Useful Idiots

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Despite recent attacks from both sides, a ceasefire is technically in effect between the US and Iran: Is peace at hand? Or are these shaky truce talks just a break before the return to full-scale military conflict?

What’s likely to move the scale in one direction or another are recent embarrassing headlines that could push President Trump to panic: the Washington Post reports that the CIA “says Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for months,” as opposed to days or weeks, which the administration has been claiming.

Another headline claims that “Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show.” And just this week Marco Rubio announced that the new goal of the war is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and get everything "back to the way it was" before Trump launched the first attacks.

Will these revelations force Trump into a corner and get him to take the win of a ceasefire, claim victory in Iran, and leave? Or does the embarrassment of losing on the global stage send him and Cartoon Pete Hegseth back out to war?

To analyze all the latest in Iran, from a technical weapons level to the geopolitical ramifications of it all, we spoke with Dr. Sajjad Safei, researcher, lecturer, and analyst specializing in Middle Eastern geopolitics. Plus, we watch the latest right-wing commentator to once again prove the Useful Idiots thesis: “At this point, I think it’s in Israel’s interests to act against Iran in a way that blows up this deal.”

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From a weird empty void, surrounded by cartoon drawings of guns and moneybags, with hand-drawn and number-free graphs floating by, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth makes a plea for $1.5 trillion to be added to the Pentagon budget to fuel Trump’s endless wars.

And his pitch? The US will actually be saving money with the Pentagon having its most inflated budget of all time. This is because, uh, it’s going to be run like a business, not bureaucracy, and um, instead of the bureaucrats from before it’s now going to be cool, cigar-smoking old businessmen who call themselves Deal Team Six and probably have a cool secret handshake.

“It’s simple,” Hegseth claims, “we now move at the speed of business.”

Ohh, we move at the speed of business.

So, since it’s run like a business, does that mean it will have profits? And will those profits go to the services that Trump gutted, like childcare, Medicaid, and Medicare? (An answer to this question was not covered in Pete’s cartoon).

Katie and Aaron pick apart Hegseth’s incredibly disingenuous cartoon slop, showing why it’s not just wrong, but dumb too. Plus, the Fraudfather, aka the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt released an annual report of antisemitic incidents, and Aaron and Katie struggle not to laugh while reading through some of them.

It’s a lot of the same vibe as this gem:

There’s so much madness: watch with Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

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“So, we are still at war with Iran?” CBS’ Margaret Brennan asked top White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett.

“I don’t know what the definition of war is,” responds the smiling Hassett.

It’s been over 60 days of Trump’s disastrous war-of-choice on Iran, the global economy is breaking, and Americans can’t afford gas and basic household items. Yet still Trump sends his economic team onto the corporate Sunday shows week after week to tell us that the economy’s fine, and who even knows what a war is?

Oh, and also that Iran is now using dolphins as suicide bombers to attack US ships. The WMD hoax seems like a sophisticated ballet operation in comparison to whatever’s going on these days.

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“Being anonymous is very important to this group. And they had really good OPSEC, which is security to make sure they’re not found. When we saw their internal documents and communications, we found a marketing PowerPoint where they listed core values. And one of the core values was Anonymity to Scare the Enemy.”

This is from independent investigative journalist Jacqueline Sweet, who recently exposed and revealed members of the Canary Mission for DropSite News. The Canary Mission is a pro-Israel doxxing site which has been notoriously secretive since its creation in 2015, exposing and creating blacklists to target college students, professors, and others who have dared to even criticize Israel.

The Trump Administration has used their blacklists to kidnap, imprison, and target students for deportation.

One such student was Mohsen Mahdawi, Palestinian refugee, Columbia University graduate student, and organizer who was arrested when he appeared for a citizenship interview. He was detained for over two weeks and targeted for deportation over his pro-Palestine speech and activism in April 2025.

So for this week’s episode we spoke with both Mohsen and Jacqueline about the Canary Mission’s role in Mohsen’s case, Jacqueline exposing Canary Mission doxxers, and why Mohsen isn’t backing down in the face of threats from both the Canary Mission and the government:

“If they succeeded in silencing me, it would have a much larger effect on others. So come at me harder and I will show you how I will continue to smile and I will speak up even louder.

I go around and people are sometimes surprised. They say, ‘What happened to you is really scaring me.’ And I would say, ‘If you react to them, to their intimidation, that’s what they want us to do so we can lose sight, so we can’t envision, so we can’t imagine, so we can be pushed into survival mode.’

And I refuse to do that. I continue to plan. I continue to envision. And I keep telling them, keep coming harder because every time you do that, you’re pushing my profile much higher and you’re bringing more people into my life and you’re bringing me into more people’s life. So I’m making an opportunity out of it. And every crisis has an opportunity. This is my belief.

Subscribe for the full interview where Jacqueline explains how she and DropSite News were able to break into the Operational Security (OPSEC) of Canary Mission to expose its members.

Subscribers keep us going by supporting our work, and also get Katie and Aaron’s analysis of the craziest moments of the week, the Friday Free-for-All: “Gas prices may be up, but you’ll be happy to know that Iranians can’t feed themselves.”

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When even the Fox Business host thinks your economic plan stinks, you know something’s very wrong.

After gas prices have shot up and Americans face an affordability crisis due to Trump’s disastrous war-of-choice on Iran, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett somehow argues that this will help Republicans in upcoming elections.

“People vote their wallets,” he tells Fox Business host Stuart Varney. “I don’t really trust surveys.”

“But you gotta look at the numbers,” Varney says, doing his best to hide his concern in an effort to make Hassett look good, an apparently impossible and thankless job. “I mean, you got an average of regular [gas] of $4.35 a gallon. It's up 7 cents overnight. Diesel is $5.60. That hits voters hard. Can you give us any idea about when they’re going to come down?”

And to this, the always-grinning Hassett gives one of the most psychopathic and out-of-touch answers we’ve heard yet on a Friday Free-for-All:

“Well,” he smirks, thinking he has the perfect solution for Americans who are struggling to pay for gas and feed their children. “It you look at the situation in Iran, the Iranian economy is completely on the ropes, they’re running out of food, and a huge amount of the feed that goes to their animals is having trouble getting through the gulf.”

So the next time you’re stressed about your bills, Americans, just remember, Iranians can’t feed themselves because of murderous sanctions imposed on them by the US. Kevin Hassett thinks that’ll make you feel all better.

Plus, Bill Maher gives the most snowflake answer imaginable for why he thinks he’s been “soft canceled,” EU President Ursula von der Leyen says she’s stopping human rights abuses against Iranian women (by killing them), Pete Hegseth gets destroyed by Useful Idiots guest Rep. Ro Khanna, and so much more madness.

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Watch this week’s Monday Mourning here:

After a shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, corporate media erupted in fights, with Republicans and CNN hosts alike pointing blame at Democrats for “using heated rhetoric” against President Trump.

Meanwhile, there was no discussion on these shows of the girls’ elementary school that the US bombed in Iran, nor the hospitals in Palestine, nor the apartment buildings in Lebanon. Heated rhetoric, according to Israeli activists like CNN’s Dana Bash, only goes one way.

Katie and Aaron sift through a dense slate of Sunday morning news shows, analyzing and debunking lies about the shooting as well as, you guessed it, more warmongering against Iran.

It was a brutal one for us to watch. Like the YouTube stream or subscribe to us here on Substack to help support our work. Thanks for being part of the UI community!

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This week we’re looking at the latest in Trump’s regime-change war on Iran and how it’s spilled over into Lebanon, where Israel has just killed another journalist, Amal Khalil.

Khalil was assassinated in a “double tap” strike while she was reporting in South Lebanon: the Israelis first hit her car, and then the house she fled to in an attempt to seek refuge. Israeli soldiers then blocked rescue workers from reaching her and she died under the rubble.

She is the latest in the hundreds of journalists who have been targeted and killed by Israel since October 7th.

To discuss Amal Khalil, the broader regime-change war in Iran, and why Israel is “afraid” of invading Lebanon, we speak with Mohamad Hasan Sweidan, researcher and academic based in Beirut.

Useful Idiots: What explains Hezbollah’s resilience? They lost their leader, they suffered very big setbacks with the pager attacks, and lost their land bridge in Syria, through which they could receive arms from Iran.

But yet on the ground in Lebanon, they’re still able to fight toe-to-toe with Israel and impose serious costs, to the point where now Israel is afraid of invading and engaging in another land war.

So what explains how Hezbollah, which many people thought was on its last legs, has been able to persevere and still be effective militarily?

Mohamad Hasan Sweidan: There are three main reasons.

Number one is ideology. Hezbollah has a very strong religious ideology that doesn’t believe in backing off. It believes it should continue fighting the oppressor until the end.

Number two is that Hezbollah doesn’t have a choice. If they don’t rebuild themselves and if they don’t return to the fight, then all of Hezbollah will be destroyed. It’s a battle of no choice. And when you are in a battle of no choice, you continue till the end.

Number three: Hezbollah represents a huge amount of the people inside of the country. There are Lebanese people who believe in resistance. So if Hezbollah decides to disarm, then you have other Lebanese people who will hold the weapons and go defend the land. Because history proved that the only way to defend the land is when you become a resistance.

So there are three main reasons. Ideology, battle of no choice, and the people. When you have these main factors, you don’t have really a choice other than trying to resist, even if the cost or the price of resistance is very high.

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“What should happen if the Iranians don’t come to the table after 72 hours?”

This was asked to Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, author of such lines as “Iran is a death cult running a country,” who has previously campaigned for the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (AKA torture). You know, a real Washington Post type.

His answer: “If there are two factions in Iran, one that wants a deal and one that doesn’t, let’s kill the ones that don’t want a deal.” He pauses to laugh, and continues, “It’s that simple! We’ve killed over 50 Iranian leaders so far, let’s end the ceasefire and finish the job.”

It’s mafia-boss mentality with a war crime twist. When the New Nuremberg Trials begin, remember to add Thiessen to the list of complicit journalists, under T next to Tapper.

Katie and Aaron are all over this, plus about a million other war-crime whispers strewn across corporate media this week: Bill Maher is devastated over Democrats turning on his beloved Israel, former Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan can’t believe anyone (other than himself) would help Israel commit mass murder, a Congressman grossly refers to the US as a “dominant predator,” and more skincrawllers all over mainstream media.

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