competing, mutually suspicious tribes, each demanding group-specific rights rather than equal individual rights under a shared constitutional framework. E pluribus unum is replaced by e pluribus plures, which is exactly what the Democrat Party seeks.
“Marxism and communism thrive on diverse cultures that foment hatred—open borders increase the opportunity.” A classic conservative national-sovereignty argument: Marxist strategy has always depended on manufacturing class and group antagonisms. Mass unvetted immigration, which was the essence of Biden’s open borders policy, is not humanitarian policy at all but rather a mechanism for accelerating social fragmentation, straining civic institutions, and creating the conditions of dependency and conflict that collectivist politics require.
“Science is a mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority” (Green New Deal context). One of the most intellectually serious items on this list. Science produces provisional, falsifiable conclusions through open debate—it does not issue binding commands. When Democrats and their legacy media allies declare “the science is settled” to foreclose economic debate about energy policy, they are not following science; they are using its brand name to launder ideological mandates and bypass democratic deliberation.
“The law of the jungle: The strong will do what they will, and the weak will suffer what they must.” Adapted from Thucydides, Ian Bremmer’s formulation is offered as a warning about what happens when American deterrence and constitutional order erode. Conservatives apply it domestically as well: when the rule of law is selectively enforced (as it was throughout the Biden regime), it ceases to be law and becomes the will of whoever controls enforcement—the very definition of tyranny.
“A fellow just in it for the money still has value—just make sure someone else doesn’t make him a better deal.” Don Surber’s cynical but clear-eyed observation about political loyalty: you don’t need ideological converts, only aligned incentives. It’s a realist’s argument for why transactional politics can be more durable than moral crusades—and a warning that you must constantly tend to the economic interests of your coalition or watch it defect.
“Leniency to the guilty leads to cruelty to the innocent.” The policy logic of criminal justice conservatism in a single sentence. Democrat policies of catch-and-release prosecution, bail reform, and prosecutorial nullification do not reduce suffering—they transfer it from the criminal class to law-abiding citizens, who disproportionately tend to be lower-income and minority residents of high-crime neighborhoods: the very people the lenient policies claim to protect.
Taken individually, each of the observations in this collection might be dismissed as a talking point, a partisan barb, or the predictable grievance of the political opposition. Taken together, they constitute something more serious: a systematic indictment of a governing philosophy that has lost its accountability to the people it claims to serve, the Constitution it claims to defend, and the truth it claims to follow.
The theme connecting every item on this list is the abuse of asymmetry. Asymmetric justice—one standard for allies, another for enemies. Asymmetric speech—protected protest for the favored, prosecutable rhetoric for the disfavored. Asymmetric sacrifice—open borders for the interior, bused migrants away from the coastline. Asymmetric science—settled consensus when it empowers, negotiable data when it inconveniences. This is not the behavior of a movement confident in the justice of its principles. It is the behavior of a movement that has quietly stopped believing its own arguments and is now operating purely on the logic of power retention. This is the essence of fascism!
The constitutional conservative response to all of this is not, at its core, a counter-ideology. It is a demand for consistency. Apply the law equally. Subject every truth claim—including scientific ones—to open scrutiny and democratic deliberation. Judge citizens as individuals, not as representatives of racial or ethnic collectives. Enforce the borders that give national sovereignty its meaning. Hold the powerful to the same standards as the powerless. These are not radical propositions. They are the operating premises of the American Founding, tested across two and a half centuries and still the most durable framework for self-governance ever devised.
The Democrat Left’s great strategic gamble has been that enough Americans could be divided against one another—by race, by class, by grievance, by tribe—that the constitutional consensus holding the country together would simply dissolve, leaving in its place a manageable collection of dependent constituencies rather than a self-governing citizenry.
This is the essence of Obama’s ongoing drive to “transform America” (into something the Founders would not recognize).
The observations catalogued here suggest that the gamble is failing. When even a third of the Democrats’ own voters distrust the basic factual narrative their leadership provides, something has broken in the machinery of manufactured consent. When “saving democracy” lands as a punchline rather than a rallying cry, the narrative has exhausted itself.
What comes next depends entirely on whether enough Americans—left-wing, right-wing, and unaffiliated—are willing to reinhabit the common ground the Constitution provides. Not as a concession to the other side, but as a recognition that the alternative to constitutional order is not a more enlightened progressivism. It is the law of the jungle: the strong doing what they will, and the weak suffering what they must.
The floor (our constitutional republic) is worth saving. That is what every one of these observations, in its own way, is ultimately about.
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/12/2026 - 17:40