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Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, “In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon if Iran had decided to do so. There were indirect negotiations that the Biden administration did, but it went nowhere. So when President Trump argues that he did what no other president would, is it just simply that the bill was coming due and it fell on his watch?”

“I do think there’s a certain element to that, and that’s why I was supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein replied. “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”

Hochstein, for the record, is an Israel-born IDF veteran who reportedly played a major role in the Biden administration encouraging Israel’s horrific bombardment of Lebanon in September 2024. And his narrative that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “may have had to happen” under a theoretical second Biden term is false.

In March of last year, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khomeini [sic] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” contradicting both the claims of President Trump and of Antony Blinken the year before.

But even if you accept that Iran was a nuclear risk, there was nothing stopping the Biden administration from simply restarting the nuclear deal that the Obama administration secured with Tehran in 2015. The JCPOA was working fine while it was in place; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to war with Iran, and the Biden administration refused to reverse this move because they wanted war too.

[Embedded tweet by Branco Marcetic -- https://xcancel.com/BMarchetich/status/2046284223187726497]

Democratic partisans have been pointing to Trump's war for weeks to chide Hasan Piker and anyone else they blame (read: everyone but themselves) for losing in 2024. But it turns out the Biden admin was planning to attack Iran if they won a 2nd term

The Democrats were beating the drums of war for Iran well ahead of the 2024 election. Here’s an excerpt from the official 2024 Democratic Party platform explicitly attacking Trump for not going to war with Iran in his first term:

“All of this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency. In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.”

Kamala Harris, who controversially replaced the dementia-addled Biden as the Democratic candidate late in the race, labeled Iran the number one enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that Trump’s depravity in Iran proves everyone should support Democrats, but it’s clear the Democratic Party is just the more polite-looking face on the same evil power structure.

The war with Iran was always planned. Analysts like Brian Berletic and Richard Medhurst have been laying out solid arguments that this American war is more about attacking the economic and energy interests of Russia and China in a last-ditch effort to retain planetary hegemony than it is about assisting Israel. This places the United States on a dangerous trajectory toward increasingly hostile escalations between nuclear-armed powers.

These moves were planned years in advance, and would have been rolled out regardless of what impotent meat puppet happened to be wheeled into office in January 2025.

You don’t get to vote out an empire. Whether or not the US will continue working to dominate the planet will never be on the ballot. We will continue seeing reckless US wars of immense human consequence until the empire falls, or until the American people bring the revolutionary change to their country that the world so desperately needs.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

It continues...

What are they saying, essentially?

They basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists a "they" - the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior - and a "we" who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir's product catalog the civilizational cure).

Look at point 4 for instance. They write that "the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would "free and democratic societies" (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to "prevail"? Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there?

Nowhere in the document do they defend this assumption: it's simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument.

But it's the entire ballgame: if civilizations and political systems can coexist - as they largely have, imperfectly but recognizably, throughout history - then the entire case they make in the document evaporates.

In fact one can argue that, studying history, the big problem was not that civilizations couldn't coexist: it was that, from time to time, one of them decided that others were inferior, threatening, or standing in the way of its rightful expansion - and acted accordingly.

So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others.

The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it's arguing for reviving them!

Or take point 15: they explicitly call for the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and an end to "Japanese pacifism". Basically undoing one of the foundational settlements of the post-WW2 order.

I mean, think about the insanity of this for a second: a private company - unelected, answerable only to its shareholders - is casually proposing to overturn the security architecture of two continents. A settlement that took a world war, and tens of millions of dead to establish.

Why do they propose this? There is obviously a commercial motivation: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets.

But the more troubling answer is that point 15 fits into the ideological project the rest of the manifesto lays out - a civilizational contest requires a consolidated Western bloc, and pacifist members are a liability in such a contest.

So taking a step back we now have what's the most influential defense-software company in the world, with its code deeply embedded in all the machinery of Western states - intelligence agencies, militaries, police forces, welfare systems, border controls - openly outing itself as an ideological project.

They're effectively saying "our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours."

Because, worryingly, that's what they CAN do. Palantir software is all about basically telling states: "these are your threats, these are the people and groups to watch, these are the patterns that matter, these are the targets that warrant action."

For instance the DGSI - the French intelligence services - use Palantir (see: x.com/RnaudBertrand/…): do you honestly think the software is warning them about, say, the NSA tapping the phones of French government officials? About the weaponization of US extraterritorial law against French companies? Did it warn them about the AUKUS ambush that cost France a sixty-billion-euro submarine contract? Obviously not.

And that's exactly what the manifesto is saying. They've positioned themselves as advocates of Western civilizational unity, so their software can't undermine it. The ideological position and the product roadmap have to align, or the whole project falls apart.

This makes their software not only deeply dangerous for the world as a whole but also, almost by definition, for any country using it. When it comes to your security as a state, it is primordial you base yourself on truth as opposed to ideology. The entire point of an intelligence agency is to tell its government what is true, not what your so-called "allies'" defense contractors would like you to see.

A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda.

The conclusion couldn't be more obvious. Every government still running Palantir software in its intelligence, security, or public-service infrastructure needs to start ripping it out, now! Lest they want to be embarked on the delusional and deeply destructive clash-of-civilizations crusade Palantir has now openly committed itself to.

More than 70% of displaced Palestinian households in the occupied West Bank identified threats to women and children — particularly sexualised violence — as the decisive reason for leaving their communities, according to a report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, led by the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The report documents how conflict-related sexual violence has become a systematic tool of forced displacement in Area C, operating within a broader coercive environment of settler attacks, movement restrictions, and persistent impunity.

Based on 83 in-depth interviews and 12 focus group discussions across 10 Palestinian communities, it found at least 16 documented cases of sexual violence attributed to Israeli settlers and soldiers — a figure researchers say is significantly higher in reality, as survivors rarely disclose incidents due to stigma, fear of retaliation, and the threat of further targeting by Israeli forces.

Among the documented abuses: ▪️ Settlers attempting to sexually assault a blindfolded man with a broomstick in Wadi al-Seeq, with perpetrators circulating images of the abuse ▪️ A woman subjected to a full-body naked inspection by female Israeli soldiers, with derogatory comments and touching of intimate areas ▪️ Settlers walking naked between Bedouin shelters before a community fled overnight ▪️removed threats made while settlers stalked women walking to latrines ▪️ Drones hovering outside bedroom windows and cameras directed at beds

Key findings on the consequences of displacement: ▪️ 84% of households experienced settler violence alongside systemic coercive pressures ▪️ 87% of women who experienced forcible transfer lost all sources of income ▪️ 90% of women reported increased psychological stress and trauma ▪️ 40% of affected children lost access to education ▪️ 92% of displaced households lost access to grazing and agricultural land

Since January 2023, more than 5,600 Palestinians including 2,600 children have been displaced across 107 communities. In the first three months of 2026 alone, 1,697 Palestinians were displaced — already surpassing all of 2025. Settler attacks last year reached their highest recorded level since OCHA began monitoring in 2006.

The United States has quietly used the current US-Iran ceasefire to reposition critical THAAD and Patriot missile defence batteries across Jordan, immediately transforming a temporary operational pause into a wider contest over regional survivability. High-definition Chinese satellite imagery released on April 19 has exposed the new American deployments, demonstrating that even during a fragile ceasefire, large missile defence systems remain visible to increasingly sophisticated foreign surveillance networks. The redeployment carries consequences extending far beyond Jordan because it reveals how the United States, Iran, and China are now competing simultaneously across missile warfare, operational concealment, and space-enabled intelligence collection. The movement followed Iranian strikes during March that damaged the previous THAAD deployment near Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, forcing Washington to reconsider whether its earlier defensive layout remained operationally viable. The American battery originally entered Jordan during late January, reflecting growing concern that Iranian ballistic missiles and armed drones could threaten US facilities throughout the Levant and Gulf.

The current two-week ceasefire, announced on April 8 and brokered by Pakistan, provided the first sufficiently low-risk opportunity for the Pentagon to move sensitive launchers, radars, generators, and supporting logistics equipment. Chinese commercial imagery companies rapidly identified the new deployment areas, publishing annotated photographs showing dispersed launchers, support vehicles, radar arrays, and freshly prepared defensive positions near existing Jordanian military facilities. The released images appeared to show both THAAD launchers linked with AN/TPY-2 radar components and Patriot batteries operating alongside AN/MPQ-65 engagement radars and supporting command vehicles. The resulting public disclosure has intensified concern inside Western defence circles because the imagery emerged from commercial Chinese providers rather than Beijing’s more capable classified military reconnaissance architecture. No American official has publicly confirmed or denied the redeployment, yet the visual evidence corresponds closely with earlier base layouts, known radar signatures, previous launcher configurations, and established American force posture patterns. The exposure of the new Jordanian sites also indicates that future American missile defence deployments across the Middle East may require far greater mobility, deception, camouflage, and electronic concealment than previously considered necessary. For Washington, the Jordan episode has therefore become more than a regional force-protection issue because it demonstrates that every future crisis will unfold beneath continuous Chinese overhead observation.

Ceasefire Used to Repair a Damaged Defensive Shield

The United States appears to have treated the ceasefire primarily as an operational breathing space, allowing damaged missile defence infrastructure inside Jordan to be repaired, replaced, dispersed, and reintroduced without immediate attack. Iranian retaliation during early March reportedly struck the original THAAD site, leaving visible debris, burn marks, and apparent damage surrounding the battery’s principal radar installation. That earlier deployment had been concentrated around Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where the THAAD system protected American aircraft, logistics hubs, and command facilities supporting operations throughout the broader Middle East. Because THAAD relies heavily upon its AN/TPY-2 radar, any successful strike against that component can significantly degrade the entire battery’s detection, tracking, and interception effectiveness.

...

New Positions Suggest a Shift Toward Dispersed Survivability

The newly visible deployment areas appear deliberately selected to reduce vulnerability against ballistic missiles, armed drones, cruise missiles, and loitering munitions approaching from several directions simultaneously. Rather than returning the systems to their previous, easily identifiable locations, American forces appear to have positioned launchers closer to terrain features and existing infrastructure. The fresh layout also seems more widely dispersed, making it harder for Iranian planners to destroy the entire defensive architecture through a single coordinated strike package. Several launchers appear separated from their associated radar systems, indicating an effort to complicate enemy targeting and reduce the likelihood of simultaneous catastrophic losses.

this also shows the problem with dispersal - there's a reason those launchers come together in a package with the radar systems, separate them and while they may be more survivable, they'll also be less effective

...

Chinese Satellite Imagery Has Exposed a New Battlefield Reality

The Chinese imagery that exposed the redeployment reportedly originated from commercial providers using sub-meter resolution optical satellites supported by artificial intelligence-based analytical software. Those systems can automatically identify launchers, radar arrays, logistics vehicles, roads, prepared sites, and camouflage patterns before rapidly distributing annotated products across social media platforms. The imagery released publicly on April 19 reportedly came from firms associated with MizarVision, which draws upon commercial satellite constellations and automated geospatial interpretation tools. Even those publicly available systems are not considered China’s most advanced overhead surveillance assets, making the episode strategically significant far beyond Jordan. China’s classified military reconnaissance network reportedly offers far greater revisit rates, higher resolution, improved persistence, and substantially stronger all-weather observation capability through combined optical and radar satellites. That means large missile defence systems such as THAAD and Patriot can increasingly be tracked almost continuously, even when deployed rapidly during periods of crisis. The Jordan redeployment therefore illustrates how former assumptions about operational secrecy are rapidly becoming obsolete under modern commercial and military satellite surveillance. American forces may still conceal smaller mobile systems, yet large fixed assets now appear increasingly vulnerable to immediate discovery, analysis, and public dissemination.

Beijing Gains Strategic Leverage Without Direct Involvement

China’s decision to allow the imagery to circulate publicly adds a strategic signalling dimension extending well beyond the immediate question of American missile defence positioning. By exposing the redeployment during a ceasefire, Beijing effectively demonstrated that it can observe, interpret, and publicise sensitive American military activity almost in real time. That capability provides China with indirect leverage because it allows Beijing to influence regional perceptions without deploying forces or issuing direct political threats. The imagery also strengthens China’s narrative that the United States can no longer assume information dominance across the Middle East or Indo-Pacific. For regional states watching the confrontation, the satellite disclosures reinforce perceptions that China now possesses a rapidly expanding intelligence and reconnaissance advantage. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other American security partners may therefore begin questioning whether future US deployments can remain concealed during a prolonged conflict. The episode also creates potential deterrence complications because visible missile defence positions can become easier targets for adversaries planning future precision strikes. China therefore gains strategic value from merely revealing the deployments, even without participating directly in the ongoing confrontation between Washington and Tehran.

Fragile Ceasefire Masks Continued Preparations for Future Conflict

The American redeployment strongly suggests that Washington does not believe the current ceasefire will produce a lasting reduction in regional military tensions. Instead, the repositioning indicates that US commanders expect hostilities could resume quickly if negotiations collapse over Lebanon, the Strait of Hormuz, or additional Iranian missile activity. The movement of THAAD and Patriot systems into less exposed locations therefore represents a hedge against renewed conflict rather than preparation for withdrawal.

...

The redeployment also suggests that Washington is preparing for future attacks specifically targeting radar systems, launch vehicles, and support infrastructure rather than only personnel. The most important lesson from the episode is therefore not merely that THAAD and Patriot moved inside Jordan, but that every future movement may now occur under nearly total overhead visibility.

...

• Kati - a northern suburb of the capital Bamako, control over which would have allowed the jihadists to attack the capital. And at the same time, success here would have allowed them to tie up the main forces of our "African Corps" and local security forces (not allowing them to react to events in the east and north of the country).
• Sevare - the most important junction of strategic roads in the center of Mali, control over which would have given the militants the opportunity to cut the country into separate parts and thereby disunite the government forces.
• In Gao is a strategically important bridge over the Niger River, control over which would have allowed to control any maneuvers of forces in this part of the country, and in the neighboring city of Bourem is an important junction of roads. And joint control over these areas would also have given the opponents of the official authorities a significant tactical advantage.
• And finally, Kidal - a major outpost of the authorities in the northeastern, desert part of the country, populated by Tuaregs.

And as I said above, today in the morning a simultaneous attack from all sides began according to a clearly coordinated and well-organized plan. And by lunchtime, all Ukrainian quasi-military information outlets (and we must understand that in Mali, mercenaries from Ukraine are working as instructors) were flooded with victory reports, as they, together with NATO, in one day threw the Russians out of Mali. Who, a few hours later, shut up and are now silent like fish (trying to understand how it happened that literally in a few hours the "victory" suddenly turned into a "betrayal"). Meanwhile, our units of the "African Corps", whose main base was subjected to an unexpected morning attack, went on the counteroffensive in the area of the capital and by the evening completely cleared out individual militants who had broken into the capital and drove out the enemy from Kati. And the second wave of attackers, the so-called "second echelon", which began to develop the success, having seen that the first attack had faltered and turned into a beating of the attackers, turned around and fled. At this moment, as of this evening, the day in general remained with us. Practically everywhere we managed to inflict a defeat on the enemy, and the count of his losses (killed, wounded and captured) is already in the hundreds. If not thousands (who will now count them and collect them from the desert). Importantly, the local defense forces, which our military have been teaching for so long, put up serious resistance, and despite the losses, did not abandon the positions they occupied. Unfortunately, our "African Corps" also suffered losses today. But given the scale of the battles, this was inevitable. God rest the guys. To be a warrior is to live forever!!!

guess they tried pulling another Syria, but it didn't quite work out this time. although the situation is still developing, so we'll see

https://xcancel.com/rybar_africa/status/2048145985529127013

FLA separatists and Al-Qaeda-linked JNIM are continuing attacks across Mali - from Kidal to Bamako's outskirts. The alliance of France-backed nationalists and radical islamists signals dangerous new phase. But Mali is not Syria. A nationwide collapse of defense has been avoided. At least this time. Key events by 21:00 GMT:

• The attack on Bamako began at 5 A.M. with a suicide bombing near the defense minister's residence. The offensive has now been repelled, the minister is alive, and FAMa are conducting a counteroffensive, pursuing scattered militants in the suburbs with the support of the local population.
• The terrorist "coalition" main success was the capture of Kidal. Indeed, FAMa and the African Corps hold a key stronghold in the south.
• In Gao, FLA and JNIM attempted to infiltrate the city from the north. By evening, most of the attacks were repelled.
• In Sévaré, militants attempted to enter the city disguised as civilians, but failed. This was followed by a motorcycle assault, which was repelled by Russian troops.

https://xcancel.com/rybar_africa/status/2048062940910104586

🇲🇱🇷🇺Bamako [capital of Mali] dismisses most of the info as fake news: no new militant footage for hours, confirmed holds on all strategic towns, including Gao. The situation at African Corps bases is also stable. Separatist and JNIM accounts flood X with recycled Syria and Sudan clips. Western media, as usual, are picking up this nonsense. Now look at real "success" of militants👇

[picture of dead militant]