I've heard unsubstantiated rumours from right-wing bloggers and yootooberz that Trump was supposed to have joined Israel's attack on Iran in a substantial way last June, but that Charlie Kirk went to the White House and talked him out of it. Ah! Here it is: "Charlie Kirk urged Trump in Oval Office to avoid war with Iran, Carlson says"
Slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk had privately pressed President Donald Trump in the Oval Office not to launch a war against Iran, even while donors aligned with him opposed that stance, US right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson said.
Kirk was one of the only people close to Trump who raised the risks of escalation, Carlson said at the Megyn Kelly Show on Friday.
“He went to the Oval Office and said, ‘Sir, I totally understand and think Iran’s really bad. But a war with Iran is something that could really hurt our country,’” Carlson said.
He added that Kirk showed him “intense” donor messages criticizing his position but argued he stuck to it because “he was for doing the right and wise and difficult thing.”
Kirk, founder of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA, was killed by an unknown assassin on Wednesday. He had expressed mixed views on Iran over the years.
In 2020, after the US killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani on Trump’s order, he warned against deeper involvement, saying: “Iran is an evil regime … Critical we remain restrained and disciplined against another endless, reckless war in the region. NO WAR with Iran!”
In the midst of Israel's 12-day war against Iran in June, and before the US airstrikes, Kirk cautioned that Iran’s size, history, and resilience made open war a dangerous prospect.
“They were a great power for a thousand years. Not even the Romans could defeat Persia,” he told Newsmax on June 20.
Yet his stance shifted when Trump ordered strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, known as Operation Midnight Hammer. While other conservative allies questioned the wisdom of the move, Kirk applauded it.
"America stands with President Trump," he wrote on X. "President Trump has been navigating this quite well in fact, he could potentially declare victory," he added in a video testimonial posted online.
This is a little different from the narrative that I just heard some YouTuber mention last night. That report from Iran International says that Kirk started out opposing attacking Iran but later fell in line when Trump disregarded his advice. But let's remember what happened last June. Israel unilaterally attacked Iran on June 13th, while Trump's envoys were negotiating with Iran in Qatar. Iran's ability to strike back came as a shock to the Israelis and the world. Trump left Israel to take it for nine days, when he launched his strike on Iran's nuclear sites, where he claimed to have obliterated them. Iran struck a US base in retaliation and then a ceasefire was called. But don't forget, Iran warned Trump that it was going to attack that base.
So, let's play this out: Israel attacks Iran. Trump did not want to attack Iran. Charlie Kirk was one of the few who Trump listens to who advised him not to attack Iran. (Other isolationists, like Tucker Carlson, are becoming leaders of a rising trend among US-American conservatives.) Iran's response shocks Israel who ask Trump to come in on their behalf. Trump launches his air-strikes (that most people are convinced did NOT have any significant impact on Iran's nuclear program) and declares victory. Iran goes through with the formality of the strike on the Qatari base. Allows Israel to pretend it had to be "pressured" into accepting the ceasefire it was, in fact, begging for.
So, while acknowledging that I wasn't a fly on the wall in the Oval Office, and therefore can't say with any certainty what he was saying and thinking and hearing and discussing all this time, ... that I can't pretend to have any secret scuttle-butt about Trump's relations with Israel, Netanyahu, domestic zionists, etc., ... I will maintain that Trump had brains enough to know that attacking Iran might be a disaster, that he tried to avoid it, but that Netanyahu forced his hand.
Charlie Kirk was one of the few people who warned him about the dangers of attacking Iran. But when Trump DID attack Iran last June, he praised him. BECAUSE Trump's attack was performative. Iran obviously understood this. Because we KNOW that Iran's attack on the US base in Qatar (the base that allowed the Israeli attack on Hamas negotiators) was arranged with Trump. Trump's bombing and Iran's retaliation were both Kabuki theatre. So, when Charlie Kirk went along with it, he had probably been informed about what the point of it was. Trump got to say that he'd "obliterated" Iran's nuclear weapons program. Iran got to both get its message across to Israel to smarten the fuck up and that it could be allowed (under the circumstances) to even attack a US base. And both Trump and Iran agreed to pretend that Netanyahu was only reluctantly agreeing to stop the hostilities, when really, he was begging for it. Charlie Kirk went along with this charade to try to end a process that could (and since HAS) seen the USA dragged into the most terrible war since Vietnam.
Is it at least possible that Trump is smart enough to know that saying that Iran's nuclear weapons program had been "obliterated" could have been a hint to Netanyahu to let it go? Or was it just his usual grandiose blustering? I'm going to say the former, simply for the sake of argument.
Is it at least possible that Kirk (knowing the true story) agreed to sell some of his own credibility with his followers to support Trump's desperate efforts to restrain Netanyahu?
There ARE different ways to tell this story. We don't know what was really going on behind the scenes. But I'm just playing out the narrative that while Trump hates Iran and is also a full-time idiot, racist, rapist asshole, ... he also isn't sure that if he attacks Iran it might go badly for him. But some years ago, when Trump was younger and his penis was more insistent, he liked to visit Jeffrey Epstein and help himself to one of the pubescent girls that Epstein always had lying around, and rape her. And Epstein had video recordings of these rapes. Which means that Mossad does. Which means that Netanyahu does.
So, acknowledging the truth of those writers I discussed two posts ago, about the continuities of US policy towards Iran from, Eisenhower to Trump, ... there are also individual idiosyncrasies. That's what I discussed in that post. The idiosyncrasies of various presidents within a continuous overall framework.
In his first term, Trump didn't start any new wars. He started the process of ending the useless war in Afghanistan. He fired weapons from ships and from the sky in support of wars that he inherited. Being a stupid man he almost started a war with Iran when he assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. But compared to his predecessors, and then with Biden, Trump could still advertise himself as a "peace president" when he ran for re-election. (The disgusting Democratic Party and its hopeless, cult-like supporters like to mock right-wingers who fell for Trump's lies about being for peace. They don't realize that all they're saying is that US-American voters can't have a genuine peace candidate. The idiots.)
I'm at the point in this post where I realize it's getting to be a long one and there are other things that I want to do. But this is a darned interesting topic and I want to get through it. There are bits and pieces of various topics below this paragraph that I'm going to try to quickly polish off. Just as a lot of the stuff written above was added to various half-finished paragraphs I started a couple of days ago. So, apologies if what follows feels even more hurried and incoherent than my usual output.
So, what I'm getting at, is that Trump is part of this growing white-nationalist isolationist "America First" movement. He genuinely believed that the "forever wars" of Clinton, bush II, Obama, and Biden, were stupid. But Trump is also a narcissist. A megalomaniac. A coward. And, importantly, someone who I'm 99.99% certain raped adolescent girls (as well as women) and whom Israeli intelligence has video evidence of these crimes. So, if zionists like the billionaire Adelson's want to give him money and political support so that he can (in his own deranged mind) be the Man-God on Earth, smashing enemies and taking over Venezuela's oil for his own personal benefit and brazenly starving Cuba's entire population, and insulting past presidents and current European leaders, and shaking down Arab monarchs for billions, and thinking that he'll "solve" Gaza for Israel by making it a gigantic beach resort for the world's wealthy, that he will personally own and profit from, ... he's happy to help them.
But even a maniac like Trump knows that attacking Iran is problematic.
I'm going to appear to be going off on a bit of a tangent here but it's valid. It fits. I know progressives, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who feel compelled to twist themselves up in knots to try to avoid sounding "antisemitic" when they criticize Israel. Most of my FIVE readers are Canadians. You're aware how Canadians (like most people) can get angrily defensive when their own country is being criticized. Jewish people have suffered centuries of persecution at the hands of European Christians. PART of the argument for a Jewish state was for there to be a place where Jews could feel safe. Even Jewish people who aren't committed supporters of Israel get their defences up when Israel is criticized, because, while they don't necessarily equate zionism with Judaism, they are aware that some criticism of Israel comes from antisemites.
But this understandable sentiment causes these Jewish people (and non-zionist/non-Jewish progressives) to imagine "antisemitism" in condemnations of Israel that AREN'T THERE and they find themselves providing cover for goddamned GENOCIDE out of narcissism, tribalism, paranoia, whatever.
In the same way, genuine antisemites (like, say CHARLIE KIRK, or Marjorie Taylor-Greene, or Candace Owens) are more able to condemn Israel's barbarism and to demand that the USA cease supporting, oh, I don't know, GENOCIDE, without worrying in the slightest about dotting every "i" and crossing every "t" to prove that they're not antisemitic.
I will get into the whole debate about "the tail wagging the dog" further down. Here I just want to say that people who genuinely believe that the tail is wagging the dog (like Charlie Kirk) won't apologize for saying out-loud that they believe that "The Jews" are using their money (actually, the money of hard-working, white, Christian, US-American taxpayers) to bribe and corrupt Washington (as they've "behind the scenes" bribed and corrupted and manipulated hapless Christian European leaders everywhere for centuries) to serve Israel's interests before the USA's interests.
Racists are often stupid people. Coarse, vulgar, brutal people. People who are incapable of grasping how terrible their violent fantasies are. Being callous, insensitive and stupid, they are, ACTUALLY, very capable of making temporary alliances with the people they despise in order to attack some other group of people. [Think of Ukrainian nazis letting the Jewish Volodymyr Zelensky be their president, and letting Russian nazis <who reject Putin's attempts to create a constitutional Russian identity that incorporates Russia's myriad ethnic groups> to fight on their side, even though they <stupidly> see Russians as sub-human.]
I have no doubt that Trump is such a person. He hates women and all non-white people. But he's a shallow, stupid man. So if he can get something personally from a woman, or any non-white person, he'll find himself able to at least pretend to get along with them. That's how I see it with him and zionism.
Maybe Charlie Kirk would have gone down the same road eventually. (He hates Black people, but Candace Owens, a Black woman who lies to herself that anti-Black racism and misogyny don't exist and therefore they don't and therefore Black people who complain about racism and women who complain about sexism are just lazy grifters, is useful to him and he ended up genuinely liking her.) [More about Ms. Owens later.] But in the final months of his life he was the leader of a movement that had convinced itself [rightly] that the "Forever Wars" of the Neo-Cons, the zionists, the military-industrial-complex, the banks, the oil companies, were hurting ordinary US-Americans. So he used his access to Trump to warn him against joining Israel in its attacks on Iran. Trump didn't need much convincing that it would be a disaster, and refrained from the attack until Netanyahu demanded he help. Trump did his demonstration attack, allowed Iran its pro forma retaliation, and got them to stop punishing Israel. Kirk pretended to support this to help Trump.
But then Charlie Kirk sped up his break with his zionist funders. Again, probably thinking that his organization "Turning Points USA" was big enough, established enough, to finance itself. The zionists, knowing that they've lost the voting base of the Democratic Party, saw themselves as losing the younger generations of the Republican Party. Then Charlie Kirk got shot in September. After arguing with Erika about it. And after renouncing zionist money for TPUSA.
I still think that Charlie Kirk was a white-supremacist asshole. Just as I think Trump is. Charlie Kirk will never be one of my heroes. But his response to ... I'm going to have to devote an essay to those principled, intelligent, non-mercenary types who twist themselves up in knots trying to deny Israel's out-sized influence on US politics. And the sort of pro-zionist garbage I spent 2 posts trashing [here and here].
But let's consider that, whatever his intellectual failings, Trump was capable of grasping what Charlie Kirk [allegedly] told him in June 2025. That attacking Iran would be a disaster, both militarily and politically. And Trump listened.
Read how Caitlin Johnstone describes long established thinking about the USA attacking Iran:
It’s so wild how we keep seeing reports that Iran’s retaliation caught the US off guard. For all the years I’ve been paying attention to this issue I’ve been reading experts and analysts saying if the US attacks Iran, Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz and strike US bases and the energy infrastructure of US allies in the region.
A few examples:
A 2006 Oxford Research Group paper titled “Iran: Consequences of a War” warned that Iran has numerous options at its disposal in the event of a US attack, and that the “most significant of these would be any possible retaliatory Iranian action to affect the transport of oil and liquefied natural gas through the Straits of Hormuz,” adding that stopping Iran from doing this “would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, leading to a fear of attack which alone would have a formidable impact on oil markets.”
A 2007 Cato Institute paper titled “The Iraq War and Iranian Power” warns that “Iran possesses the largest ballistic-missile inventory in the Persian Gulf — missiles which can reach Israel, Saudi Arabia and US military bases in Iraq,” and that “experts argue Iran could also use the ’oil weapon’: blocking the 34km-wide Strait of Hormuz and conducting submarine and anti-ship missile attacks against ports and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council states.”
A 2012 NPR article titled “Can Iran Close The World’s Most Important Oil Route?” features then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acknowledging that Iran absolutely can block the Strait of Hormuz, saying Tehran has “invested in capabilities” which specifically enable them to do so.
A paper from the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy and the Center for a New American Security titled “IN DIRE STRAITS? IMPLICATIONS OF US-IRAN TENSIONS FOR THE GLOBAL OIL MARKET” warns of a potential scenario “that includes damage to Gulf oil infrastructure and a temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz.”
These weren’t a bunch of keffiyeh-wearing peaceniks making these assessments, they were deeply entrenched swamp monsters entirely loyal to the US empire. They opposed war with Iran not because it would be an evil act of unforgivable mass murder, but because it would be bad for the imperial power structure.
Some argue that Trump is a delusional idiot who wasn't aware of any of this decades-spanning consensus on attacking Iran. And that's why he's losing. Others say that Trump anticipated all of this. He's winning. But he chooses to disguise his winning by looking and sounding like a deranged shit-head who has no idea what's going on. And then there's my theory: Trump had the sense enough to know how bad war with Iran could go. He tried to get out of it. He didn't need Charlie Kirk to convince him to try to avoid it. But he allowed Kirk's advice about the military AND domestic political costs to help make his decision last June.
Following that, the zionists killed Kirk. And then they worked on Trump to go through the whole stupid thing again, and threatened him with the Epstein files and/or assassination, and so, this time, he joined in the attack. And its going worse than most analysts predicted. [I said that I'd say more about Candace Owens. I've decided that all I'll do is post to a link where she proves that the new TPUSA leadership is lying when they say Charlie Kirk wasn't breaking with zionism.]
It kind of makes all of his incoherent, self-destructive, stupid statements, including his pointless televised address last night, somewhat more enigmatic. Like, "How can I discredit myself and my project even more?" Or: "How can I bluster my way out of this shit-storm I've gotten myself into?" Or: "My god! This is a disaster! I'm a dead man walking, politically. I'm babbling because I'm out of my fucking mind! I shouldn't have raped those teenage girls!"
THE TAIL WAGGING THE DOG
Yes. It's true. Some theories about the Israeli tail wagging the US-American dog are based on antisemitic worldviews about the Jews running everything. With some of these theories positing white US-Americans as being innocent dupes, being manipulated to act against their own self-interest.
Two posts ago I discussed the counter-argument that Israel serves the USA's interests in West Asia. It serves to weaken Arab unity. It helps keep the puppet-monarchies in line. It attacked independent Arab actors like Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The USA stations its own troops in the puppet monarchies, but Israel had long done a lot of the "heavy lifting."
Some of these writers say things like: "The USA is far stronger than Israel and it subsidizes Israel and it could stop defending it, stop subsidizing its military and society anytime it wants to." Therefore the dog wags the tail.
And yet, for some reason, the USA never does that. Its just always assumed that if the USA hardly ever seems to exercise any of its leverage against Israel, it's because the various administrations in Washington always felt that they didn't need to. They were in charge and Israel is the servant and that's just the way that it is.
A couple of things: Israel isn't just the zionist Jews in Israel. The USA's domestic Jewish zionist lobby is powerful for a number of reasons. The USA's domestic Christian-zionist lobby is also powerful. Especially for the Republican Party. It isn't antisemitic to point to the power and influence of pro-Israel Christians who have their own shit-for-brains Biblical reasons to support Israel.
The USA's military-industrial-complex benefits from US taxpayer subsidies to Israeli military spending.
The USA's fossil-fuels sector benefits from Israeli protection of all the benefits of controlling the oil markets on the USA's behalf.
But what do Jewish Israeli zionists want? They want a powerful "Greater Israel" stretching from the Nile in Egypt to Iraq.
For now, they're just trying to take all of Palestine. Also (since Trump) parts of Syria and Lebanon.
And then there's Netanyahu. Everyone knows that he needs to stay in power in order to avoid being taken to court for various corruption charges. It's personal with him.
So, when some "The dog obviously wags the tail" says that ordinary Israelis are suffering much more than US-Americans are and that this demonstrates Israel's subordinate status, they neglect to consider that, aside from the fact that most Israelis support Netanyahu's wars, ... it is Netanyahu serving his own interests that is getting some of his fellow Israelis killed. From October 7th, 2003 til now, it's primarily been Netanyahu.
Finally, ... for all those people who INSIST that the dog is wagging the tail, ... and who sometimes mention the Epstein files directly (ie., "this is not about deflecting from the Epstein files"), ... how the fuck do you acknowledge that Trump being in the released [and as of yet still ILLEGALLY un-released] Epstein evidence but insist that that has NOTHING to do with his decision-making process?
Trump didn't want to attack Iran but his hand was forced and what we are witnessing is a highly stressed-out 79-year old trying desperately to appear to be in control, to dig himself out of an impossible situation that gets deeper and deeper in shit.
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