<![CDATA[Between Here and There]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!C30j!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F479491e3-fb35-48dc-a7b4-bc3a0464f363_1080x1080.pngBetween Here and Therehttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.comSubstackThu, 02 Jul 2026 12:33:59 GMT<![CDATA[It Was Never Just That Trump Knew Epstein]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/it-was-never-just-that-trump-knewhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/it-was-never-just-that-trump-knewWed, 24 Jun 2026 12:15:27 GMTAggressive nipple sucking and flicking is not usually the sort of thing you expect to encounter in the pages of The New York Times.

It is certainly not what you expect to find discussed in the White House Situation Room, a secure complex reserved for national security crises and classified military operations.

A young woman known only as Jen, in the Epstein Files, told Sarah Ransome what Donald Trump did to her body. Ransome wrote it down and sent it to a journalist. The account entered the federal court record in January 2024. In 2025, it reached the White House Situation Room, where Trump’s most senior advisors gathered twice to contain the damage.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the two most prominent Trump chroniclers in American journalism, reported it. Their article “Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files,” published June 10, 2026 in The New York Times and adapted from their book Regime Change, is why we know any of this.

The White House Situation Room

JD Vance had an idea. On July 17, 2025, he was in the Situation Room with Susie Wiles, Todd Blanche, Karoline Leavitt, and Steven Cheung. Pam Bondi and Kash Patel were on speakerphone. The Epstein files were back in the news. The White House wanted it buried.

Vance proposed having Tucker Carlson interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. His thought was that Maxwell would go on camera and say Trump had done nothing wrong.

(Pause.) A convicted associate of Jeffrey Epstein would serve as a character witness for the President of the United States.

They met again weeks later, on August 13, 2025. The administration was considering a public website for Epstein-related material. Someone searched the test version for Trump’s name.

The search turned up Jen.

She was one of the girls trafficked by Epstein and identified as someone who had sex with Trump. What Jen told Ransome was sent to Maureen Callahan of the New York Post in 2016. That email became part of the court record in Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 1:15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y. 2015), entered as Document 1332-16, filed January 8, 2024, and published on the Department of Justice (DOJ) website.

Ransome wrote this:

“She confided in me about her casual “friendship” with Donald. Mr Trump definitely seemed to have a thing for her and she told me how he kept going on about how he liked her “pert nipples”. Donald Trump liked flicking and sucking her nipples until they were raw. One evening when we were showering together she showed me her nipples. They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them. I also know she had sexual relations with Trump at Jeffery’s NY mansion on regular occasions as I once met Jen for coffee, just before she was going to meet Trump and Epstein together at his mansion.”

Vance argued for releasing everything, including unsubstantiated allegations against Trump. He said Trump had been accused of worse. Wiles strongly objected. The president would not like it, she said.

One official called the discussion surreal.

The Clinical Meaning of a Specific Assault

For years, the public debate over Donald Trump’s mental fitness has cycled between two insufficient diagnoses: his narcissism, which explains the vanity and the dominance, and his cognitive decline, which explains the rambling and the confusion. Neither comes close to explaining what Jen described.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is the label most commonly applied to Trump—the grandiosity, the lack of empathy, the need to dominate every room. That describes how he moves through the world. It does not explain what he did to her body.

The clinical term for what happened to Jen is sexual sadism. The term is widely misunderstood, so one distinction matters above all others.

Sexual Sadism Disorder is the diagnosis specified by the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR, and categorized by the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 as Coercive Sexual Sadism Disorder.

It is not the infliction of pain that defines the sadist. It is the suffering of the victim that arouses him. The suffering must be intentionally elicited, consciously experienced by the victim, and sexually arousing to the offender. That is the clinical core of the diagnosis, and it is what separates sexual sadism from other forms of sexual aggression.

FBI forensic psychiatrist Park Elliott Dietz, together with researchers Robert Hazelwood and Janet Warren, who have studied sexually sadistic offenders extensively, indicate that to the sexually sadistic offender, it is the suffering of the victim that is sexually arousing. Rapists cause their victims to suffer. Only sexual sadists intentionally inflict that suffering to enhance their own arousal.

Trump did not simply have sex with Jen. He fixated on her “pert nipples,” flicking and sucking them until they were raw. When Ransome saw Jen’s nipples in the shower, she winced. They were red, swollen, and agonizingly painful.

The obsession. The repetition. The force. The injury. This is the evidence Ransome shared. It documents the exact source of arousal described by Dietz, Hazelwood, and Warren.

Ransome reported that Trump had sex with Jen on regular occasions. That repetition is diagnostically significant; it establishes a recurring pattern.

Jen was trapped inside Epstein’s network, built to deliver young women to powerful men under conditions of fear, obligation, and dependency. Trump knew how that world worked, and he took advantage of it.

The absolute control Trump held over Jen ensured her helplessness. For a sexual sadist, as Dietz and his colleagues proved, that helplessness is the necessary precondition for arousal.

The Epstein Files do not merely add another accusation to the public record; they introduce a new category of evidence, forcing a shift in how we evaluate Trump’s behavior.

Narcissism drives a man to exploit and demean others to feed his own ego. Jen’s account exposes a much darker pathology: a man who inflicted pain deliberately and repeatedly, deriving his sexual gratification from a victim's inability to stop him.

Trump’s Epstein Story is Not Going Away

The question on the table in that Situation Room was how to keep the public from reading what Ransome wrote about Jen.

Congress forced the issue on November 19, 2025, by passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The mandate required the Justice Department to publish all unclassified investigative materials within 30 days. The DOJ released more than three million pages.

Then it began removing them.

Nearly 48,000 files were pulled from the public database. Among them, more than 50 pages of FBI interview notes related to a woman who stated that Trump had sexually abused her in 1994 when she was 13 years old. She appears in the Epstein victims’ lawsuit as “Jane Doe 4.”

The FBI interviewed her four times in 2019. A DOJ source told the Miami Herald they would not have interviewed her four times if they thought she was lying. Three of those four interview records are missing from the released files. An NPR investigation confirmed the removals in February 2026. The House Oversight Committee’s ranking member stated that the DOJ appeared to have withheld the documents illegally.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who participated in the Situation Room meetings, signed a letter to Congress on February 14, 2026, insisting that nothing had been withheld for political reasons. In April, Trump fired Bondi and Blanche became acting Attorney General. In June, Trump nominated him for the permanent position.

The Epstein story will not go away no matter what Trump does, Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times on June 13, 2026. This story is now a national obsession. It exists in too many forms — testimony, court files, journalism, congressional oversight, DOJ redactions, and White House panic — to be buried or suppressed.

Sarah Ransome saw Jen in the shower. She saw what Trump had done to her body. She wrote it down. It entered the court record. It reached the Situation Room. It was removed from a government database. It was denied in a letter to Congress.

We already knew that Trump had boasted about grabbing women by the pussy — he said so himself, on tape, in 2005, 11 days before an election he won anyway.

We did not know what he had done to Jen, repeatedly. What her body looked like afterward. What his conduct meant clinically. Until now. And what the men in that room were willing to do to make sure we never found out.

Notes

The New York Times describes the underlying allegation as unconfirmed.

Sarah Ransome sent the emails to journalist Maureen Callahan of the New York Post in 2016 and subsequently attempted to retract them, stating she wanted to "retract everything." She later explained she withdrew the emails because Jeffrey Epstein — then alive and wielding enormous power — had threatened to have her parents killed if she ignited a political firestorm during the 2016 election.

Ransome never stated the account of Jen's abuse was false. She separately admitted fabricating claims about possessing physical blackmail sex tapes, which she described as a desperate bluff to deter Epstein from following through on his threats. That admission of fabrication applies to the tapes, not to what she witnessed.

In forensic statement analysis, the graphic specificity of Ransome's account — the particular body part, the precise physical aftermath, the detail of wincing in the shower — is consistent with what clinicians call unnecessary specificity: detail that is too particular, too painful, and too private to the experience of Trump’s victim to fit the behavioral pattern of a manufactured political script.

The woman identified as Jen has never come forward publicly.

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Appendix: Diagnostic Criteria

DSM-5-TR (302.84 / F65.52): Sexual Sadism Disorder

The American Psychiatric Association, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), defines the disorder as follows:

Recurrent and intense sexual arousal from the physical or psychological suffering of another person, as manifested by fantasies, urges, or behaviors. The formal diagnosis applies if the individual has acted on these sexual urges with a nonconsenting person, or if the urges cause significant distress to the individual.

A diagnosis is triggered by either the nonconsensual behavior, or the presence of severe personal distress. If a patient actively denies having sadistic fantasies, a clinician requires a documented history of multiple sexual episodes involving nonconsensual pain to infer a diagnosis. This diagnosis explicitly excludes consensual adult BDSM practices.

ICD-11 (6D33): Coercive Sexual Sadism Disorder

The World Health Organization, in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision (ICD-11), characterizes the disorder as follows:

A sustained, focused, and intense pattern of sexual arousal—as manifested by persistent sexual thoughts, fantasies, urges, or behaviors—that involves the infliction of physical or psychological suffering on a nonconsenting person. The individual must have acted on these thoughts, fantasies, or urges, or be markedly distressed by them.

This clinical diagnosis excludes consensual sexual sadism or masochism practices between consenting adults.

Sources

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]]><![CDATA[The Missiles We Chose to Fire: Outdated Maps, Precision Pellets, and the Civilians of Minab and Lamerd]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-missiles-we-chose-to-fire-outdatedhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-missiles-we-chose-to-fire-outdatedWed, 17 Jun 2026 19:54:37 GMTThere are no words that can fix the structural choice to drop air-burst shrapnel bombs into a city neighborhood, or erase the reality of a parent identifying their child by their socks in a repurposed fish locker.

In the face of systemic official silence and a government that pathologizes civilian deaths as “human shields” or strategic “dilemmas,” the only meaningful act a journalist or writer can offer these families is the refusal to let their names be erased.

Minab, Hormozgan Province, Iran

The school was called Shajareh Tayyebeh, translated “The Good Tree.” It sat on Resalat Street in a city of 80,000 people near the Strait of Hormuz. It had operated for 10 years. Children from all backgrounds studied there — sons and daughters of laborers, teachers, shopkeepers. Some were Baluchi. Only a few had fathers in the military.

Mikaeil

Mikaeil Mirdoraghi drew missiles falling on his school the night before he died. He misspelled the words. He was 9.

He showed the drawing to his brother Kourosh. Then they played war, using sofa cushions for trenches and pencils bundled together for guns.

Mikaeil was Iran. Kourosh was America.

Iran won, Mikaeil told his mother.

In the morning, she took his photo on the apartment landing. Shakiba did this every day at his request. Then he went to school.

His teacher called him an angel because his name, Mikaeil, meant “heavenly angel.”

Shakiba did not see her son's drawing until two weeks later, after she had identified him in the refrigerated truck. Then she lost consciousness. When she came to, she photographed the drawing with the same phone. It is one of the few things left of him.

Drawing by Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, the night before U.S. missiles struck his school.

A child draws what he cannot say in words, to make sense of what the adults around him could not explain. He already knew. Somehow. Mikaeil drew three missiles coming down. The exact number that fell the next day.

Selma and Esra

Mokhtar Zakari, a university professor, drove his daughters Selma and Esra to school before returning home to teach his morning class online. Selma, 6, was in first grade. Her sister, Esra, 9, was in fourth grade.

Selma had been jealous of her older sister and would not say goodbye to her father properly when he dropped her off. That morning, for the first and last time, she shook his hand.

The first missile struck the school around 10 a.m. Students were on break. The explosion destroyed half the building.

The teachers gathered the surviving children in the prayer hall. They called the parents to come pick up the children.

The second missile struck the prayer hall directly shortly after that — killing children, teachers and parents who had rushed to collect them.

Mokhtar and his wife Razieh barely reached their car when the ground shook. They followed the smoke.

“They hit the school? No, impossible. Something else must have happened,” Mokhtar said.

The third missile struck the sheds surrounding the school later that day, at approximately 3 p.m. It killed the rescue workers and parents who were searching the rubble.

Mokhtar identified Esra the first night at the hospital and Selma the next day in the morgue, where the girls lay not far from each other. One was number 62; the other was number 70.

On both death certificates the cause of death was written as head trauma.

Mokhtar could not return to the school after the debris was cleared. In his view it was a killing ground.

“This place had never seen war,” Mokhtar said. “Not even during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. This is the first time war has come here. Even the Mongols did not attack here. Only before Shah Abbas did the Portuguese attack Minab.”

Ninety percent of the children’s bodies were destroyed — so badly damaged by the blasts that they could not be recognized, or were recovered in pieces.

Alireza

Alireza Shahroju, 7, said he didn’t want to go to school that day. His mother insisted. That is now the greatest regret of her life.

Minab has only one hospital morgue, with capacity for 30 bodies. A local benefactor made available a refrigerated hall he had recently purchased for fish and shrimp.

Alireza’s mother searched for him there until she saw the first two bodies and could not bear it and came out.

By Monday, two days later, a relative went in and found two bodies he could not tell apart because the faces were damaged. Alireza's mother went back in. They washed the swollen faces with saline. She identified him by his sports clothes and socks.

One of his legs was completely gone.

Raha

Raha Zarei, 7, had thick curly hair and a contagious laugh.

She was an only child. Her mother, Fariba, had been a midwife for 15 years before she met Reza, a salesman. Neither had been sure they would ever have children. When Raha was born she became the center of their world.

Raha wanted to be a dentist. She loved school and especially her teacher. She was silly, full of energy, always laughing, singing, making up little poems.

Her father found her in the rubble. Her body was limp. Half her face was covered in blood. Two days later her aunt, Farzaneh, moved through rows of the dead lifting shrouds one by one. There were children without limbs. Bodies without heads. And then, finally, Raha.

In her empty bedroom, Hello Kitty wallpaper lined the walls. A hula hoop rested on the corner of her bed. Colorful pens were neatly arranged on her desk, next to a unicorn-patterned backpack.

There is a video. Raha standing on a lookout hill above Minab, smiling and dancing. “This is Minab, Iran,” she sings. “We have a beautiful city.”

Her father sits on her bed now, his head buried in his hands.

Nothing of her remained at the school except a single shoe.

Mohammad

Mohammad Jafari was 10. For a month after the strike his family did not know where he was. His father Masoud and mother Khadijeh gave DNA samples in Bandar Abbas, sent to Shiraz. Because of the war, everything was delayed.

On March 29, the call came. Their DNA had been matched to a pair of legs. No head. Only part of a torso.

In a mosque in Minab where the entire family had gathered, Mohammad was returned to his parents wrapped in white cloth, laid in a simple plywood coffin adorned with red flowers. Khadijeh sat cross-legged on the floor, holding her firstborn son one last time before placing him back inside the coffin.

He would be buried alongside dozens of other children killed in the strike.

Ms. Zamani

Razieh Zamani, 34, taught third grade at Shajareh Tayyebeh. She lost her father as a child, at age 7, and was raised by her mother.

She studied rural development engineering and could not find work in her field. She became a teacher instead. This year her salary reached eight million tomans a month, with no insurance or benefits.

Ms. Zamani’s brother, Mahmoud, said her students loved her. He described her as a creative and dedicated educator. Parents asked for Khanoom Zamani by name. (In Iran, teachers are typically addressed as Khanoom, meaning "Lady" or "Mrs.")

On the morning of February 28 she stepped out of her classroom to go to the office. The first explosion occurred.

Her school bag was found completely intact. Her body was never found.

Her grave reads: Javid al-Asar, Arabic for eternally missing.

A neighbor, Yadollah Shahroju, passed the school every day on his commute between Minab and Bandar Abbas. He had never once seen military forces going in or out.

Our Navy Bombed Civilians in Minab

U.S. Navy Tomahawk missiles struck the school three times, twice in the morning — at 10:23 AM and 10:45 AM — and once in the afternoon.

Multiple independent investigations concluded the United States was responsible.

Donald Trump said otherwise. “In my opinion and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” the president told reporters.

Tomahawk missiles are not in Iran’s arsenal.

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, was asked directly whether U.S. forces had conducted the strike. “It’s being investigated,” he said. Three days later, at a Pentagon briefing, he said the rules of engagement are designed “to unleash American power, not shackle it.” He did not take responsibility.

General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the strikes at a Pentagon briefing four days after the school was destroyed. “Measured, deliberate, precise, and lethal,” he said.

Within two weeks of the strike, a preliminary military investigation concluded it was caused by a targeting error — the Defense Intelligence Agency's imagery of the site had not been updated in seven years. An investigation by The New York Times also revealed: Internal flags and direct warnings to update the target maps, repeatedly sent up the chain of command for months, were completely ignored.

Then, 80 days after the strike, Admiral Brad Cooper, Commander of U.S. Central Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said the investigation was “complex” because the school was located on what he called an active Iranian cruise missile site. The school had not been a military site for more than a decade.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand questioned U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, Commander of U.S. Air Forces Central, and Admiral Cooper. She asked Cooper to explain the documented damage to 22 schools and 17 healthcare facilities across Iran — verified by the New York Times. Cooper said there was no indication of that damage whatsoever. His command had not investigated those claims. Gillibrand called for Hegseth's resignation.

Congressman Adam Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, had heard enough.

“It’s really pretty clear what happened there,” Smith said. “Eighty days on, we have not taken responsibility for that attack. The endless stalling — ‘It’s being investigated, it’s being investigated, it’s being investigated.’ You are making yourselves look like clowns. Own up to it.”

Cooper did not.

Lamerd, Fars Province, Iran

Six hours later and two provinces away, in Lamerd, two U.S. Precision Strike Missiles struck a sports hall, an adjacent elementary school, and the surrounding residential neighborhood.

Each missile exploded in the air, scattering 180,000 tungsten pellets outward in every direction. The nearby IRGC compound was untouched. The “precision” missiles missed it by 900 feet (the length of three American football fields).

At the sports hall, the lights went out. The children were scared and screaming. Everyone scrambled for the exits.

Across the street, pellets reached the blood transfusion center. The building security guard’s son was waiting out front. He was struck by shrapnel and killed.

On the adjacent soccer field, two children and their coach were killed during practice.

On a nearby block, Avina Barzegar, 2, was playing outside her house when she was struck and killed.

At least 21 people were killed. More than 100 were injured. Many face permanent disabilities.

Elham

Elham Zaeri, 11, had been on the volleyball team two years and already had a mean serve. She was a natural athlete who had surprised everyone in her family and at school with her skills.

Her father told the journalist Negin Bagheri that Elham had “big dreams” to become a professional volleyball player one day.

Helma

Helma Ahmadizadeh, 10, was Elham’s teammate. When the lights went out, she ran to her coach.

“It feels like something has gone into my body,” she said.

She lifted her shirt. Something small had pierced her skin.

She boarded the ambulance by herself. There was not a single drop of blood visible.

She never woke up.

“I can’t cope with the death of my daughter,” her father told Negin Bagheri.

Our Army Bombed Civilians in Lamerd

U.S. military commanders denied responsibility for Lamerd too. They said Iran had struck its own city. The Iranian Foreign Ministry said it was “not a mistake” but “a calculated decision to test the destructive power of a new weapon system on Iranian civilians.”

The New York Times obtained the videos. Christiaan Triebert watched them frame by frame. In one video you can see the missile itself. It does not hit the ground. It explodes in the air. Then tungsten pellets travel outward in every direction.

Triebert counted 2,000 impact points on a single stretch of road, and 700 on a row of homes. Also hit by the pellets: a beauty salon, a real estate agency, a travel agency, civilian cars, and an oil truck.

Wes J. Bryant served until 2025 as the senior adviser on precision warfare and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — the office Hegseth dissolved before the first missile flew. Bryant called the Minab strike “a failure in fundamental targeting doctrine and standards.” He told The New York Times: “People need to be fired and decertified for negligence. Senior commanders need potentially to be held under UCMJ violation because this was so incredibly negligent. There’s no ‘fog of war’ excuse here.”

The Precision Strike Missile was made by Lockheed Martin in Camden, Arkansas. The U.S. Army is seeking to quadruple its procurement budget for the missile.

Cooper confirmed that Lamerd was the first combat use of the Precision Strike Missile.

The children and residents of Lamerd were the first human beings the Precision Strike Missile was ever used on.

Field tested. Results: 180,000 pellets per detonation.

Now they know it works.

They Called Them Human Shields

The Trump administration had one response to the deaths in Minab and Lamerd: the Iranian people had been warned. American forces, Admiral Cooper said, made certain of that.

"Our staff specifically warned the Iranian people more than 100 times about the threat of them being used as human shields."

Under international humanitarian law, using civilians to shield military targets is itself a war crime. But the law is equally clear: Shielding does not release the attacker from the obligation to protect civilian life. Not even if the enemy violates the rules first. The attacker must still verify targets, distinguish combatants from civilians, and ask whether the military advantage justifies the harm.

Cooper told the Senate that preventing civilian deaths was his passion. In the opening days of the war, the United States fired 13,629 munitions over Iran. He had opened one active civilian casualty investigation, into the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh.

“I just could not be prouder of our men and women in uniform,” Cooper said, “leveraging innovation to create dilemmas for the enemy.”

The dilemmas were Mikaeil and Selma and Esra and Raha and Alireza and Mohammad and Elham and Helma and Avina. They were attending school. They were practicing in the gym and on the fields. They were at home.

They were not human shields. They were children.

In Memoriam

Date of Death: February 28, 2026

یادشان گرامی — Yadash Gerami. May their memory be honored.

Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School

Minab, Hormozgan Province, Iran.

CHILDREN

  • Ahmad Soltani, 7 years old.

  • Ali Asghar Zaeri, 8 years old.

  • Alireza Shahroju, 7 years old, in the 1st grade. His mother identified him by his clothing. One of his legs was missing.

  • Alireza Zarei, 9 years old.

  • Amirghasem Zaeri, 7 years old.

  • Arad Ahmadizadeh, 8 years old, gymnast.

  • Arina Arab-Kish, 8 years old, gymnast.

  • Arya Bahadori, 9 years old.

  • Asna Raeisi, 12 years old.

  • Atena Ahmadzadeh, 10 years old, gymnast.

  • Athareh Zarei, 10 years old.

  • Benyamin Jangjou, 8 years old.

  • Ehsan Saleminia, 6 years old.

  • Esra Farahi-Zadeh, young girl.

  • Esra Zakeri, 9 years old, in the 4th grade. Selma’s sister, identified by her father the first night at the hospital.

  • Fatemeh Dorazehi, 10 years old. Her family is Baluchi.

  • Fatemeh Fadavi Hokmi, 10 years old.

  • Fatemeh Rahdar, 10 years old.

  • Fatemeh Yazdan-Panah, young girl.

  • Fatemeh Zahra Karimi, 7 years old.

  • Hamed Par-Ashegh-Nezhad, 7 years old.

  • Hana Dehqani, 8 years old.

  • Hananeh Mehdikhah, 7 years old.

  • Khadijeh Darvishi, 9 years old.

  • Liana Mohammadi, 7 years old.

  • Mahdis Nazari, 7 years old.

  • Mahna Zarei, 2 months old.

  • Makan Nasiri, 12 years old, gymnast. His body was never found. A symbolic grave was established in his memory.

  • Maryam Pazark, 10 years old.

  • Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, 9 years old, in the 3rd grade. Found with his school backpack on his chest.

  • Mohammad Hatam Raeisi, 10 years old.

  • Mohammad Jafari, 10 years old. His family waited a month for news. His DNA was matched to a pair of legs.

  • Mohammad Sadra Zarei, 8 years old.

  • Mohammad Shah-Dousti, 8 years old.

  • Mohammad-Ali Karyani Pak, 7 years old.

  • Mohammad-Mehdi Chegini, 10 years old.

  • Mohammadian Bahrami, 17 years old.

  • Mohammadreza Shahsavari, 8 years old.

  • Nadia Shahmiri, 9 years old.

  • Parham Ranjbari, 9 years old.

  • Parsa Mokhtari-Nasab, 12 years old.

  • Raha Zarei, 7 years old, an only child. She wanted to be a dentist. Nothing of her remained except a single shoe.

  • Reza Barani, 6 years old.

  • Reza Habashian, 7 years old.

  • Reza Ranjbar, 6 years old.

  • Sara Shayesteh, 5 years old.

  • Selma Zakeri, 6 years old, in the 1st grade. That morning, for the first and last time, she shook her father’s hand.

  • Zahra Ansarifard, 7 years old.

  • Zahra Asghari-Far, 8 years old. The blast threw her into the yard. There was only a small scratch above her eyebrow.

  • Zahra Bahrami, 7 years old.

  • Zeynab Bahrami, 10 years old.

  • Zoha Pasand, 8 years old.

TEACHERS AND STAFF

  • Fatemeh Salari, 34 years old.

  • Fatemeh Shahdadi.

  • Fatemeh Taherifard, 29 years old.

  • Fereshteh Sangarzadeh, 44 years old.

  • Mahmoud Gholamyani, 35 years old.

  • Mandana Salari, 29 years old.

  • Marzieh Bashirifar, 38 years old.

  • Neda Solhizadeh.

  • Razieh Zamani, 34, the 3rd grade teacher. Her body was never found. Her grave reads: Javid al-Asar (“eternally missing.”)

  • Roghayeh Karimi, 42 years old.

  • Samira Basarde, 38 years old. Selma and Esra’s teacher.

  • Sobhan Shohadaei.

  • Zeinab Makkizadeh.

  • Zohreh Shahriari.

UNNAMED PERSONS

  • Schoolchildren, teachers, parents, and other civilians whose names have not yet been made public.

Sports Hall, Soccer Field, and Surrounding Neighborhood.

Lamerd, Fars Province, Iran.

CHILDREN

  • Abdul Mosavar Rahmani, student. From Afghanistan.

  • Avina Barzegar, 2 years old. She was playing outside her house when she was struck and killed.

  • Elham Zaeri, 11 years old. She had “big dreams,” her father said, to become a professional volleyball player.

  • Helma Ahmadizadeh, 10 years old. Before she boarded the ambulance she told her coach: “It feels like something has gone into my body.”

  • Ilia Khatami, 6th grade.

TEACHERS, STAFF, FAMILY MEMBERS, AND NEIGHBORS

  • Abedin Gharibdoost.

  • Abuzar Amiri.

  • Alireza Abbasi.

  • Farhad Najafi, soccer coach.

  • Hossein Ebrahimi, 31 years old.

  • Jafar Hatami.

  • Mohammad Najafi, volleyball coach.

  • Rahman Mansouri.

  • Robab Dehdashti, medical worker.

  • Sakineh Shabani.

  • Seyed Asghar Mousavi.

  • Siavash Shahbazi, an oil industry worker.

  • Zahra Asadinezhad.

UNNAMED PERSONS

  • Workers, residents, children, and other civilians killed in or near the sports hall, playground, and nearby homes. Their names have not yet been released.

About the Reporting

This piece was made possible by the reporting from Iran of four journalists: Negin Bagheri, Elnaz Mohammadi, Stefanie Glinski, and Mohammad Mohsenifar.

Negin Bagheri and Elnaz Mohammadi are colleagues who were both sentenced to three-year partly suspended prison terms in 2023 for “conspiracy and collusion” — charges stemming from their coverage of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Bagheri, a journalist and human rights defender based inside Iran, reached Lamerd shortly after a missile strike hit a local sports hall. She interviewed the families of Helma Ahmadizadeh and Elham Zaeri. Her report was translated by the human rights organization Femena and featured on The World from PRX.

Elnaz Mohammadi and her twin sister, Elaheh, won the 2026 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). Reporters Without Borders nominated Elnaz Mohammadi for its 2026 Courage Award for defending press freedom despite intense censorship. Writing from inside Iran during active conflict, she reported on the families of Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, Selma and Esra Zakeri, Alireza Shahroju, Razieh Zamani, and the community of Minab. Her account was originally published by the reformist newspaper Shargh Daily and later translated by Femena for global distribution.

Stefanie Glinski. a freelance journalist and photographer, has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa for The Guardian, Foreign Policy, the LA Times, and The Economist. She speaks four languages, including Dari, and has faced Taliban harassment for her courageous reporting in Afghanistan.

For an investigative feature in Foreign Policy, Glinski partnered with Tehran-based Iranian journalist Mohammad Mohsenifar, who took significant personal risk to report from inside his home country. Together, they traveled to Minab to interview the grieving families of Raha Zarei and Mohammad Jafari. Without their shared courage and persistent field reporting, these names would remain unknown outside Iran.

Sources

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]]><![CDATA[The Left-Click Slaughter]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-left-click-slaughterhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-left-click-slaughterFri, 12 Jun 2026 03:48:06 GMTThe Pentagon used AI to strike 13,000 targets in 38 days, killed children in Iran, and made accountability nearly impossible.

On February 28, the United States killed children in Iran. The Pentagon denied responsibility. The law that makes this a war crime has never been used against a senior official. The names of the responsible individuals remain unpublished. They should be named.

The First Strike: Minab and Lamerd

On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab during morning classes. The principal moved her students to the prayer hall and called their parents. A second missile hit the prayer hall. At least 175 people died. Most were girls between seven and 12 years old.

Hours later, two U.S. Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) hit a sports hall and school complex in Lamerd, in southern Iran’s Fars province. The explosions collapsed a volleyball facility, outdoor playgrounds, and two blocks of family homes. Twenty-one people died. At least four were children. One hundred more were injured. No Iranian soldier was killed. The sports hall was not the intended target; an IRGC facility stood 900 feet away.

A rendering of the PrSM, courtesy of Lockheed Martin’s marketing department.

The walls of the Lamerd sports complex show dense, uniform pockmarks. This pattern requires a weapon that detonates in mid-air and scatters fragments across a wide area. The Iranian Hoveyzeh is a point-detonating land-attack missile; it hits a surface and explodes. It cannot produce that pattern.

The weapon that produces that pattern is the PrSM. Analysts at Janes Defence Intelligence reviewed security camera footage and identified the missile from its shape, length, silhouette, and airburst characteristics. McKenzie Intelligence reached the same conclusion independently. Three U.S. officials confirmed it to the New York Times on background. BBC Verify confirmed it independently. Amaël Kotlarski, weapons team lead at Janes, said the PrSM was likely the only weapon in the Pentagon’s arsenal that could have struck Lamerd from U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, or elsewhere in the Gulf.

The PrSM had never been fired in combat before February 28. It is designed to detonate above its target and disperse 180,000 tungsten pellets in every direction. Someone approved the first combat use of that weapon in a neighborhood with a sports hall full of children.

The Pentagon said U.S. forces had nothing to do with it. The Pentagon said Iran did it.

CENTCOM’s Navy Captain Tim Hawkins issued a formal statement on March 31 about Lamerd: no U.S. operations occurred within 30 miles of the city on the opening day of the war. The damage, he said, was caused by a malfunctioning Iranian Hoveyzeh cruise missile.

A U.S. official briefed on the investigation told The Intercept it was “colossal negligence.” A Senate investigation called it “likely the deadliest child casualty event by American forces since 1991.” Amnesty International called for accountability. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk and diplomats from Norway and Iceland formally condemned the strike before the UN Human Rights Council. DAWN called on Iran to file a declaration with the International Criminal Court under Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute.

Policy Overhaul and the AI Interface

Both strikes were made possible by decisions Pete Hegseth made before the first missile flew.

In March 2025, immediately after taking office, Hegseth closed the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office. He also closed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, created by Congress in 2022 with bipartisan support. Its statutory mandate under 10 U.S. Code § 184 was to prevent civilian deaths in U.S. military operations—to review target lists, audit databases, challenge weapon selections, and maintain the no-strike infrastructure the law required.

Hegseth fired the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. He cut civilian harm mitigation staff at U.S. combatant commands by more than 90 percent, over the documented objections of generals, admirals, and members of the Joint Chiefs. He made law of war training optional, calling it an “unnecessary distraction” from combat.

These were decisions made before the war about what kind of war this would be. By closing these offices, the administration removed the people who would have caught the mistakes.

The people meant to catch the Minab database error before a missile was assigned to a girls’ school had been removed. The lawyers meant to question the Lamerd weapon selection had been fired. The training that might have prompted someone to raise a flag had been made optional. Neither failure was caught before children died.

In May, the Pentagon’s own Inspector General concluded in a formal report that the Defense Department is actively violating U.S. law by failing to prevent civilian casualties. The Guardian and The Intercept obtained the report. Hegseth did not respond.

On March 13, two weeks after the children were killed, Hegseth addressed the war. “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” he said. “No quarter” means no prisoners. It means killing those who attempt to surrender. It is prohibited under international law, the Geneva Conventions, and the Pentagon’s own law of war manual.

Senator Mark Kelly, a Navy combat veteran, took to the floor of the Senate and read directly from that manual, demanding Hegseth clarify the statement and reaffirm that U.S. troops have a duty to refuse illegal orders. Legal experts at Just Security concluded Hegseth’s statement likely violates 18 U.S.C. § 2441.

Hegseth said this two weeks after the children died, and it did not cost him anything.

To fire 13,000 weapons in 38 days—342 per day—required more than policy. It required a targeting system that could process decisions at that speed. The Pentagon built one.

AI-powered data integration and decision support system built by Palantir in 2025.

What made it possible was artificial intelligence—specifically, Palantir’s Maven Smart System integrated with Anthropic’s Claude large language model. Before Claude’s integration, Pentagon operators processed about 10 target assessments per day. After: 3,000.

The interface presents operators with a prioritized queue of target cards on a Kanban-style layout. Left-click approves. Right-click rejects. Claude handles the decision logic underneath.

At 342 strikes a day, the left-click is not a review; it is a blind fraction-of-a-second signature on the system’s output. Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, confirmed in May that Pentagon users were processing 20 billion tokens of data per day during Operation Epic Fury.

The danger was not just that software replaced human responsibility. It was that the system spread responsibility across many people, making each approval look like a routine task.

At 20 billion tokens per day, no human being is reading the reasoning, checking the source database, or asking whether the school was flagged. The speed itself is the insulation. When the system moves that fast, it becomes nearly impossible to assign individual accountability.

Failed Oversight and Official Hypocrisy

The military continued using the AI system despite a sudden executive order targeting its software supply chain.

On February 28, the day the missiles flew, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to immediately stop using Anthropic’s tools, designating the company “leftwing nut jobs” and a national security supply chain risk. Anthropic had previously refused Pentagon demands for unrestricted military use of its AI, citing ethical limits on autonomous weapons, and had sued the Defense Department. The military kept the model running anyway during the opening day of the war. Pentagon CTO Emil Michael explained on March 12: “You can’t just rip out a system that’s deeply embedded overnight.”

On March 24, Pentagon Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies confirmed before a Senate subcommittee that the AI system was in active operational use during Operation Epic Fury. She told Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island: “The use of the system is active right now.”

When the Maven system ran the Defense Intelligence Agency’s database, it flagged the Minab school coordinates as a valid target. An operator approved the strike in seconds.

The DIA’s database had not been reviewed for over a decade. The school had operated publicly for ten years, featuring a website, painted sports fields, and blue-and-pink walls visible on commercial satellite maps, separated from an adjacent IRGC naval compound by a fence in place since 2016. Targeting officials had relied on outdated intelligence.

The man running the DIA during that database failure was Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse. He was not fired for the database error; he was fired because his assessment of U.S. nuclear strikes contradicted President Trump’s claim that Iran’s facilities had been “obliterated.” Senator Mark Warner stated: “The dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country.” Lieutenant General James Adams replaced him. No one has been held accountable for the database that killed 175 people.

Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the PrSM, finalized an expanded procurement agreement with the Defense Department in the weeks that followed, building on an existing $4.94 billion contract. The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request asks Congress for nearly two billion dollars to purchase 1,134 more—four times the previous year’s allocation.

No external legal avenue exists to challenge these strikes.

Internationally, the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. That 28-year bipartisan consensus, maintained across Republican and Democratic administrations, keeps global prosecutors from reaching American soil. Domestically, the Justice Department answers directly to the president who ordered this war. Legislative oversight has broken down; Republicans control both chambers of Congress.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen, joined by more than 40 colleagues, launched an April investigation into Hegseth’s dismantling of civilian protection programs. Their letter noted that since the start of the war, strikes by U.S. and Israeli forces had killed more than 1,700 civilians and struck more than 20 schools and a dozen healthcare facilities.

Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand asked Admiral Brad Cooper how many schools U.S. forces had bombed. Cooper said there was one active civilian casualty investigation, the Minab school, out of 13,629 missions.

Gillibrand asked how he explained the publicly verified damage to 22 schools and 17 healthcare facilities, documented by the New York Times.

“There’s no way that we can corroborate that,” Cooper said. “No indication of that whatsoever, Senator.”

Gillibrand asked whether his command had investigated those claims. Cooper said it had not.

Cooper justified the Minab strike by stating, “Our staff specifically warned the Iranian people more than 100 times about the threat of them being used as human shields.” The children were not human shields; they were attending school.

Before the House Armed Services Committee on May 19, Representative Adam Smith pressed Cooper directly: “It’s really pretty clear what happened there. Eighty days on, we have not taken responsibility for that attack. Can you at this moment acknowledge that that mistake was made?”

Cooper referred back to the investigation.

“So that’s a no,” Smith said. “We will not take responsibility for something we very obviously did.”

Representative Sara Jacobs presented Cooper with a letter signed by more than half the Democratic caucus demanding the investigation be made public. Senator Mark Kelly pressed Cooper to reinstate personnel to the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office. Cooper called the question hypothetical. “I’m always looking to organize to purpose,” he said, “and we’ll just see what the investigation shows.”

Cooper said the AR 15-6 investigation into Minab is nearing its end. He would not say when it would conclude.

He would not identify the investigating general officer he appointed to lead it; the targeting officer who approved the Minab coordinates; the CENTCOM J-2 Target Nomination Chief who signed off on the validity of the underlying data feed; the Staff Judge Advocate operational lawyer who reviewed the strike’s proportionality under the laws of armed conflict; the J-3 Director of Operations who authorized launch; or the person who authorized the combat debut of the PrSM 900 feet from a sports hall.

The absolute refusal to apologize, pay reparations, or accept legal responsibility for foreign civilian casualties is the consistent, unbroken posture of the United States government across generations.

This cannot be fixed from the inside.

War Crimes Statute and Historical Precedent

Under 18 U.S. Code § 2441—the federal war crimes statute—a U.S. national who orders or commits a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions is subject to life imprisonment, or death, if the victim dies. Article 51(4) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits indiscriminate attacks—attacks whose effects cannot be directed at a specific military objective or limited as required by international law. Firing a weapon that scatters 180,000 tungsten pellets, 900 feet from a building full of children on its first combat use, meets that definition. More than 100 international law professors said so in April. The ICC agrees. So does the Pentagon’s own law of war manual.

The federal war crimes statute has existed since 1996. It has never been used to prosecute a senior military or civilian official.

In November 1969, Seymour Hersh published the story of what U.S. soldiers did to between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai on March 16, 1968.

The London Times published stories on My Lai by Seymour Hersh that were initially rejected or downplayed by American newspapers.

Hersh did not publish a forensic analysis. He named Lieutenant William Calley. He named Captain Ernest Medina. He named the soldiers. He named the village, the date, the ditch where the bodies were found. The Army could ignore a report of civilian deaths; it could not ignore a named officer attached to a specific atrocity on a specific date.

Calley was convicted. Nixon commuted his sentence after three days of house arrest. But Medina’s trial established “The Medina Directive”: a commander is criminally liable if they know, or should have known, about a subordinate’s war crime and fail to act. Under this long-standing U.S. military precedent, commanders cannot legally hide behind an automated algorithm to evade operational intent.

In 2004, photographs from Abu Ghraib documented the systematic torture of Iraqi detainees held by U.S. forces. It was the names—Private Lynndie England, Specialist Charles Graner, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski—that created the pressure for Senate hearings and courts-martial.

Seven enlisted soldiers were convicted. The officials who designed the program were named, investigated, promoted, appointed to federal judgeships, and retired with honors. The law reached the soldiers; it did not reach the officials. But the naming preserved the record of exactly who they were and what they authorized.

In 2015, U.S. forces struck the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, repeatedly, for over an hour, after MSF had given CENTCOM its GPS coordinates. MSF named General John Campbell. A 3,000-page investigation followed, naming every link in the chain of command that failed. No one was prosecuted. But the naming forced the investigation, and the investigation produced the record.

In 2021, a U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed ten civilians, including seven children. The press named the driver, Zemari Ahmadi. It named his children. It named the operator. The naming forced the Pentagon to reverse its “righteous strike” claim.

Earlier cover-ups were reactive, clumsy, and human. The system still depended on signed orders, legal reviews, and identifiable personnel files. Because humans had to write and sign their names, independent researchers could pull on a single thread and force the apparatus to crack.

Now, concealment is built into the system before the war begins. The lawyers are gone. The system is automated. It is designed to move faster than oversight can track. By removing the legal guardrails before the war began and routing accountability through an algorithm, the current administration has built a system in which no single human being can be said, with certainty, to have made any individual lethal decision.

The Role of Investigative Newsrooms

Journalists executed the forensic role with precision. The ground documentation began with Tehran-based journalist Negin Bagheri, who interviewed survivors and first reported the local casualties.

Bypassing the Pentagon’s public affairs offices, The New York Times investigators Alexander Cardia and Eric Schmitt expanded on this tracking. Working alongside weapons team leads at Janes Defence Intelligence and McKenzie Intelligence, they acquired commercial satellite photography and matched the ballistic pockmarks on the Lamerd sports complex walls to the blast signature of the PrSM. Independent reporting proved the initial CENTCOM denials were false within 80 days of the launch.

Exposing the weapon and the initial lie is the necessary first step, but it cannot be the last. Filing lawsuits for redacted documents or waiting for official statements allows the military to hide individual decision-makers behind a shield of anonymity. When newsrooms publish the technical specifications of a missile without the identity of the officer who cleared the flight path, the exposure risks turning the slaughter into a mechanical error rather than a human choice.

Under joint military targeting doctrine, these operational roles are mandatory command slots with real names attached to them in personnel logs, targeting files, and internal reviews. The data exists. The tracking files exist.

Once the forensic proof is out, journalists must track down those names. Without them, the algorithm takes the blame, the institution absorbs the crime, and no one is held accountable.

his U.S. government has decided the public does not have the right to know what is being done in their name, to children, with their taxpayer dollars. The law exists. The victims have names.

Farhad Najafi was a soccer coach, killed on the grass while running a drill.

Ilya Hatami, 12, was a 6th-grader who died on the field beside him.

Avina Barzegar was two years old, mortally wounded by tungsten shrapnel while playing in the yard of her home.

Helma Ahmadizadeh, 10, was a 4th-grade volleyball player. She survived the initial detonation inside the sports complex, walked into the ambulance on her own feet, and told her coach, “It feels like something went into my body,” before an undetected shrapnel pellet stopped her heart.

Elham Zaeri, 11, was a 5th grader — Helma’s best friend and volleyball teammate. She was striking a ball across the net when the roof collapsed and killed her.

The names of the people responsible for these and other deaths that day have not appeared in print.

Name them.

Sources and Visual Evidence

Primary Documentaries and Video Forensics

  • The New York Times Video Reporting Team. (2026). How a New U.S. Weapon Killed 21 Civilians in Iran. Direct visual investigation tracking security cameras, satellite evidence, and the PrSM blast characteristics in Lamerd. Watch the documentary directly on YouTube below.

  • CNN-News18 International Desk. (2026). Deadly School Strike in Iran: 150 Children Killed in Minab Missile Attack. Global broadcast documenting initial civilian impact metrics, playground rubble, and family first-hand responses at the girls’ school. Watch the investigative broadcast on YouTube below.

Technical and Ballistic Intelligence Reports

  • The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). (2026). Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) Weapon System Profile. Full technical blueprint documenting Lockheed Martin’s surface-to-surface weapon system, flight limitations, and payload fragmentation properties. Find and review the telemetry sheets on the CSIS Missile Threat Database at csis.org

  • Bagheri, Negin. / Khabaronline News Agency. (2026). A Narrative of the Attack on the Lamerd Volleyball Girls: How Helma and Elham Died on the First Day of Airstrikes. Direct primary on-the-ground report from Fars province, containing interviews with the surviving coaches and family metrics. Read the un-redacted primary text at khabaronline.ir

  • Defense Procurement Liaison. (2020). The US Navy Has an Upgraded Tomahawk: Here’s 5 Things You Should Know. Detailed naval analysis tracking target-card integration, flight-deck infrastructure, and cruise weapon systems. The operational analysis on Defense News is available at defensenews.com

Legal Statutes and Command Accountability

  • Just Security Editorial Board. (2026). PrSMs in Iran War: U.S. Obligation to Conduct Legal Review. Legal evaluation of the principle of distinction, indiscriminate weapon airburst parameters, and legal obligations under international humanitarian law. Read the complete study on the Just Security Portal here: justsecurity.org

  • Legal Information Institute. (1996). 18 U.S. Code § 2441 - War Crimes. Full statutory text detailing grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, life imprisonment thresholds, and federal criminal penalties for United States nationals. View the law on the Cornell Law School Portal at cornell.edu

  • The International Criminal Court. (1998). Rome Statute Article 12(3) Jurisdictional Declarations. Global legal framework tracking voluntary state declarations and third-party prosecutorial thresholds on foreign territory. Access the baseline rules via the International Criminal Court Legal Tools Database at icc-cpi.int

PLAYABLE VIDEOS

  • CNN-News18 International Desk. (2026). Deadly School Strike in Iran: 150 Children Killed in Minab Missile Attack. A major investigative broadcast tracking the first wave of airstrikes against the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school, documenting the initial civilian impact metrics, international outrage, and independent probe demands. Full broadcast media link available on YouTube here:

  • The New York Times Video Reporting Team. (2026). How a New U.S. Weapon Killed 21 Civilians in Iran. Frame-by-frame analysis of security camera footage, satellite evidence, and tracking of the PrSM blast characteristics in Lamerd. Watch the YouTube video of The New York Times forensic visual investigation here:

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]]><![CDATA[Some of You Are Not Even Listening]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/some-of-you-are-not-even-listeninghttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/some-of-you-are-not-even-listeningThu, 11 Jun 2026 23:39:26 GMTIn 1966, he splayed his fingers across his guitar and strummed until his thumb bled, shouting into the microphone. Richie Havens had simple words for it: hydrogen bombs, guided missiles.

On that stage, he asked: “Hey, what’s the use of singing this song? Some of you are not even listening.”

He was singing to a room of people looking at each other, unable to imagine a pocket-sized screen that could hijack our eyes and isolate us in the middle of a crowd.

Our cell phone just keeps us somewhere else.

You scroll through a daze of attention-grabbing noise you never set out to find — the celebrity headlines, the mindless loops, the flashing ads for things we don’t need — riveted by trivia you don’t even care about.

If a shattered building flashes across the glass, it is gone before the shock can even settle.

A haptic alert or a passing reel intercepts it, wiping out the sudden panic before the thought can even fully form.

What if that was my house, my neighborhood rained down on with tungsten pellets?

The screen takes the friction, and the outrage stays flat.

We are flooded with data, insulated by thousands of miles of empty space, moving too fast to ever feel the weight of it.

Print journalism and the nightly news we used to share are going down fast under Trump’s seize. There is no shared reality left. Everything has been broken down into hyper-customized feeds that treat an atrocity like standard content.

As I write this, I pause and glance out my window. Outside, the morning presents an ordinary illusion of safety.

Leashed dogs, strangers pausing over the opened roses near the walkway to our home.

A bloom on the tall rose bush I planted out front in clear view from my desk.

On the grass, a pair of cardinals guide their fledglings—clumsy, flightless drops out of the bushes, plopping down and hopping frantically to find cover before a predator tracks them.

There is no sulfur in the air here. I am not in Iran. I am not in Lebanon. I cannot hear the iron moving through the air.

Then a sudden twitch hits my palm. The blue light blinks, yanking my eyes back down to a digital space I never set out to visit, riveting me there.

He warned us to listen for the whistle.

But the screen ensures the sound never reaches us. It leaves me right here, looking through the glass at a beautiful world, watching the slaughter on mute.

Why am I writing this?

Because I am sitting by a window where the roses are blooming and the birds are teaching their young to fly, trying to figure out how to live with the horror of being completely safe.

And because he asked if anyone was listening.

The children killed on the opening day of the Iran war had names.

Farhad Najaf, Avina Barzegar, and Helma Ahmadizadeh.

Say them out loud before the next notification twitches in your palm and yanks you away.

Hey, look yonder, tell me what’s that you see
Marching to the fields of Concord?
It looks like handsome Johnny with a musket in his hand
Marching to the Concord war, hey, marching to the Concord war
Hey, look yonder, tell me what’s that you see
Marching to the fields of Gettysburg?
Looks like handsome Johnny with a flintlock in his hand
Marching to the Gettysburg War, hey, marching to the Gettysburg War
Hey, look yonder, tell me what’s that you see
Marching to the fields of Dunkirk?
Looks like handsome Johnny with a carbine in his hand
Marching to the Dunkirk War, hey marching to the Dunkirk War
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Hey, look yonder, tell me what’s that you see
Marching to the fields of Korea
Looks like handsome Johnny with an M1 in his hand
Marching to the Korean War, hey marching to the Korean War
Hey, it’s a long hard road, it’s a long hard road
It’s a long, hard road, and before we’ll be free
And before we’ll be free
Hey, look yonder, tell me what you see
Marching to the fields of Vietnam?
It looks like handsome Johnny with an M15
Marching to the Vietnam War, hey, marching to the Vietnam War
Hey, look yonder, tell me what you see
Marching to the fields of Birmingham
Looks like handsome Johnny with his hand rolled in a fist
Marching to the Birmingham war, hey, marching to the Birmingham war
Hey, what’s the use of singing this song
Some of you are not even listening
Tell me what it is we’ve got to do
Wait for our fields to start glistening
Hey, wait for the bullets to start whistling
Hey, here comes a hydrogen bomb
And, here comes a guided missile
Here comes a hydrogen bomb
I can almost hear its whistle
I can almost hear its whistle
Yeah, yeah, yeah

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]]><![CDATA[For Sixty Years, No Accountability]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/for-sixty-years-no-accountabilityhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/for-sixty-years-no-accountabilityThu, 11 Jun 2026 05:10:23 GMTU.S. missiles and bombs strike homes and schools, leaving families with the dead, the wounded, the rubble, and the trauma that follows. The public is told this is the unavoidable cost of warfare. Few call it what it is: a massacre. Independent journalists and human rights monitors do.

These are not isolated errors, targeting glitches, or intelligence failures. They are repetitions. And that tells a different story.

1968: The Canal at Son My, Vietnam

On March 16, 1968, U.S. Army soldiers from Charlie Company entered the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai and spent four hours killing everyone they found. They murdered 504 civilians — predominantly women, children, and elderly men. None resisted. Soldiers raped women before shooting them, tossed grenades into family bomb shelters, and filled a drainage ditch with bodies.

Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., the helicopter pilot who landed between U.S. troops and Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and ordered his crew to stop the killing.

One man tried to stop it. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between the troops and a group of surviving civilians, ordering his door gunner to fire on American soldiers if they continued the assault. Thompson evacuated the survivors and reported the massacre to his superiors. The command structure buried the reports. It took more than a year for the truth to reach the American public, forced into the light only because a 22-year-old veteran named Ron Ridenhour gathered eyewitness accounts and mailed his findings to 30 officials, including Arizona Representative Morris K. Udall, who immediately bypassed the military blockade and forced the Department of the Army to act.

Out of 25 men charged, only Lieutenant William Calley was convicted. Found guilty of murdering 22 civilians and sentenced to life, Calley served three days in a military stockade before President Richard Nixon intervened. He spent three years under house arrest. The superior officers who orchestrated the assault and signed off on the cover-up—including Major General Samuel Koster and Colonel Oran Henderson—faced no criminal convictions. Koster, who actively suppressed Warrant Officer Thompson’s eyewitness reports, received a reduction in rank but retired with a full military pension and went on to work as an executive for an electrical contractor. The House Armed Services Committee concluded that responsible officers "failed to make adequate, timely investigation."

The lesson the U.S. military took from My Lai was not how to stop killing civilians. It was how not to get caught.

2003: The Vial on the World Stage

Thirty-five years later, Secretary of State Colin Powell stood before the United Nations Security Council and held up a small glass vial. He told the world it could contain anthrax. He declared that Iraq possessed biological weapons, mobile labs producing toxins, and missiles fitted with chemical payloads.

Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial during his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on Iraq’s alleged weapons program, February 5, 2003.

“Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” Powell said. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

None of it was true.

The State Department’s own intelligence bureau had raised red flags before Powell ever stepped to the podium. The presentation cherry-picked testimony and omitted a decisive truth: Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel al-Majid — the defector who had run Iraq’s WMD program — testified to international inspectors that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological stockpiles after the first Gulf War. The audio intercepts Powell played were edited to sound more incriminating. The WMD illustrations came from Iraqi fabricators telling the Bush administration precisely what it wanted to hear.

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter had already confirmed in 2002 that Iraq had destroyed 90 to 95 percent of its weapons capability. Ultimately, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

In October 2006, The Lancet estimated 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the invasion—2.5 percent of the country’s population—with more than 600,000 caused by direct violence. While other estimates range from 150,000 to over one million, the vast delta in these figures is itself a metric of the chaos; the dead were too numerous to accurately count.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice faced no legal consequences. Attorneys and officials within the Obama administration’s Justice Department actively chose not to investigate or prosecute. The International Criminal Court was powerless because American politicians had deliberately refused to ratify the court’s statute, insulating their leadership from international law before the first bombs fell. A symbolic tribunal in Kuala Lumpur convicted Bush and Cheney in absentia, but the verdict carried no legal weight because no government official would enforce it.

Powell later called his UN speech “a blot” on his record. He was not a passive victim of faulty intelligence; he had spent five days at CIA headquarters alongside Director George Tenet, actively editing the presentation to maximize its incrimination while ignoring explicit red flags from his own State Department staff. His post-war comment allowed him to avoid legal accountability while rejoining corporate boards.

In 2022, speaking at his presidential center in Dallas regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Bush stumbled into a rare moment of unscripted truth: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” He caught himself, shaking his head. “I mean, Ukraine.” Then, in a quiet murmur, he added: “Iraq too.”

The political cost of this protected status extends far beyond American borders. Analysts at the Institute for Policy Studies note that authoritarian leaders worldwide used the absolute immunity enjoyed by Bush and Cheney as a green light for their own aggression. Had American war planners been held to account, foreign leaders—potentially including Vladimir Putin—might have hesitated before launching their own illegal invasions.

Exemption from the law is a policy blueprint exported to the rest of the world.

2026: The Ruins in Minab, Iran

On February 28, 2026, the opening salvo of a joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign pierced the airspace over southern Iran. One hour into the assault, U.S. Raytheon Tomahawk Block V cruise missiles tore into the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab. The roof collapsed into the classrooms. When confronted with the facts, the Pentagon first offered denials, then claimed the school was a military base.

The elementary school in Minab after the February 28, 2026 strike. The school was full of children when it was hit by two missiles in succession — a double-tap strike.

One hundred and twenty children were killed in those classrooms in Minab. On that same day, 60 miles away in Lamerd, U.S. Lockheed Martin PrSM Increment 2 missiles detonated as airbursts directly over a neighborhood sports facility, spraying hundreds of thousands of high-velocity tungsten pellets into soccer players, a coach, children, and nearby residential blocks. The anti-personnel warheads shredded everything within their radius, killing 21 people and wounding more than 100 others.

Helma Ahmadizadeh, a 10-year-old 4th-grader, and Elham Zaeri, an 11-year-old 5th-grader, were killed at volleyball practice. Ilia Khatami, a 6th-grade student, was killed near the adjacent soccer field with his coach, Farhad Najafi. Two-year-old Avina Barzegar was mortally wounded while playing outside her home. They had names. So did the others who died that day.

In the lead-up to the bombardment, administration officials declared that Iran posed an immediate nuclear threat. Yet, a 2025 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment concluded that Tehran was at least a decade away from a viable intercontinental ballistic missile — assuming it even chose to build one.

Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, publicly stood by that intelligence. The president overrode her on Air Force One. “I don’t care what she said,” he told reporters. “I think they were very close to having one.”

George W. Bush spent months applying institutional weight, engineering a public case, and leveraging intelligence agencies to manufacture a war. Donald Trump did it on camera, in a single sentence, and ordered the strikes.

Within days of the bombardment, the administration discarded the pretense of an imminent threat, contradicted directly by the Pentagon’s own closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill. Prompted by reporters, the president changed the rationale completely: “It was my opinion that they were going to attack first.” A modern war of aggression was launched on an executive whim.

Congress was never consulted; no authorization was sought. Months prior, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth systematically dismantled the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation teams — the internal offices that historically gathered the field data and generated the paper trail required for legal review. This move followed years of quiet lobbying by executives at Lockheed Martin and RTX, who argued that casualty tracking slowed down weapon procurement cycles. By eliminating these oversight teams, Trump and Hegseth ensured that no internal data would exist to document the casualties of the airstrikes.

When challenged by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Hegseth dismissed the deaths as the tragic but inevitable consequence of conflict, defending his actions by pointing to the compromised tracking records of past administrations, which had spent decades undercounting the dead through bureaucratic manipulation. But the current Pentagon leadership used that legacy to justify halting the collection of records entirely.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Central Command Admiral Brad Cooper deployed a manufactured defense to deflect the public record. Cooper dismissed the casualty logs by asserting that his staff had warned the Iranian public more than a hundred times, claiming the deaths occurred entirely because the regime was utilizing school children as human shields.

The Motives

Why Iran? The answer is simple: Follow the money.

For Trump, this war is the ultimate payout for a financial dynasty that has spent a decade buying America's Middle East policy. Chief among them is casino mogul Miriam Adelson, who pumped over $100 million into Trump’s 2024 campaign alone, bringing her total family contribution to his machine to over $350 million. Miriam is executing a multi-decade strategy engineered alongside her late husband, Sheldon Adelson—the GOP kingmaker who explicitly conditioned his historical 2016 and 2020 campaign funding on the termination of the Iran nuclear agreement.

Sheldon, who once publicly advocated dropping a nuclear weapon into the Iranian desert as a warning shot, died in 2021, but his money successfully bought a direct pipeline to the Oval Office.

Today, Miriam holds the checkbook, utilizing a transactional second Trump administration to complete the regional war her family spent billions trying to start. Trump even bragged about her $60 billion bank account during a speech at the Israeli Knesset.

Alongside Adelson stand the oil tycoons who spent $75 million to elect Trump. Big Oil donors, including Energy Transfer LP billionaire Kelcy Warren, who funneled $25 million directly into the MAGA Inc. super PAC, are currently collecting their dividends. Since the air campaign began, U.S. crude oil prices nearly doubled, leaping from $65 to over $110 a barrel. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth pocketed a $104 million windfall in just three months, while defense contractors like RTX, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman saw their stock prices surge up to 27 percent as dropped bombs required immediate, billion-dollar replacements.

Benjamin Netanyahu used this transactional environment to cross his own 40-year finish line. Netanyahu has been warning the world about an imminent Iranian bomb since 1986. He utilized a bought-and-paid-for American administration to finally get the war he spent his entire career trying to start. Trump wanted to reward his donors and seize resources; Netanyahu wanted to eliminate a rival. Their plans overlapped perfectly.

For the Washington insiders who drew up the maps for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iran was always the mandatory sequel. It took them 23 years of waiting, but the oil executives, defense lobbyists, and war planners finally got their market.

The Cost

None of this explains why American missiles are tearing through families. There is no strategic explanation for slaughtering children. There is only a structural one.

When political appointees fire the investigators tracking civilian deaths, they remove the only people inside the building who can slow down a launch sequence. When executives override their own intelligence assessments, they deliberately bypass the warnings that would label a target off-limits.

For 60 years, every single American president, military general, and cabinet secretary who ordered an air campaign has retired with complete legal safety. This unbroken record of protection tells every commander, pilot, and drone operator exactly how to act: foreign families do not matter.

The children in Minab did not die because an analyst made an accidental computer error. They died because the specific individuals who authorized the flight coordinates knew they would never pay a personal price for the bodies.

They were right. The history of past administrations has proven that the personal risk is zero.

My Lai cost Calley three days in a stockade. Iraq cost Powell a comfortable retirement on corporate boards. The question now is what Iran will cost the planners in Washington—and the precedent proves the answer is nothing. The fallout will be limited to a defensive statement from a press secretary, and a line in a memoir written years from now by an official who will never see the inside of a courtroom.

The massacres will continue because those with the authority to cancel the strikes choose to sign the launch orders, fully aware that their own safety is guaranteed.

Postscript

The names of the victims in Minab were compiled by independent human rights monitors within hours of the February 28 bombardment. Under standard military instructions and federal statutory laws, including Section 1057 of the National Defense Authorization Act, the Pentagon is legally required to document these civilian casualties, cross-reference them with independent field data, and submit them to public and congressional registries. By choosing to omit these deaths, the Trump administration is actively violating federal reporting requirements, ensuring the names of the dead never enter the official ledger.

Funeral procession in Lamerd, Iran, for the 21 civilians killed in the February 28, 2026 missile attack. Coffins draped in Iranian flags rest before mourners dressed in black. Families, neighbors, clerics, and others accompanied the dead through the city before burial. This is grief carried into public space: a communal act of mourning when the loss is too difficult for families to bear alone.

Sources

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]]><![CDATA[The Insatiable Sentence]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/insatiabilityhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/insatiabilityWed, 10 Jun 2026 22:11:06 GMT

Cartoonists and writers both hold us in place. Marcel Proust and William Faulkner took that further. Proust once wrote sentences that ran for pages. Faulkner wrote one that stretched past a thousand words. My sentence is different. It is insatiable. It has no end. It stops only because I felt, in that moment, that we must find a way to stop the harm this man is doing.

There is a strange way certain people remain haunted by slights long after they have ceased to matter, and a stranger way still in which victory, instead of releasing them from the insult, preserves it, enlarges it, gives it rooms to occupy, crowds to address, buildings to rename, enemies to punish, courts to defy, loyalists to summon, and monuments to imagine, so that the injury, which in another life might have been absorbed into memory, begins to govern the life around it, until the world, having failed to admire him sufficiently, must be made to admire him again; the critic, having failed to disappear, must be named again, mocked again, threatened again, investigated again; the praise, having failed to last, must be repeated around the table, in public, before cameras, as if loyalty itself were a ceremony of replenishment; and the achievement, having failed to bring rest, merely enlarges the territory over which dissatisfaction can travel, so that each triumph discovers new humiliations to remember, new enemies to pursue, new disloyalties to catalogue, until the original injury, whatever it was, wherever it began, disappears beneath the machinery built to serve it, leaving behind the motion of acquisition, retaliation, self-display, and grievance; because grievances, unlike achievements, possess the remarkable ability to survive their own resolution, and because there are moments in the life of a society when resentment becomes more compelling than accomplishment, when the story of what has been taken acquires greater force than the story of what has been gained, and when a figure whose own life appears organized around insult, revenge, recognition, and appetite discovers that millions of others are carrying injuries of their own, some real, some imagined, some inherited, some cultivated, and that by speaking to those injuries, naming them, enlarging them, feeding them, assuring people that every disappointment has an author and every frustration a culprit, he can transform private grievance into public identity, so that the wound no longer belongs only to him but becomes shared property, a source of fellowship, a badge of membership, a way of distinguishing believers from doubters, loyalists from enemies, patriots from traitors, until the appetite ceases to be merely personal and becomes political, drawing strength from each grievance it discovers and each grievance it refuses to surrender; until there comes a point at which victory itself begins to lose its meaning, because victory ordinarily implies an ending, whereas for a person who has learned to derive identity from conflict, attention from outrage, loyalty from shared resentment, and purpose from the pursuit of enemies, the ending is the one thing that cannot be permitted, since peace threatens relevance, satisfaction threatens momentum, forgiveness threatens memory, and acceptance threatens the entire structure erected upon refusal, so that every triumph must be followed by a new dispute, every criticism by a counterattack, every rival by a new rival, every act of disobedience by a demonstration of authority, because the contests themselves have become indispensable, supplying the drama that achievement can no longer provide and the meaning that success, having become commonplace, can no longer deliver; and it is perhaps for this reason that the names attached to such a man by those who encounter him at different moments of his passage through the world begin to resemble partial descriptions of the same phenomenon, because the contractor speaks of the con man, the investor of the fraudster, the former ally of the grifter, the woman of the sexual predator, the court record of the adjudicated rapist, the historian of the demagogue, the journalist of the chronic liar, the citizen of the election subverter, the observer of the cult leader, and each believes himself to be describing a separate offense when each may be looking at the same appetite from a different angle; and perhaps it is here, rather than in the scandals, verdicts, elections, feuds, insults, retaliations, or monuments, that the deepest loss reveals itself, because what gradually disappears in such a life is not merely restraint but reciprocity, not merely humility but encounter itself, the capacity to stand before another person, another creature, another landscape, another generation, another mystery, and recognize that it possesses a reality independent of one’s own desires, so that the tragedy, if tragedy is the correct word, lies not only in the harm done to others but in the narrowing of vision by which those others cease to appear as fully real, and the world, instead of appearing as a community of beings with their own dignity, suffering, memory, and purpose, appears increasingly as raw material for the construction of the self, until the self grows so large that it obscures everything beyond itself.

(776 words)

ENDNOTES

William Faulkner and Marcel Proust did not write long sentences for the same reason

Faulkner: The 1,288-word sentence

William Faulkner’s longest sentence is 1,288 words. It appears in Chapter 6 of Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The sentence is Quentin Compson’s silent interior monologue. Quentin is a character from Faulkner’s earlier novel The Sound and the Fury. In Absalom, Absalom!, he obsessively reconstructs the history of his family and the South.

Faulkner explained his purpose in a 1957 interview:

“A character in a story at any moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him, and the long sentence is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something.”

Faulkner wanted to collapse time—he wanted past and future compressed into a single moment. The sentence is one continuous sentence with no period until the end. It accumulates clauses, details, and images. The voice is dense and rhythmic, like a chant.

Faulkner’s long sentence makes the reader experience time as Quentin does—not as a sequence of moments but as everything happening at once.

Proust: Sentences that run for pages

Marcel Proust's long sentences are from In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), published 1913–1927. The longest is 958 words; it's in the fourth volume, Cities of the Plain (Sodom et Gomorrhe, 1921), a passage on his character M. de Charlus.

Proust’s purpose differs from Faulkner’s. He doesn’t state a thought and move on. He thinks through the sentence. Each clause adds another layer to an argument about memory, desire, jealousy, time. The sentence itself is how he thinks.

He uses stream of consciousness to follow trivial, accidental memories that open into larger currents of consciousness and identity. His sentences show the mind moving the way it actually moves—messy, associative, not organized.

Proust deliberately refuses to hurry. He does not want to arrive quickly. He wants to linger, unfold, complicate. He shows how the mind experiences memory and time in their full complexity.

FOR FURTHER READING

Many people are documenting the harm done by Donald J. Trump as president of the United States:

  • Executive Order Tracker: Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), “Trump Administration Tracker,” U.S. House of Representatives. What it documents: Executive orders deemed illegal and unconstitutional: Actions that weaken democratic institutions, slow the economy, roll back public health and environmental protections, and put healthcare and Social Security at risk for millions.

  • Corruption Tracker: RepresentUS, a nonpartisan grassroots organization, “Tracking Corruption in the Trump Administration.” What it documents: Conflicts of interest and self-dealing by Trump, his family, and administration officials—including no-bid contracts to Trump-linked firms, Trump family crypto profits, defense deals with Trump Jr. and Eric Trump’s companies, cabinet members directing millions to Trump through donations and stock holdings, pardons sold to wealthy offenders, and misuse of taxpayer funds. Shows how the grift harms Americans through preferential treatment for donors and corrupted policy.

  • Academic Publication: John L. Campbell, “Institutions under Siege: Donald Trump’s Attack on the Deep State,” Cambridge University Press, 2022. What it documents: Damage to the Department of Justice, federal court system, government finances, and the Republican Party itself. Available through university libraries or major book retailers.

  • Human Rights, Report: Amnesty International USA, “President Trump’s First 100 Days: Attacks on Human Rights,” 29 Apr. 2025. What it documents: Human rights emergency affecting millions—mass deportations, family separations, harsh asylum restrictions, crackdowns on student protesters (especially Palestinian solidarity), anti-trans policies, attacks on abortion rights, and marginalization of Black and racialized communities. Includes case: Mahmoud Khalil, Palestinian student detained for peaceful protest.

  • Civil Rights, Report: The Leadership Conference, “Trump Administration Civil and Human Rights Rollbacks.” What it documents: Chronological timeline including ending birthright citizenship, restoring federal death penalty, “Remain in Mexico” program, suspending refugee admissions, banning transgender people from military, eliminating DEI programs, attacking reproductive rights, ending gender-affirming care for youth, deporting U.S. citizens without due process, arresting student protesters.

  • Immigration Harm, Commentary: Human Rights Watch, “Ten Harmful Trump Administration Immigration and Refugee Policies,” 19 Feb. 2025. What it documents: Policies barring asylum on U.S. territory, mandatory detention, ending parole programs for Cubans/Haitians/Nicaraguans/Venezuelans, halting U.S. refugee admissions (operating since Vietnam War), ending birthright citizenship, and suspending humanitarian aid threatening health and safety of millions worldwide. Impact on asylum seekers, migrants, refugees, families, and communities.

  • Health Care Access, Research Brief: Physicians for Human Rights, “Consequences of Fear,” 17 Apr. 2025. What it documents: Immigration policies blocking health care access—widespread fear reducing health care utilization among undocumented immigrants, visa-holders, mixed-status families, and U.S. citizens. Patients arriving sicker, delayed care, missed preventive services. Children in mixed-status families especially vulnerable.

  • Iran War Civilian Harm, Article: ProPublica, “Trump DoD Axed a Program Meant to Limit Civilian Casualties,” 9 Mar. 2026. What it documents: U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran killed more than 1,700 civilians, including at least 254 children. Tomahawk missile hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing at least 150 people—most of them children ages 7–12, plus 26 teachers. By June 1, 2026, 25,000 people injured, including 4,000 women and 1,600 children. 3.2 million Iranians internally displaced. 48 hospitals and 218 health facilities damaged.

  • Journalistic Documentary: PBS Frontline, “Trump’s Power & the Rule of Law,” PBS, 2 July 2025. What it documents: The high-stakes showdown between President Trump and the courts over presidential power.

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]]><![CDATA[The Insiders: How Money and Think Tanks Pushed for War]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-insiders-how-money-and-thinkhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-insiders-how-money-and-thinkWed, 10 Jun 2026 00:46:05 GMTThe road to Tehran was always intended to run through Baghdad.

In 1997, a group of Republican foreign policy architects formed an organization called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and wrote down their plan. Dick Cheney signed it. Donald Rumsfeld signed it. Paul Wolfowitz signed it. While John Bolton did not sign the original 1997 charter, he fiercely championed its goals.

To a reader today, these might look like names from a history book. But just a few years after signing this document, these exact men became the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and the top military strategists who launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Iraq was the first target. Iran was the destination.

At a conference shortly after Bush’s 2002 “axis of evil” speech, a member of the Bush transition team explained to a room of European academics that the coming war with Iraq “wasn’t really about Iraq — it was about Iran.”

Setting the Stage

They got Iraq. They did not get Iran. Not then.

So they built the network that would give them the next war. They launched a new organization in Washington called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), placed their people inside Republican administrations, and waited.

From its first days immediately following the September 11 attacks, FDD pushed for U.S. wars against Iraq and Iran. In 2002, it ran ads conflating Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, and Saddam Hussein. It helped construct the arguments that became the Bush doctrine. When Iraq collapsed into disaster, FDD shifted its approach, but Iran remained the target.

Between 2008 and 2011, Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus gave FDD nearly $11 million. Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer gave $3.6 million. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave $1.5 million. These figures come from FDD’s own financial filings, obtained and published by Salon in 2013. This money served a very specific purpose. It kept FDD alive and kept its staff paid during the eight years of the Obama presidency. It allowed these writers and strategists to bide their time, keeping their plans ready until a Republican president was back in office and ready to use them.

Funding the Campaigns

Adelson was Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal friend. He was Trump’s largest single donor in the 2016 Republican primary — $25 million to the campaign, $5 million to the inaugural committee. He and his wife Miriam gave $218 million to Republican causes in the 2020 election cycle, more than any other donors in American history that year. When Adelson died in 2021, Netanyahu said his work strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship “will be remembered for generations.” Miriam Adelson gave $95 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

The same family that bankrolled the think tank dedicated to building the case for war with Iran also bankrolled the president who launched it.

Singer funded FDD and a network of groups — the American Enterprise Institute, the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Manhattan Institute — that for decades argued for confrontation with Iran. Marcus gave nearly $11 million to FDD and hundreds of millions more to Republican causes and pro-Israel networks.

These three men funded both the think tank that manufactured the war rationale and the politicians who authorized the budgets that paid for the bombs.

Moving into Government

The think tank’s reach into the Trump administration is right there in the personnel files.

FDD senior advisor Richard Goldberg served as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction on Trump’s National Security Council in the first term. Per his own FDD biography, Goldberg “helped coordinate key elements of President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran.” He returned in the second term as senior counselor on the White House National Energy Dominance Council, advising on oil and gas, advanced nuclear power, and critical minerals. The man who spent years building the sanctions architecture against Iran came back to advise on energy the moment war with Iran became viable.

FDD advisor Charles Kupperman was Trump’s deputy national security advisor. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security advisor in the first term, chairs the board of FDD’s center on military and political power. John Bolton — a key PNAC ally — ran Trump’s national security apparatus and spent his tenure pushing relentlessly for military action against Tehran. As Trump’s war in Iran approached, the administration recruited Nick Stewart, managing director of advocacy at FDD’s lobbying arm, to join the diplomatic team.

FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz, a former Trump Iran adviser, sent a memo to Trump’s National Security Council in the first term pushing what he called “a strategy of coerced democratization” in Iran. “The very structure of the regime invites instability, crisis and possibly collapse,” the memo argued.

In June 2025, FDD published a list of 44 reported Iranian attacks against Americans. Eight months later, the Trump White House published its official justification for the Iran war — reproducing that list almost word for word. Normally, when a president takes the country to war, the justification comes from classified reports compiled by the Pentagon and the CIA. Here, the administration skipped the government’s own intelligence agencies entirely. Instead, they took a document written by FDD—a private organization funded by the very billionaires backing the president—copy-pasted it, and handed it to the public as official U.S. policy.

The Defense Contracts

The defense contractors were already positioned.

Lockheed Martin’s stock rose nearly 40 percent in the months before the war as tensions with Iran grew. RTX — formerly Raytheon — rose 4.7 percent in the first day of trading after the bombs fell. Lockheed CEO Jim Taiclet told investors the Iran war was “a golden opportunity right now based on who’s in government, their experience, their willingness to change the demand that they have for what we do.” Congress allocated a record $901 billion to the Pentagon for 2026. The Pentagon then asked for an additional $200 billion. Hegseth’s response: “It takes money to kill bad guys.”

These companies fund the politicians who authorize these budgets. After January 6, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop all announced they were pausing donations to Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election. Northrop subsequently gave $175,000 to 26 of those 147 Republicans. Lockheed donated more than $366,000 to 90 of them. Raytheon gave $309,000 to 66.

Those politicians sit on the Armed Services and Appropriations committees that set defense budgets. The contractors fund the committee members. The committee members authorize the budgets. The budgets fund the wars. The wars deplete the weapons stockpiles. The stockpiles generate the new contracts.

Trading on the War

In the months between Election Day and the strikes on Iran, nineteen members of Congress or their spouses purchased defense stocks — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon — all of which surged after the bombs fell.

Then there is the president.

The Office of Government Ethics filing for the first quarter of 2026 documents 3,642 individual trades made through a brokerage account in Trump’s name — between $220 million and $750 million in volume, at roughly 60 trades per day. Every president since Lyndon Johnson has used blind trusts, index funds, or — in Carter’s case — liquidated all personal assets to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Trump simply filed the trades with the ethics office.

On March 23, Trump announced that the U.S. and Iran had been having “very good and productive conversations” — the first market signal of deescalation after weeks of war. Brent crude plunged nearly 11 percent. The brokerage account in Trump’s name spent that day buying Phillips 66, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron — and Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, the companies that stood to profit if the war continued.

Sixteen minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants, $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a sudden spike with no public news to explain it. Richard Painter, securities law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics counsel under George W. Bush: “The president has both confidential information about overseas developments and the power to move commodities markets through his own decisions.”

Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. have invested in drone companies competing for Pentagon contracts.

Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law, one of his Iran envoys — is raising billions for his private equity fund from Persian Gulf governments entangled in the war.

How the Circle Closes

Here is what this looks like from start to finish.

PNAC writes the plan in 1997. Adelson, Singer, and Marcus fund the think tank that keeps the plan alive through sixteen years of Democratic presidencies. The think tank places its people inside Republican administrations — Goldberg on the NSC, Kupperman as deputy national security advisor, Bolton running the show. The think tank writes the war rationale and the White House copy-pastes it. The contractors fund the politicians who vote for the budgets. The politicians authorize the wars. The contractors’ stocks surge. Nineteen members of Congress buy the shares before the bombs fall. The president’s brokerage account buys oil and defense stocks while the bombs are still falling. The money flows back to the politicians for the next cycle.

This is not a conspiracy hidden in the shadows. It operates in plain sight — in public campaign filings, think tank donor rolls, government ethics reports, and White House press releases. The people involved do not hide what they are doing. They have learned, after decades of never facing consequences, that they do not need to.

Bush’s people got rich after it was over—like Cheney’s deferred compensation from Halliburton and the no-bid contracts. Trump’s people are getting rich while it is happening. The trades are filed. The receipts exist.

The children in Minab are the cost that nobody in this room will ever pay.

Sources

  • “Adelson Campaign Funding Records.” OpenSecrets / Center for Responsive Politics, 2020, www.opensecrets.org.

  • “Board of Directors and Leadership Profile: H.R. McMaster.” Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2026, www.fdd.org/team/hr-mcmaster.

  • Clifton, Eli. “The Money Behind the Holy War on Iran.” Salon, 28 Aug. 2013, salon.com.

  • “Corporate PAC Donation Tracking Post-January 6.” ProPublica, 2022, projects.propublica.org.

  • Dubowitz, Mark. “A Strategy of Coerced Democratization in Iran.” White House Policy Memorandum, reported by Politico and LobeLog, 25 June 2017, politico.com.

  • “Federal Election Commission Data: Miriam Adelson PAC Filings.” Federal Election Commission, 2024, www.fec.gov.

  • “Halliburton No-Bid Contracts and Deferred Executive Compensation Records.” CorpWatch, 2004, www.corpwatch.org.

  • “Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners Wealth Fund Procurement.” Axios, 25 Mar. 2026, axios.com.

  • Leonnig, Carol, and Philip Rucker. The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021. Doubleday, 2022.

  • “Lockheed Martin Q1 Earnings Call: Taiclet Address to Investors.” Fortune, Apr. 2026, fortune.com.

  • “Oil Futures Market Anomalies and Market Disruption Reports.” NPR, 26 Mar. 2026, www.npr.org.

  • “Project for the New American Century Foundational Documents.” SourceWatch, Center for Media and Democracy, ⁠www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Project_for_the_New_American_Century.

  • Rogers, Paul. “From Neoconservative Dream to Spontaneous War: The Trajectory of American Empire in Iran.” Explaining History, 2 Mar. 2026, www.explaininghistory.org/2026/03/02/from-neoconservative-dream-to-spontaneous-war-the-trajectory-of-american-empire-in-iran/.

  • “Staffing Profile: Richard Goldberg.” Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2026, www.fdd.org/team/richard-goldberg.

  • “Strategic Frameworks on Iran: Personnel Analysis.” The Nation, Jan. 2020, thenation.com.

  • Thakker, Prem. “This Pro-Israel Group Paved the Way for Trump’s Disastrous War in Iran.” Zeteo, 3 June 2026, zeteo.com.

  • “The Pentagon’s Supplemental Funding Requests and Executive Briefings.” Time Magazine, Apr. 2026, time.com.

  • “Trading Disclosures and Stock Portfolios of Congressional Spouses.” The Lever / Sludge, June 2025, thelever.com.

  • United States, Office of Government Ethics. Periodic Transaction Report (Form 278-T) for Donald J. Trump. 14 May 2026, www.oge.gov.

Between Here and There is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Trump's ceasefire, Trump's war, Trump's Truth Social posts. Round and round we go.]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/trumps-ceasefire-trumps-war-trumpshttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/trumps-ceasefire-trumps-war-trumpsTue, 09 Jun 2026 22:32:57 GMTHere we go loop de loop.

On Monday, June 8 — day 101 of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran — Trump posted on Truth Social that both sides are looking to do an immediate ceasefire and that final peace negotiations are proceeding, “subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way.”

The day before, Sunday, Israel had struck Beirut’s southern suburbs. Iran launched multiple missile barrages at Israel in response — the first since the ceasefire took effect in April. Trump demanded the attacks stop immediately.

Here we go loop de lie.

Ceasefire announced. Israel bombs anyway. Iran retaliates. Trump says stop. Brokerage account watches the oil prices.

Nearly a year ago, in June 2025, the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Trump declared them “completely and fully obliterated.”

Three days later he brokered a ceasefire. Then Israel bombed Iran anyway.

On June 24, 2025, Trump posted two messages on Truth Social within hours of each other, and he might as well have posted them yesterday.

“THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!”

“ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS.”

With his signature line, of course:

“Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Here we go loop de loop.

Here we go loop de lie.

NOTES

  1. In June 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump brokered a ceasefire to end the 12-Day War between Israel and Iran. It lasted eight months. In February 2026, the U.S. and Israel launched a new larger, deadlier war, assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader in the opening strikes.

  2. "Loop de Loop" is a song written by Teddy Vann and Joe Dong and performed by Johnny Thunder featuring The Bobbettes. It reached No. 4 on the U.S. pop chart and No. 6 on the U.S. R&B chart in 1963.

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]]><![CDATA[These Bombs Are Not Random]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/these-bombs-are-not-randomhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/these-bombs-are-not-randomMon, 08 Jun 2026 04:52:09 GMTOn February 28, the first day of Operation Epic Fury, a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, during morning classes and killed 175 people, most of them children.

Hours later, two U.S. Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) struck a sports hall and adjacent school complex in Lamerd, Fars province. The explosions occurred over a facility used for volleyball practice, its outdoor playgrounds, and two blocks of surrounding family residences. Twenty-one people died. Helma Ahmadizadeh was 10. Elham Zaeri was in fifth grade. The youngest victim was 2.

The Pentagon denied both strikes. The New York Times, BBC Verify, and independent weapons analysts confirmed them.

Neither bombing was random. Both were made possible by decisions Pete Hegseth made before the first missile flew.

In 2025, Hegseth closed the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office. He closed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which had been established by Congress in 2022 with bipartisan support. Its statutory mandate under 10 U.S. Code § 184 was to prevent civilian deaths in U.S. military operations — to review target lists, audit databases, challenge weapon selections, and maintain the no-strike infrastructure the law required.

Hegseth fired the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. He reduced civilian harm mitigation staff at U.S. combatant commands by more than 90 percent over the documented objections of generals, admirals, and members of the Joint Chiefs. He made law of war training optional and called it an unnecessary distraction from combat.

These were not budget cuts. They were decisions made in sequence, before the war, about what kind of war this would be.

Two weeks after Helma and Elham were killed, Hegseth addressed the war.

“No quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” he said.

Senator Mark Kelly, a Navy combat veteran, took to the floor of the Senate and read from the Pentagon’s own law of war manual in response. The phrase, Kelly noted, is prohibited under international law and may be punishable under the War Crimes Act.

Hegseth said it. It cost him nothing.

In May, the Pentagon’s own Inspector General concluded in a formal report that the Defense Department is actively violating U.S. law by failing to prevent civilian casualties. The Guardian and The Intercept obtained the report.

The people whose job was to catch the Minab database error before a missile was assigned to a girls’ school had been removed. The lawyers whose job was to question the Lamerd weapon selection had been fired. The training that might have obligated someone in the approval chain to raise a flag had been made optional. What they shared was that neither failure was caught before children died.

The Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) database coded the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab as a military target [Just Security]. It had not been reviewed in over a decade. The school had operated publicly for 10 years — a website, painted sports fields, blue-and-pink walls visible on commercial satellite maps, separated from an adjacent Islamic Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) naval compound by a fence in place since 2016.

The man running the DIA when that database sent a missile to a school full of girls was Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse. He was not fired for the database failure. He was fired because his assessment of U.S. nuclear strikes contradicted President Trump’s claim that Iran’s facilities had been obliterated. Senator Mark Warner called it “the dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country.” Lieutenant General James Adams replaced him.

No one has been called to account for the database that killed 175 people.

To fire 13,000 weapons in 38 days — 342 per day — required more than policy [Just Security]. It required a targeting system that could process decisions at that speed. The Pentagon built one.

Palantir’s Maven Smart System, integrated with Anthropic’s Claude large language model, processed approximately 20 billion tokens of data per day during Operation Epic Fury, according to Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer. Before Claude was integrated into the targeting pipeline, Pentagon operators processed roughly 10 target assessments per day. After integration: 3,000. The interface presents operators with a prioritized queue of target cards. Left-click approves. Right-click rejects. At 342 strikes a day, the left-click is not a review. It is a signature on the system’s output.

On March 24, Pentagon Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies confirmed under oath before a Senate subcommittee that Claude was in active operational use [Just Security]. She told Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island: “The use of the system is active right now.”

The confirmation came on the same day Trump designated Anthropic a national security supply chain risk and ordered federal agencies to stop using its products. Anthropic had refused Pentagon demands for unrestricted access to its AI, citing ethical limits on autonomous weapons. Anthropic sued the Defense Department. The military used the model anyway. Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael explained: “You can’t just rip out a system that’s deeply embedded overnight.”

When the Maven system ran the DIA’s decade-old database — the one that still coded the Minab school as a military installation — it flagged those coordinates as a valid target. An operator left-clicked in seconds.

Four days after the Lamerd strike, Admiral Brad Cooper posted to CENTCOM’s Facebook page. “In a historic first,” he wrote, long-range Precision Strike Missiles had been used in combat during Operation Epic Fury. He said he “could not be prouder” of American forces for “leveraging innovation to create dilemmas for the enemy.”

Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the PrSM, finalized an expanded procurement agreement with the Defense Department in the weeks that followed, building on an existing $4.94 billion contract [Just Security]. The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request asks Congress for nearly two billion dollars to purchase 1,134 more — four times the previous year’s allocation [Just Security].

The weapon that killed Helma and Elham on its first combat use is being produced at scale.

The civilian protection offices are closed. The lawyers are gone. The database was never updated. The system processed the targets. The weapon went into mass production. The names remain hidden.

Under 18 U.S. Code § 2441, a U.S. national who orders or commits a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions is subject to life imprisonment, or death, if the victim dies.

The federal war crimes statute was enacted in 1996. It has never been used to prosecute a senior military or civilian official. After My Lai, one soldier was convicted. Nixon commuted the sentence after three days of house arrest. After Abu Ghraib, seven enlisted soldiers were convicted. The officials who designed the program were promoted, appointed to federal judgeships, and retired with honors.

The insulation is seamless. Internationally, the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, ensuring the International Criminal Court has no enforcement mechanism to reach American soil. Domestically, the Justice Department answers directly to the president who ordered this war, while both chambers of Congress are controlled by the president’s party. Operationally, the protection holds all the way down to the files.

The AR 15-6 investigation into Minab is nearing completion, Cooper says. He will not identify the general officer conducting it. The targeting officer who approved the Minab coordinates has not been named. The J-2 Target Nomination Chief who validated the data feed has not been named. The Staff Judge Advocate who reviewed proportionality has not been named. The J-3 Director of Operations who authorized the launch has not been named. Lieutenant General Kruse, who ran the DIA when the database killed 175 people, was fired for something else entirely.

The statute exists. The victims died. The men who gave the orders are shielded.

This is the final part of a series examining the human costs and the structural collapse of military accountability under the Trump administration.

Read Part 1, D-Day Was Yesterday, and Part 2, I Want to Know Your Name.

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]]><![CDATA[I Want to Know Your Name]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/i-want-to-know-your-namehttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/i-want-to-know-your-nameMon, 08 Jun 2026 03:31:35 GMTTwo things in recent weeks made this impossible for me to leave alone.

On March 29, The New York Times published a visual investigation of the strike on Lamerd. CENTCOM had blamed a malfunctioning Iranian missile. The reporting pointed instead to a U.S. Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). Analysts at Janes identified it from security camera footage. BBC Verify reached the same conclusion. U.S. officials confirmed it on background.

That was where I first stopped.

Helma Ahmadizadeh was 10 years old. Elham Zaeri was in fifth grade. The youngest victim was 2. Twenty-one people died. More than 100 were injured. Not a single Iranian soldier was killed.

The sports hall was not the intended target. An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) facility was nearby, 900 feet away.

The PrSM had never been used in combat before February 28. It is designed to detonate above its target and disperse approximately 180,000 tungsten pellets across a wide area. There were two distinct strikes.

The missiles completely missed the compound, raining fragments instead across a soccer field, an indoor gym, and two blocks of family homes.

The photographs from Lamerd showed dense pockmarking across walls, ceilings, masonry, and floors—the signature of an airburst fragmentation weapon.

I kept staring at the distance.

Nine hundred feet.

Somewhere in the targeting process, someone approved the first combat use of that weapon in a neighborhood that contained a sports hall full of children.

Helma Ahmadizadeh was at volleyball practice when it happened.

Then came Admiral Brad Cooper’s testimony.

During congressional questioning, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand raised public reporting that schools and hospitals had been struck in Iran. Cooper said CENTCOM had “no indication” this had occurred.

Gillibrand pressed him.

Was there no indication, or had CENTCOM simply failed to corroborate the reports?

Cooper again answered: “No indication.”

She then asked whether CENTCOM had investigated the claims.

“We have not.”

I read that exchange several times.

The New York Times had documented the damage. Public evidence existed. Members of Congress were discussing it in open hearings.

“We have not.”

Later, Cooper offered an explanation for the Minab school strike. CENTCOM personnel, he said, had warned Iranians more than 100 times about the danger of being used as human shields.

A girls’ elementary school had been struck.

Children were dead.

The school in Minab had been operating openly for years. It had painted sports fields. A public website. Blue-and-pink walls visible from commercial satellite imagery. A fence separated it from the adjacent IRGC compound.

The children in Minab were not human shields.

They were children at school.

The children in Lamerd were children at volleyball and soccer practice.

The deeper I went, the less this looked like a single mistake.

In Minab, investigators concluded that a girls’ elementary school had remained coded as a military target in a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) database that had not been reviewed in more than a decade.

In Lamerd, the issue was different. The intended target was not the sports hall. The issue was the decision to employ a weapon designed to disperse approximately 180,000 tungsten fragments roughly 900 feet from a building full of children on its first combat use.

These were different failures. One appears to have begun with bad data. The other appears to have begun with a decision about weapon employment.

What they shared was that neither failure was caught before children died.

That realization kept pulling me back to the same place.

The families.

The parents who buried children.

The children who survived.

The brothers and sisters who will remember that morning for the rest of their lives.

The families in Minab are burying children the Pentagon has not acknowledged killing. The families in Lamerd are burying children the Pentagon says were killed by someone else.

We have seen this before.

In November 1969, Seymour Hersh published the story of what U.S. soldiers did to unarmed civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. He named Lieutenant William Calley. He named Captain Ernest Medina. He named the soldiers. He named the village, the date, and the place where the bodies were found.

The Army could ignore reports of civilian deaths. It could not ignore named officers attached to a specific atrocity on a specific date.

In 2004, photographs from Abu Ghraib documented the torture of Iraqi detainees. The names gave the photographs force: Lynndie England. Charles Graner. Janis Karpinski.

In 2015, U.S. forces struck the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. MSF named General John Campbell. An investigation followed.

In 2021, a U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed ten civilians, including seven children. The Pentagon first called it a righteous strike. Reporters identified Zemari Ahmadi, named the dead, reconstructed what happened, and forced a reversal of the official story.

In each of these cases, someone named someone.

The accountability that followed—however partial, however corrupted—was built on that foundation.

Without a name, there is no record.

Without a record, there is no accountability.

In Lamerd and Minab, the names are still missing.

The decision chain is not unknown.

The Pentagon knows who approved the coordinates, who validated the intelligence, who reviewed the strike, who authorized the launch, and who approved the combat debut of a PrSM from a sports hall full of children.

Those identities exist somewhere in records, reviews, logs, personnel files, and investigations.

The public is being asked to accept a familiar proposition: children can die, investigations can occur, responsibility can be assigned internally, and yet the names of those involved remain hidden.

How can an accountability process exist if the people being held accountable remain unnamed?

Helma Ahmadizadeh was 10 years old.

Elham Zaeri was in fifth grade.

The youngest victim was 2.

The victims have names.

The people who made the decisions do not.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series examining the human cost of the war in Iran and the deliberate collapse of military accountability under the Trump administration.

Read Part 1, D-Day Was Yesterday.

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]]><![CDATA[D-Day Was Yesterday]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/d-day-was-yesterdayhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/d-day-was-yesterdayMon, 08 Jun 2026 03:18:00 GMT
D-Day veterans pay tribute to lost comrades at a previous anniversary ceremony.

The people who ordered D-Day had to answer for it.

Eisenhower answered to Roosevelt. Roosevelt answered to Congress and to the American people. Every major decision carried a signature.

When Germany surrendered, the Allied nations put the architects of Nazi Germany’s crimes on trial in Nuremberg. The defendants were the men who gave the orders. Nineteen were convicted. The trials established a principle: the men who order the killing of civilians can be made to stand somewhere and answer for it.

This week Pete Hegseth stood at the graves of Normandy and warned about migrants arriving on European beaches by boat.

Pete Hegseth, at the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, compared immigration to an “invasion,” and he warned European leaders to do more to defend their borders before it is too late.

On February 28, the first day of the American war on Iran, a Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab during morning classes. The principal moved her students to the prayer hall and called their parents. A second missile hit the prayer hall. At least 175 people died, most of them girls between seven and twelve years old.

That same afternoon, two missiles struck Lamerd. Teenage girls were inside a sports hall — volleyball, basketball, gymnastics. Children were playing on the adjacent soccer field. Families lived in the surrounding neighborhood. An elementary school stood nearby. Investigators later identified the weapon as U.S. Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), an airburst munition designed to scatter tungsten fragments across an area.

Not a single military asset was damaged. No Iranian soldiers were killed.

Eleven-year-old Elham had been on the volleyball team for two years. Her father told reporters she dreamed of becoming a professional player. Twenty-one people died, including four children. More than a hundred were injured.

Trump and senior administration officials denied responsibility for both strikes and blamed Iran. The New York Times and BBC Verify independently confirmed that American weapons caused them.

Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee, dismissed reports of civilian deaths in Iran.

On May 14, Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander overseeing the Iran war, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand asked him how the United States had bombed 22 schools. Cooper said there was “no indication” it had happened. When she pressed him on Minab specifically, he told the committee the investigation was “complex” because the school was located near an Iranian missile base. He said the subject of civilian casualties was “a particular passion” of his. He confirmed that of the 13,629 munitions fired at Iran, the military had conducted one civilian casualty investigation.

One.

Before the first missile fell, Hegseth had fired the Pentagon’s top military lawyers. He dismantled the offices legally required to track civilian casualties. Cooper told the committee he had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools.

The men buried at Normandy fought to defeat a regime that killed civilians and answered to no one. They fought inside a structure — coalition, law, signed orders, accountable command — that made Nuremberg possible.

Elham and the children of Minab were killed inside a structure built so that nothing like Nuremberg is possible. The lawyers were fired. The investigations were not conducted. The school near the missile base was “complex.” The names of the officials who gave the orders have not appeared in print.

Today is D-Day. The question it asks this year is not about the courage of the men who landed on those beaches.

It is about what we have done with what they built.

This is Part 1 of a series examining the human costs and the structural collapse of military accountability under the Trump administration.

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.

]]><![CDATA[A Twisted Kind of Love: How Roy Cohn Molded Donald Trump]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/a-twisted-kind-of-love-how-roy-cohnhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/a-twisted-kind-of-love-how-roy-cohnWed, 20 May 2026 18:55:32 GMTIn the late summer of 1986, shortly after Roy Cohn’s withered body was lowered into a Queens cemetery, his final companion, Peter Fraser, took a pair of diamond cufflinks to a Manhattan appraiser.

Roy Cohn.

The Internal Revenue Service had just confiscated virtually everything Cohn owned to satisfy millions in back taxes — the townhouse, the Rolls-Royce, the private plane. The cufflinks, presented in a plush Bulgari box toward the end of Cohn’s battle with AIDS, were Fraser’s only remaining inheritance. For over a decade, Cohn had served as Donald Trump’s legal executioner, political strategist, and surrogate father, securing him massive tax abatements and executing multimillion-dollar federal defenses completely free of charge. The jewelry was supposed to be a token of profound, lifelong gratitude.

The appraiser adjusted his loupe, peered at the stones, and looked up. The diamonds were cheap rhinestones. The gold was plated. The ultimate token of appreciation was a counterfeit.

When Cohn was dying, isolated and disgraced while facing disbarment by the State of New York, he had confided to his closest friends: “Donald pisses ice water.”

Yet, the tragedy of their bond was entirely circular. Cohn had spent 13 years teaching a young Donald Trump that empathy was a vulnerability, that sentimentality was a fatal flaw, and that everything in human existence was strictly transactional. In his final, lonely days, Cohn was forced to look into the mirror of his own creation and realize his protégé had learned the lesson perfectly. When the utility ended, the loyalty died.

This is not a story of standard political alignment, nor is it a dry history of real estate speculation. This is a psychological drama of a dark mentorship, a Faustian bargain, and — in its own warped, symbiotic way — a twisted kind of love.

Act I: The Attraction (1973)

The story begins in the smoky, velvet-lined interior of Le Club, an exclusive oasis for Manhattan’s old guard and rising elite.

On this particular night in 1973, 27-year-old Donald Trump was sitting at a corner table, staring into an abyss. He was tall, blond, telegenic, and wealthy, but he was a deeply insecure outsider. He was a boy from the outer boroughs, Queens, desperate to build skyscrapers in Manhattan, but high society viewed his family as unpolished “new money.”

Worse, Donald was facing total ruin. The U.S. Department of Justice had just slapped Trump Management with a devastating federal lawsuit, accusing them of systematically discriminating against Black renters in their apartment complexes. Traditional corporate lawyers were crowding around Donald and his father, Fred Trump, begging them to quietly settle, sign a consent decree, and apologize to the government. Donald refused to start his Manhattan career on his knees. He needed a weapon.

At a nearby table sat Roy Cohn. With heavy, hooded eyes and a permanent, cynical sneer, Cohn was the most feared attorney in New York. Two decades earlier, he had been the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, orchestrating the ruthless communist witchhunts of the Red Scare. He was a social pariah to polite society, yet he held the keys to the city’s shadow networks.

Trump walked over to Cohn’s table, introduced himself, and laid out his crisis. “The government has this case against us,” Trump said. “What would you do?”

Cohn didn’t hesitate. His eyes locked onto the young developer.

“Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court.”

It was the exact spark Trump had been searching for. Cohn didn’t talk about risk mitigation or damage control. He talked about utilizing unblinking defiance to exhaust and outlast a federal bureaucracy.

What followed was a magnetic attraction that biographers, psychologists, and historians still struggle to categorize. It was a relationship built on a complex, non-physical infatuation. Roy Cohn was a closeted gay man living a dangerous, deeply compartmentalized double life. Publicly, he was a staunchly conservative bachelor who actively lobbied against gay civil rights ordinances and had previously masterminded the “Lavender Scare” — a federal purge that destroyed the lives of hundreds of gay government employees. Privately, he was highly promiscuous, hosting lavish parties populated by young, beautiful men.

Biographers noted that Cohn’s romantic life had a strict physical archetype: he was intensely drawn to tall, chiseled, affluent, blond men. In walked Donald Trump, who radiated a raw, unvarnished ambition. Yet Cohn was attracted to far more than a physical archetype; he was mesmerized by Trump’s innate psychology. While most clients crawled to Cohn begging for a quiet exit, Trump possessed a rare, native ruthlessness that matched Cohn’s own. Cohn did not have to instill a killer instinct in the young developer; he simply had to harness it.

Cohn’s psychological denial of his own identity was profound; he famously conceptualized his sexuality not by who he slept with, but by power and clout. He viewed open homosexuals as weak and easily broken, once defensively claiming he was merely a “heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.” Because Trump was a straight, hyper-masculine prince conquering Manhattan, he represented the ultimate, untouchable archetype of success that Cohn adored but could never publicly embody. Their relationship remained entirely platonic — verified by decades of intensive investigative tracking and the close testimony of Cohn’s inner circle — but Cohn’s mentoring of Trump carried a possessive, almost romantic fervor. Trump became Cohn’s ultimate asset, a public vehicle through which the pariah lawyer could project absolute influence over the city’s skyline.

Act II: The Playbook

The alignment between the two men was immediate, driven by a shared, cutthroat understanding of human leverage. Trump found in Cohn a psychological shield that his own family could not provide. Trump’s real father, Fred, was a cold, demanding taskmaster who criticized Donald’s flamboyant impulses. Cohn, by contrast, became a surrogate father figure who offered uncritical validation. Where Fred demanded caution, Cohn egged Donald on, transforming his brash instincts into a political and business methodology.

The connection between the two men was hyper-active and obsessive. Cohn ran his entire empire over the telephone, calling Trump between five and twenty times every single day. Cohn’s longtime switchboard operator, Christine Seymour, routinely eavesdropped on the line, listening to the two men construct their strategies in real time.

Cohn took Trump’s raw ambition and carved it into a three-part operational playbook that would define Trump’s career for the next 50 years:

  1. Attack, Attack, Attack: Never play defense. Always counterattack your opponents 10 times harder than they hit you.

  2. Admit Nothing, Deny Everything: Never apologize, never show vulnerability, and never admit you were wrong.

  3. Always Claim Victory: No matter how devastating the actual result or defeat, spin the narrative to declare yourself the winner.

In the housing discrimination lawsuit, Cohn executed this playbook flawlessly. He filed a staggering $100 million countersuit against the federal government, publicly accusing the prosecutors of using “storm trooper” tactics. While the countersuit was laughed out of court and the Trumps were ultimately forced to sign a settlement implementing strict anti-discrimination measures, Cohn and Trump walked onto the courthouse steps and declared total victory to the television cameras. Trump learned that in the court of public opinion, facts mattered far less than the sheer volume of your defiance.

Soon, Trump began using Cohn’s very name as an instrument of terror. Associates from the late 1970s recall that when a contractor, city official, or business adversary pushed back against Trump, Donald wouldn’t argue. He would reach into his desk drawer, pull out an 8-by-10 glossy photograph of a glaring Roy Cohn, place it face-up on the desk, and quietly ask:

“This is my lawyer. Would you rather deal with him?”

Cohn operated out of a decaying, unheated East 68th Street townhouse where the elevator rarely worked, but it functioned as the true clearinghouse of New York power. He introduced Trump to influential media tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and political operatives like Roger Stone, stitching his protégé into the fabric of American power. He proved to Trump that public shame is entirely optional. If you refuse to accept the premise of an accusation, you effectively paralyze the machinery of accountability.

Act III: The Betrayal (1986)

The bill for a lifetime of absolute defiance always arrives, and for Roy Cohn, it came due in the winter of 1985. The man who had terrorized Washington, bullied the Department of Justice, and orchestrated the shadow networks of Manhattan was finally cornered by an enemy he could neither countersue nor intimidate: his own body.

Cohn was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. True to the playbook he had written, he refused to ever state the truth. He looked into television cameras, his face heavily made up to hide the purplish Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions spreading across his skin, and insisted to reporters that he was suffering from a severe case of “liver cancer.”

Simultaneously, the legal establishment he had mocked for decades saw its opening. The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court launched a massive effort to disbar him, charging him with misappropriating client funds, fraud, and outright dishonesty.

It was during this double collapse of his health and his career that Cohn watched his ultimate creation execute the final, purest lesson of his own mentorship: the utility had ended, and therefore, the loyalty must die.

Realizing that Cohn was now a radioactive liability who could no longer offer legal immunity or political leverage, Donald Trump began to distance himself. The frantic, daily phone calls from Trump’s office stopped. The legal files for Trump’s multi-million-dollar real estate projects were quietly bundled up and moved to other, cleaner white-shoe firms without any formal explanation. Cohn was devastated by the freezing silence. He reportedly confided to his close associates:

“I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. Donald pisses ice water.”

In a desperate bid to feel the warmth of the power he had created, a withered Cohn asked Trump for a final favor. He requested a temporary suite for his previous companion, Russell Eldridge, who was in the final, agonizing stages of AIDS. Trump complied, placing Eldridge in a private room overlooking Central Park at his Barbizon Plaza Hotel. But in a move of chilling corporate transactionalism, Trump’s office repeatedly billed the dying Cohn for the room, aggressively tracking the unpaid balance. Then came the velvet box containing the fake diamond cufflinks—a cheap rhinestone imitation meant to signify a gratitude that Trump no longer felt required to pay for.

Yet, their long history meant their split could not be entirely clean. In the final weeks of the disbarment hearings, a fragile, trembling Cohn sat in the courtroom as Trump took the stand. Trump did not abandon him completely; he testified as a character witness, telling the panel that Cohn was “a unique man” who was “unbelievably loyal.” It was a cold, strategic calculation—a public defense of the brand name they shared, but it offered no practical protection against the machinery of retribution. On June 23, 1986, the court officially stripped Roy Cohn of his legal license, branding him a disgrace to the profession.

Six weeks later, on August 2, 1986, Roy Cohn died at the age of 59.

At the memorial service in Manhattan, the room was filled with the ghosts of New York’s old power elite. Donald Trump arrived quietly. He did not sit with the family. He was not asked to speak, nor was he invited to carry the casket. He stood entirely alone in the very back of the room, a silent, towering silhouette watching the man who had validated his darkest instincts be lowered into the earth. He stayed until the service ended, then turned and walked back out into the glittering Manhattan skyline that they had built together.

Epilogue: The Eternal Playbook

Thirty years passed. The young developer from Queens moved from real estate to reality television, and eventually, to the presidency of the United States.

In March 2017, the newly elected President sat in the Oval Office, facing a gathering storm. A federal investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia was accelerating, his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, had just recused himself from the probe, and the institutional walls of Washington were closing in.

Trump grew visibly furious at what he perceived as a catastrophic lack of personal protection. He looked around the room at his lawyers and advisors, threw his hands in the air, and shouted a phrase that echoed directly back to that smoky night at Le Club forty-four years earlier:

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

The president was not looking for standard constitutional counsel; he was demanding an attorney willing to aggressively target independent federal agencies and use the Department of Justice as a private shield.

The mentor was dead, but the operational playbook remained. Throughout his presidency, Trump openly deployed the three-part strategy—attack, deny, and claim victory—elevating it from a New York real estate survival mechanism into a systemic tool of executive power.

When his administration faced congressional oversight, he executed absolute non-cooperation, blanket-denied all document requests, and publicly framed the investigation as a partisan conspiracy. Confronted with major scandals, he utilized Cohn’s foundational lesson that public shame is completely optional. By continuously introducing counter-narratives and refusing to ever apologize, he effectively paralyzed the traditional mechanisms of political accountability.

Cohn had spent his life operating from the shadows and hiding his true identity. Through Trump, his methodologies achieved institutional permanence. The relationship that began as a mutual recognition between two natural predators at a Manhattan nightclub ended by permanently reshaping the behavior of the American presidency.

A Note on Sources

While the narrative architecture and psychological synthesis of this essay are original, the text relies heavily on decades of investigative journalism and historical records to reconstruct the specific encounters, quotes, and timeline of the Trump-Cohn alliance.

The framing of the 1973 Le Club introduction and the subsequent Department of Justice housing discrimination suit draws directly on the ground-level reporting of the late Wayne Barrett in his 1992 biography, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth. The historical context regarding Roy Cohn’s mid-century role in the Lavender Scare, his psychological defense mechanisms, and his intense attraction to a specific physical archetype relies on details compiled in David K. Johnson’s monograph, The Lavender Scare, and Nicholas von Hoffman’s definitive 1988 biography, Citizen Cohn.

The highly specific operational details within this piece—including the account of Cohn’s switchboard operator, Christine Seymour, monitoring their daily telephone conversations—were originally uncovered by Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer for The New York Times. The accounts of Cohn’s final months, including the billing records for Russell Eldridge at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel and the subsequent rhinestone appraisal of the counterfeit Bulgari cufflinks, were originally reported by Marie Brenner in her landmark August 2017 profile for Vanity Fair. Finally, the President’s 2017 Oval Office outburst was a breaking-news disclosure originally reported by Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt for The New York Times.

References

Books and Articles

  • Barrett, Wayne. Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Rebirth. New York: Regan Books, 1992.

  • Blair, Gwenda. The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

  • Brenner, Marie. “How Donald Trump Used Roy Cohn’s Playbook to Win the White House.” Vanity Fair, August 2017 [1].

  • Johnston, David Cay. The Making of Donald Trump. New York: Melville House, 2016.

  • Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

  • Kruse, Michael. “The Horror Show That Made Donald Trump.” Politico Magazine, April 2016.

  • Mahler, Jonathan and Matt Flegenheimer. “What Donald Trump Learned From Roy Cohn.” The New York Times, June 20, 2016.

  • von Hoffman, Nicholas. Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Films & Documentaries

  • Abbasi, Ali (Director). The Apprentice. Briarcliff Entertainment, 2024.

  • Alper, Ivy and Daniel Rosenberg (Directors). Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn. HBO Documentary Films, 2019.

  • Tyrnauer, Matt (Director). Where’s My Roy Cohn? Sony Pictures Classics, 2019.

Between Here and There is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Manufactured in Queens]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/manufactured-in-queenshttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/manufactured-in-queensMon, 18 May 2026 12:32:17 GMTEvery morning, the country wakes up to the same exhaustion. Donald Trump forces us to live inside his pathology.

Photo by Michael James Schneider / @blcksmth

The tweets. The announcements. The lies. The insults. The way he is there when you wake up and there when you go to sleep and there in conversations you did not intend to have about him. The way the news cycle resets around him regardless of what else is happening in the world. The way people you know have been broken into camps defined entirely by their relationship to one man’s need for domination.

This isn’t politics. Politics leaves some space between the citizen and the conflict. Trump erases public life. A destructive family dynamic does not stay inside the home where it began; given enough power, it moves out, pushes everything else aside, and forces a whole society to circle around a single man’s anxiety.

This did not happen by accident. It started in a 23-room house at 85-14 Midland Parkway in Queens. Trump’s father built that property, and decided, long before his children were born, exactly how the world worked and what it took to stay alive in it.

New York real estate magnate Fred Trump, 1986.

Fred Trump ran his home like a barracks. He wore a jacket and tie to dinner and used a hardwired intercom to monitor his children. He enforced flat rules: no nicknames, no cursing, no snacking. The boys ran paper routes, but if the weather turned bad, Fred sent them in a limousine. The rules were the rules and the limousine was the limousine. He demanded compliance and the appearance of strength. He hated softness.

Fred had a reason for his hardness. His own father died of pneumonia when Fred was 12, leaving him with a mother, a brother, and the Great Depression coming. He started his first company at 17. He wrung profits out of government housing programs while giving back the bare minimum. When congressional investigators caught him taking millions in excess subsidies meant for working veterans, he told them the system let him do it.

This is the origin of Donald Trump’s obsession with grift. He expanded his father’s real estate rackets into a multi-billion-dollar presidential family business. Trump’s pardons for corporate insiders convicted of financial fraud, the private ventures run straight out of the Oval Office, and the continual extraction of cash are not departures from his character. They are the direct evolution of a child who watched his father game the federal housing system and learned that the rules are only for the losers who get caught.

Fred applied the same cold calculation to race. In 1927, the police arrested him at a Ku Klux Klan demonstration in Queens — charges dismissed. Later, he kept Black tenants out of his buildings, marking their applications with a coded “C” for “colored.”

Woody Guthrie lived in one of those complexes and wrote a song about the hate Old Man Trump stirred up in human hearts. When the Justice Department sued him in 1973, Fred handed Donald a short lesson:

The world is a slaughterhouse. You are either a killer or a loser.

Real estate magnate Fred Trump (right) looks on with approval at his son, Donald Trump (left), in New York City. (Bernard Gotfryd, 1982)

Fred also attended Marble Collegiate Church, where Norman Vincent Peale preached that if you believe something hard enough, reality will conform to your belief. Fred brought his family. Peale later officiated at Donald’s first wedding. This theology gave Fred a vocabulary for what he was already building in his son. It taught Donald that the force of a declared conviction could override a physical fact. It was not lying in the ordinary sense; it was a trained incapacity to acknowledge any reality that contradicted the performance.

Donald’s mother was present in the home the way a rumor is present. Mary Anne MacLeod Trump came from poverty in Scotland, married into luxury, and somewhere in the distance between those two lives, she lost her ability to be present to her children. She fell dangerously ill during Donald’s early childhood, suffering severe postpartum complications and an emergency hysterectomy that left her physically and emotionally unreachable during the exact months a child learns to trust the world. The children saw far more of the housekeeper than their mother. While she faded, Fred ran a long affair with his secretary.

Mary Anne stayed, said nothing, and disappeared into the background. When a mother is emotionally unavailable, a child loses his foundation. In the house on Midland Parkway, the only warmth came from Fred, and that warmth was conditional — it had to be earned.

This empty space explains why Trump needs a television screen every hour of the day. The endless alerts and the constant hijacking of the public eye are a frantic effort to stay visible. Donald developed a permanent hunger for a mirror. He cannot step away from the microphone because silence brings back the old panic of being invisible. He turns the national news cycle into his surrogate mirror—the only thing loud enough to drown out the quiet of an empty room.

His older brother, Freddy, was gentle, well-liked, and wanted to fly commercial airplanes instead of building brick apartments. Fred Trump treated that gentleness like a disease. When Freddy ordered new windows for a building when the old ones still worked, Fred humiliated him in front of the family. When Freddy succeeded, Fred said nothing. The contempt and the silence were the same tool.

Donald watched it happen from the front row. “He was the first Trump boy out there,” he said years later, “and I subconsciously watched his moves.” He watched his father mock Freddy’s passion as “driving a bus” until his brother drank himself to death at 42. Donald went to the movies while his brother died alone in a hospital room. He drew the only conclusion his father’s house allowed:

Never apologize. Never look back. Kill every piece of gentleness inside yourself before it kills you.

When Donald’s defiance became too loud, Fred exiled him to the New York Military Academy. The older cadets beat newcomers with broomsticks and forced them to stand in steam showers until they passed out. Classmates recall Donald as a boy obsessed with status and an almost mechanical neatness.

Donald Trump wearing borrowed medals.

He once physically charged at a cadet, much smaller than him, and tried to throw him out a second-story window because he had not pulled a bedsheet perfectly tight. Exiled by phone to a barracks of violence, the 13-year-old Trump found a brutal way to survive. He did not defeat the system; he signed up to be its enforcer. By mimicking the cruelty of the people threatening him, he ensured he would always be the one holding the broomstick.

In 1973, Donald met Roy Cohn in a Manhattan nightclub, and Cohn codified the rules. When the government sued the Trumps for discrimination, Cohn taught Donald the defense: file a hundred-million-dollar countersuit, call the investigators storm troopers, deny reality, and declare victory regardless of the outcome. He taught him that facts do not matter — only the volume and mass of the counterattack.

Roy Cohn and Donald Trump in the early 1980s.

Donald ran the program perfectly. When Cohn was dying of AIDS in 1986, broke and disbarred, he begged his protégé for a room to recover in. Donald never called him back. When a tool stopped being useful, Donald erased it. He treated his father with the same coldness when Alzheimer’s took Fred’s mind in the 1990s, leaving his mother to ask:

“What kind of son have I created?”

The answer to her question is in the public record. The criminal convictions for falsifying business records, the civil verdicts detailing a decades-long scheme of financial fraud, and the multimillion-dollar judgments for sexual abuse and defamation are the direct result of Fred’s binary rules.

If the world is a slaughterhouse where you are either a killer or a loser, then any tool of dominance is permitted. A criminal act becomes an aggressive transaction; a racist policy becomes a standard commercial boundary; a sexual assault becomes the ultimate, entitled extraction of compliance. They are not separate political scandals. They are the predictable consequences of a boy conditioned to believe that survival requires total, unchecked dominance.

There is a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt says you did something bad, which you can fix. Shame says: You are bad, that you are a failure and you are nothing. Fred Trump’s upbringing ran entirely on shame. In that domestic environment, a mistake did not mean you did something wrong; it meant you were defective, soft, and worthless. Because an error carried the threat of total erasure, Donald built an absolute armor against it.

Here lies the ultimate paradox at the heart of the family system: Fred Trump spent decades brutally hammering his son to be a “killer,” but the rigid conditioning he installed actually manufactured a profound psychological failure. In a clinical sense, Donald Trump was raised to be a loser. His father stripped away every tool a human being needs to handle the reality of a complex world. By making love entirely conditional on never showing weakness, never apologizing, and never losing a single transaction, Fred Trump built a child who cannot process failure without his entire sense of self collapsing.

When Trump lost the election in 2020, he declared he won. Defeat means total destruction. He managed the COVID pandemic the way Fred managed a housing lawsuit: project confidence, attack the people who show you bad numbers, and never admit a fact that makes you look bad. He calls January 6 a tourist visit, a protest, a hoax, and a patriotic act. Every version serves the same purpose, which is to make the words “I was wrong” completely unavailable.

We are now still witnessing the full scale of this conditioning.

The 2026 Iran War — from the secret channels run with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the joint airstrikes of Operation Epic Fury that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — is Fred Trump's transactional software playing out on a global stage. Donald Trump launched a war during active negotiations, without a plan for the day after, because his father's programming has no category for what happens next. You execute the deal, you declare a historic victory, and you move on. The tragedy is that this absolute defiance is not a strategy of strength. It is the frantic reflex of a man running from failure.

Trump, JD Vance, and Netanyahu in the White House, July 2025.

We saw this system crash against Benjamin Netanyahu in late 2025. When Trump demanded Netanyahu accept a Gaza ceasefire deal as a “win,” Bibi resisted because his own father, Benzion, had built him to believe that the world is a permanent trap of Jewish extermination. Trump exploded on the phone:

“I don’t know why you’re always so fucking negative. This is a win. Take it.”

The two mid-century childhoods collided. Netanyahu froze under a multi-generational fear of obliteration; Trump panicked because a partner refused to help him script a superficial triumph to stave off his own internal failure.

When a human being has to twist reality, invent lies, deny elections, and launch wars just to avoid admitting a single mistake, they are not acting out of strength. They are running a default program that forces them to fail as a leader, as a citizen, and as a human being. The tragedy of his upbringing is that the very defenses Fred Trump installed to make his son a “king” are the exact things that ensure he will always match the definition of a loser.

So instead, Trump forces the rest of the world to bear the cost of his self-defense. He drags us out of our own lives and forces us to live inside his. The current disruptions, the political gridlock, and the incessant chatter on our screens serve a single function: they keep a terrified child in Queens from ever having to look at himself in the dark.

That is what Fred made.

Sources

Historical Documents & Archival Records

  • Guthrie, Woody. “Old Man Trump.” Woody Guthrie Archives, MS 3, Box 2, Folder 8, 1950.
    www.woodyguthrie.org/lyrics/old_man_trump.htm.

  • Libertarian Institute. “The Late 2025 Ceasefire Transcripts: Inside the Trump-Netanyahu Friction.” The Libertarian Wire, Feb. 2026.
    libertarianinstitute.org/articles/.

  • “Operation Epic Fury and the Strike on Ali Khamenei.” The Times of Israel, 14 Mar. 2026.
    timesofisrael.com.

Legal & Court Records

  • Carroll v. Trump. No. 1:22-cv-10016, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 9 May 2023.
    www.nysd.uscourts.gov/node/4122.

  • New York v. Trump. No. 452564/2022, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, 30 May 2024.
    ww2.nycourts.gov/courts/1jd/supctmanh/.

  • United States v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management, Inc. Civil Action No. 73-C-1529, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, 15 Oct. 1973.
    www.justice.gov/crt/housing-cases-summary-page.

Secondary Investigative & Biographical Sources

  • Barrett, Wayne. Trump: The Deals and the Downfall. HarperCollins, 1992.
    harpercollins.com.

  • Blair, Gwenda. The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate. Simon & Schuster, 2015.
    simonandschuster.com.

  • D’Antonio, Michael. Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. Thomas Dunne Books, 2015.
    macmillan.com.

  • Fuchs, Kevin, and Natalie Petschauer. “The Houses of Midland Parkway: Mid-Century Architecture and Suburban Wealth in Queens.” Untapped New York, 14 Nov. 2021.
    untappedcities.com.

  • “History of the 23-Room Trump Mansion at 85-14 Midland Parkway.” Untapped New York, 22 Jan. 2017.
    untappedcities.com.

  • Kranish, Michael, and Marc Fisher. Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power. Scribner, 2016.
    simonandschuster.com.

  • Shavit, Ari. “The Doctrine of Benzion Netanyahu.” Haaretz, 24 May 2012.
    haaretz.com.

  • Trump, Mary L. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Simon & Schuster, 2020.
    simonandschuster.com.

  • “Woody Guthrie, Beach Haven, and the Siphoning of Veteran Subsidies.” Yahoo News, 11 Feb. 2021.
    yahoo.com.

Secondary Psychological & Theoretical Source Materials

  • Bandura, Albert. “Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement.” Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, edited by Walter Reich, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1990, pp. 161-191.
    www.wilsoncenter.org/book/origins-terrorism-psychologies-ideologies-theologies-states-mind.

  • Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books, 1969.
    basicbooks.com.

  • Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Day After: Institutional Fragility and Post-Conflict Reconstruction in the Middle East. Carnegie Analysis Series, Jan. 2026.
    carnegieendowment.org/publications/.

  • Fairbairn, W. Ronald D. Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Routledge, 1952.
    routledge.com.

  • Fearon, Pasco, et al. “Maternal Disorganization and Attachment Security: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Development and Psychopathology, vol. 22, no. 1, 2010, pp. 43-56.
    www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology.

  • Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press, 1957.
    www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1418.

  • Freud, Anna. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Hogarth Press, 1937.
    routledge.com.

  • Kaufman, Gershen. Shame: The Power of Caring. Schenkman Books, 1980.
    schenkmanbooks.com.

  • Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. Hogarth Press, 1975, routledge.com.

  • Kohut, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. International Universities Press, 1971.
    www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo3631899.html.

  • Miller, Alice. For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.
    macmillan.com.

  • Tangney, June Price, and Ronda L. Dearing. Shame and Guilt. Guilford Press, 2002.
    guilford.com.

Between Here and There is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[It Feels Like We're Stuck in a Bad Marriage]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/it-feels-like-were-stuck-in-a-badhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/it-feels-like-were-stuck-in-a-badSun, 17 May 2026 01:29:04 GMTThe American public is caught in a short-term loop. Every two years, the news cycle whips voters into a frenzy over midterm elections, razor-thin majorities, and swing-state poll numbers. We are trained to view politics as endless rounds of temporary skirmishes — perpetual arguments over who controls the house, while the foundational walls are quietly being dismantled.

This is a distraction.

While the public watches the daily headlines, a highly coordinated, multi-decade strategy is changing the rules of the compact itself. The true architects of modern conservatism are not preoccupied with who holds a slim majority in Congress next January. They are playing for a structural lockdown of power, and their ultimate target is the 14th Amendment.

Facing this reality, millions of exhausted citizens are beginning to entertain a radical question: Is it time for a national divorce?

It is a tempting thought. But a clean breakup is a geographic illusion, and the real crisis is that our civil rights protections are being dismantled from the inside out. If you want to see how a minority plans to rule the majority for the next century, stop looking at Washington. Look at how they are engineering the states.

Altering the U.S. Constitution

Under Article V, there are two paths to changing the Constitution. The standard path requires a two-thirds vote in Congress, followed by ratification from 38 states. Because that level of national consensus is nearly impossible today, conservatives have pivoted to an alternative: an Article V convention of states. This is a literal emergency rewrite clause built into the Constitution that lets state governments completely bypass Washington, D.C.

The alternative path is this: If 34 state legislatures pass a resolution demanding it, the federal government is constitutionally forced to call a convention to rewrite the Constitution. At this convention, delegates can propose deleting or fundamentally altering the 14th Amendment, stripping away federal protections for civil rights, voting rights, and birthright citizenship.

This is why gerrymandering matters. It isn’t just used to tip the scales of Congress in Washington. It is being used surgically to capture the state legislatures themselves. By rigging the state-level maps, a political minority can manufacture permanent, veto-proof state supermajorities. They aren’t trying to pass local laws; they are trying to turn their states into the building blocks needed to hit that magic 34-state threshold.

The heavily funded Convention of States Project has already convinced 20 states to officially pass the resolution. They only need 14 more.

Convention of States map, as of February 2026.

The Statehouse Trap

According to comprehensive tracking data from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL):

Republicans currently hold complete legislative control over 28 states. They are just six states away from a total majority, and only 14 states away from forcing a constitutional convention. In 19 of those states, they have locked in veto-proof dominance over both legislative chambers; this means the Republican Party in those states holds a supermajority: so many seats that they can pass any law they want, completely destroying the Governor’s power to block it.

This structural insulation is the trap. Republican mapmakers are using specific tactics to secure such unchecked power against the will of the local population. For example:

  • Indiana: In Indiana, the state is a patchwork of growing, diverse cities and sprawling rural counties. Through surgical map-drawing, the state has been carved up to “pack and crack” urban voters. Democratic voters are tightly packed into a handful of city districts to waste their excess votes, while the remaining population centers are cracked apart and swallowed by massive rural districts. The lines on the map guarantee that the ruling party cannot lose power.

  • North Carolina: A classic “purple” swing state where statewide elections are decided by razor-thin margins. Yet, the legislature is an engineered Republican stronghold. In the 2022 midterms, even though the total statewide vote for Congress was split almost exactly 50-50, the engineered maps handed Republicans over 71% of the seats, completely neutralizing the veto power of the state’s Democratic governor.

  • Utah: Salt Lake City is a densely populated, left-leaning, diverse urban hub. Instead of letting the city have its own voice, mapmakers sliced Salt Lake City into four pizza-shaped wedges. Each wedge was deliberately stretched out to include vast, conservative rural areas deep into the Utah desert. The urban vote is completely drowned out by rural voters in every single district.

  • Wisconsin: For over a decade, Wisconsin’s maps were drawn so aggressively that even when Democrats won a massive landslide victory statewide—such as winning 53% of the total assembly vote—the structural rigging still allowed Republicans to walk away with nearly two-thirds (64 out of 99) of the legislative seats.

They are all doing the same thing: transferring political power away from where the people actually live and onto empty land.

The Economic Realities

When you look at the math of these locked-down state supermajorities, it is natural to wonder if the 18 states currently controlled by Democrats would be better off walking away.

We are living in a bad marriage where the other partner is quietly rewriting the rules in the middle of the night. Is it time for a national divorce?

If progressive states were to form a legal alliance, they would instantly form one of the most powerful economies in the world. Blue states account for nearly 60% of the total United States GDP. Furthermore, federal balance-of-payment data aggregated by platforms like USAFacts proves that states like California pay hundreds of billions of dollars more to the federal government than they receive back in federal funding. Conversely, deep-red states remain heavily dependent on federal aid.

In a national divorce, affluent metropolitan hubs would instantly retain trillions of dollars in wealth that currently subsidizes the very state capitals trying to strip away their rights.

But the dream of a clean breakup hits a brutal, geographic wall. The common narrative we hear often on the news is that “blue cities” are at war with “red rural areas.” Yet, historian Colin Woodard’s research reveals that our real divide runs much deeper than raw population density.

Writing in The New York Times, Woodard proved that our political identities are anchored in deeply entrenched, regional cultures that completely ignore state lines. Look at the actual data: a rural county in the upper Midwest votes completely differently than a rural county in the Deep South, because they belong to entirely different historical "nations.”

Notice how state borders vanish: "Blue" regions like El Norte or the Left Coast snake across multiple states, while "Red" regions like Greater Appalachia swallow up interior territory regardless of state lines.

This reality means a “national divorce” cannot be achieved by simply drawing a line around a city or a state border. The modern crisis is that gerrymandered state capitals are forcing these diverse regional populations into rigid, artificial state buckets—locking millions of citizens inside a structural cage.

When you try to force these complex, overlapping cultures into a hard political partition, the map fractures at the local level.

If California secedes, what happens to the millions of conservative voters living in its central agricultural valley? If the South isolates itself into an exclusionary regime, what happens to the millions of Black, Hispanic, and progressive Americans living in the urban centers of Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, and New Orleans?

Because a clean breakup is a geographic fantasy, we cannot walk away from the table. We have to change the rules of the house we share. Since we are forced to live together, our only choice is to fix the foundation.

In other words: Running away is an illusion. The fight isn't about dividing the country. It is about reclaiming the system that traps us.

The Call for Unity

Breaking out of this short-term loop requires looking honestly at how we fight. When confronted by the statehouse trap, the standard reaction is to pour everything into the next defensive campaign. We are told to register more voters, knock on more doors, and trust that localized grassroots turnout can tip the scales.

But within a structurally rigged system, relying solely on grassroots mobilization is a losing battle. Turnout cannot overcome structural math. When state districts are drawn to guarantee a supermajority for one party, a surge of voters cannot change the outcome.

Politicians in rigged districts do not fear the voters; they only fear a primary challenge from the extremes of their own party. If we are going to stay united as one country, the solution must match the scale of the crisis.

The rules of democracy must be made transparent, fair, and uniform across all 50 states through two non-partisan pillars:

  1. Banning Partisan Gerrymandering Nationally: A federal law must mandate that all states use independent, citizen-led redistricting commissions. Lines must be drawn based on logic and geography—keeping cities, counties, and neighborhoods together—rather than political data. This ensures that if a state shifts politically, the legislature shifts with it.

  2. Establishing Uniform Federal Standards: A new voting rights act must establish a permanent baseline that guarantees and protects access for every American citizen. This means setting uniform, non-negotiable rules for automatic voter registration, secure mail-in ballots, and early voting across all 50 states—ensuring the rules cannot be scaled back.

Unity cannot be maintained by force or by nostalgia; it can only be maintained by fairness. We cannot expect citizens to remain invested in a democratic system where their votes are mathematically neutralized before they are even cast.

We cannot fix this marriage by simply arguing louder; we have to fix the foundation of the house we share.

A new, robust national voting rights bill that bans partisan gerrymandering is an existential requirement. It is the only mechanism capable of dismantling the statehouse trap, disarming the long game to alter the Constitution, and ensuring that a government of the people, by the people, for the people can truly exist.

Between Here and There is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sources

A Closer Look: The 11 Cultural Nations of America

For readers who want to explore the deep historical roots behind this essay’s geographic argument, this foundational map defines the 11 distinct cultures that shape modern American beliefs about government, freedom, and community.

Join the Conversation

I wrote this piece because I am exhausted by the cyclical political theater that ignores the structural changes happening in our own backyards.

  1. On the Emotional Toll: The essay talks about a feeling of deep political exhaustion — like being trapped in a bad marriage where the other partner is rewriting the rules in the middle of the night. Does this resonate with you? How do you manage that exhaustion without completely tuning out?

  2. On the “National Divorce” Temptation: When you see maps being structurally engineered to silence urban and diverse populations, do you find yourself wishing for a literal separation or a clean break? If a geographical split is an illusion, how do we cope with being locked in the same house?

  3. On the 34-State Threat: Were you aware of how close the Article V “Convention of States” movement actually is to hitting its threshold to rewrite the Constitution? Why do you think the national media keeps us focused on congressional seats instead of this statehouse capture?

  4. On the Solution: The piece argues that localized grassroots organizing is a trap if the maps are rigged, and that only a federal voting rights overhaul can save the country. Do you agree that a national law is the only way out, or is there another path to fighting minority rule that this essay missed?

Leave a comment. If this perspective resonated with you, please consider subscribing and sharing this piece with others.

Thanks for reading Between Here and There! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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]]><![CDATA[Where Are the Hit Men Now?]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/where-are-the-hit-men-nowhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/where-are-the-hit-men-nowThu, 14 May 2026 12:03:25 GMTThe hit man was not on the beach. The men with guns were sent to Minneapolis.

On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good, 37, on Portland Avenue. On January 24, CBP tactical agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez killed Alex Pretti, 37, on Nicollet Avenue. All three agents are walking free.

Ross was transferred by the federal government to active duty in another state to escape local subpoenas. Ochoa and Gutierrez are living at home on paid administrative leave, collecting federal checks while the Department of Justice (DOJ) suppresses the evidence.

These killings occurred during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s armed immigration deployment into Minneapolis.

When James Comey saw seashells spelling “8647” and posted a photograph on Instagram, federal prosecutors took the image to a grand jury. Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the case as the product of months of investigative work.

But in Minneapolis, after federal agents killed Good and Pretti, the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) actively withheld the evidence Minnesota needed to investigate what happened on its own streets.

The U.S. government sent nearly 3,000 federal immigration agents into Minnesota under a military-style operation, resulting in 4,030 arrests. The White House claimed the operation targeted dangerous criminals, but newly released ICE data reveals that 63 percent of those detained, a total of 2,532 people, had no criminal convictions or pending charges. The sweeping enforcement tactics targeted refugee communities, unconstitutionally broke into private homes, and wrongfully arrested innocent bystanders, including U.S. citizens.

The operation crippled ordinary federal law enforcement in the district. From January through April, federal prosecutors filed only eight gun or drug cases, down from 77 during the same period the year before. The federal government had redirected its entire local apparatus, hollowing out routine felony prosecutions to run wide-scale immigration sweeps.

The story begins not with seashells, not with Comey, not with a photograph on a beach, but with armed federal agents sent into Minneapolis in force.

The Car on Portland

Renee Good was a mother and poet. She was with her partner, Becca Good, on Portland Avenue when Ross confronted them during the operation.

Federal officials later described Renee Good as a “violent rioter” who had “weaponized her vehicle,” and Trump said she “ran over the ICE officer.” Continuous dashcam footage and neighborhood security video reviewed by Reuters completely contradicted that account. The footage established that Good’s car was moving forward at less than 10 miles per hour with its wheels turned sharply away from Ross, executing a clear turn to bypass him. The video showed Ross drawing his weapon and firing three shots into the driver's side window as the vehicle went past, while the vehicle never altered its path or struck him.

The DOJ did not open a criminal civil-rights investigation into Ross. Blanche said there was “currently no basis” for one. Senior officials repeatedly said they would not follow the ordinary path in such shootings and investigate whether Ross used excessive force. A supervisor in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, Tracee Mergen, resigned after bureau leadership in Washington pressured her to stop pursuing a civil-rights inquiry into Ross. Such inquiries are a common step in similar shootings.

The DOJ did not simply decline to investigate Ross. It turned its attention toward Becca Good. According to the New York Times account entered into the U.S. House of Representative record, the DOJ scrutinized Good and her partner for ties to left-wing protest groups in Minneapolis. That decision prompted at least six senior prosecutors in the Minnesota office to resign in protest, alongside a wave of departures from the Civil Rights Division in Washington.

That is the raw reality of the Good case. Ross killed her. The DOJ refused the ordinary civil-rights path. The FBI supervisor who tried to investigate him resigned. Career prosecutors left their posts. Federal investigators targeted her surviving partner, Becca Good, while the killer was shielded from accountability.

The Pavement on Nicollet

Pretti was an intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis VA. He was killed while residents were watching and filming federal agents during the same operation that had left Good dead two weeks earlier.

Federal officials moved immediately to make him the villain of his own death. DHS said Pretti “approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun” and said the encounter looked like someone wanted to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Stephen Miller called him a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin.”

The video record dismantled that story. Reuters verified continuous bystander footage showing Pretti holding his cell phone horizontally at eye level, recording the agents with his palms open. The footage shows agents pinning him face-down to the pavement, with one officer reaching into Pretti’s waistband, pulling out his licensed handgun, and tossing it into the grass. The agents opened fire, hitting Pretti 10 times in the back, seconds after his weapon had been thrown completely out of his reach. A preliminary CBP review made no mention of Pretti brandishing a firearm, even though Trump officials had built their first public account around the weapon.

The two killings met completely different federal responses. In Good’s case, Blanche saw no basis for criminal civil-rights scrutiny. In Pretti’s case, federal officials announced internal and federal investigations. This announcement was an administrative trick.

The DOJ used the promise of an internal review to quiet public outrage while routing the case entirely away from criminal prosecutors. They buried the file in a civil workplace litigation unit, ensuring from day one that the inquiry could never end in a criminal indictment.

The investigation was designed to examine internal personnel policies and dig into Pretti’s past, hunting for a way to retroactively turn a VA nurse into a domestic terrorist.

The federal announcement did not give Minnesota the record. It kept state investigators blocked from the scene, the footage, the interviews, and the identities of the officers who used force.

The Blocked Search

Minnesota state authorities filed suit because the federal probe was worthless. The DOJ and the DHS were sued in Washington, D.C., by Minnesota, Hennepin County, and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). The lawsuit says federal authorities blocked state investigators from key evidence and refused to cooperate in investigations of three shootings by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge.

The state needed body-camera footage, personnel files, training records, interviews, forensic materials, scene evidence, names, and conduct records. The lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C., because, as Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said, that is where the decisions to deny Minnesota access were being made. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Minnesotans were watching their federal government “hide evidence and obstruct investigations,” and promised to fight for transparency and accountability “as long as it takes.”

The fight over evidence began almost immediately. After Pretti was killed, state authorities obtained a judicial search warrant and returned to the scene. Federal authorities turned them away again. About three weeks later, the FBI formally told the BCA it would not provide any information or evidence it had collected at the scene.

Residents had already become part of the evidentiary record. Twin Cities residents filmed the operations, the confrontations, and the aftermath. Hennepin County later created the Transparency and Accountability Project, an online portal for the public to submit evidence of potentially unlawful behavior by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge. More than one thousand submissions came in through the evidence portal, according to Moriarty.

This was not a procedural dispute. The evidence is the definitive record of a homicide. It contains the exact location of the bodies, the trajectory of the bullets, the identities of the shooters, and the names of the supervisors who ordered state investigators off the street. When federal law enforcement agencies seize that record, they control the public’s ability to know what happened.

The Withheld Videos

In Good’s case, the fight reached U.S. District Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan, who ordered the federal government to produce unredacted materials related to the shooting for private court review. The order was for evidence tied to Jonathan Ross, such as body-camera or other video, training and personnel records, use-of-force policies, and Ross’s statements before and after the shooting.

The deadline was May 1. When that afternoon arrived, the DOJ executed a bureaucratic pivot. Instead of delivering open, reviewable files directly to Judge Bryan’s chambers, federal prosecutors deposited an encrypted digital drive with Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Cowan Wright.

That was weeks ago. By placing an encrypted drive into a magistrate’s repository, the federal government successfully locked the evidence in an intermediate legal limbo, safely out of reach of the presiding judge. The raw files remain entirely suppressed.

Becca Good’s attorney, Robert Bennett, openly rejected the transaction, labeling the digital drop-box maneuver an outright stalling tactic designed to keep the raw body-camera footage hidden from local state prosecutors who are tracing the ballistics.

Seashells and Hit Men

Against that maneuver, the Comey indictment looks obscene.

Federal prosecutors took a photograph of seashells to a grand jury. The shells spelled “8647.” Comey said he understood the image as political, not violent. Blanche defended the case as broader than a single Instagram post and as the product of months of investigative work, claiming that a wider net of intelligence proved the arrangement on the sand was a coordinated, tactical threat.

While Blanche’s team deployed grand jury subpoenas, forensic tracking, and months of active surveillance to decode a hidden conspiracy in a beach photograph, the DOJ took the opposite direction in Minneapolis. Faced with two concrete homicides on local streets, federal authorities actively hid the ballistics, blocked state warrants, and bypassed a federal judge’s explicit discovery deadline. They treated an innocuous arrangement of seashells as an actionable threat, while real bullets and documented video footage became government secrets.

The seashells were never the real story. They represent what prosecutors, investigators, and political appointees were willing to do when Trump’s imagined safety was at stake.

The hit men were nowhere near a beach. There were on the streets of Minneapolis.

Bypassing a federal court order to hide body-camera footage is an enormous aberration. Can anyone in authority — Moriarty, Ellison, Judge Bryan, or a committee in Congress — make a difference now? The courts have been sidelined by a legal shell game over encrypted files.

A president's malice dictates the priorities of federal law enforcement. The constitutional checks have stopped working. The federal government no longer functions as an arm of the law. It formats reality to execute an old grudge, turning Trump’s personal obsession for revenge into grand jury indictments.

The Unraveling Mind

Federal political appointees hid the body-camera footage and ballistic reports, I believe, because the man at the top couldn’t handle the reality.

For a decade, specialists have watched Donald Trump lose his grip on sentences, words, and focus. What started as short sentences and repeated phrases in 2017 has become a total reliance on handlers just to get through a day. He is not leading. He is being managed.

The result is a state of functional vulnerability. Trump relies on a small circle of unelected loyalists and informal surrogates to interpret events and validate his beliefs. This baseline dependence makes him intensely susceptible to manipulation. It shifts essential executive function out of public view, leaving national policy vulnerable to his immediate emotional triggers—flattery, grievance, or fear.

This is where Trump’s state of mind enters the story. A president who sees a mob command in seashells creates one kind of danger. DOJ officials willing to act on that create another.

Trump’s distorted threat perception matters because it does not stay inside his head. Other people carry it into court filings, charging decisions, public statements, agency orders, enforcement priorities, and armed deployments. His handlers treat actual evidence as a threat to his stability. They seal the record, block state warrants, and lock the truth away. The country is no longer governed by a stable constitutional command; it is being managed around an unraveling mind.

The story here is not just what was done in Minneapolis, and what the government still does not want Minnesota to see. Or how that suppression sits in stark contrast to Comey’s indictment. It is now also about the cognitive impairment and functional vulnerabilities that made both actions possible.

The DOJ locked the evidence away on Nicollet Avenue for the same reason the White House filters the record in Washington: to insulate an ill man who still serves as the President of the United States. The federal blockade in Minnesota is a direct extension of the internal containment strategy used to hide Trump’s mental collapse from the public. The DOJ cannot produce the unredacted files to a local grand jury because the raw record exposes a command structure driven entirely by delusion and managed by proxy.

Professional standards in medicine, law, and psychology state that when functional decline poses a direct risk to public safety, silence is complicity. The American Psychological Association and American Bar Association jointly advise that cognitive decline in public officials must be evaluated when it compromises public trust. Without a protocol requiring neurological evaluations or the mandatory disclosure of cognitive deterioration, the office of the presidency is being systematically reshaped around decline—its authority performed by proxy and its armed deployments driven by erratic executive reflexes.

Appendix

THE VERIFIED RECORD: A CHRONOLOGY OF EXECUTIVE DECLINE

The following chronology compiles the public record, expert observations, and documentable administrative crises tracking the visible progression of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline from the baseline metrics of his first term to the breakdown in 2025 and 2026. This is the verified data that the federal apparatus is currently structured to conceal.

The Breakdown of Governance Systems

The presidency requires sustained accountability, continuity, and cognitive control. When the person occupying the office can no longer self-monitor, evaluate evidence, or maintain a consistent narrative, the internal checks of government stop functioning.

Advisors inside the White House enable, conceal, or redirect the president rather than challenge or restrain his impulses. To mask the extent of this dysfunction from the public, staff routinely edit official transcripts, withhold raw footage, and issue post-event clarifications. Key decisions are regularly delayed, reversed, or issued in direct contradiction to agency guidance.

Cabinet members frequently operate in total isolation to avoid relying on presidential direction, stalling crucial domestic systems, while foreign allies and domestic law enforcement agencies increasingly sidestep the president entirely, turning to military leaders or public media signals to interpret national intent.

The Shift in Speech and Syntax (2017–2024)

In clinical terms, dementia is a sustained decline across multiple areas of cognition — specifically memory, language, and executive function — that breaks down a person’s independent capacity to evaluate risk. “Progressive” signifies that these deficits deepen irreversibly over time.

Neurolinguists began documenting changes in Trump’s speech during his first term. A 2017 comparative analysis by STAT News reviewed decades of archival interviews and found shorter sentences, a sharp loss of varied vocabulary, and simplified syntax.

By 2020, The Atlantic documented spontaneous speech patterns that had become highly repetitive, vague, and dependent on a small handful of basic adjectives. Peer-reviewed research confirms that this loss of semantic complexity, alongside word-finding errors and connected-speech repetition, serves as an early indicator of neurodegeneration.

By 2024, cognitive experts like Harry Segal, PhD, of Cornell University tracked the consistency of Trump’s speech derailments, his reliance on fixed phrases, and his inability to hold a narrative thread. These observations included physical markers like gait instability, accompanied by severe impulsivity and a restricted conceptual range.

Clinical professionals increasingly framed Trump’s condition not as a question of legal competence, but of functional capacity — the fluid ability to understand, reason, and make choices in real time.

When an individual’s outward confidence remains intact while internal judgment erodes, they become highly suggestible. Aides must simplify briefings into single-sentence options and present binary choices to avoid conversational derailment.

Trump absorbs information emotionally, retaining input that flatters his impulses while discarding contradictory facts. National policy becomes distorted when a president’s declining cognition is propped up by handlers, leaving the command structure vulnerable to executive drift.

The Log of Behavioral Incidents (2025–2026)

The public acts recorded over the last two years document an accelerating pattern of mental disorganization and collapsed judgment.

On September 24, 2025, during an address to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump accused his staff of sabotaging the teleprompter mid-speech, then pivoted to grievances about an escalator in Trump Tower and a broken Secret Service earpiece.

His concluding accusation that UN deep-state forces were destroying his legacy forced U.S. diplomats to spend two days reassuring allies that these statements did not reflect national policy.

On September 30, 2025, during remarks to senior military leaders at Quantico, Trump misidentified the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as General Kelly, who left government years prior.

He turned to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to ask, “Is that still right?” Hegseth nodded silently, and the president moved on. Video recorded the commander-in-chief outsourcing basic confirmation of military leadership to a former Fox cable news host he appointed to run the Pentagon.

On October 3, 2025, during a disaster briefing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Trump referred to Hurricane Florence from 2018 as an active event, asking if it had made landfall yet.

When staff corrected him, he asked aloud, “What year is this?” The meeting ended without operational decisions, stalling emergency disaster updates by thirty-six hours.

On October 11, 2025, just twenty-four hours after telling reporters that he was not a king and respected the people, Trump’s account posted an AI-generated image of him wearing a jeweled crown while dropping sewage on protesters with the caption, “The weak will drown in their lies,” demonstrating a complete breakdown of internal checks.

In January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump referred to Greenland as Iceland four times before an audience of world leaders, while his press secretary explicitly denied what was captured on the live video broadcast.

Following the summit, his former White House attorney, Ty Cobb, Trump’s former White House attorney, publicly declared that the president's cognitive decline was "palpable" and "accelerating." Cobb identified a severe, chronic sleep-wake reversal, a documented behavioral marker of advanced Alzheimer's disease. He warned that foreign actors were actively exploiting the executive’s disorientation to drive national policy decisions.

In April 2026, while American fighter pilots were missing over active combat zones in Iran, White House aides completely excluded the commander-in-chief from the Situation Room. Handlers withheld the tactical military briefings because they determined the president's erratic attention span would derail the operational response. Trump spent that critical national security window focused on White House ballroom renovations.

That same week, when reporters asked him which conflict would resolve first — the war in Ukraine or the war in Iran — Trump answered by reciting specific troop numbers he had posted about Iran six days prior, applying the data to Ukraine without apparent awareness of the substitution.

Sources

Linguistic and Cognitive Analysis (2017–2020)

  • STAT News. (May 23, 2017). “Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?” An archival analysis of decades of public interviews documenting a long-term reduction in lexical variety and a simplification of grammatical and syntactic structures.

  • The Atlantic. (January 9, 2020). “What Trump’s Worsening Speech Says About His Mind.” Detailed documentation tracking the evolution of the president’s spontaneous speech into highly repetitive, vague, and fragmented semantic patterns.

Clinical Evidence and Expert Commentary (2024)

  • Cornell University Media Relations. (March 11, 2024). “Trump’s frequent phonemic paraphasia ‘are signs of early dementia,’ says Cornell expert.” Analysis identifying persistent word-finding errors, conversational derailments, and sound-substitution errors as strong clinical indicators of neurodegenerative decline.

  • STAT News. (August 7, 2024). “Trump keeps losing his train of thought. Cognitive experts have theories about why.” Extensive documentation and clinical breakdown of systemic conversational drift, tangential speech, and loss of narrative continuity during public addresses.

  • Cornell University College of Arts & Sciences. (October 16, 2024). “Trump’s abrupt decision to play DJ a sign of ‘accelerating cognitive decline.’” Professional assessment examining public displays of sudden behavioral impulsivity, loss of thematic focus, and executive disinhibition.

Second-Term Administrative Incidents (2025)

  • Reuters. (September 24, 2025). “Trump says Secret Service probing ‘sabotage’ of escalator; teleprompter failed at UN.” Eyewitness and transcript data documenting acute instances of paranoid ideation and the conflation of local business grievances with international diplomacy.

  • The Guardian. (September 24, 2025). “Trump alleges ‘triple sabotage’ at the UN.” Corroborating investigative report detailing erratic rhetorical shifts and diplomatic incoherence during the United Nations General Assembly framework.

  • Air & Space Forces Magazine. (September 30, 2025). “Inside the room for Trump and Hegseth’s speeches to top military brass.” Detailed logistical record documenting chain-of-command confusion and the president’s reliance on external media figures for basic situational validation.

  • PolitiFact. (October 7, 2025). “No, Portland is not ‘burning to the ground.’” Analysis of administrative panic and public threat distortions regarding operational surges.

  • Heather Cox Richardson. (October 5 & 8, 2025). Letters from an American. Post-event situational analysis tracking deep temporal disorientation during emergency FEMA management briefs and consecutive 36-hour operational policy delays.

Clinical and Ethical Frameworks

  • American Psychological Association & American Bar Association. (2022). “Assessment of Older Adults with Diminished Capacity.” Joint professional advisory standard defining the threshold of functional vulnerability and the legal-ethical obligations of public office exposure.

  • The New York Times / House Record. (2026). Account documenting internal suppression and subsequent career prosecutor resignations within the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office.

  • National Institute on Aging. (2024). “Understanding Dementia and Cognitive Impairment.”Foundational clinical reference outlining the structural differences between normal aging and progressive cognitive decline across executive brain networks.

Peer-Reviewed Research

  • Fraser, K.C. et al. (2016). “Linguistic Features Identify Alzheimer’s Disease in Narrative Speech.” Alzheimer’s & Dementia. Peer-reviewed methodology establishing how reductions in syntactic complexity and narrative cohesion serve as quantifiable markers for early neurodegeneration.

  • Boschi, V. et al. (2017). “Connected Speech in Neurodegenerative Language Disorders.” Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. Clinical research correlating consistent word-finding delays and repetitive vocabulary choices with structural decay in executive temporal processing.

  • Rascovsky, K. et al. (2011). “Diagnostic Criteria for the Behavioral Variant of Frontotemporal Dementia.” Brain. Core neurology consensus guidelines outlining the behavioral benchmarks for assessing environmental suggestibility, environmental regression, and the loss of executive control.

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]]><![CDATA[For He's a Jolly Good Fellow]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/for-hes-a-jolly-good-fellowhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/for-hes-a-jolly-good-fellowWed, 13 May 2026 03:36:03 GMT

“I should be indoors at a secure facility where I can quietly, beautifully, and safely play out my term, destroying everything that comes in our way.”

The crowd laughs and applauds.

May 11, 2026 Oval Office maternal healthcare event tied to the launch of Moms.gov. (Birthday elements added digitally.)

On May 1, just six weeks shy of his 80th birthday, Donald Trump spoke at The Villages in central Florida, to several thousand retirees who cheered him for the better part of an hour.

Those words capture the speech in miniature: grandiosity, casual violent rhetoric, and no apparent awareness of how they sound outside the room.

The setting is friendly. No hostile interviewers. No debate opponents. No visible expectation of coherence, discipline, or restraint.

Trump speaks like someone whose defensiveness, disinhibition, and fragmented thinking break through openly when he feels safe. He drifts from Medicare to racial attacks to media conspiracies to personal grievances, abandoning thoughts midway, circling back without structure. Emotional momentum and crowd response hold it together.

Moments later, he mocks the retirees supporting him:

“I don’t happen to be a senior. I’m much younger than you. I’m a much, much younger man than you. Look at you old guys. Wouldn’t you like to be my age?”

The crowd laughs again.

He is the sitting president of the United States. He insults supporters directly, mocks their age, questions their intelligence, and they reward him for it anyway. The reinforcement makes him looser, more impulsive, less restrained as the speech continues.

He attacks the press:

“That’s a lot of fake news. That’s a lot of fake news. That’s a lot of fakers.”

Then he gives his incoherence a name:

“I love the weave because the weave is great.”

The weave, he explains, means telling multiple stories at once, wandering away from the original subject, then reconnecting them later. He offers the fragmentation as evidence of intelligence.

Topics dissolve into grievances. Policy drifts into self-defense. One trigger leads unpredictably to another. Less sustained argument than associative drift, driven by resentment, ego protection, and crowd stimulation.

At one point, he erupts at the sound crew:

“Tell them to turn up the microphone, will you please? Turn up the mic.”

The complaint widens immediately:

“You pay these guys a lot of money, and then you get up and the mic isn’t on properly. And then they want their money. And I don’t believe in paying people that do a bad job. I only like to pay — I pay early, and I’m screaming my ass off because the mic is no good. Turn the mic up, please. Amazing.”

A technical problem becomes a grievance before he moves on.

He introduces Mehmet Oz this way:

“We have a man here who knows more about Medicaid, Medicare, medical crap than any human being.”

Then he turns to Representative Ilhan Omar and Somalia:

“Somalia. It’s a beautiful place. It’s got no government. It’s got no military. It’s got no anything. It’s got one thing that’s really strong: crime. It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty.”

“She comes here from Somalia and tells us how to run the United States of America.”

“And then she married a brother to come in.”

Trump does not simply repeat the false claim about Omar marrying her brother. He acts it out as entertainment:

“Darling, I love you very much. Good night, brother. Let’s go to bed.”

He enjoys performing humiliation and sexualized degradation before a cheering crowd.

Then he fixes on his cognitive screening exam. He describes identifying animals, solving arithmetic problems, answering basic questions, and presents the test as proof of extraordinary intelligence.

“The first question is very easy. It’s a lion, a giraffe, a bear, and a shark.”

“Not too many people, even in this very room, could answer those last 10.”

He compares himself favorably to Obama and Biden, suggests they could not pass the same exam, and describes doctors supposedly telling him: “He’s a mad genius.”

The president turns 80 next month. That exam exists, in part, to catch what age does to a mind. He cannot leave it alone — treating it as evidence of superiority, as proof of genius, as anything but what it is.

He describes Iran in apocalyptic terms, talking about whether he should “blast the hell out of them” or “make a deal.”

He complains that critics are saying the United States is losing the war with Iran:

“We get the radical left to say, ‘We’re not winning, we’re not winning.’”

Then he escalates:

“They don’t have any military left. It’s unbelievable.”

And then further:

“It’s actually, it’s actually, I believe it’s treasonous, okay? You want to know the truth? It’s treasonous.”

Political disagreement becomes disloyalty. Dissent becomes betrayal.

Afterward, the speech moved into the usual press frames.

The Washington Post described a rambling, grievance-heavy appearance. Reuters framed it as a bid to reassure older voters ahead of difficult midterms. The Guardian focused on the Omar section. The New York Post ignored the behavioral questions and called it a successful speech about seniors and the economy.

On Substack, Heather Delaney Reese gave the sharper reading in “Trump’s midterm panic is getting ugly.” Trump, she argued, no longer tries to maintain restraint, discipline, or normal political boundaries. Her strongest line:

“He is not unhinged. He is unleashed.”

Reese also writes about numbness: the way words that once made the body recoil begin to pass through after too many speeches, posts, threats, clips, and headlines.

What I see is this: Trump is not embarrassed, restrained, or self-conscious about any of it. He is comfortable, and he no longer knows where the boundaries are supposed to be.

At some point the country has to stop pretending these are isolated moments, stylistic quirks, or harmless eccentricities.

We are watching a rapidly aging man display fragmentation, compulsive self-defense, emotional volatility, derailment, perseveration, and loss of executive control — patterns that would raise serious concerns in any other cognitively demanding profession.

  • If a public school principal spoke this way at an assembly — drifting between unrelated subjects, exploding at staff, obsessively defending cognitive fitness, humiliating people publicly, losing coherent lines of thought — parents and school board members would demand intervention.

  • If a family doctor moved through appointments this way — jumping unpredictably between topics, looping defensively, escalating emotionally, showing obvious disinhibition — patients would stop trusting that doctor’s judgment.

  • If a police chief gave a 90-minute press conference like this, city officials and the public would openly question whether the person was fit to remain in command.

  • If the CEO of a large company spoke this way during an earnings call — wandering, agitated, defensive, emotionally erratic, unable to sustain coherent focus, repeatedly boasting about passing a cognitive screen — investors would panic and the board of directors would have to act.

The presidency is one of the most cognitively demanding positions in the world, yet behavior that would provoke intervention almost anywhere else gets reframed as political style, entertainment, branding, authenticity, or simply “Trump being Trump.”

On June 14, Donald Trump turns 80. There will be a celebration. There will be a crowd, and someone will lead the song. The room will join in — faces turned toward the man at the center, voices lifted together, the tune as familiar as it has always been.

The crowd at The Villages laughed when he mocked them. They applauded when he degraded others. They stayed with him through the drift, the grievance, the eruption, the fantasy, the accusation — not because they could not see it, but because they could.

That is the most precise thing that can be said about where we are. Not that we have been deceived. Not that we failed to notice. But that we have looked directly at it — and we know all the words.

Sources

Heather Delaney Reese
Trump's midterm panic is getting ugly
At 4:10 this afternoon, Donald Trump reemerged into the public eye for the first time since the shooting in Washington, D.C. this past weekend. As he made his way toward the podium, he struggled to s…
Read more
2 months ago · 2307 likes · 88 comments · Heather Delaney Reese

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]]><![CDATA[The Lady Doth Protest Too Much]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-lady-doth-protest-too-muchhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-lady-doth-protest-too-muchMon, 27 Apr 2026 20:02:02 GMTThis is a little too obvious for me as a psychologist to point out, but I think that Melania Trump is projecting her true feelings about her husband onto Jimmy Kimmel.

Just for the fun of it every time she says “Kimmel,” I substituted “my husband.” And for “ABC,” I substituted “Congress.”

From deep within the mind of Melania Trump:

“My husband’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. … his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like my husband shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, my husband hides behind Congress because he knows … (it) will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for Congress to take a stand. How many times will Congress’ leadership enable my husband’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”

The substitution works almost too cleanly.

Projection is the right clinical frame, but I hesitated with the modifier. Are her feelings “true” or “hidden” or “unconscious.”

  • Unconscious is the classical Freudian qualifier and would be accurate here, if she’s not aware she’s doing it.

  • Hidden suggests strategic concealment.

  • True implies she consciously holds these views but disguises them.

Unconscious fits if she’s genuinely displacing onto Kimmel feelings about Donald that she can’t afford — psychologically or practically — to own directly.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Melania’s Words

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”

Melania posted that on X this morning.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has always featured a stand-up comedian. This year, with Trump attending for the first time, no comedian was booked.

Kimmel did the job anyway. This was not without risk — ABC had already suspended him once, last September, under FCC pressure. He came back. He kept going.

On Jimmy Kimmel Live! Thursday night, he called Trump “a delicate snowflake with the thinnest, fat skin of any human being ever” and said he was delivering the jokes a comedian might give “if our president wasn’t a trembling drama queen who’s scared of comedy.”

On Epstein:

“Thirty years ago, you’re just some rich guy on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet out of Teterboro. But you worked hard. You stayed friends. You shared some wonderful secrets. And because of that, you’re able to fly on that plane seven more times. Dreams really do come true.”

Then he turned to the first lady: “Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

Two nights later, a gunman breached security at the Washington Hilton and was tackled well before reaching the ballroom where the Trumps were seated on stage. A Secret Service agent was reportedly struck in the chest — “saved” by a bulletproof vest, Karoline Leavitt said at her presser.

The First Lady and the President seated at the WHCA dinner Saturday evening.

Within hours the DOJ sent a letter demanding the National Trust for Historic Preservation drop its lawsuit against Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom construction by 9 a.m. Monday, citing “last night’s extraordinary events.”

On 60 Minutes yesterday, Norah O’Donnell opened by asking Trump directly:

“Why do you think so many people may be trying to kill you?”

Trump’s answer: “They go after consequential presidents. They go after presidents that do things.”

At the Monday briefing, Leavitt said the shooter’s manifesto was “indistinguishable from the words that we hear daily from so many people” and named Kimmel specifically, saying his rhetoric had “led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words.”

Leavitt then asked:

“Who in their right minds says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?”

Melania’s statement arrived Monday morning, riding the same current.

And the projection, it turns out, looks like it’s doing double duty.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Afterword

I needed a headline. My first instinct was Shakespearean — “Melania, wherefore art thou” — but I caught myself. Juliet isn’t asking where Romeo is. She’s asking why he has to be who he is, why he has to be a Montague, the thing that makes him dangerous to love. That’s actually closer to Melania’s situation than it first appears. She knows exactly who he is.

The more precise Shakespeare, it turns out, is elsewhere. Lady Macbeth is the classic study in what happens when you yoke yourself to a man whose ambition and cruelty you enabled, and then cannot escape. Her sleepwalking scene — “Out, damned spot” — is the most famous instance in all of literature of unconscious guilt and suppressed truth surfacing without the conscious mind’s permission. That’s the clinical heart of projection.

And then there’s Hamlet:

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Gertrude says it watching a play-within-a-play, observing a queen who over-declares her fidelity. The irony is that Gertrude is almost certainly talking about herself.

That’s the headline.

Sources

  • Melania Trump. Post on X (formerly Twitter). April 27, 2026. https://x.com/FLOTUS

  • O’Donnell, Norah. “Read the full transcript of Norah O’Donnell’s interview with President Trump.” CBS News. April 26, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/read-the-full-transcript-of-norah-odonnells-interview-with-president-trump-60-minutes/

  • Leavitt, Karoline. White House press briefing. April 27, 2026. Reported in: “White House Press Secretary Calls Out Jimmy Kimmel’s ‘Expectant Widow’ Joke.” Deadline. https://deadline.com/2026/04/trump-jimmy-kimmel-joke-dinner-shooting-1236873587/

  • “DOJ Uses White House Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting to Pressure Preservationists to Drop Lawsuit Over Trump’s $400 Million Ballroom.” Fortune. April 26, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/04/26/justice-department-white-house-correspondents-dinner-shooting-preservations-lawsuit-trump-ballroom/

  • James, Meg. “First Lady Melania Trump Blasts ABC, Says Jimmy Kimmel ‘Deepens the Political Sickness.’” Los Angeles Times. April 27, 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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]]><![CDATA[The Story That Didn’t Run: The Kill Switch]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-story-that-didnt-run-the-killhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-story-that-didnt-run-the-killMon, 27 Apr 2026 10:30:15 GMTI wasn’t going to watch the C-SPAN broadcast. A room full of journalists applauding a president who arrested their colleagues, raided their homes, and prosecuted them for their reporting — that’s not a celebration of the First Amendment. That’s surrender.

The “kill switch” is the story.

Trump had not attended one of these dinners as a sitting president until Saturday. He boycotted them through his entire first term and the first year of his second.

Weija Jiang, president of the the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), at the start of the group’s annual dinner on Saturday.

The last time he was in that room, in 2011, Barack Obama stood at the podium and dismantled him — the birther crusade, the gold-plated ego, the reality television brand — while Trump sat stone-faced in the crowd. He left and did not come back.

He came back Saturday because the room was finally his.

Controlled Access

In February 2025, the White House took control of the press pool, stripping the WHCA of the role it had held for decades: deciding which journalists rotated into the small spaces where presidents are questioned up close.

The administration took that power for itself, issued nearly 500 new press passes to outlets including The Daily Wire, Right Side Broadcasting, Real America’s Voice — Steve Bannon’s platform — and Lindell TV, and installed a rotating conservative outlet in the briefing room seat that previously belonged to the Associated Press.

Legacy outlets were not removed. They were punished selectively.

The AP lost special access for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico. The Wall Street Journal was restricted from the press pool after publishing a story on Trump’s Epstein ties. The FBI raided the home of Washington Post correspondent Hannah Natanson and seized her devices.

Also, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is prosecuting two independent journalists — Don Lemon and Georgia Fort — for covering a protest.

When Trump agreed to attend Saturday’s dinner, he negotiated the terms. No comedian. A mentalist instead. His cabinet seated onstage.

By the time he walked in, the organization had spent a year surrendering the mission it was founded to keep.

Weijia Jiang is both the WHCA president who presided over the dinner and a CBS News correspondent.

That is the CBS story.

Murrow and Cronkite

In 1954, Edward R. Murrow used his CBS program See It Now to expose Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fabrications on the air, while McCarthy still had the power to destroy careers, including Murrow’s own. CBS pulled the program the following year under sponsor pressure.

In 1968, Walter Cronkite told the country on CBS Evening News that the Vietnam War was a stalemate. President Lyndon Johnson watched and said that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost middle America, and announced weeks later he would not seek reelection.

Murrow lost his program. Cronkite helped end a war.

Both understood what the network owed the public when the truth made the powerful uncomfortable.

The capture of CBS News happened in stages, visible in public filings.

Paramount paid $16 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris — a suit lawyers widely described as baseless — to smooth FCC chair Brendan Carr’s approval of the Skydance merger.

As part of that approval, CBS agreed to install an ombudsman to monitor its news division and committed to no DEI programs.

Carr explained the logic of the transaction. “So long as everyone plays ball here,” he said, “so long as Paramount is willing to make that $16 million settlement… this is the way that deals get done, at least so long as Trump is in office.”

Ellison installed Bari Weiss, with no television news experience, as editor-in-chief. Her first editorial act was to spike a finished, five-times-reviewed, legally cleared 60 Minutes investigation into deportees imprisoned in El Salvador’s CECOT torture facility three hours before broadcast, after Trump publicly criticized CBS the day before.

Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi wrote in an internal memo: “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.” The segment aired in Canada. CBS has not officially released it.

The White House was handed a kill switch.

Ellison is now seeking DOJ antitrust approval for a $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — CNN included. The financing runs through sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.

On Thursday, two days before the Correspondents’ Dinner, Ellison hosted a private dinner at the U.S. Institute of Peace to honor Trump and his administration. Bari Weiss sat at Trump’s table. So did Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general whose antitrust division will rule on the Warner Bros. deal. So did Paramount’s chief legal officer. CBS News president Tom Cibrowski attended. So did anchor Norah O’Donnell, chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes, chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford, and Weijia Jiang.

Saturday night, CBS seated Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller at its table. The week before, Hegseth had compared the media to the Pharisees.

On C-SPAN earlier that day, Jiang was asked about pressure from nearly 500 retired journalists — Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson, Ann Curry among them — who had signed a petition demanding a “forceful defense of freedom of the press” from the podium, in front of the man doing the threatening. She said:

“I don’t think people realize how closely we are working with the White House. The relationship is important. It can be complicated. It can be intense. But it is robust.”

Murrow lost his program for less.

The only question worth asking Saturday night was whether anyone in that room would stand up.

Georgia Fort was there to find out. The Emmy Award-winning Minneapolis journalist and founder of BLCK Press — arrested at her home by FBI and Homeland Security agents in January, currently facing federal felony charges brought by the same DOJ officials dining three tables away — had spent the afternoon organizing a silent walkout. She was the only person in the room whose presence was an act of defiance rather than an act of access.

She never got the chance.

Cole Tomas Allen had checked into the Washington Hilton the night before as a registered guest. Nobody checked his luggage. Attendees at pre-dinner receptions roamed freely without bag checks, ID verification, or magnetometers — screening was limited to the ballroom entrance. Allen allegedly assembled his weapon in an unsecured area of the hotel before the event began.

Just after 8:30 p.m., the air changed.

Allen charged a Secret Service checkpoint in the foyer one floor above the ballroom, carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. Agents yelled “shots fired.” Guests dove under tables. Al Jazeera producer Chris Sheridan, standing just behind the ballroom doors, said he could smell the powder. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who had covered more than thirty of these dinners, was thrown to the ground by officers. Allen fired and hit an agent in the vest. Agents swarmed him and pinned him shirtless, face down, on the floor.

Secret Service director Sean Curran called it a success: “It shows that our multi-layered protection works.”

Trump was evacuated within seconds. Agents surrounded him so quickly he went belly-first onto the stage before they pulled him clear.

While Trump sat in a secure holding area, servers returned to the ballroom. They refolded napkins, refilled water glasses, and prepared his teleprompter.

Trump did not return to the ballroom. He said later he had “fought like hell” to remain.

Before the FBI had characterized the incident or the Metropolitan Police had issued a statement, Trump posted to Truth Social. He posted the photograph of Allen — shirtless, face down, subdued. Then the surveillance footage. At the White House, he said he had ordered their release.

Photo of the suspect posted by Donald Trump on Truth Social.

Trump gave the first account of what had happened.

At the podium, he was controlled. He called Allen a “lone wolf.” He praised the Secret Service. He named the agent whose vest had stopped the shot. Asked whether he had been the target, he said, “I guess.” Then: “When you are impactful they go after you, when you are not impactful they leave you alone.”

Donald Trump and a roomful of journalists, still in black-tie attire, at the White House briefing room, after being evacuated from the WHCA dinner.

Then he used the shooting to argue for his very own ballroom: “I will say, you know, it’s not a particularly secure building, and, uh, I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s much more secure. It’s got — it’s drone proof. It’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it.”

Trump used the first briefing to promote the White House ballroom project, which is tied up in legal challenges over bypassed historic-preservation approvals.

He said he did not want to say it. He said it immediately.

Flanked by JD Vance, Todd Blanche, and Markwayne Mullen, Trump finished. Then Kash Patel stepped forward. Law enforcement had performed heroically, Patel said, because Trump inspires them “24/7, 365.” Patel is under active congressional scrutiny over allegations of excessive drinking, repeated absences, and misuse of the FBI jet.

Back in the ballroom, Jiang addressed the people who remained:

“I said earlier tonight that journalism is a public service, because when there is an emergency, we run to the crisis, not away from it. And on a night when we are thinking about the freedoms and the First Amendment, we must also think about how fragile they are.”

She also sat at David Ellison’s table on Thursday, two seats from the man whose department will determine the future of CBS and CNN.

Competing Narratives

By Sunday morning the narrative had separated from the facts.

Trump went on Fox News Sunday morning, claiming that the funding gap in the Department of Homeland Security had stretched security thin—and that Democrats, by blocking ICE appropriations, had left the president exposed.

The claim collapsed under scrutiny. Secret Service, which protects the president, is not funded through ICE and Border Patrol appropriations. The shooting wasn’t a tragedy to be investigated. It was leverage.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted that the dinner had been “hijacked by a depraved crazy person who sought to assassinate the President.”

Todd Blanche — overseeing the actual investigation — told Meet the Press he wanted to be “careful not to say something that ends up not being true.”

Trump had called Allen a “lone wolf.” But the wolf had been howling. Allen’s brother had notified local police of a written statement minutes before the first shot was fired. His sister told investigators her brother had a “tendency to make radical statements” and had obsessed over a plan to do “something” to fix the world.

On Fox News, Trump told his base: “When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians, that’s one thing for sure.” Allen’s note told a different story. A practicing Christian who had attended Caltech’s Christian Fellowship, Allen argued from within his faith — writing that “turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.” Trump took a man reasoning from Christian ethics and told his base he hated them.

Later that day, 60 Minutes aired. Norah O’Donnell read him a line from Allen’s statement. She said Allen had written he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Trump’s response: “I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people.” When O’Donnell asked whether he thought Allen was referring to him, Trump told her she should be ashamed of herself. “You’re a disgrace.”

The story was not the shooting.

That was the story every journalist knows how to cover: the checkpoint, the weapon, the agent hit in the vest, the evacuation, the footage, the briefing.

The walkout was forgotten before it began. By Sunday morning, every channel was running Trump’s version of the story.

The story was the kill switch, itself. That is what the Correspondents’ Dinner should have forced into the open.

Because that’s the job. Murrow understood it. Cronkite understood it.

The point was not to celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man threatening it. The point was to defend it — before the room goes dark.

Sources

  • Alfonsi, Sharyn. “Internal Memorandum Re: El Salvador/CECOT Segment Cancellation.” CBS News (Leaked), 21 Dec. 2025. Reproduced in The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cbs-news-60-minutes-bari-weiss-cecot-segment-transcript/

  • Associated Press. “AP Reporter and Photographer Barred from Air Force One over ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Terminology Dispute.” AP News, 12 Feb. 2025. https://apnews.com/article/trump-ap-news-ban-air-force-one-b90b8b842d63aef9960ccffb4a657dc2

  • Bader, Eleanor J. “When Reporting Becomes a Crime: Georgia Fort on Her Arrest, Press Freedom and Black Media Representation.” Ms. Magazine, 21 Apr. 2026. https://msmagazine.com/2026/04/21/georgia-fort-women-journalism-media-protest-minnesota-cities-church/

  • Carr, Brendan. “Memorandum Opinion and Order: Applications for Consent to Transfer Control of Paramount Global.” Federal Communications Commission, MB Docket No. 24-275, 24 July 2025. https://www.fcc.gov

  • Chmielewski, Dawn. “Trump Says He Received $16 Million Payment after Paramount Lawsuit Settlement.” Reuters, 22 July 2025. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/trump-says-he-received-16-million-payment-after-paramount-lawsuit-settlement-2025-07-22/

  • Kurtzleben, Danielle, and Ryan Lucas. “Details Emerge of Alleged Shooter at White House Correspondents’ Dinner.” NPR, 26 Apr. 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/26/g-s1-118807/trump-white-house-correspondents-dinner

  • MPR News Staff. “Feds Charge Journalists Don Lemon, Georgia Fort over Minnesota Church Protest.” MPR News, 30 Jan. 2026. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/30/journalists-don-lemon-and-georgia-fort-arrested-after-filming-minnesota-church-protest

  • “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy.” See It Now, CBS, 9 Mar. 1954. Transcript archived by The Beat Begins. https://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/archive/Murrow540309.htm

  • Sullivan, Margaret. “Bari Weiss Yanking a 60 Minutes Story Is Censorship by Oligarchy.” The Guardian, 23 Dec. 2025.

  • Thomma, Steve. “WHCA Statement on White House Announcement on Press Pool.” White House Correspondents’ Association, 25 Feb. 2025. https://whca.press/2025/02/25/whca-statement-on-white-house-announcement-on-press-pool/

  • New York Times Staff. “A Timeline of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting.” The New York Times, 26 Apr. 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/26/us/white-house-correspondents-hilton-shots.html

  • “Vietnam: Walter Cronkite Reports from Vietnam.” CBS Evening News, 27 Feb. 1968. Archived by PBS, Reporting America at War. https://www.pbs.org/weta/reportingamericaatwar/reporters/cronkite/

Between Here and There is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[The Living Faces]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-two-grandfathers-and-grandsonshttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/the-two-grandfathers-and-grandsonsSat, 25 Apr 2026 05:25:49 GMTFor many reasons, my favorite photo:

Our two grandsons are in this photo, but the youngest has his face buried in my belly, not wanting to let go. We were saying goodbye at the Hanga Roa airport.

We are the two grandfathers.

I spent several weeks with Sergio Rapu Haoa on Rapa Nui — my first visit to the island — and most days we toured the historic sites together. He shared firsthand knowledge of the moai: their construction, their meaning, the “aringa ora” — the living face of the ancestors. Sergio was part of the team that excavated Anakena Beach and recovered the coral eyes.

Our grandsons were with us every day.

At every site, Sergio would begin and one of the boys would finish his thought. Sergio and I looked at each other, smiling with our eyes.

They are the sons of Sergio Mata’u Rapu and my eldest daughter Elena Kouneski Rapu — who together made the documentary Eating Up Easter, asking what the next generation will inherit from the island.

We are together now in Minneapolis.

It was at Anakena that Sergio told me what happened the day he placed fragments of white coral into the eye sockets of a fallen moai. They fit perfectly. Inserting the eyes was a ritual act. It activated the statue. The ancestor was present again, transmitting mana — the knowledge and wisdom of those who came before — to the living, who are expected to receive it and act on it.

The older moai have rounded bellies — the mark of elders. So do we.

The Activation

(A poem for our family)

The boys speak, and the air between us changes.
They are not just repeating a story. They are claiming it.

Sergio’s knowledge is no longer just in the stone or in his own memory.
It is in the high, clear voice of a child.

It is one of the most graceful things I have ever felt.
As joyful as when I embraced my own daughters, newly born.

Sergio and I glance at each other, knowing we are becoming the past.

We stand there with our rounded bellies like the silent stones—
vessels through which aringa ora breathes.

A new ancestor is present.
And he is wearing a child’s face.

On Reflection

  • Watch: Eating Up Easter.
    A documentary by Emmy-nominated filmmaker Sergio Mata’u Rapu and Elena Kouneski Rapu. Winner of Best Documentary at the Monaco Streaming Film Festival, this film explores the environmental and social challenges facing Rapa Nui and the generation working to solve them.

  • Read: Filmmakers Show the World the Real Easter Island.
    An insightful interview via PBS Independent Lens on the complexities of producing a film that is both a “wakeup call” and a message of hope, rooted in the connection between Minnesota and the island.

  • Listen: Outside/In: The So-called Mystery of Rapa Nui
    A deep-dive podcast episode featuring Sergio Rapu Haoa and Sergio Mata’u Rapu. Oral history indicates the moai were transported by "walking" them rather than cutting down trees, challenging long-held theories of societal collapse. The page includes an archive of maps, historical engravings, and footage of the statues in motion.

  • Explore: Ahu Ko Te Riku: The Living Face.
    A closer look at the only moai on the island with its white coral eyes and obsidian pupils fully restored—the physical representation of the aringa ora.

Between Here and There is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

]]><![CDATA[Inside Opus Dei's Global System of Coercion and Control]]>https://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/inside-opus-deis-global-system-ofhttps://dredkouneskiphd.substack.com/p/inside-opus-deis-global-system-ofThu, 23 Apr 2026 04:02:58 GMTA Bolivian woman spent 31 years as a domestic worker inside Opus Dei. She cleaned the rooms of priests. She cooked for them. She washed their clothes. She was recruited as a teenager with promises of education and a better life. The education never came. What came instead was a schedule of 12-hour days, seven days a week, unpaid, inside a world where her mail was censored, her family visits were controlled, and any doubt about her vocation was treated as a psychological problem.

Her testimony is part of a broader record of coercion, exploitation, and abuse documented across multiple countries.

When she was struggling, Opus Dei sent her to one of their own psychiatrists. The psychiatrist gave her antidepressants and sleeping pills. He told her to think of the “Father” — meaning Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, canonized a saint by Pope John Paul II in 2002.

“I was walking down the street thinking that I didn’t want to live,” she testified to Argentine federal prosecutors in April 2025.

She is one of 43 women whose testimony is now at the center of a federal human trafficking prosecution in Argentina — the most significant legal challenge Opus Dei has ever faced. The second-in-command of Opus Dei worldwide has been named as a defendant. Prosecutors are now seeking to question the head of the organization itself.

This case did not come from nowhere. The same pattern of exploitation has been documented in Ireland, France, Spain, Peru, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The women at the center of it belong to a category Opus Dei created specifically for them.

The Category

Opus Dei has approximately 90,000 members in over 90 countries. Most are married people with ordinary lives and careers who follow a demanding spiritual regimen but otherwise live in the world. These are called supernumeraries.

A smaller group — numeraries — are celibate, live in Opus Dei residences, work secular jobs, and donate most of their income to the organization.

Then there is a third category, open only to women.

They are called “assistant numeraries.” Until the 1960s, Opus Dei called them numerary servants. The name changed. The function did not.

Assistant numeraries are the domestic workers of Opus Dei. They cook. They clean. They maintain the centers and residences where other members live. They serve male numeraries their meals. They are celibate, live under obedience to Opus Dei, and receive no independent income. Opus Dei describes their role as a freely chosen religious vocation — the “apostolate of apostolates,” in the words of Escrivá himself. There are approximately 4,000 women in this category worldwide.

They are recruited young, often from poor families, frequently without their parents’ full understanding of what is being asked. One Irish woman joined at 15 after being taken to interview at what was presented as a catering training school. Her parents were interviewed separately. Everyone received tea and coffee in beautiful surroundings. She was in Opus Dei for years before she understood what she had joined.

“I don’t remember turning 17, 18, 19 or 20,” Anne Marie Allen told the National Catholic Reporter in 2025. “I remember going between centers in Ireland, doing the same monotonous duties seven days a week, for years. Seven days a week, morning until night, silently cleaning for no pay, trafficked, enslaved and unhappy.”

The Global Pattern

The Financial Times published a major investigation in March 2024 by Antonia Cundy, an award-winning special investigations reporter. Cundy interviewed 16 former assistant numeraries from 1977 to 2020, across Europe, the United States, Africa, and Latin America.

The women described a consistent system: recruitment from poor and working-class backgrounds as teenagers, promises of education that were never fulfilled, years of unpaid domestic labor, censored correspondence, restricted family contact, mandatory physical mortification including the use of a cilice — a spiked chain worn around the thigh — and no financial resources upon leaving.

The pattern has been documented across countries and decades.

In France, the evidence produced a completed criminal conviction. In 2016 an appeals court in Amiens found an Opus Dei-run hospitality training school guilty of criminal labor violations covering nearly 100 assistant numeraries, including minors, over several years. The court awarded monetary compensation to former members. Opus Dei has not publicly detailed what steps it took to prevent the same violations elsewhere.

In Ireland, Anne Marie Allen — who later became a prison governor — joined at 15. She attended what she believed was a catering college at Ballyglunin Park in County Galway. There was no curriculum. Each student was assigned an Opus Dei member to bring her into the organization. In 2024 Allen filed a formal safeguarding complaint with the Archdiocese of Tuam. She found the response deeply disappointing. She is now considering filing with Ireland’s National Board for Safeguarding Children.

The pattern extended beyond labor exploitation.

In Spain, Opus Dei has formally acknowledged seven cases of sexual abuse of minors by its members. A former teacher at an Opus Dei school was convicted by a Vatican canonical process in December 2024 for abuse that occurred more than 15 years earlier. A 10-year-old boy was abused at an Opus Dei school in Bilbao. When his family filed charges, they received threats and were forced to move to another city.

In the United States, an Opus Dei priest in Washington DC — acknowledged by Opus Dei itself to have credible sexual misconduct accusations against him — oversaw the 2009 conversion of Newt Gingrich to Catholicism. No criminal prosecution has been filed in the United States.

In Peru and Mexico, former members have described patterns identical to those documented in Argentina and Europe.

In December 2025, an international summit on Opus Dei abuse was held in Buenos Aires, organized by Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA Global). Survivors from Argentina, Peru, Spain, Mexico, and the United Kingdom attended, alongside journalists and legal experts from multiple countries.

Argentina

The Argentina case is the most legally advanced, and the most specific.

In 2020, 43 women who had been assistant numeraries in Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Italy, and Kazakhstan approached Opus Dei with a simple request: payment of social security contributions that had not been made on their behalf during decades of service. Opus Dei did not resolve the matter.

In September 2021 the women filed a formal complaint with the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The complaint named both Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz, the current head of Opus Dei worldwide, and his deputy, Monsignor Mariano Fazio, as ultimately responsible for the alleged abuse. It also named at least 24 Opus Dei priests.

The complaint described what the women had experienced. Recruited as minors, often from poor rural families, they were promised education and a better life. A ources
sources investigation described the system as a network of “schools” that fed girls into years of unpaid domestic labor.

They were then assigned to unpaid domestic work inside Opus Dei residences — cooking, cleaning, and serving the organization’s elite male members and clergy for years, sometimes decades, without pay or labor protections or social security registration.

The controls were total. Mail was censored. Family contact was restricted. Members were forbidden from reading anything other than religious texts or children’s books. Any expression of doubt or desire to leave was treated as a psychiatric problem. Women were sent to Opus Dei-chosen therapists who prescribed medication and urged compliance. Economic dependency was absolute — members had no bank accounts, no savings, no resources to leave.

Argentine federal prosecutors conducted a two-year investigation. In 2024 they formally filed charges against four priests who had served as Opus Dei’s regional leaders in Argentina between 1991 and 2015: Father Carlos Nannei, Father Patricio Olmos, Father Víctor Urrestarazu, and Father Gabriel Dondo, former director of the women’s branch.

In July 2025, prosecutors added a fifth defendant: Monsignor Mariano Fazio, the second-highest authority in Opus Dei worldwide and the man considered most likely to succeed Ocáriz as head of the organization. The addition of Fazio was based in large part on the testimony of the Bolivian woman who had cleaned his rooms. Between 2009 and 2014, while Fazio served as regional vicar in Argentina, she was assigned to his personal domestic service. She testified to the conditions she endured. She testified to what happened to her when she struggled.

Prosecutors are now also seeking to question Ocáriz himself.

Prosecutors describe “a deceptive system that specifically targeted girls from poor backgrounds,” using “false promises” of a better education and work opportunities, subjecting them to “indoctrination and psychological manipulation,” including “the obligation to chastity, the severance of family and social ties, periodic health checkups, and the provision of psychiatric medication” under “threat of punishment.”

The legal characterization is human trafficking and reduction to servitude.

Opus Dei categorically denies the charges. The organization says the work performed by assistant numeraries is a freely chosen religious vocation, not forced labor. It calls the trafficking charge “a complete decontextualization.” It has acknowledged poor handling of complaints and inadequate internal structures, but denies criminal wrongdoing. It has established a “Healing and Resolution Office” and says it is committed to reform.

The Vatican Responds

The women’s 2021 complaint to the Vatican did not receive a formal written response from the Holy See. But it produced consequences.

In 2022, Pope Francis issued a papal decree ordering Opus Dei to revise its statutes and reform its governance. He transferred oversight of the organization from the Congregation for Bishops to the less prestigious Dicastery for the Clergy. He removed the right of Opus Dei’s leader to hold the rank of bishop. Opus Dei’s revised statutes, three years in the making, were finally submitted to the Vatican on June 11, 2025 — to Pope Leo XIV, who inherited the matter after Pope Francis died in April 2025.

On March 16, 2026, Pope Leo XIV met privately for more than 40 minutes with Gareth Gore, whose 2024 book Opus documented the organization’s alleged financial crimes, political influence, and abuse of assistant numeraries. The meeting took place in the Apostolic Library. Gore presented the Pope with testimonies from alleged victims and documents from the Argentine prosecution. The Pope called Gore’s book a rigorous piece of work.

Gore had urged the Pope to open a full independent investigation into all categories of alleged abuse by Opus Dei — spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical. “If you’re trying to solve a problem,” Gore said afterward, “the first step is to understand exactly what the problem is.”

The Vatican offered no official comment on the meeting.

Opus Dei’s proposed statutes remain under review.

What Has Not Changed

The assistant numerary category still exists. Approximately 4,000 women worldwide remain in it today.

Opus Dei says they are paid in accordance with the labor laws of their countries and that their vocation is freely chosen. Former members say the conditions that made free choice impossible have not been structurally addressed.

The women in Argentina who were denied social security contributions have still not been compensated. In France, a court ordered compensation in 2016 for nearly 100 women. Opus Dei has provided no public accounting of how widely this system of exploitation and coercion extends across the more than 90 countries where assistant numeraries serve.

Opus Dei did not recognize their labor as work. It called that labor a vocation.

Monsignor Mariano Fazio, named as a defendant in the Argentine federal trafficking prosecution, has not stepped down. In May 2025, he met at the Vatican with Pope Leo XIV to discuss the reform of Opus Dei’s statutes. He remains the organization’s second-in-command while prosecutors seek to charge him.

The organization he helps lead is not peripheral to American political life.

Power in Washington

The Catholic Information Center (CIC), a few blocks from the White House, is run by Opus Dei. Leonard Leo a longtime board member, built the donor network that secured a conservative Supreme Court majority. Kevin Roberts, who receives spiritual direction there, wrote the Project 2025 blueprint now being implemented across the federal government. Roberts is a close friend of JD Vance; he has said that Josemaría Escrivá influenced how he thinks about political authority.

JD Vance is not an Opus Dei member. He entered the Church through Dominican clergy. His political career was financed by Peter Thiel and developed alongside Leo and Roberts inside this network of conservative Catholic power brokers and Republican political strategists.

Vance has called for ruthlessness in the exercise of power. He aligned himself publicly with Viktor Orbán’s far-right government in Hungary. In April 2026, he warned Pope Leo XIV, who is now reviewing Opus Dei’s statutes and meeting with its critics, to be careful when speaking about theology.

He was enforcing loyalty to Donald Trump.

The women in Argentina were expected to obey and remain silent. Dissent meant failure of faith.

The theology Opus Dei built demanded total submission from the women in its kitchens. The politics it now underwrites demands a different kind of submission — from courts, from agencies, from a democratic order it views as an obstacle.

The Bolivian woman who testified against Fazio spent 31 years cleaning priests’ rooms and left her wanting to die. She was told her labor was a gift to God.

Inside Opus Dei, obedience is not optional. Reality is defined for you.

Sources

  • Cundy, Antonia. "The Opus Dei Diaries." Financial Times, March 16, 2024.
    https://www.ft.com/content/53bbc8a8-1c5b-4c6e-8d50-8b7c00ffa5f8

  • Allen, Anne Marie. Serve: My Lost Years at the Heart of Ireland’s Opus Dei. Gill Books, 2025.

  • Bistagnino, Paula. “Opus Dei: The Handmaid’s School.” Buenos Aires Herald, May 26, 2025.
    https://buenosairesherald.com/society/opus-dei-the-handmaids-school

  • “Auxiliary vicar of Opus Dei charged with human trafficking and labor exploitation.” Catholic World Report, July 6, 2025. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/07/06/auxiliary-vicar-of-opus-dei-charged-with-human-trafficking-and-labor-exploitation/

  • “Argentinian prosecutors want to question a top Opus Dei official in enslavement investigation.” National Catholic Reporter, July 3, 2025. https://www.ncronline.org/news/argentinian-prosecutors-want-question-top-opus-dei-official-enslavement-investigation

  • “Former Opus Dei numerary’s memoir claims abuse, trafficking.” National Catholic Reporter, September 26, 2025. https://www.ncronline.org/culture/book-reviews/former-opus-dei-numerarys-memoir-claims-abuse-trafficking

  • “He spent years investigating Opus Dei, a Catholic group accused of a vast conspiracy of abuse. Then Pope Leo asked to meet.” The Guardian, April 6, 2026. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/2026/04/he-she-spent-years-investigating-opus-dei/

  • Gore, Gareth. Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024.

  • Brockhaus, Hannah. “Pope Leo meets author critical of Opus Dei.” National Catholic Register, March 16, 2026. https://www.ncregister.com/cna/pope-leo-meets-author-critical-of-opus-dei

  • “Questions and Answers About a Legal Investigation in Argentina.” Opus Dei official statement. https://opusdei.org/en-us/article/questions-and-answers-legal-investigation-argentina/

  • ECA Global Summit on Opus Dei Abuse. Buenos Aires, December 16, 2025. https://www.ecaglobal.org/eca-global-summit-in-buenos-aires/

  • “Teacher at Opus Dei school in Spain maintains innocence after abuse conviction by Vatican.” Catholic World Report, March 5, 2025. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/03/05/teacher-at-opus-dei-school-in-spain-maintains-innocence-after-abuse-conviction-by-vatican/

  • “Opus Dei investigated 7 cases of sexual abuse in Spain.” Omnes, December 22, 2023. https://www.omnesmag.com/en/news/opus-dei-abuse-report-spain/

  • “Leonard Leo.” Catholic Information Center, accessed April 22, 2026. https://cicdc.org/speakers/leonard-leo/

  • Leingang, Rachel, and Stephanie Kirchgaessner. “Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei.” The Guardian, 26 July 26, 2024.
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/kevin-roberts-project-2025-opus-dei

  • “How Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley funded the sudden rise of JD Vance.” Financial Times, 17 Jul. 2024. https://www.ft.com/content/408fb864-5831-4b1d-beef-fd1966b3beed

  • “Vance tells pope to ‘be careful’ when talking theology.” Reuters, April 15, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW258715042026RP1/

  • “‘Popesplaining’ Vance out of depth in argument over whether Iran is a just war.” The Guardian, April 17, 2026.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/17/pope-jd-vance-row-iran-just-war

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