The Trump administration is backing away from its earlier instructions to halt immigration raids at farms, hotels and restaurants, according to reports.

Homeland Security officials instructed agency leadership in a call Monday to resume raids at those businesses — which have higher proportions of illegal migrants in their workforce — following the days-long pause, according to the Washington Post and CNN.

President Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday that his mass deportation campaign was taking its toll on the agricultural and hospitality industries.

The Musk versus Trump fallout (at least for now) has a distinct 'made for television' quality to it. But do not be deceived by the entertainment content. The spat illustrates a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the MAGA coalition. It is quite possible that this contradiction will erupt at some further point and may end up triggering the slow decay of Project Trump.

A fulcral moment in the last U.S. election was the switch of Silicon Valley's ultra-rich Tech oligarchs from their support for the Democrats to Trump. It brought both money and the potential glittering prize that America could seize a monopoly over global data storage; AI; and what Yanis Varoufakis calls 'cloud capital' - the purported ability to extract rent (i.e. fees) for access to America's putative massive data hoard and to Big Tech's associated platforms. Such a data monopoly, it was believed, would then give the U.S. the ability to manipulate how the world thinks - and to define the products and planforms seen to be 'cool'.

The notion too was that a monopoly on data centres could potentially be as lucrative as the U.S. monopoly of the dollar used as the principal trade currency - which could provide major capital inflows to offset debt.

The explosive quality to a coalition of Tech Oligarchs with the MAGA Populists, however, is that both factions hold irreconcilable visions - both for dealing with America's structural debt crisis, as well as that of America's cultural future.

The 'Tech Bros' vision is wildly radical; it is 'authoritarian libertarianism'. Peter Thiel, for example, argues that a small posse of Oligarchs should rule the empire, unfettered by any democratic limitation; that the future should be based in 'disruptive technology'; be robotic and AI driven; and that the populace should be tightly 'managed' through AI control.

The Trump Economic Team's vision is quite different: Trump's own primordial objective - to which geo-politics is subordinate - is to shore up the dollar as the world's main trading currency. This objective however can only be sustained through addressing America's unsustainable debt overhang.

The overhang reflects the imbalance that built up after 1970 when the U.S. trade account slipped into deficit: On the one hand, the U.S. has facilitated an exaggeratedly large sphere of global dollar indebtedness to splurge worldwide; but at the same time, this massive inverted pyramid of debt rests on a diminutive and shrinking American production base.

In other words, whilst America benefited enormously from these capital inflows, it can no longer expect to grow itself out of its own, self-created debt-trap.

Israel's years-long covert aggression against Iran has now escalated into open war following a massive wave of air strikes overnight in which several Iranian cities, including the capital, Tehran, were targeted with hundreds of missiles and drones.

Several of Iran's top military commanders have been killed, as well as dozens of civilians, according to Iranian media.

Tel Aviv is warning that the attacks will continue for weeks. U.S. President Donald Trump has gloated about "excellent" strikes and warned of more to come, although he also claimed that he advised Israel against taking military action.

The U.S. claims it did not participate but did give "exquisite" intelligence for the attack. Meanwhile, NATO is believed to have provided military support to thwart Iranian retaliatory strikes while the organization's civilian leader, Mark Rutte, deceptively appealed for a "de-escalation".

The Iranian leadership is vowing a painful retaliation in the coming days for Israel's "declaration of war".

The reported deployment has driven speculation that the US is directly involved in the Israel-Iran war.

The US has reportedly deployed more than 30 aerial refueling tankers across the Atlantic toward the Middle East, Military Watch Magazine reported on Monday. The outlet has described the buildup as "unprecedented," claiming it could suggest broader US involvement in the ongoing Israeli-Iranian war.

West Jerusalem and Tehran have entered the fourth day of open hostilities. Last Thursday, Israeli forces launched airstrikes on Iranian nuclear and military targets, killing senior military officials and scientists and prompting retaliatory missile barrages on Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv and Haifa.

The US has expressed support for the Israeli strikes, with President Donald Trump calling them "excellent." He has also warned that Washington could become directly involved in the conflict if American interests are threatened but has yet to announce any plans to involve US forces.

However, according to flight tracking data, the US has already started deploying KC-135 and KC-46 aerial refueling tankers to the Middle East. Military Watch Magazine has suggested that the aircraft may be intended to support Israeli Air Force operations or refuel US fighters and bombers if Washington expands its role in the conflict.

The US is "complicit" in Israel's strikes on its archrival's nuclear sites, according to the journalist.

US President Donald Trump's support for Israel's strikes in Iran could spark an "all-out war" in the Middle East, American journalist Tucker Carlson has warned.

Early Friday morning, IDF jets bombed nuclear and military sites across Iran, prompting Tehran to retaliate with a barrage of drones and missiles targeting Israeli cities. The escalation threatens ongoing negotiations over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program, which Trump revived earlier this year.

In what he described as possibly his "final newsletter before all-out war," Carlson - a key Trump ally during the 2024 presidential election - argued that the US was "complicit in the act of war."

"While the American military may not have physically perpetrated the assault, years of funding and sending weapons to Israel, which Donald Trump just bragged about on Truth Social, undeniably place the US at the center of last night's events," Carlson wrote.

"Washington knew these attacks would happen. They aided Israel in carrying them out. Politicians purporting to be 'America First' can't now credibly turn around and say they had nothing to do with it," he added.

This is as serious as it gets. Let's survey the chessboard - from micro to macro.

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Israel's shock'n awe on Iran - straight from the trademark US playbook - essentially failed, despite the initial combination of speed, meticulous military planning and the element of surprise, including hacking the Iranian electronic communications within the military grid; decapitation of the vertical IRGC nomenklatura; the spiderweb drone attack playbook; and bombing - ultimately ineffectual - of key nodes of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

It took hours for top Iranian technicians to get their grid back. And once that happened, the tide began to turn, to the point that after surgical missile volleys deep in the night on Sunday, the IRGC announced its capability to seriously disrupt Israel's command and control systems using "enhanced intelligence", thus breaching Iron - or Paper - Dome.
Absolutely key infrastructure nodes in Tel Aviv and Haifa have been destroyed - from the Rafael weapons complex (specialized in missiles, drones, cyber warfare and Iron Dome components) to the power plant and oil refinery in Haifa. This is historic in more ways than one.

Compound the cries of joy all across the lands of Islam to the massive psychological trauma inflicted on Israel. The myth of Israeli invincibility has been definitely shattered. Unleashing hell from above, killing women and children and spinning like there's no tomorrow does not win a war against a real opponent.

The tweaked IRGC strategy - applied by an instantly revamped leadership - is being fine-tuned day by day in a calculated, surgical manner. It's not that hard for the IRGC to totally paralyze Israel's economy. Israel has only one oil refinery (already bombed); three ports, of which one is already bankrupt (Eilat) and another is on fire (Haifa); and one airport (already in dire straits).

The blowback on Tel Aviv's desperate, indeed suicidal move - no chess involved - is in effect. Tehran is proving that every Zionist axis calculation that Iran could - and was - bled dry in a matter of hours was, predictably, false.

Two of the most powerful figures in organized labor have dramatically cut ties with the Democratic National Committee - a stunning rebuke to new DNC Chair Ken Martin as internal tensions roil the party.

Randi Weingarten, longtime head of the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME, which represents 1.4 million public service workers, have both declined reappointments to the national party under Martin's leadership.

"While I am proud to be a Democrat, I appear to be out of step with the leadership you are forging," Weingarten wrote in a June 5 resignation letter obtained Sunday by the NY Times. "I do not want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent and actively trying to engage more and more of our communities."

Trump's deception may run deeper than it appears; we'll only know for sure with time.
Something about the war between Israel and Iran doesn't seem to add up. Israel's initiated the hostilities, which, of course, were purely defensive in nature. They were merely a justified retaliation against Iran's missile attack which was sure to follow in the near future. Israel always has the right to defend itself.

Trump's collusion with Bibi

But the troubling part of this story is that it appears to have been planned in collusion with the Trump administration and that Donald Trump himself took part in the elaborate deception of the Iranian leadership. The US-Iran negotiations, which were supposed to take place in Oman over the weekend were only a ruse intended to give the Iranians a false sense of security that neither Israel nor the US would attack them as a deal with the US seemed within reach. Trump's own messaging in the aftermath of Israel's surprise attacks gave the world a firm impression that this was indeed the case:
Then there's also this:

Trump's supposed BFF Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu reaffirmed this impression, profusely thanking President Trump for his steadfast support and friendship along with the hard to watch, gushing praise of Trump. Thus, by Saturday morning the case seemed closed: the whole affair was a devious, cynical deception played by Trump and the Israelis against the Iranians, aimed at effecting a regime change in Iran. But why?

Iran launched the next stage of their True Promise 3.0 operation, targeting various sites of Israeli energy and military infrastructure. This time it reportedly included the latest Fattah-1 hypersonic missiles, which made quite the dazzling impact all over Tel Aviv and northern Israel — a sight so spectacular it is rivaled only by last year's Oreshnik strikes:


The scenes were almost too unreal to believe, like something from an over-produced Michael Bay blockbuster. Among the targets was the Haifa refinery and Israeli research center of the Weizmann Institute for Science in Rehovot, near Tel Aviv:

Tehran will continue to be sanctioned, pummeled, and subjected to targeted assassinations until strategic deterrence is attained

Just hours after Israel launched its strikes on Iran in the early hours of Friday, June 13, US President Donald J. Trump declared that it was "not too late" for Tehran to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. The level of delusion displayed by the joint aggressors here is simply staggering. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the bombs being rained on Iranian cities as a means to bring "freedom."

The US-Israeli axis sees no contradiction in reducing a sovereign nation to rubble while draping its aggression in humanitarian rhetoric. The strike came even as Washington and Tehran were engaged in protracted negotiations over the thorny nuclear issue. This is not diplomacy; this is coercion cloaked in diplomatic theater. Worse, it will go down as a day of infamy in international relations: a moment when negotiation was used not to resolve conflict, but to disguise premeditated violence.