Can the U.S. Afford to Annihilate Iran? /Seyed M. Marandi
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – October 1, 2026
Elmo Sold mRNA Jabs to Your Toddler. Now They Are “Off-Label.”
How Sesame Street, CNN, and federal health officials turned a children’s vaccine campaign into a one-way lesson in trust.
By Sayer Ji | September 30, 2026
How a $240 million messaging machine put a three-year-old puppet to work selling an mRNA shot to parents of infants — and what the government has quietly admitted since.
On June 28, 2022, Sesame Street posted a 60-second video to its YouTube channel titled “Elmo Gets the COVID-19 Vaccine | PSA.”
It’s a well-made piece of persuasion. Elmo, who has been three and a half years old since 1984, shows off his “super duper” bandage. There “was a little pinch. But it was okay.” Then his father, Louie, looks into the camera and speaks to every hesitant parent in America:
“I had a lot of questions about Elmo getting the COVID vaccine. Was it safe? Was it the right decision?”
Eleven seconds later, the doubt has been resolved for you:
“I learned that Elmo getting vaccinated is the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy and enjoying the things they love.”
A hug follows. Then an announcer: “It’s okay to have questions about COVID vaccines for your kids.”
That’s the move worth studying. The ad takes the parent’s instinct to ask questions, gives it to a beloved puppet, and answers it before the parent has a chance to. It presents doubt so it can close it down.
This was not a whimsical one-off from a children’s television workshop. It was one output of what its own organizers called the largest communications program in our nation’s history, built with federal public-health agencies, a major medical trade association, and tens of millions of corporate dollars.
Four years later, Pfizer-BioNTech’s product is no longer authorized for children ages six months through four years. Federal guidance and product labeling have also narrowed which pediatric uses are on-label, a shift sharply at odds with the PSA’s broad, categorical reassurance. Nobody made a puppet video about that.
This is the story of who built the campaign, what it cost, and what came after.
Part I: Who Was Behind It
Sesame Workshop’s own press release is candid about who was in the room. The PSA was released “in collaboration with the Ad Council and COVID Collaborative’s COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative,” and it was “produced in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).”
Five institutions. Each one deserves a name and a face.
Sesame Workshop
The nonprofit behind Sesame Street produced and released the spot. Its campaign lead was Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, Senior Vice President of US Social Impact. Its president at the time, Sherrie Westin, was named CEO in July 2024.
The clearest statement of what Sesame thought it was offering came from its own chief marketing officer. Launching an earlier round of vaccine PSAs, Samantha Maltin, EVP and CMO, said the goal was to:
“… harness the power of Sesame Workshop and the reach of the Ad Council…”
Harness the power. The asset being put to use was fifty years of trust that parents and children have placed in these characters.
The Ad Council
The Ad Council turns corporate media budgets into “public service” messaging. Its president and CEO, Lisa Sherman, was the campaign’s public face. On the Elmo spot:
“It’s important that parents feel informed and confident about what the COVID-19 vaccines mean for their families, and we are proud to work with our partners, medical experts – and of course Elmo – to spread that message.”
She also named the urgency: this was “an important decision many need to make in advance of the upcoming school season.”
COVID Collaborative
The COVID Collaborative is a bipartisan assembly of former officials, and it convened the vaccine education initiative with the Ad Council. Its CEO is John Bridgeland, former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Its president is Gary Edson, and its co-chairs are former Idaho Gov. and Sen. Dirk Kempthorne (R) and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D). The Collaborative is a project of UNITE, chaired by Tim Shriver.
The CDC
The CDC was a named production partner, and it wasn’t a passive one. According to the campaign’s organizers, the CDC provided scientific guidance on all aspects of the campaign, and its brand appeared on select creative assets.
The American Academy of Pediatrics
The AAP, the pediatricians’ professional association, was the other named production partner. Its president in 2022 was Dr. Moira Szilagyi. Looking back later, she said: “Somewhere what got lost in our country, I think, was what a miracle these vaccines were.”
Keep the AAP in mind. It comes back in Part IV.
Part II: Follow the Money
The Elmo spot was built on a large funding structure, and its size helps explain how thoroughly this message saturated American media.
The corporate fund. On November 23, 2020, before any vaccine was authorized, the Ad Council announced a $50 million fund for the COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative, created with the COVID Collaborative. By February 2021 it had exceeded that goal.
The COVID Collaborative reports more than $52 million raised. The leading contributors it names are Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Cisco, CVS Health, Facebook, General Motors, Google and YouTube, the Humana Foundation, NBCUniversal/Comcast, Salesforce, Verizon, Walgreens, and Walmart.
Two of those names stand out. CVS Health and Walgreens both gave the shots the campaign was promoting in their own pharmacies.
The donated media. The money was only the seed. By October 26, 2021, the initiative had surpassed its goal of $240 million in donated media and related publicity. Donors of airtime and ad inventory included Disney (ABC, ESPN, Hulu), FOX, NBCUniversal and Telemundo, ViacomCBS, WarnerMedia, Facebook and Instagram, Google and YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and The Weather Channel.
Several of the same platforms that donated airtime and advertising inventory to the vaccine-education campaign were simultaneously under public and private pressure to enforce COVID-19 misinformation rules against specifically identified individuals, including people named in CCDH’s ‘Disinformation Dozen’ report. YouTube later [restored] my channels and stated that, after review, they did not violate its Community Guidelines.
The taxpayer layer. Alongside the private effort, HHS ran its own $265 million COVID public-education campaign starting in summer 2020. That included a $250 million NIH award to the Fors Marsh Group, which created the “We Can Do This” brand, all paid for through a $300 million interagency agreement drawing on CDC’s CARES Act funds. Under its “Vaccinate with Confidence” framework, the CDC funded more than 200 partners. Across the March 2021–December 2022 rollout, it funded 110 primary and 1,051 subrecipient partners at the national, state, and community level.
A note on accuracy. I have not found documentation that Pfizer or Moderna directly paid for the Elmo spot, and the campaign materials don’t list them as partners. Pfizer does appear as a Sesame Workshop donor in later years, in the $100,000–$249,999 band of its 2024 impact report. That’s worth knowing, but it’s a separate fact. The documented structure is damning on its own: corporate money, federal science guidance, and a medical trade association, all speaking through a puppet.
Part III: It Wasn’t One Ad
The Elmo spot was the youngest-audience edge of a sustained effort to put Sesame Street characters to work for vaccine messaging.
- November 2021: CNN and Sesame Street co-produced a family town hall, “The ABCs of COVID Vaccines.” That same month, Big Bird delivered his own pro-vaccine message to young viewers, which drew public criticism from Sen. Ted Cruz.
- June 2022: Elmo’s PSA, released days after the FDA’s emergency authorization for children as young as six months.
- Later: Sesame Workshop, the Ad Council, COVID Collaborative, and CDC launched a further series of PSAs with Elmo, Louie and other Muppets, “created in close partnership with the CDC.”
The criticism started right away. Cruz accused Sesame Street of having Elmo “aggressively advocate” for shots in young children and noted that the spot cited no scientific evidence. The comedian Russell Brand put it more sharply:
“When it starts getting into complex territory that involves the power of the state, the influence of pharmaceutical companies, the impact of coronavirus on young children — these are not issues I want resolved by members of Elmo’s family.”
The critics were dismissed as cranks at the time. Here is what the government has said since.
Part IV: The Walk-Back Nobody Advertised
There was no $240 million campaign for any of what follows. No Muppets and no hug at the end. It came out as label changes, regulatory memos, and footnotes in clinical guidance.

The cardiac warning got stronger
On June 25, 2025, the FDA required and approved expanded warnings about myocarditis and pericarditis on Pfizer’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax. The new label estimates about 8 cases per million doses in people aged 6 months through 64 years, and about 27 per million in males aged 12 through 24, in the week after vaccination.
The most important sentence isn’t about frequency, though. It’s about what happened to the hearts afterward:
“… at a median follow-up of approximately 5 months post-vaccination, persistence of abnormal cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) findings that are a marker for myocardial injury was common. The clinical and prognostic significance of these CMR findings is not known.”
Read it twice. Five months out, markers of heart-muscle injury were “common,” and the agency says their long-term significance is “not known.” This isn’t a critic’s claim. It comes from an FDA-funded, FDA-co-authored study, and it’s now printed on the label.
The spot told parents “there was a little pinch. But it was okay.” Nobody in the ad said “unknown long-term cardiac significance.”
The authorization for the youngest children was pulled
On August 27, 2025, Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID vaccine was no longer authorized for children under 5. CDC’s current clinical guidance puts it plainly: “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is no longer authorized in the United States for children ages 6 months–4 years.”
That is the age group the Elmo spot was released to reach. It went out days after emergency authorization opened the shots to children as young as six months. Four years later, one of the two products it promoted to parents of those children can’t legally be given to them.
Healthy children are now “off-label”
The broad “everyone six months and older” recommendation is gone. In May 2025, HHS dropped the routine recommendation for healthy children, and the CDC moved to what it calls shared clinical decision-making.
CDC’s current guidance, updated September 23, 2026, limits Moderna’s approval for the youngest children to those with “at least one condition that places them at increased risk for severe COVID-19.” Then it states the conclusion outright:
“Vaccination of children 5-11 years of age with any product other than Spikevax or Comirnaty and vaccination of children in this age group without high-risk conditions is off-label use.”
“Vaccination of persons 12-64 years of age without high-risk conditions is off-label use.”
In 2022, the message was that vaccinating Elmo was “the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy.” In 2026, the CDC’s own wording is that giving the shot to a healthy child is off-label.
The deaths question
On November 28, 2025, Dr. Vinay Prasad, then director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, sent staff a memo headed “Deaths in children due to COVID-19 vaccines and CBER’s path forward.” He wrote that career staff “have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” based on an initial review of 96 child deaths reported to VAERS between 2021 and 2024.
The FDA’s formal analysis, made public in May 2026, came back more cautious. Of the 96 reports reviewed, none were classified as “certain.” Five were classified “possible” and two “probable,” mostly involving myocarditis, with an average age of 13. The agency stressed that these classifications don’t prove causation.
Media coverage framed that result as a debunking. Set the headline aside, though. The FDA’s own conservative review, using WHO causality criteria, still found seven child deaths it could not rule out as vaccine-related, and it called two of them probable.
And yet, still being promoted
This is where the irony stops being subtle.
Visit the FDA’s parent-facing page today, Vaccines for Children – A Guide for Parents and Caregivers. The COVID-19 vaccine is still listed alongside measles and polio among “the most commonly administered vaccines.” And parents are still told:
“Getting a COVID-19 vaccine is the best way to prevent COVID-19, including the potential consequences of hospitalization and death.”
That’s Louie’s line almost word for word, four years later, from the same agency whose label now carries the cardiac warning, whose authorization for under-5s was pulled, and whose own reviewers flagged seven child deaths.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, a production partner on the Elmo spot, hasn’t backed off either. As of September 2026, the AAP recommends COVID-19 vaccination for “all infants and children ages 6 months through 23 months,” and for “anyone ages 2 to 18 who isn’t at risk but whose parents or guardian wants them to get a shot.”
So we have two different postures at once. The regulator has narrowed approval, expanded the warning, and reclassified healthy-child use as off-label. The professional association that helped make the puppet ad still recommends the shot for every baby. And the FDA’s own parent guide still uses the 2022 talking points.
Part V: What They’ll Say — and Why It Doesn’t Save Them
Serious readers deserve the strongest counterargument, so here it is.
CDC’s guidance cites a retrospective cohort of more than 4 million people aged 16–25 from 2020 to 2025. It found myocarditis incidence of 0.05% after COVID illness versus 0.005% after vaccination. In other words, the infection carries a higher myocarditis risk than the shot.
That’s a legitimate data point and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t answer the question this piece is asking, for three reasons.
First, the comparison is an average over a population of teenagers and young adults. It says nothing about a healthy toddler with near-zero risk of severe disease. That’s the child this campaign targeted, and the child for whom the CDC now calls the shot off-label.
Second, it doesn’t address the finding printed on the label: persistent markers of heart-muscle injury at five months, of “not known” significance. The open letter discussed below says there are “no studies demonstrating prevention of hospitalization or death” in children. If that’s right, an unknown cardiac risk is being weighed against a benefit that was never shown.
Third, and most importantly, the argument here doesn’t depend on any contested injury number. It depends on an asymmetry. When the product was being promoted, it got a puppet, $50 million, a quarter-billion in donated airtime, the CDC’s logo, and the pediatricians’ endorsement. When the regulator narrowed the product, it got a label revision and a footnote. The public was sold a certainty the evidence never supported, and was never told when that certainty was withdrawn.
That isn’t public health communication. It’s a marketing campaign that never issued a correction.
Part VI: The Petition — Why I Signed
Earlier this month, 168 physicians, scientists, researchers, lawmakers, and health-freedom advocates, representing more than 63 million followers, sent an open letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump demanding removal of the mRNA platform. The effort was coordinated by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden. The signatories include Rep. Thomas Massie, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louisiana Deputy Surgeon General Dr. Sean Troxclair, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Tucker Carlson, and others.
I’m one of them, and I want to explain why.
The letter’s first demand is to “ban mRNA/gene therapy-derived technologies for all vaccines.” That includes the products still being given to children. Its other demands are to end the PREP Act declaration and its “ironclad liability shield for manufacturers and administrators,” ask Congress to repeal the PREP Act, ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, end the incentive structures that push providers toward medical coercion, and end conflicts of interest at the CDC, FDA, NIH, and NIAID.
On children specifically, the letter makes the point this whole piece has been building toward:
“Parental choice is not realistic when parents are not getting informed consent on the true risks of these products.”
It also takes on the “shared clinical decision-making” framework directly:
“By treating the decision to inject a child with mRNA as a ‘shared decision,’ while treating routine injections as the default, a dangerous legal precedent is being set that assigns powers to the federal government that have historically belonged solely to parents.”
According to the letter, more than 50 million Americans received mRNA COVID shots this year, including about 7 million children, and HHS has awarded $1.24 billion in contracts to Pfizer for future mRNA shots, “including for children.”
The Elmo spot is exactly why that line about informed consent matters. You can’t give informed consent to a hug from a puppet. A one-minute ad that turns a parent’s hesitation into a script and then answers it in eleven seconds isn’t informing anyone. It’s persuasion aimed at the people least able to push back: parents who trust Sesame Street and children who love Elmo.
The letter isn’t the only pressure. Children’s Health Defense’s citizen petition, asking the FDA to revoke the Pfizer and Moderna licenses, has been pending since December 8, 2025 and has drawn more than 104,000 public comments in support. On September 25, the Independent Medical Alliance called on the CDC to immediately withdraw its “off-label” recommendation for healthy infants, children, and adults.
HHS’s response to the open letter, through press secretary Emily Hilliard, was that Secretary Kennedy “believes mRNA products warrant heightened scientific scrutiny,” and that HHS had “wound down investments in mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory viruses because the technology does not effectively protect against infection from rapidly mutating viruses such as COVID-19 and flu.”
Think about that sentence next to the Elmo spot. The federal health department now says the technology “does not effectively protect against infection” from COVID. In 2022, a puppet told America it was “the best way to keep himself, our friends, neighbors and everyone else healthy.”
Heightened scrutiny isn’t enough. A product that federal officials now concede doesn’t reliably prevent infection, that carries a cardiac warning with unknown long-term significance, whose own regulator calls it off-label for healthy children, and whose makers are protected from liability should not be given to children at all.
Conclusion: The Correction That Never Aired
Every institution in the Elmo spot is still operating. Sesame Workshop is still making children’s programming. The Ad Council is still running “public service” campaigns. The CDC’s logo is still on its creative. The AAP still recommends the shot for every infant. The FDA’s parent guide still repeats Louie’s line.
None of them has produced a PSA that says: We told you this was the best way to protect your baby. Since then the label has been changed to warn about heart injury. The authorization for the youngest children was withdrawn. The government now calls this use off-label for healthy kids. We’re sorry we used Elmo to tell you otherwise.
That’s the one-minute spot this country is owed. Until it airs, the original belongs where I’ve put it: in the Hall of Fame of the Covid-era Mockingbird Media, as a case study in what happens when institutions that are supposed to earn a parent’s trust decide to manufacture it instead.
Watch it again. Listen for the moment Louie asks, “Was it safe?”
It was a good question. It still is. They just never let him wait for the answer.
British state targets Palestine Action with yet another crooked trial
The Grayzone | October 1, 2026
Once again, the British state is exploiting anti-democratic terrorism measures to secure convictions of Palestine Action defendants who targeted an Israeli weapons plant. UK media is currently forbidden from reporting on the trial.
From October 5th, an eight-week-long trial of nine Palestine Action activists known as the Instro 10 will begin at London’s Old Bailey. The defendants are accused of criminal damage, burglary – trespass including criminal damage – and violent disorder.
In keeping with several recent cases brought against the activist collective, which the British state proscribed as a terrorist entity in July 2025, the jury and public are not allowed to know – and the British media is prohibited from reporting – that if activists are convicted of any offenses, they could be sentenced as terrorists.
Palestine Action is a direct action protest group which successfully forced four weapons plants run by the Israeli state-owned company Elbit Systems to close. In several cases, juries acquitted activists after they argued that the property damage they caused saved countless lives in the besieged Gaza Strip, where Israel stands accused of committing genocide. Having suffered millions in damage as it was repeatedly forced to cease production, Elbit and the British state began conspiring to crack down on the activists. This resulted in the effort to stack the legal deck against Palestine Action defendants.
This June, four activists received prison terms ranging from nearly five to over eight years due to the subsequently applied “terrorist connection” label. The judge prohibited the defendants from discussing their motives or arguing that their actions were intended to prevent far graver crimes being perpetrated by Elbit’s weapons.
By denying defendants particular legal defenses, British authorities are attempting to rubber-stamp convictions, and ramming through sentences that are far harsher than for criminal offenses. Had the Instro 10 been publicly charged with “terrorist” offenses, they would have had an opportunity to effectively argue their case properly in open court. But under the new, nakedly undemocratic rules, they are muzzled by judicial decree.
The Instro 10’s names are Nasser Akhtar, Elliot Wilson, Maximillian Dixon, Nirad Abrol, Seirol Davies, Xavi Davies, Eoin O’Meara, Hannah Davidson, Yulia Brigadirova.
On June 17 2024, Palestine Action descended on the British headquarters of weapons factory Instro Precision, a subsidiary of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. Instro’s CEO is Dagan Yogev, an Israeli military veteran who was a major during Tel Aviv’s 2006 assault on Lebanon. After leaving the IDF, he worked in senior positions within Elbit’s Israeli headquarters. Instro produces targeting equipment which has been used in genocidal assaults on Gaza and Southern Lebanon.
Seven Palestine Action members broke into the factory, inflicting reportedly in excess of £1 million ($1.32 million) in damage. Two days later, an Instro Precision state export license to Israel was cancelled, perhaps due to the firm’s inability to fulfill the order in the wake of Palestine Action’s visit.
The seven activists responsible were arrested on-site, and released on bail within 24 hours. Counter-terror police were not involved at any stage. By this point too, not a single Palestine Action activist had been accused of terrorism, or charged under the Terrorism Act.
Unbeknownst to Palestine Action, a secret meeting occurred within 10 days of Instro Precision being struck, at which the Crown Prosecution Service discussed “the resource implications” of PA’s proscription as a terrorist organization with senior British counter-terror officers. In other words, prosecutors and police were weighing the potential financial windfall they would reap by designating Palestine Action as a terrorist group.
The Grayzone has reviewed heavily redacted records of the meeting. They contain powerpoint charts replete with a “threat matrix” indicating how citizen political activity is categorized by authorities as “high level aggravated activism,” or “terrorism.” The former activity is defined as activism involving “unlawful behaviour that has… a significant negative impact on UK businesses.”
In March 2025, around the time Britain’s Proscription Review Group met to determine whether Palestine Action should be proscribed as a terrorist group, British authorities brought charges against activists who targeted the Instro factory. Initially, they were accused of the same crimes as the Filton Six: aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder, with a “terrorist connection” covertly applied on the basis of serious property damage. But in July, when then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced PA’s proscription, she cited the Instro case as an example of “violence” perpetrated by the group.
Despite the highly politicized terror designation, a British court was forced to drop charges of aggravated burglary against the Instro 10, indicating that neither police nor prosecutors possessed any evidence Palestine Action intended to harm any person. Indeed, during its five years of operation, PA has conducted hundreds of direct actions without injuring a single person.
This August, as Palestine Action appealed its proscription in the UK, the administration of US President Donald Trump designated the group as a global “terrorist” threat. This appears to have been, at least in part, an effort to bolster the dubious case against the philanthropist and Palestine Action supporter Fergie Chambers, who faces extradition to the US from Spain for supporting “foreign terrorist organizations.”
From Washington to London, governments are stripping away their patina of liberal democracy to protect their relationship with Tel Aviv. Counter-terror legislation is now the weapon of choice in their war on citizens who seek to obstruct Israel’s genocide machine.
Americans are paying the price to preserve Israel’s nuclear hegemony
By Jamal Kanj | MEMO | October 1, 2026
Since the start of the latest made-for-Israel war, Donald Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly promised Americans that it would be a few weeks and oil prices would soon crash below prewar levels. Instead, it was every promise that crashed. When those promises failed to materialize, the message shifted: the war is worth the price to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
But what if Iran did become a nuclear power? How would that pose a greater threat to the U.S. than North Korea or Russia already do? Or is the real concern not a risk to America, but a challenge to the regional hegemony of a foreign nuclear power, Israel?
For more than thirty years, according to Israel’s fiction, Iran was on the verge of becoming a nuclear-armed state. That fictitious deadline has come and gone repeatedly, yet Benjamin Netanyahu has been recycling the same lie since 1992. The Israeli lies and deceit persisted even though, unlike Israel, Iran’s nuclear program was subject to strict international monitoring.
Still, Trump, at Netanyahu’s urging, walked away from an agreement that imposed some of the most stringent and verifiable restrictions ever placed on a country’s nuclear program. Now Americans are being asked to pay in blood and billions of dollars for abandoning a diplomatic agreement that had kept Iran’s nuclear program under unprecedented international scrutiny and helped contain the very threat now being used to justify the war.
The hypocrisy is impossible to overlook. Iran has been subjected to relentless demands for transparency and inspections, while Israel’s own nuclear arsenal, built in part with materials stolen from the U.S., remains shielded from any international inspection.
Yet somehow Iran’s ambitious know-how is the existential nuclear threat, not Israel’s nuclear bombs.
American consumers have long been the victims of a disinformation campaign, and now they are being forced to pay the price for a war sold to them on false pretenses. The most recent misinformation claiming the Strait of Hormuz is open and oil is flowing. The president said it on Fox, and the outgoing White House press secretary told Fox & Friends that the U.S. is essentially controlling the strait and that it remains open. These claims leave only two possibilities: either the statements are outright lies, or oil companies are gouging the consumer.
The UK Maritime Trade Operations Centre reported that commercial traffic through the strait remains about 75 percent below pre-conflict levels. It also tallied dozens of projectile strikes on vessels in just the past two months.
Three quarters less traffic is not a sign of an open strait. Shipowners and insurers know this, so do traders and so the climbing numbers at the gas pump.
The market has already made its judgment, and every American who fills a tank can see it. It is past time for Washington to stop lying.
For the average consumer, the pump is where it felt. Regular gasoline was below $3 a gallon before the U.S. was dragged into another one of made-for-Israeli wars. Families are paying more to get to work, truckers are paying more to move goods, and those costs show up in the price of groceries.
Meanwhile, American oil companies are pumping at record levels. Exxon and Chevron are producing record volumes from oil fields on American soil, thousands of miles from the Strait of Hormuz. Their production costs have not changed. What has changed is Israel’s war surcharge consumers are being forced to pay.
Chevron reported the largest quarterly net profit in its history, $12.1 billion. Exxon made $14.5 billion in the same quarter, about $160 million a day. Refining has become more lucrative. Gross refining margins more than doubled, soaring from a typical $20 crack spread to as much as $60.
Meanwhile, Trump dangles a pie-in-the-sky deal with Venezuela as a distraction from consumers’ mounting anxiety, while his administration stands by as oil companies exploit overseas crises for record profits. These companies have no reason to lower prices when war has handed them a windfall. This is what a war of choice looks like on the ground: American consumers are forced to pay the price, while oil executives in Texas turn a crisis into a lucrative business opportunity.
American consumers deserve more than false promises. If the Strait is open, then oil prices should be coming down. If it is not, then stop treating consumers as an audience whose emotions must be managed rather than citizens entitled to hear the truth. Since the war started, every week, like millions of Americans, I fill my gas tank, and the Israeli war tax is higher than it was the week before.
No, Mr. President, that is not “worth the price” to pay for a war fabricated in Israel, a repeat of the made-for-Israel war in Iraq 23 years ago.
This is not a war to end Iran’s fictitious nuclear power. It is a war paid for by taxpayers’ money and American blood to ensure that Israel remains the only absolute nuclear power in the Middle East.
Resistance factions are necessary to ensure a permanent US Iraq withdrawal
By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | October 1, 2026
US President Donald Trump has officially announced a formal withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi territory, yet the economic, social and diplomatic hold on the nation remains. If US troops are going to be permanently booted out, it necessitates an Iraqi national resistance that is capable of operating as a guarantor.
On October 21, 2011, former US President Barack Obama announced that the United States had withdrawn its remaining occupying forces from Iraqi territory. Then, only two and a half years later, the US re-deployed its forces back into the country under the guise of fighting the Daesh insurgency.
Iraq, having experienced a regime change operation followed by a brutal occupation and nationbuilding project, was left incapable of defending itself from the ISIS takeover, let alone pushing back against the United States redeploying its forces. First, the Obama administration deployed forces that it said were there to protect its diplomatic staff, in addition to advisors to the Iraqi armed forces.
Later it would expand this presence, expanding its “Operation Inherent Resolve” into Syrian territory, providing it with supply routes and a platform from which to de facto occupy northeastern Syria. The US operation in Syria and Iraq helped them eventually achieve their longtime goal of regime change in Damascus by depriving the Syrians of their access to the nation’s oil resources and fertile agricultural lands.
In 2020, Donald Trump had agreed to remove his forces from Iraqi territory, re-iterating this pledge during a meeting with then Iraqi PM Mustafa al-Kadhimi. The following year, former President Joe Biden then declared the official end of his nation’s combat mission inside the country. Only now, in 2026, and after extensive attacks on US military facilities by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, has the pledge to withdraw American forces been followed through on.
When the US and Saudi Arabia recently blamed Iraqi forces for carrying out an attack on Riyadh’s East-West Pipeline, launching a large-scale bombing campaign across the country, some Iraqi officials instead issued statements against Iraq’s armed factions that had vehemently denied involvement in the incident.
The Trump administration is openly pushing for the disarmament of all military factions within the country, a project Washington has also sought to impose on all Resistance groups across the region. The United States has not allowed for there to be a reasonable integration of Resistance forces like Hezbollah in Lebanon with the Lebanese Armed Forces, nor allowed time for formal agreements to be struck in Iraq of a similar nature. Their goal is simply to disband these groups and then exert control over the armed forces of Lebanon and Iraq, leaving them all but defenseless and without access to strategic weapons capable of deterring violations of national sovereignty.
In the case of Baghdad, the nation’s government was a construct of US occupation; Washington still holds the economic cards that are capable of pressuring any leadership, no matter how well-intended its goals are, while it maintains an enormous soft-power pull through its extensive NGOisation project inside the country. Iraq was not allowed to rebuild its nation’s military following the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s rule in 2003, leaving it defenseless against ISIS terrorism a decade later.
On the ground, this is why there was a need for the Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation Forces) to emerge. It was the Hashd that was chiefly responsible for defeating the terrorist invasion and purging its militants from Iraqi cities. Many of these groups that fought under the banner of the Hashd then went on to develop considerable military power and an extensive arsenal.
As revealed during the Ramadan War earlier this year, the Israeli Mossad was able to develop bases inside Iraqi territory, while numerous militant groups still exist across the country’s territory, including various armed factions that are backed by the CIA and the Mossad.
If the Islamic Resistance in Iraq is disbanded and disarmed, then Iraq will be in the exact same defenseless position that allowed for ISIS to sweep through the nation so rapidly and seize so much territory, leaving behind a trail of blood in their wake. This poses a threat to not only Iraq, but other neighbouring countries, including Iran. It threatens Syria’s fragile status quo too.
An Iraq without the Islamic Resistance would be like a Lebanon without Hezbollah, completely left at the mercy of the United States and their Israeli allies. Washington and Tel Aviv have a project that aims to totally dismantle regional sovereignty; this is why they have dedicated trillions of dollars and countless resources to destroying the armed forces of both Iraq and Syria over a period of nearly 30 years now. They are not about to simply sit by and allow Iraq and Syria to rebuild capable militaries, allowing them to follow the will of their people and to defend their own national interests.
The United States still maintains its air defence systems inside Iraqi territory, can use the country’s airspace at will and, as we saw only months ago, will launch airstrikes across the nation at the drop of a hat.
In order to deter a return of American occupation forces, under the guise of fighting whatever future threat they choose to use, there must be an Iraqi military force that is capable of acting in defense of the country, both on the ground and through the use of its long-range munitions if need be. A nation without a real military force cannot enjoy sovereignty. And a nation that is not able to go against the will of the United States, will serve as its proxy and will suffer the blowback that is inherent in complicity.
The US withdrawal from Iraq did not happen without a long history of resistance against its forces and public opinion that also opposes American interference. Protecting the achievement of ridding the country of the majority of US forces takes real military deterrence. Otherwise, the Israelis and the US will simply use the country’s territory for whatever projects they wish.
How Israel destabilizes the Middle East: Denying sovereignty and the right to exist
By Buğra Sarı | MEMO | October 1, 2026
Israel’s pursuit of security increasingly rests on a destabilizing proposition: that its neighbours become less threatening when their capacity to exercise sovereignty is diminished. Since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, this approach has become particularly visible across several distinct arenas. Military operations, territorial incursions and restrictions on political and economic autonomy suggest a conception of security dependent on keeping others vulnerable. The consequences extend beyond individual confrontations. When states cannot control their territory, rebuild institutions or protect their populations, the regional conditions necessary for durable security begin to erode.
The argument is not that Israel created every conflict in the Middle East. Authoritarian rule, sectarian violence, armed groups and competing regional interventions have all contributed to the region’s instability.
The question is whether the means Israel uses to pursue its own security deepen that instability. Repeatedly weakening neighbouring states and political communities may bring short-term military gains, but it can also erode their ability to contain violence and maintain order, making the region more dangerous—including for Israel itself.
This pattern can be understood as the denial of sovereignty. Sovereignty involves more than diplomatic recognition: it requires institutions capable of governing, providing services and exercising legitimate authority over the use of force. When these capacities are persistently degraded, formal independence becomes increasingly hollow.
The cases differ in their circumstances and severity, but together they reveal a troubling hierarchy: Israeli freedom of military action repeatedly takes precedence over other societies’ ability to govern and secure themselves.
Syria offers a particularly revealing example. Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, Israel launched extensive attacks against Syrian military infrastructure and moved into the separation zone established under the 1974 disengagement agreement. Israel justified the destruction of military assets as necessary to prevent advanced weapons from falling into extremist hands. Yet the targets included airfields, air-defence systems and naval facilities—capabilities relevant to the functioning of a state, whatever government eventually controls them.
The longer-term problem is that preventing a hypothetical future threat can obstruct the reconstruction of an already devastated country. Syria needs accountable security institutions capable of controlling territory, containing armed factions and protecting communities. Destroying military capabilities without a credible framework for rebuilding legitimate state authority risks leaving those functions unfulfilled. In July 2025, Israeli strikes on Damascus, including the defence ministry, further demonstrated Israel’s willingness to impose military limits on the new authorities.
Syria’s transitional authorities must themselves answer for abuses and protect minorities; state consolidation cannot justify repression. Nevertheless, externally imposed military vulnerability is no substitute for accountable governance.
A government expected to prevent threats from emerging within its territory must have the capacity to exercise authority there. Undermining that capacity can preserve the fragmentation through which armed groups survive.
Lebanon exposes a related contradiction. Hezbollah’s independent military power has long constrained the Lebanese state’s authority and its ability to determine questions of war and peace. Reducing that parallel authority could, under appropriate political arrangements, strengthen state sovereignty. But Israeli military action does not automatically transfer power from Hezbollah to the Lebanese government. Bombardment, displacement and violations of Lebanese territory can weaken the institutions expected to assume responsibility for national security.
The distinction is crucial: weakening an armed organization and strengthening a state are separate outcomes. In March 2026, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called both for respect for Lebanon’s sovereignty and for stronger support to its armed forces so that they could become the country’s sole military force. That combination identifies what repeated unilateral intervention overlooks: security requires an institutional successor capable of governing after military operations end.
Where that capacity remains inadequate, another cycle becomes possible. Armed groups invoke external attacks to justify retaining their weapons; the state struggles to establish authority; Israel cites the continuing armed presence to justify further intervention. Hezbollah bears responsibility for its own decisions, but Israeli policies can reinforce the conditions sustaining its claim that the Lebanese state cannot protect the population.
The attack on Doha on September 9, 2025 extended this logic into the diplomatic sphere. Qatar was mediating negotiations involving Israel and Hamas when Israel struck Hamas representatives on its territory. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the attack as a breach of international law and an assault on mediation. The significance exceeded the violation of Qatari sovereignty: even a state facilitating negotiations could find its territory treated as an extension of the battlefield.
Mediation depends on practical assurances that communication with an adversary will remain possible. Targeting interlocutors in a mediating country makes those assurances harder to provide. It raises the costs of hosting negotiations and can undermine channels needed for ceasefires, hostage releases and humanitarian arrangements. Military reach may expand while opportunities for a political settlement contract.
Israel’s recognition of Somaliland in December 2025 raises a different sovereignty question along the region’s Red Sea periphery. Somaliland has maintained separate institutions for decades, and its claim to recognition has its own history. Nevertheless, Israel’s recognition challenged Somalia’s internationally recognized territorial framework. The African Union rejected the move and warned that such recognition could undermine peace and stability.
Recognition is not equivalent to bombardment, and the cases should not be collapsed into a single legal category. Their connection is political: the territorial arrangements on which other governments rely become subject to unilateral decisions shaped by Israeli interests. In an already contested regional environment, such decisions risk adding another dispute to fragile processes of state consolidation.
The confrontation with Iran illustrates the danger of extending preventive military logic to a powerful regional adversary. On February 28, 2026, Guterres condemned the use of force by the United States and Israel against Iran and Iran’s subsequent retaliation across the region. He warned that these actions undermined international peace and security. The escalation demonstrated how efforts to eliminate threats militarily can expose additional countries to attack.
Iran’s support for armed groups and its own military conduct cannot be excluded from this assessment. Nevertheless, degrading an adversary’s capabilities does not necessarily resolve the political incentives driving confrontation. It may instead encourage dispersal, rearmament or greater reliance on asymmetric methods. Tactical destruction can coexist with a more dangerous strategic environment.
The Palestinian case represents the most profound expression of this problem because it concerns both collective self-government and the conditions of human survival. In the West Bank, withholding revenues owed to the Palestinian Authority weakens the institutions expected to administer daily life.
The World Bank documented how the suspension of transfers in 2025 intensified fiscal distress, reduced salary payments and placed pressure on essential services. These measures undermine the practical foundations of Palestinian self-government.
A political authority cannot provide credible governance indefinitely while lacking reliable access to its own revenues. Weakening public administration also weakens its legitimacy, potentially benefiting actors who argue that institutional politics offers no meaningful route to Palestinian rights. The resulting dysfunction can then be invoked as evidence that Palestinians are incapable of governing themselves. Restrictions on capacity thus risk producing the very incapacity used to justify continued control.
In Gaza, the destruction has reached beyond institutional viability. The devastation of housing, healthcare, water systems and livelihoods, compounded by restrictions on humanitarian access, has endangered the material conditions necessary for life. In August 2025, a joint statement by UN agencies confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate and described a crisis involving starvation and preventable deaths. The issue was no longer merely whether Palestinians could build a state, but whether civilians could survive.
Hence, in Gaza, the denial of sovereignty has escalated into a denial of survival. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Earlier, on November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, finding reasonable grounds to believe that he bore criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. These findings expose the devastating human consequences of denying a population access to the essentials of life. The systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure and deprivation of food, water and medical care undermine Palestinians’ ability to survive as a community in their homeland. Viewed through this analysis, the genocide identified by the UN commission represents the most extreme manifestation of denial: a progression from obstructing a people’s capacity to govern themselves to destroying the conditions necessary for their continued existence.
Taken together, these cases suggest a self-reinforcing cycle. Military intervention and institutional weakening can generate insecurity, displacement and political fragmentation. Those conditions create opportunities for armed actors, whose activities then provide further grounds for intervention. This is a causal risk, not an inevitable outcome of every operation. Its importance lies in the contradiction between immediate military advantage and the requirements of lasting security.
Breaking that cycle requires a different measure of success: whether policies leave behind institutions capable of governing, populations able to live securely and diplomatic arrangements that reduce incentives for violence. Protecting Israeli civilians and respecting neighbouring societies’ sovereignty are mutually reinforcing necessities.
A regional order built around one state’s freedom to intervene and everyone else’s enforced vulnerability cannot offer durable peace. By denying others the capacity to govern—and, in Gaza, devastating the conditions necessary to survive—Israel risks perpetuating the insecurity from which it seeks protection.
Europe’s Establishment Is Embracing War – and Losing Voters
By Leonid Ragozin | The American Conservative | September 30, 2026
Britain’s Labour Party is not traditionally thought of as a bastion of militarism or authoritarianism. Yet listening to some of what its top figures have been saying recently might cause one to doubt the conventional wisdom on that.
Consider what Labour Party strategist Paul Richards said in a GB News interview earlier this month. Asked how the UK might respond to an increased Russian threat, Richards—who has worked for two Labour governments—gave a disturbing answer. “We’d have to lock some people up,” he said, “some of the pro-Russian voices, people who say there isn’t a threat, [and say] ‘Don’t fight for your country, don’t go to war for Burnham.’”
His comments are not a one-off. They reflect a worrying trend among Britain’s political mainstream—the old parties, media, and think tanks—which has increasingly adopted a siege mentality informed by the far-fetched expectation of imminent war with Russia.
Nor is the trend restricted to Britain. It spans the entire Western world. And it helps explain why the centrist political forces previously seen as “reasonable” are losing ground to the supposed “fringe.” Apocalyptic millenarianism is no longer the domain of radical obscurantists, but of people like NATO’s secretary-general Mark Rutte, who in 2025 seemed to foretell with relish a conflict between Europe and Russia on the scale of the Second World War. “Imagine it,” he said, “a conflict reaching every home, every workplace, destruction, mass mobilisation, millions displaced, widespread suffering and extreme losses.”
It is politicians branded as far right or far left radicals who, surprisingly, have emerged as the main opposition to this unhinged bellicosity.
What’s largely prompting this trend is the very logic of the liberals competing with the populists. Western societies display a demand for performative “toughness,” which caters both to the infantilism of their political classes and the gamification of war in far off countries.
Things seem to have begun in earnest in 2016, when the prospect of liberals losing to rivals like Donald Trump led the former to embrace conspiracy theories like Russiagate and double down on foreign policy hawkishness as a way of evading responsibility for their own failures. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine served a similar function, providing a theater for “toughness” even as the West has gotten bogged down in what has increasingly turned into a proxy conflict.
Trying to outdo the populists along a different axis, rather than doing the hard work of opposing them with value-based positions, has led the centrists into a trap. It left a vacuum in the center, into which the populists—ever alert to political opportunities—have deftly stepped.
Here is how it plays out in Germany. When the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered an embarrassing defeat in Saxony-Anhalt earlier this month, the party’s leader and premier in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrik Wüst, said the government should consider banning the AfD (which won the election by a landslide). Wüst is eyed as a potential replacement for the unpopular chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The CDU went on to suffer additional defeats in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in Berlin. The former is particularly symbolic, because this is where the Nord Stream gas pipelines make landfall—a fact that makes this state a direct beneficiary of the German-Russian joint venture to supply cheap Russian gas to the German economy.
When Nord Stream 2 was blown up in September 2022, the immediate consensus in the West was that Moscow was responsible. Yet the culprits turned out not to be Russian, but Ukrainian. German police investigators eventually charged individuals associated with Ukraine’s military intelligence service for the attack. (It’s worth noting that this Ukrainian spy agency was rebuilt in 2015 with considerable assistance from America’s CIA.)
Germany’s rejection of Russian gas supplies after Putin’s all-out invasion in Ukraine can be seen as a noble gesture, perhaps, but it had dire consequences for the country’s economy, which contracted in 2023 and 2024 before showing anemic growth in 2025. Even more importantly, it hit every household in Germany with skyrocketing heating and power bills. Interestingly, Germany wasn’t receiving Russian gas at the time of the explosion, which means the attack was aimed at preventing the resumption of supplies after the end of war rather than interrupting ongoing exports.
The German government has never properly addressed the issue at the federal level. On the eve of September elections, Merz’s sharp reaction to the Leipzig drone incident, which he instantly blamed on Russia, contrasted sharply with the virtual absence of a response to the perpetrators of the Nord Stream attack.
Voters in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania slaughtered Merz’s party, excluding it entirely from the state’s legislature for the first time in nearly 80 years. The big winner was the AfD—a party unafraid to ask questions about Nord Stream and which muses about restoring gas supplies after the Ukraine War ends. Voters also largely spared the Social Democrats, under whose leadership Nord Stream was built in the first place (although they had to disown it after Russia’s invasion).
The early days of tension between post-Soviet Russia and the West, which culminated in the war in Ukraine, were marked by squabbles over pipeline projects delivering gas to Europe (remember South Stream or Nabucco?). The unyielding opposition of centrist politicians to such projects has led voters to wonder whether their political establishment is more interested in catering to armsmakers and shale gas producers than in providing for its citizens. It’s hard to think of a better illustration of NATO’s unofficial mission to “keep the Germans down and the Russians out” than the fate of Nord Stream.
The perception of abandonment is what fuels the popularity of the AfD’s sovereigntist stance. And despite accusations of extremism, it is the AfD who sounds the most moderate and reasonable on the vital issues of war and peace.
Indeed, their foreign policy stance provides AfD leaders with one bulletproof rebuttal to accusations of fascism. A defining component of the fascist ideology is aggressive militarism—a trait exhibited by the German political establishment, not its hard-right challengers. The AfD fills the shoes of the old-school left-wing peaceniks when it comes to Ukraine, while the Merz government staunchly supports further escalation while discreetly undermining Trump’s efforts to bring the conflict to a close. The AfD also condemns the war on Iran (which Merz initially supported, before making a U-turn under public pressure).
(Ex-)centrists also advocate an enormous defense spending hike Germany can ill afford, as well as compulsory military service (this latter move has sparked youth protests across the country). The way mainstream German politicians are courting the far right in Ukraine—members of Azov movement prominently featured at the prestigious Munich Security Conference this year, for example—make the charges of nazism levelled against the AfD look especially lame.
Opposing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which the AfD does, is one thing. Supporting an endless proxy war with a nuclear-armed great power—and committing to fight this “to the last Ukrainian”—is quite another.
And the polls suggest German voters have little appetite for risking their country’s future in such a gambit.
The AfD and other insurgent parties thrive when their opponents lean into hawkishness and authoritarianism, but so far there is little evidence the establishment understands this. Indeed, European political elites are doubling down. They recently invited Zelensky’s former press secretary, Iulia Mendel, to speak in front of the European Parliament. But Mendel is a vocal critic of her former boss, and so the parliament’s centrist leadership banned her from entering after Zelensky’s government imposed sanctions on her (an extrajudicial punishment he is routinely applying to political rivals). By banning Mendel from speaking and turning a blind eye on Zelensky’s abuse of power, the center once again chooses delusion and bellicosity over a genuine commitment to democracy.
Meanwhile, alternatives like the AfD will continue to fill the vacant space left in the middle of the political spectrum.
NATO chief advocates war of aggression
RT | October 1, 2026
European NATO members should have been able to attack Iran instead of relying on the US and Israel, according to Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the head of the self-described defensive alliance.
Iran has been attacked twice in two years, both times over allegations that it seeks to develop nuclear weapons, which Tehran rejects as false. Speaking at the Euronews Defence & Space Summit on Friday, Rutte endorsed the idea that European nations should acquire the military capabilities needed to carry out such wars of aggression themselves.
In the future, “the Europeans will be able to take care of their backyard themselves. It should be us doing this, not the Americans,” he said.
“Europe was not able to take out the nuclear capability of Iran. We couldn’t. We didn’t have the capabilities. In 10 years, we can and we should,” he added, referring to multi-billion euro rearmament efforts now underway in European members of the military bloc.
Earlier in the day, the NATO chief dismissed Russian concerns over hostile rhetoric by some members of the bloc regarding the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Region.
“Basically what we said is, ‘hey, listen, we are a defensive alliance, and stop the nuclear threat’,” he told journalists when asked about a formal warning Moscow had sent to Brussels.
Russia cited remarks by Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who proposed in September deploying additional troops near the Russian border so that Moscow would be “uncertain of what we will do.” Moscow said it would use its “entire available arsenal” to defend Russian territory from a possible attack by NATO states.
NATO was created in the early years of the Cold War, ensuring a continued US military presence in Western Europe. The Soviet Union later established its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, which no longer exists.
While NATO describes itself as a defensive alliance, it has carried out military attacks against other countries, including the UK- and French-led 2011 intervention in Libya, after which the North African state was balkanized.
Russia considers NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War a major national security threat and has cited it as one of the principal causes of the Ukraine conflict.
Rutte’s argument in support of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran echoed remarks by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said in June 2025 that the Israelis were doing “[the] dirty work for us.”
