Brave The New World

Trump says he never wanted regime change in Iran. He said the opposite, repeatedly, on day one of the war. Matt and CJ start with the gaslighting and end up somewhere bigger: if Trump only attacked Iran because he was captured, why can he suddenly defy Netanyahu and the whole Israel-first machine without fear?

Matt floats a theory about who actually holds the leash, CJ tests it against a couple centuries of how elites really operate, and together they walk through what Trump may have been promised, the three things that will prove whether this peace is genuine, and the outcome nobody in Washington wants to admit. Iran is stronger now. The US is weaker. Every

Republican running in the midterms is going to have to explain how that happened.

Plus the scapegoat question, the aid hidden inside the Pentagon's budget, and why a country protected by two oceans keeps going looking for fights it doesn't need.

https://x.com/matthewcarano

https://x.com/KillmerCj

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSuSWVH4XXhPkDgQSpzOTog

Matt Carano and CJ Killmer bring you the latest in news and politics.

This week, Trump's own officials leaked a call to Axios where he called Netanyahu "crazy" and "ungrateful." Hours later, Israel ran its worst bombing campaign in southern Lebanon in weeks. The feud made headlines. The policy didn't move an inch.

Matt and CJ Killmer break down why the blowup was theater, why the Iran war is the most unpopular American war in modern history yet nobody's in the streets, and what the $32 million it took to unseat Thomas Massie actually tells you about who runs US foreign policy. Plus: the case for capture, the Vietnam-era stat-juking playing out again, and the escalation that closed Kuwait's main airport.

CJ also previews the new episode of the Dangerous History Podcast — the Peloponnesian War, the Sicilian Expedition, and why a 2,400-year-old "it'll be easy" war keeps repeating.

Chapters:
00:00 CJ's new Dangerous History episodes
08:00 Warhawks vs. skeptics — Alcibiades, Nicias, and the "easy war"
28:00 Juking the stats: Vietnam, McNamara, and what "winning" hides
32:00 Two-thirds against the war, so where's the movement?
37:00 $150 oil and why Democrats won't pull the plug
49:00 The "performative" Trump-Netanyahu call
50:00 Lebanon: the real crux of the ceasefire
1:01:00 Compromat, Kushner, and the case for capture
1:09:00 What the Massie defeat actually proves
1:15:00 Tankers, Kuwait, and where we stand

New episodes weekly. Aggressive toward power, welcoming toward the curious.

On Twitter:

https://x.com/matthewcarano

https://x.com/KillmerCj

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@BraveTheNewWrld

The media keeps insisting an Iran deal is imminent. Read the terms and it's obvious no one in Tehran would sign — not after being surprise-attacked twice mid-negotiation, including the killing of their own leader. Matt and CJ start there and end up somewhere bigger: what a declining empire does when it stops believing in limits.

From Trump threatening to "blow up" Oman over the Strait of Hormuz, to Beirut bombed over the weekend, to boats destroyed off South America with Cuba teed up next — this is a foreign policy with no brakes.

CJ brings the history: Eisenhower ending the Korean War in under a year because he understood limits, and Thucydides watching Athens chase the mad dream of conquest. Then a full breakdown of the Libertarian Party's disaster convention, the LPNH purge, and where the liberty movement should actually be fighting.

In this one:

• Why Iran negotiates from strength — and why no concessions means no signature
• The economic bill coming due: gas, inflation, fertilizer shortages, famine
• An empire that can't stop: Oman, Lebanon, Cuba, the neglected hemisphere
• Eisenhower, Thucydides, and leaders who once understood limits
• The LP convention meltdown, the 15–2 disaffiliation of LPNH, and the Massie question

Brave The New World with Matt Carano and CJ Killmer. New episodes weekly.

https://x.com/matthewcarano

https://x.com/KillmerCj

The Israel lobby just spent $32 million to remove Thomas Massie from Congress. AIPAC bragged about it on X within hours. A sitting Defense Secretary flew to Kentucky to campaign against him — federal law be damned.

And here's the kicker: the three most expensive House primaries in US history were all decided by the same foreign lobby, all against members who criticized Israel.

Matt and CJ work through the central question: at what point does this stop being lobbying and start being an act of war?

Plus: the generational collapse in support for Israel (75% to 40% among under-30 Republicans), the IHRA laws now embedded in 38 states, Mark Levin's "Nazis and jihadis" rant, the Epstein angle, the Charlie Kirk timing, the "political dark matter" framework for understanding Trump's 180s — and why Americans killing COVID tyranny by refusing to comply is the template for what comes next.

CJ Killmer of the Dangerous History Podcast is back after a brutal few months, and we walk through where the United States actually stands two and a half months into the war with Iran.

The blockade is theater. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. Every justification the administration has given has shifted, and every objective they set is unreachable. Trump is in Beijing this week asking Xi for help on a war he says he doesn't need help with.

CJ takes us back to 1948 and walks the full history of the Israel lobby's grip on American foreign policy. Truman's reelection calculation. Eisenhower at Suez. Kennedy on Israeli nukes. Reagan's one and only pushback. Carter's Camp David walkback. Why Netanyahu's time preference is shorter than Trump's term.

We get into the Massie primary, the Tucker apology, the Charlie Kirk void, the campaign promises Trump has run against, and why the midterms are going to cream Republicans.

Subscribe for new episodes weekly.

Iran sent its response to the United States this weekend. Trump posted "TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE" on Truth Social.

He knows what the deal is going to look like. So does anyone willing to look at the receipts.

The Strait of Hormuz belongs to Iran. The blockade is theater. The polling at home is the worst any wartime president has ever seen. Gas is climbing toward five dollars and the midterms are six months away.

This episode walks through what's actually on the table, what's actually happening at the Strait, and why Lebanon is the piece this whole thing turns on. Israel went to war to topple Iran. Israel couldn't. So Netanyahu pivoted to taking land — Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon. The trade Trump is negotiating right now is whether the United States keeps providing the cover.

Plus the four pressure points crushing Trump's clock at home, the damage to American credibility abroad, and what to watch in the next two weeks.

• 0:00 — Trump Knows
• 2:00 — What's Actually on the Table
• 9:00 — The Strait, the Blockade, and the Geography Problem
• 17:00 — Lebanon Is the Real Trade
• 27:00 — Why Trump's Clock Is Running Out
• 37:00 — The View From Outside
• 45:00 — What Comes Next, and the Close

• The 14-point US Memorandum of Understanding and Iran's counterproposal
• Why the US naval blockade of Iranian ports is theater
• The Lebanon-as-carrot trade between Trump and Netanyahu
• The third round of direct Israel-Lebanon talks at the State Department this Wednesday and Thursday
• The Trump-Xi summit in Beijing the same days
• The Massie primary in Kentucky
• The five signals to watch over the next two weeks

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has flown to Jerusalem multiple times to sign Florida laws on foreign soil. He's not the only one.

Thirty-eight US states have adopted the IHRA framework — a definition of antisemitism whose own author, Kenneth Stern, has been telling Congress for years is being weaponized to silence political speech about a foreign government.

This episode walks through what's actually been built. The state laws. The federal Title VI enforcement wave. The lobbying network — Joseph Sabag, Eugene Kontorovich, Richard Goldberg, the Brandeis Center, the Combat Antisemitism Movement, ALEC.

The federal court rulings calling it viewpoint discrimination and a smokescreen for ideologically-motivated assault. The Americans already hurt — Mahmoud Khalil, who missed the birth of his first child during 104 days in a Louisiana detention facility for activities the State Department's own memo described as "otherwise lawful." Harvard, hit with a $2.2 billion funding freeze before a federal judge struck it down.

Then the foreign comparison. The United Kingdom: thirty arrests per day for online speech. Germany: five years in prison proposed for a phrase. France: criminal prosecutions for calling consumer boycotts. The destination is named, and the only thing standing between the apparatus already built here and the cases unfolding there is the First Amendment — which the architects know they cannot beat in a fair fight.

If free speech falls, no other right is safe. This is a documentation of what has been built, who built it, who it serves, and what it has already cost.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 — DeSantis in Jerusalem

05:00 — What Free Speech Actually Is

14:00 — The IHRA Tool

22:00 — Florida Step by Step

33:00 — Who Built It

46:00 — Are These Laws Doing Damage?

51:00 — Where This Leads

The Southern Poverty Law Center was just indicted by a federal grand jury for fraud, money laundering, and paying the people it told its donors it was fighting.

A Klan-affiliated informant got over a million dollars. The Unite the Right coordinator got $270,000. The money moved through shell companies with names like "Fox Photography" and "Rare Books Warehouse."

And in the fiscal year after Charlottesville — the rally their paid informant helped coordinate — SPLC donations jumped from $50 million to $132 million.

But the SPLC is not the story. The SPLC is the clearest possible view of a much bigger machine.

In this episode, Matt Carano walks through three cases of the same structural model operating at three different scales:

— The SPLC and the manufactured domestic extremism it fundraises off of

— The National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and the US regime change apparatus that replaced what the CIA used to do covertly

— with Ukraine 2013–14 as the worked example

— Benjamin Netanyahu's decade-long strategy of propping up Hamas to prevent a Palestinian state, in his own words

One machine. Three scales. The threat is the product.

Iran announced today that the Strait of Hormuz is "completely open" for commercial traffic. Iran announced it. Not the US Navy or Trump.

Iran opened the strait the same way they closed it — by deciding to, tied to the ceasefire in Lebanon.

That's the whole story. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. They always did. Their coastline runs the length of it. They hold seven of eight islands.

The shipping lanes are two miles wide and funnel every tanker within range of shore-based drones, mines, and fast-attack boats. The president himself admitted they can threaten those lanes "no matter how badly defeated they are."

So what was the blockade for?

In this episode, I walk through why Iran's control over Hormuz is permanent, what they built during the war (a toll system collecting Chinese yuan and crypto that was actually moving oil), who the US blockade was actually targeting (the ships getting through — mostly bound for China), and who paid the price for all of it (Americans, Europeans, Australians — not Iran, and definitely not Russia, who's having their best quarter in years).

The blockade was theater. The opening today proved it.

Sources and receipts are linked at Brave The New World — bravethenewworld.com

Chapters:

00:00 Iran Just Opened the Strait 0

4:00 The Map Doesn't Lie 09:00 The Insurance Is the Weapon

13:00 The Toll Booth

20:00 Who Was on Those Ships

25:00 Who's Paying for This

32:00 The Blockade of a Blockade

Tuesday night, the US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. Pakistan brokered it. Both sides confirmed. Markets surged. Oil dropped 13%. Families in Beirut packed their bags to go home.

Twelve hours later, Israel launched 50 jets into Lebanon. 100 targets. 160 munitions. 203 dead. The largest strike of the entire war — after the ceasefire.

Netanyahu said Lebanon wasn't included. Trump backed him over his own mediator. Called 203 dead "a separate skirmish."

In this episode:

— What the ceasefire deal actually was and why Trump accepting Iran's terms was a concession

— How Netanyahu vetoed the deal within hours

— Who inside the White House is fighting for peace and who's fighting for Israel

— The inner circle: Kushner, Witkoff, Rubio, Huckabee, Adelson, and the structure around Trump

— Iran's response and why the ceasefire is collapsing in real time

— The pattern: Israel has torpedoed every peace process for decades

— What comes next if the restraint faction loses — ground troops, Kharg Island, and the point of no return

Sources: NPR, Al Jazeera, CBS, NBC, CNN, Axios, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Times of Israel, PBS, Fox News