Events in Europe, the Middle East, and here are moving so quickly, it seems that decades of deceit, corruption, and just plain stupidity are nearing their end sooner than we could have imagined. Here’s a sample of the tremors this week which promise to undo the near past.

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Iran

Credible reports indicate 23,000 civilians have been murdered by the mullahs’ forces, and videos (again made public due to the extraordinary efforts of Elon Musk’s teams to work around the mullahs' blackouts) reveal incredible brutality. Corpses with catheters and heart monitors still attached support accounts of persons being snatched from hospitals and left to die of untreated bullet wounds. A major bazaar was set on fire, and those who sought escape from the flames were machine-gunned.

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Khalid Umar reflects on the protest culture’s silence.

No “Free Iran.”

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No marches.

No slogans.

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The absence is not accidental. It is revealing.

SELECTIVE MORALITY, PERFECTED

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The modern protest industry is not driven by universal ethics. It is driven by alignment. Iran does not fit the approved script of oppression -- because condemning Tehran would mean indicting the very ideological ecosystem that has been protected, rationalised, and indirectly funded for decades.

Iran is not an inconvenience.

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Iran is the source. 

Only the U.S. and Israel have come to the aid of the suffering Iranians, he notes, and explains in detail why “there are no emergency UN sessions, no campus occupations, no celebrity tears.” It is, he argues, because Islam is killing Muslims, and neither Islamophobia nor colonialism, nor the Jews, nor, indeed, any outside force can be blamed.

THE UMMAH IN COGNITIVE SHOCK

Sunni and Shia alike stand frozen.

Voiceless & Paralysed.

There is no script for this moment. No victim card to play. No external enemy to blame. Iran has ripped the mask off political Islam from the inside and the Ummah does not know how to respond. Soulless men walking. Living ghosts.

A CIVILISATIONAL RUPTURE

An entire nation -- larger than the UK, Germany, France, and Spain combined -- is attempting something unprecedented: abandoning a theocratic death cult en masse.

After fifty years of enforced darkness, Iranians are not reforming Islam.

They are rejecting it. They are leaving it. Telling Islam can’t be reformed; it can only be banished.

This is not a protest. It is a declaration of freedom.

As for the U.S. response, it looked this week as if we would see action, and then the apparent offensive was reversed after the mullahs, through channels, promised to delay planned executions. Are we reneging on a promise, as some claim? I think, as does this author, that the initial containment operation was strategic, a Phase 1 of our plan.

This is a live containment operation. [snip] The response was not symbolic. It was surgical. The deterrent message was delivered with maximum ambiguity. Iran blinked. Trump flexed. But neither side collapsed. This was a trial run. The US gained full-spectrum data on Iranian readiness. Command latency. Radar activation. Defensive posture. Iran showed its hand under pressure. The Pentagon watched every move. What the US just did was a dry-run ignition protocol to test reflexes. And it worked. No bombs dropped. No martyrs made. But the field was mapped, the pressure applied, and the exit offered. Trump now controls the pace of escalation. Iran is buying time through signals and intermediaries. The Ayatollah is either evacuating or preparing an internal firewall. Both are collapse moves. The sanctions, the media leaks, the social media info war -- they are not distractions. They are phase 2 of a psyops-led siege campaign. Collapse without a missile. Submission through saturation. This is war by other means. The strike is no longer the question. The strike is now leverage. Collapse has entered the slow spiral. No fundamental rescue exists inside Iran. Sanctions are deepening. Capital is fleeing. Water shortages, blackouts, repression -- all accelerating. The regime is now hostage to its own stagnation. And everyone at the top of the game knows it. This was not about killing leaders. This was about proving who moves the sky. And now the whole world sees who moves it. The tempo of collapse has entered American control. Not by force. By frequency.

Money is pouring out of the pockets and banks of the mullahcracy, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant says we see the flow, and know who sent what and where it’s going. The Iranian banking system and its currency are collapsing. Tyrants don’t ship their means of control out of a country they think they have in hand.

The United States

Those of us angry at the double standard in criminal prosecutions probably should stock up on popcorn. Jeff Childers offers up a preview of coming attractions. 

I penciled out a quick list of all the public officials that are or have been under DoJ investigation or prosecution. The Devil’s inventory is swelling:

Tim Walz, catfish-like governor of Minnesota

Jacob Frey, slimy mayor of Minneapolis

Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve and palace-builder

Lisa Cook, Federal Reserve governor (diversity hire)

James Comey, former FBI Director and Russiagate architect

Letitia James, trash-talking New York Attorney General

Adam Schiff, shifty U.S. Senator

John Bolton, former National Security Advisor and deep-state crocodile

Elissa Slotkin, U.S. Senator (for her reckless “defy illegal orders” video)

Mark Kelly, U.S. Senator (same)

Jack Smith, pencil-necked former Special Counsel on Trump prosecutions

Dana Williamson, shady former Chief of Staff to Governor Newsom (swamp operator)

Sean McCluskie, top aide to former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (and vaccine mandate architect)

Greg Campbell, heavyweight Sacramento Democrat lobbyist and fundraising bundler, now jailbird

There are more in the crosshairs. Fani Willis is probably wondering when she’ll get a visit from the process server, for example. Trump has teased investigations of Governor Newsom himself, for another.

I ask you -- have you ever seen anything like this?

It shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, it is picking up pace. As I’ve previously reported, last week on January 8th, the White House created a new Division for National Fraud Enforcement, homed in the West Wing and not the DOJ, which is rapidly ramping up to focus on welfare and benefits fraud, and its website suggests a plethora of new fraud prosecutions coming soon.

Europe

Latin America, tutored by Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, is moving steadily rightward, away from Marxism and narcoterrorism. Europe, on the other hand, is sinking deeper into the slough. The EU destroys Western Europe (Eastern Europe is pushing back) by punishing dissenting speech, forcing open borders, and expanding a bureaucratic chokehold on free markets and innovation.

People and political opponents are being muzzled and kept from holding office. Keir Starmer's Labour Party is canceling elections right and left to keep even a crooked toehold in Parliament.

The article “The Great Leap Backwards” clearly explains what’s happening to Europe’s economy and culture, and I urge you to read it all.

...modern European businesses are being encouraged to melt down their profit margins to produce mountains of "Compliance Certificates." It is a spectacular race to the bottom where the winner is the country that can produce the most paperwork with the least amount of actual electricity.

The energy policy has reached a level of avant-garde absurdity that would make a central planner weep with joy. By banning everything that actually glows or hums while the sun is down, the Union is pioneering a "Post-Industrial Romanticism" where factories operate only when the wind blows at exactly twelve knots. It’s a bold return to the medieval agrarian calendar, but with much more expensive spreadsheets. We are witnessing a revolutionary Five-Year Plan where the goal is to have every citizen hand-knitting their own carbon credits while sitting in the dark, celebrating the fact that while they have no heating, they do have a standardized USB-C charger for the phones they can no longer afford to charge.

[snip]while the rest of the world is distracted by artificial intelligence and space travel, Europe remains focused on the true struggle: ensuring that every single digital interaction is preceded by a twenty-page legal disclaimer written in a language that no human has spoken since the fall of the Holy Roman Empire.

Politically, the "Solidarity of the Breadline" is making a massive comeback, as the Union replaces the "invisible hand" of the market with the "very visible thumb" of the regulator. There is a certain poetic beauty in watching twenty-seven nations sit in a circle, debating the precise curvature of a subsidized organic turnip while their global market share evaporates like a puddle in a heatwave. It is a total commitment to the "Equality of Stagnation" -- a grand vision where no one is allowed to get ahead, because moving forward would require a permit that hasn't been printed yet.

Minnesota

In a clear attempt to deflect from the massive corruption in Minnesota and, in particular, Minneapolis. Governor Walz and Mayor Frey are encouraging the lawless attacks on ICE personnel. They are hoping to replay the outrageously deceitful prosecutions of police officers when a very sick, dope-filled George Floyd died in custody and the BLM riots, which burned the city down, took hold. I don’t think it’s working. (For one thing, this time the progressive private school heads in D.C. are not sending out messages of support for Renee Good, who was killed as she drove her car into an ICE officer, as they did when lifelong criminal Floyd died. Maybe enough parents and donors registered their contempt for this idiotic virtue signaling then to warn them off it now.) Walz and Frey seem to be trying to egg the president into calling this an insurrection and bringing in federal troops, so the miscreants can ignite their fellow leftists in other blue cities to ramp up riots before the midterms. So far, it’s not working. ICE is showing clever thinking.

This week they began working at dawn, a time when paid protesters are still in bed sleeping off their cosplayed revolution. Also, this time investigations are underway into who is funding these riots with the aim of at last holding them responsible for damage done.

Why should poor and middle-class citizens and business owners pay the price and not the rich donors who fueled the mayhem?