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California Exposes Amazon's Alleged 'Retail Price Fixing' In Unredacted Court Filing

California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Monday released a largely unredacted court filing packed with internal emails that allege Amazon strong-armed brands like Levi Strauss and Hanes into pressuring Walmart, Target and other rivals to raise prices - all to protect Amazon’s $2.66 trillion empire.

The 19-page memorandum, filed in support of a preliminary injunction in San Francisco Superior Court, paints a picture of coordinated price elevation that Bonta calls “naked” and “per se illegal” under California’s Cartwright Act. The evidence builds on documents the Guardian first reported on last week, but goes significantly further by naming major brands and quoting verbatim email chains that had remained heavily redacted until Monday.

"You don’t see price fixing so explicitly and egregiously in writing like this," Bonta told reporters, framing the documents as proof that Amazon used its market dominance to eliminate real competition across the internet.

The case, The People of the State of California v. Amazon.com Inc. (CGC-22-601826), dates back to September 2022. California accuses Amazon of running what it calls a "Retail Price Fixing Scheme" that relies on threats of lost Buy Box placement, suppressed search visibility and outright order suspensions - tools the state says gave the company "overwhelming bargaining leverage" over vendors.

The emails tell the story in real time.

In one exchange detailed in the filing, Amazon flagged "styles of concern" to Levi’s - specifically Easy Khaki Classic pants listed cheaper at Walmart. The next day, Levi’s replied that it had "partnered with" Walmart to raise the price back to the desired $29.99 ladder. Amazon then matched the higher price.

Similar patterns appear with Hanes (pressuring Target and Walmart), Allergan eye drops (Walmart raised prices after Amazon suppressed the listing), pet treats coordinated with Chewy, and furniture sold through Home Depot. Vendors repeatedly acted as intermediaries, contacting rival retailers at Amazon’s direction to "fix" or "resolve" lower prices elsewhere.

The filing also describes Amazon’s internal enforcement mechanisms: "CRaP" (Can’t Realize a Profit) flags, Guaranteed Minimum Margin demands, and instructions to discuss pricing by phone to avoid a paper trail.

According to the filing, Amazon's conduct harms consumers by creating an invisible price floor across major online retailers. "The company is price fixing, colluding with vendors and other retailers to raise costs for Americans beyond what the market requires - beyond what is fair," Bonta said in a statement.

Amazon pushed back sharply, calling the release "a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case" and noting that the evidence is years old. "Amazon is consistently identified as America’s lowest-priced online retailer, and we’re proud of the low prices customers find when shopping in our store," a spokesperson said. "Amazon looks forward to responding in court at the appropriate time."

The timing is notable. Bonta filed the preliminary injunction request in February; a hearing is scheduled for July 23, 2026. Full trial begins January 19, 2027 - one of at least three major Amazon antitrust trials now teed up for next year, including the FTC’s separate monopoly case (joined by 18 states and the DOJ) that also features allegations of algorithmic pricing tactics known internally as "Project Nessie."

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states sued Amazon in 2023, accusing the company of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail by squeezing merchants who sell on its site and prioritizing its own products. Those actions resulted in “artificially higher prices,” according to the government’s suit.

In September, the F.T.C. agreed to settle a lawsuit against Amazon that accused the company of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Under the terms of the settlement, Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers. It did not admit or deny wrongdoing. -NYT

Legal experts say the explicit emails could make this one of the more straightforward price-fixing cases in recent Big Tech history - though Amazon is expected to argue that vendors set their own prices and that its practices ultimately benefit consumers through lower prices and greater selection.

For now, the unredacted documents give regulators, lawmakers and the public a rare, granular look inside the mechanics of modern retail pricing power. Bonta’s office framed the release as a transparency win amid a national affordability crunch. "Amid a crisis of affordability," the attorney general said, "Amazon is illegally working to rake in profits by making sure consumers have nowhere else to turn to for lower prices."

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"Civic Action Requires More Than Textbooks": Chicago To Subsidize May Day Protests By Teachers

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

The Chicago Public Schools are facing a major truancy problem…among teachers.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) was up in arms over suggestions that classes should be held on May 1 when teachers wanted to be out protesting.

Called International Workers’ Day, May Day is a global day of protest for socialist, communist, and unionist groups.

The CTU was upset when parents objected that canceling a day of class for teachers to join a political protest was a burden for working parents. These teachers believe that they are teaching something far more important through their activism. In defending the demand for publicly subsidized protests, CTU Vice President Jackson Potter explained that “teaching our students what civic action looks like requires more than textbooks.”

While that does not help with the dismal proficiency scores of actual students, it is vital to training students as political foot soldiers.

The CTU and the National Education Association recently collaborated on a “curriculum build” to bring “social justice into the classroom” ahead of May Day. Dave Stieber, a history teacher in Chicago Public Schools is shown declaring that “May Day is a dress rehearsal for maybe there’s a random day in, you know, June that we all are, like, no work, no school, no shopping…So this is a continuation and a buildup of that.”

In the meantime, with only 2 of 5 students reading at grade level, the Chicago teachers chose to lower proficiency levels rather than improve their teaching record.

While failing on actually teaching students, the CTU is proficient at instructing politicians such as Mayor Brandon Johnson through the use of union dues to fund Democratic campaigns.  The CTU and other teachers’ unions funneled millions into Johnson’s campaign. By one estimate, 93 percent of Johnson’s campaign budget came from unions.

The CTU has long held the distinction of being the most radical teachers’ union in the country. It was a CTU delegation that went to Venezuela during the Maduro regime to praise conditions under socialism. In a country where dissenters and reporters were being jailed and killed, the Chicago teachers gushed about how “we did not see a single homeless person!”

Chicago area teachers have been charged with violent protests.

Suggesting that teachers should work rather than attend May Day protests set off the Chicago teachers. Now, the union has confirmed that classes will be held without the participating teachers, and Chicago Public Schools will pay for buses for both students and educators to go to the protests.

The city further promised that there would be no repercussions for either students or teachers playing hooky from school.

This is not the first time unions and teachers have allowed students to skip classes to support left-wing protests. In New York, teachers and students were allowed to skip school to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. Previously, students were allowed to skip school to protest climate change.

These school districts do not show the same participatory support for protests on the right. There is no accommodation or city-subsidized buses for pro-life protests or demonstrations in favor of Israel.

Nevertheless, the Chicago school system is declaring that this is what schooling is all about in the Windy City. CPS CEO Macquline King stated that “the agreement honors the proud history of civic action in Chicago and beyond.”

Decades ago, my parents helped create an organization to stem the exodus of families from public schools and to reinforce academic standards in the Chicago Public School system. They convinced more families to remain in the system because they believed (as I do) that public schools can play a critical role in shaping citizens through a diverse and shared experience.

I was long skeptical of voucher systems because of that commitment to public education. However, teacher unions and administrators are destroying public education in America. They are treating families as captive audiences while infusing education with social and political agendas. The only way to break this decades-long cycle of failure, in my opinion, is to give families alternatives by allowing them to send their children to schools with core educational (as opposed to advocacy) priorities.

Nevertheless, Mayor Johnson celebrated the funding of the May Day protests:

“We are pleased all parties are working together to ensure school communities can participate in commemorating International Workers Day…Encouraging participating allows Chicagoans to honor our history while advocating for our future. We look forward to a day of meaningful solidarity and community resistance to the forces trying to tear us apart.

Schools have long been a target for indoctrination by radical elements. The Cultural Revolution in China was the most extreme example where children were forced into protests and taught that political activism came before scholastics under the slogan “to rebel is justified.”

Mao declared that “our educational policy must enable everyone who receives an education to develop morally, intellectually and physically and become a worker with both socialist consciousness and culture.”

In the CTU/NEA seminar, Kirstin Roberts, a pre-school teacher in Chicago Public Schools, is shown explaining that the purpose is to “encourage teachers of young children not to feel like this is stuff that’s way beyond their students, not to be afraid of raising up social justice issues, including workers’ rights, anti-racism, pro LGBT, LGBTQIA plus issues, immigration and immigrants rights.”

The erosion of the line between education and advocacy is now occurring on every level of our educational system. Some universities now have “resident activist” programs or offer degrees in advocacy.

In my book Rage and the Republic, I discuss the rise of the “new Jacobins” in the United States, including a cadre of radical educators who use our schools to pursue fundamental changes in our constitutional system. Law professors and deans are now calling for trashing our Constitution as a threat to the nation while teachers are using classes to radicalize students.

Chicago’s subsidy of May Day protests uses public funds in the struggling school system to foster radical political agendas. It removes any doubt for parents about the priority of Johnson, the CTU, and many of these teachers.

Some of the sentiments expressed in Chicago could have been ripped from Mao’s Little Red Book and speeches. He insisted “education must serve proletarian politics” and demanded “the period of schooling should be shortened, education should be revolutionized.”

In Chicago, the “period for schooling” is now being shortened in favor of “solidarity and community resistance.” While the students may not be able to actually read, they will learn the three R’s of modern education: resisting, raging, and rebelling.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution

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Whistleblower Says CIA Hid 2020 Election Threats To Help Biden

For years, Democrats and the mainstream media treated 2020 as settled history: the system worked, the election was secure, and accusations of fraud were conspiracy theories.

However, a newly declassified intelligence memo, paired with fresh whistleblower allegations, points in a less convenient direction. 

Behind the scenes, U.S. intelligence warned well before the 2020 election that core election systems were more exposed than the public was told, especially the vast digital repositories that hold voter registration data. Making matters worse, according to former senior cyber official Christopher Porter, intelligence leaders then kept those warnings from public view because airing them could have benefited President Donald Trump and complicated the push to portray Joe Biden’s eventual victory as unquestionable.

On January 15, 2020, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced an assessment warning that foreign adversaries could compromise U.S. election infrastructure in the coming presidential election, which has just been declassified. The memo specifically called out Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other non-state actors. Analysts did not claim they had evidence of a specific plot to alter votes nationwide, but they did say the threat was real, technically plausible, and serious enough that senior intelligence officials personally briefed President Trump at the White House in February 2020. 

What worried analysts most was not some Hollywood-style rewrite of every ballot cast in America. “We assess that centralized election-related data repositories, such as voter registration databases, pollbooks, and official election websites, are most vulnerable to exploitation, and adversaries could use access to these systems to disrupt election processes,” the NIC assessment warned. 

Intelligence analysts believed vote tabulators and reporting systems had weaknesses, especially machines without paper backups. Despite this, they judged it would be hard for foreign adversaries to change the certified national outcome through direct machine compromise alone. That was never the same as saying the systems were secure in any ordinary sense. It meant large-scale outcome manipulation looked difficult, while localized disruption and perception management looked much easier. 

Despite the warnings of threats, after the election, senior officials pushed the opposite narrative, assuring Americans that 2020 had been a model of resilience.

In mid-November 2020, the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council’s executive committee issued the now-famous statement declaring that “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” Chris Krebs, then running the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), later testified that he approved the statement and regarded it as the consensus view of the election-security community. That tidy line proved politically useful. It also sat awkwardly beside an internal intelligence record showing that multiple foreign actors had the capacity to exploit the very systems officials were publicly celebrating.

Porter, who prepared the January 2020 memo in his role overseeing cyber intelligence, says the contradiction was not an accident. “What is shocking is how uncontroversial some of these findings are to professionals—it is no secret that China and Iran compromise election equipment for a variety of intelligence purposes, nor was it controversial at the time that these systems had technical vulnerabilities,” he said. He goes further, alleging that bureaucratic and political considerations shaped what the public was allowed to know. “Every agency concurred on these findings, but because it was seen as potentially aiding the President’s reelection campaign, there was an active effort to damage him politically by refusing to share the declassified report with the public.”

Another way to put it was that the truth would have undermined faith in Joe Biden’s eventual victory. That is the heart of the whistleblower claim. 

According to Porter, Trump personally ordered the information declassified because he believed election integrity demanded it. But Porter said that CIA leadership refused to release it.

“The President of the United States personally ordered this information declassified and shared with the public because he thought election integrity was so important to our country. Despite this, CIA leaders at the time refused to release the declassified report,” he said. He also alleges the resistance did not end there. “Years later, when he was reelected, CIA went so far as to claim that the report had never been declassified. Even the record of its declassification had been removed from the system,” he said. Porter describes that as an extraordinary breach of normal intelligence practice, adding, “It is important for people to recognize that this is not normal behavior by the Intelligence Community—most officers would never do something like this.”

 Intelligence reports later concluded that China gained access to voter registration databases in multiple states before the election. A confidential FBI counterintelligence source also reported in summer 2020 that Beijing was attempting to interfere to aid Biden, including through a scheme involving fake U.S. driver’s licenses shipped into the country. Those reports did not become part of the public understanding in real time. Iranian hackers were not indicted until November 2021. Chinese penetration of voter data emerged publicly only after documents surfaced in March 2026. By then, the “most secure in history” line had already hardened into civic catechism.

The intelligence community’s inspector general, Christopher Fox, has opened a full investigation into whether Porter’s warnings were buried and whether he faced retaliation for pressing agencies to follow Trump’s declassification order. That review arrives alongside earlier findings from the intelligence community’s analytic ombudsman, who concluded in January 2021 that some analysts downplayed China’s role because of their disdain for Trump and reluctance to bolster his China policy.

None of this proves that foreign actors changed the 2020 outcome through hacked machines. But it tells us that senior officials knew election systems had meaningful vulnerabilities, but went out of their way to sell to the public a more politically convenient story.

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All The Dream-Houses Of The Left

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny.

Pseudo-Heroes

It is difficult to determine whether the bizarro worldview of the current Democrat-media nexus can simply be attributed to either its generic Trump Derangement Syndrome or the attendant Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner obsessive/compulsive disorder. But the crazy world of the Left increasingly bears scant resemblance to reality.

In this alternate universe, Eric Swalwell was a liberal icon and invaluable asset for years, though admittedly a bit randy and occasionally a serial sexual predator—a fact that the man himself made little effort to hide.

Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was, at last, the Left’s “real thing,” the white working-class liberal stiff who could win back the hoi polloi—although he couldn’t get his story straight on whether his Nazi tattoo was an accident or supposed proof that he was brainwashed into Nazism by the toxic US military.

Tim Walz was also hailed as the Left’s Mr. Everyman, a truck-driving street fighter, although he is now in anti-American socialist Spain, at a time of war, libeling his own country and American soldiers as being in the service of a fascist cause.

Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly a mere eccentric autodidact, wannabe insider, and generous party host, though a bit too eager to use his girls to buy his way into liberal academic and intellectual circles.

Sam Bankman-Fried was a lovable genius gadfly, a billionaire slob, but with a big and timely checkbook for radical causes.

Jussie Smollett was to be the next George Floyd rallying cry, if only his ridiculous lies were not so ridiculous.

And George Floyd—multi-felon, ex-convict, past home invader who once stuck a pistol in a woman’s stomach, arrested while passing counterfeit bills, high on drugs, and resisting arrest—became the innocent martyr who died at the hands of diabolical, murderous police and set America afire.

Erasing Joe Biden

Along with such a pantheon, somehow the Democrat borg also fantasizes that the historic legacy of the Biden years has been squandered by Trump—as if the country suffers from collective amnesia.

But any sane person knows that Biden served as a waxen effigy, puppeteered by the radical Left to serve as a moderate veneer over the most radical agenda in modern memory.

In just four years, Biden’s handlers obliterated the southern border, admitting 10–12 million unvetted aliens, including an estimated 500,000 criminals, apparently as a demographic booster shot for their otherwise unpopular agendas.

Almost daily, we read of Americans assaulted, raped, and murdered by illegal aliens—stories almost always smothered in the left-wing media.

Rampant multibillion-dollar theft of US entitlement money by foreign nationals or recently naturalized citizens from Minneapolis to Los Angeles is also daily fare. The nihilistic Biden years of open borders have cost the nation untold amounts in blood and treasure. Yet the Left’s answer is to attack ICE officers attempting to enforce federal immigration law.

Stranger still is the contrast between protesters who seem to be mostly affluent, suburban white women. The latter, for some reason, seem to be free between 9 and 5 on workdays, to spit on, scream at, and obstruct ICE officers—whose ranks are working-class and 45 percent non-white.

All this is called progressivism: impeding the deportation of violent criminals who prey on poor neighborhoods, lacking the security that the protesters take for granted in their own protected enclaves.

The Biden puppeteers enriched and empowered theocratic Iran by lifting sanctions. They did little to nothing when Iranian proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen serially attacked US installations and ships.

The Biden years saw near-record gas prices, 9 percent hyperinflation, all-time high crime spikes, and a president who even Democrats now admit was non compos mentis. He was toppled as a candidate for reelection by a coup of Democrat backroom politicos, but only after a disastrous debate. In his place, they and donors appointed a mostly inert Kamala Harris as nominee, who, as a 2020 presidential candidate, had failed to win a single delegate.

Iran Fantasies

The Left has created another fantasy world out of the current six-week Iran war.

When Trump warned on a Monday that the Iranian regime might face terrible punishment for its continued drone and missile attacks, he was libeled as a modern Nazi exterminator, hellbent on mass death. When on Tuesday Iran relented and asked for negotiations, Trump suddenly became smeared as a TACO naif, apparently too eager for peace. Each day, the Left tries to think up a new argument for American defeat, even as Iran suffers more one-sided damage. Their idea is to embolden Iran to hold out, in hopes that Trump—under constant left-wing assault, international pressure to lower gas prices, and his own restive Congressional allies—will fold and then be trashed by the Left as a TACO again.

More preposterously, the Left has peddled the fantasy that Trump’s demands for Iran to surrender its nuclear material (mostly hyper-enriched during the Biden administration) copied the Obama Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called Iran deal.

But who could deny that, under Obama, the deal empowered Iran to rearm even more rapidly with lifted sanctions, nocturnal cash transfers, and the unfreezing of its assets?

The frenzied armament and empowerment of Iran either terrified or impressed the Obama administration enough to hatch the wacky idea of envisioning a Shiite crescent of Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, and Gaza. Such terrorist regimes would “balance” the moderate Arab states and democratic Israel in “creative tension.”

And the message to Iran was not nuclear disarmament, but slow, graduated nuclear armament, albeit of the sort to be completed during an administration to come.

In contrast, Trump’s deal was with an obliterated, prostrate Iranian military. The US fleet was in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and the blockade of Iran. More than 300 US combat aircraft could render Iran a medieval mess with impunity, should it persist in its terrorist agendas.

Begging a fully armed and defiant Iran merely to postpone its acquisition of a bomb is not the equivalent of dictating to a flattened Iran a series of demands that, if unmet, will lead to its veritable destruction—after it had already suffered the loss of a half-century investment in a half-trillion-dollar arsenal and military infrastructure.

In the surreal left-wing narrative, the more Iran lost its air force, navy, most of its missiles and drones, its command and control, its subterranean arsenals, its nuclear production facilities, and its factories that turn out weapons of war, the more the Democrat-media nexus declared the war lost and the Americans—after six weeks and 13 lost lives—to be trapped in a quagmire analogous to the war in Vietnam (eight years of war with 58,000 dead, 150,000 wounded).

Impeaching Pete Hegseth?

Examine another fantasy: the charade of a Democrat effort to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on silly charges of supposedly aiding an unauthorized war against Iran, war crimes, reckless handling of classified information, obstruction of Congressional oversight, abuse of power, politicization of the military, and conduct bringing disrepute to the US and its armed forces.

Each of these writs is either false or more aptly applies to the Biden and prior Democrat administrations.

Note that Hegseth, in a single year, fixed the years-long crisis of falling enlistment that he inherited. He has now even exceeded recruitment targets by emphasizing that soldiers should concentrate on combat effectiveness and not fixate on race, sex, or sexual orientation.

His Pentagon oversaw the summer 2025 destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities (with no fatalities), the military extradition of Nicolás Maduro and the recalibration of a once-rogue Venezuela (with no casualties), and the current six-week war that had destroyed the military capability of a once-feared, 93 million-person theocratic Iran (with 13 fatalities so far).

Hegseth has rebooted procurement with emphasis on far more excellent weapons rather than too few superb ones. Compare that to the prior secretary, Lloyd Austin, who went medically AWOL without informing the White House that he was incapacitated for 3–4 days in the ICU. He oversaw the Pentagon’s historic misadventure in Afghanistan and the constant attacks on US soldiers in the Middle East that went unanswered and emboldened Iran’s terrorist proxies. No Republican called for his impeachment.

The war in Iran is not “unauthorized”; it has not exceeded the 90-day limit under the War Powers Act. However, Barack Obama’s seven-month unauthorized bombing of Libya, under the Democrats’ current logic, really was a “war crime,” as was his “unauthorized,” months-long predator assassination campaign on the Afghan border that killed 500, including four US citizens.

The Congress that wants to impeach Hegseth should extend its gaze to Joe Biden’s 30-year unlawful possession of unsecured and classified documents and his use of them with an unauthorized ghostwriter who subsequently destroyed subpoenaed tapes with impunity.

The military has been depoliticized. That is, it no longer serves as a fast-track laboratory for the Left to try out its radical theories—transgenderism, racial tribalism, and unconstitutional racial prejudiced preferences.

Resuscitating Lawfare?

Finally, for over a decade, the Left has waged a coordinated, often extralegal effort to destroy the campaigns and presidency of Donald Trump. What lawfare did the Left not sanction?

The first impeachment hinging on the hearsay evidence on an unnamed pseudo-whistleblower who connived with the prevaricator Adam Schiff—with the acquiescence of a partisan inspector general?

The Russian collusion hoax orchestrated by the past and present Obama FBI and CIA?

The laptop disinformation campaign, to use the government to censor the news and promulgate the lie of a Russian-concocted Hunter Biden laptop on the eve of an election?

The unconstitutional effort to de-ballot Trump in 25 blue states?

The SWAT-like, staged raid on the then-ex-president’s home at Mar-a-Lago to find some 100 classified documents from more than 11,000 confiscated?

The pervasion of the legal system to wage four years of lawfare in five civil and criminal courtrooms?

Despite all that, we are now warned by Democrats like Susan Rice that when the Left regains power, they are going to restart their vendettas to punish their enemies.

An unbalanced politico, James Carville, advises the Democrats to keep quiet about their real plans upon returning to power: to pack the court to destroy the 157-year, nine-justice Supreme Court; to end the 66-year, 50-state Union with two new blue “states,” Puerto Rico and Washington, DC—all to obtain in an instant four new left-wing senators; and to kill off the 220-year-old Senate filibuster.

Carville is upset that the decade-long lawfare against Trump failed. So now he advocates expanding the warping of the justice system to charge Trump’s family and friends.

What is the one constant theme in this alternate left-wing universe?

No Democrat outlines an immigration agenda, a way to round up Biden’s criminal illegal alien entrants, an energy plan, a way to balance the budget, an anti-corruption agenda to stop the multibillion-dollar looting of the federal and state welfare systems, or a new strategic plan abroad. Instead, the party creates alternate realities that demand changing the system itself rather than working within it to appeal to the American voter.

Living with daily delusions and shrieking at Trump demons raging in their collective heads is no way to run a country.

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Things Get Interesting-er

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“It is one thing for the people (of Iran) to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now impotent incompetents and buffoons.”

- VDH

Wednesday the US / Iran ceasefire expires. It has been an interesting two weeks. The US used it to negotiate an end to hostilities, resupply our ships in the Arabian Sea, do maintenance on our ships and warplanes, dismantle Iran’s banking conduits, and blockade Hormuz to shut down the regime’s remaining income flow. The Iranians used it to jump up and down and go woo-woo-woo. They also tried to dig out the entrances of their bombed caves and tunnels to unearth whatever’s left of their hidden missile launchers. Our satellites watched everything they did and mapped the coordinates.

Negotiations? So far, not fruitful, if termination of hostilities and surrender of Iran’s uranium is the goal. We’re not even sure the Iranians we’re negotiating with have any real authority to make a deal. Iran’s government at this point is a hash of conflicting factions: the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), which is a large Jihadi mafia that happens to own half of Iran’s economy and controls its advanced missile and drone weaponry; the regular Army (Artesh) which would theoretically defend against a ground invasion, but otherwise just stands by; and the civilian government represented by President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibef — none of whom seem to hold any real decision-making power.

America’s negotiators, led by Veep Vance along with Messrs. Witkoff and Kushner, will land back in Islamabad, Pakistan, today (Monday, April 20).

Our deal is still on the table.

It’s pretty straightforward:

  • the aforementioned uranium plus a twenty-year halt of nuclear activities with no path toward a weapon;

  • full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz;

  • an end to Iranian support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis;

  • phased-out sanctions and access to frozen assets;

  • and cessation of hostilities.

Events over the weekend argue that Iran is not finished playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes.

They tried to run the Hormuz blockade on Sunday with an incoming cargo ship, the Iranian-flagged M/V Touska. The USS destroyer Spruance, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, blew a hole clean through its engine room and then seized the vessel. Its cargo remains undisclosed for now.

Iran claims that it has closed the Strait of Hormuz. The US said it was already closed via the US blockade (we closed it harder). Iran can’t surreptitiously move any oil out to sell to China or run supplies into the country. Iran will lose about $500-million a day and China will lose the majority of its oil imports. China will jump up and down and go woo-woo-woo over that, while the IRGC will lose its last remaining income stream, meaning no pay for anyone. Let’s see if that prompts an attitude change.

If Iran can’t move its oil, it will soon reach the limit of its oil storage capacity, meaning it will have to shut down its oil wells.

If that happens, the hydrology is such that water invasion of the underground strata will permanently damage the oil fields. Iran is between a rock and a squishy place.

That might be enough to force a deal in the hours ahead.

President Trump has made it clear that the time for Iran jerking-around the US is over.

So then, it’s back to Power Station and Bridge Day (blowing them up).

That would be extremely unfortunate for the ordinary Iranian people.

They are unarmed and helpless to resist the maniacs of the IRGC who would allow Power Station and Bridge Day to happen, who, in effect, don’t really care about the ordinary people of Iran.

However, the regular Iranian army, the Artesh, does have weapons (they are the army and armies are generally armed).

Perhaps they will use them to put the insane jihadi IRGC out of business.

After all, the Artesh’s mission is defense on-the-ground of the Iranian homeland, and just now the biggest threat to Iran is the IRGC.

I guess we’ll have to wait on that and watch.

Meanwhile, interesting developments back on America’s home front: All of a sudden, pieces are moving around the game-board of the ongoing and long-running color revolution that the Trump administration is trying to stop.

By color revolution I mean the Democratic Party and its Deep State cadres’ efforts to transform our country into a matrix of crypto-Marxist racketeering operations — and to evade responsibility for the damage already perpetrated dating back to at least 2016.

The FBI Director, Kash Patel, said explicitly on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning news show that his agency has amassed hard evidence of fraud in the 2020 elections and to expect arrests presently.

(Hmmmm, maybe not so “baseless” after all.)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has prepared to move Colorado political prisoner Tina Peters out of the state lockup and under protection in a federal facility.

It is rumored that the move is due to Ms. Peters’ imminent transformation into a witness for a federal case against Colorado election officials.

AG Blanche has also hired Joseph diGenova, former US Attorney for the DC District, as an assisting counsel to US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones in the Southern District of Florida, who, as you know, is running a grand jury down there.

Mr. diGenova, 81, has mapped the events and time-lines necessary to make a solid “grand conspiracy” case against the well-known posse of color revolutionists who perpetrated a series of hoaxes, frauds, and malicious prosecutions on our country and on thousands of innocent citizens (including the current occupant of the White House and his lawyers and associates). Like I said, things get interesting-er.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/20/2026 - 16:20
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