A Virtual Private Network (VPN) creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet. Not only is it impossible to control this technology effectively, it is actively undesirable — because robust encryption and privacy tools are foundational to security. VPN were invented so that no one could snoop on or intercept your traffic. Masking public IP adresses is also a critical security feature.

Blocking all known VPN and proxy IP addresses is technically futile. Providers constantly spin up fresh addresses, and no exhaustive list or central registry has ever existed. That very fluidity — the rapid rotation of public IPs — is a core security feature of VPNs, not a bug.

Take the recent Utah law that bans minors from using commercial VPNs and stipulate that a user is “accessing from Utah” if they are physically present there, regardless of any VPN, proxy, or obfuscation tool. This is perfectly absurd. It requires authorities to prove the user’s physical location at the exact moment of connection — while simultaneously stating that anyone physically in Utah is subject to Utah law. The notion that a digital offense committed in Utah via a server in another state or country magically does not “occur” in Utah only underscores a severe legal and technical incoherence.

This is the perfect demonstration of the emptiness of all technocratic power plays: frantic attempts to regulate what cannot be regulated, control what cannot be controlled, and legislate into submission. The eurocrats (and their American imitators) aren’t safeguarding anyone. They’re simply revealing their own irrelevance in the face of technological reality.

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What logic compels the European Commission to keep escalating its financial commitments when it cannot reliably fund the ones it already has?

More pointedly: is the EU quietly engineering a form of hidden mutualised debt — one that steadily hollows out member states’ budgetary sovereignty, bypassing national parliaments entirely, and kept well out of sight of the voters who would foot the bill?

The proposed 2028–2034 budget makes the question impossible to ignore. The Commission is putting forward nearly €2 trillion over seven years — a 59% increase in current prices on the existing framework. The headline is staggering. The Commission calls it “historic.”

Look closer, and the gloss fades fast.

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Let’s kill a misconception right away. Palantir is not a mass surveillance company — however loudly and repeatedly that claim gets made. Palantir is a software publisher. Its business is consolidating vast, heterogeneous datasets and making them analytically actionable for decision-makers. It is not artificial intelligence, even if AI features sit inside its toolkit. Conflating the two only muddies the debate — and a muddy debate serves Palantir just fine.

Here is another inconvenient truth: Palantir is not particularly innovative. Every single brick in its architecture existed long before the company did. What Palantir did — and this is its one genuine achievement — was package them into a single integrated solution. That is engineering, not invention. A distinction worth keeping.

A Tool Is Neutral. Its Owners/Users Are Not.

A pickaxe can dig a well or crack a skull. The object carries no ideology nor intent. The hand that holds it does.

And that is precisely where Palantir becomes dangerous — not in what the software does (to be taken with a pinch of salt as qualitication is required), but in the worldview of the people who own and run it. The techno-fascist manifesto published by CEO Alex Karp lays it bare: a belief system in which data confers absolute power over the social order — the same tired 19th-century Panopticon fantasy, now turbocharged with transhumanist eugenics 2.0 and a barely concealed racial hierarchy dressed up as civilizational theory. The notion that not all civilisations are morally equivalent is, let us be precise, the ideological bedrock of Anglo-Saxon imperial tradition. Nothing new. Nothing subtle.

The Deep State’s Privatized Arm

The second and more structurally damning problem: Palantir did not emerge from a garage in Palo Alto. It emerged from the American federal state itself — specifically from activities the state could no longer legally conduct on without triggering constitutional guardrails. What could not be done by government fiat was quietly outsourced to a private company.

Palantir is, in the most literal sense, the Deep State made corporate. A public power wearing a private-sector mask — with shareholders, a stock price, and none of the accountability that democratic institutions, however imperfect, are theoretically required to provide.

That is the real story. Not the algorithm. Not the data lake. The architecture of unaccountable power — and the ideology whose holders believe they are entitled to use it.

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France’s support for the semiconductor industry? The fix was always in.

Nobody with a functioning brain should be shocked by the French Court of Auditors’ latest report. The findings are as damning as they are predictable: government support, funneled almost exclusively toward the Franco-Italian STMicroelectronics and the CEA-Leti (the state research lab tasked with turning scientific breakthroughs into industrializable technology), is described as “enormous and growing.”

The effectiveness of that aid, meanwhile, is “hampered by the slowness of its disbursement.” And France’s grand plan — with the European Union dutifully trailing behind — will not “close the technological gap accumulated over years.” The French strategy is, in the Court’s carefully neutered language, “insufficiently coordinated with Germany.” Nothing here that wasn’t already obvious to anyone paying attention.

Let’s recall the farce that preceded this diagnosis. With European state-aid rules conveniently loosened — a welcome flexibility, or a carte blanche for industrial folly? — France and Germany launched a full-blown subsidy war to lure foreign giants.

Germany landed TSMC, the world’s number-one chipmaker. France got a partnership with Intel that went nowhere, just like the ST–GlobalFoundries alliance: both now floating in bureaucratic limbo.

The Franco-American joint venture between ST and GlobalFoundries, which promised to double chip production capacity in Europe, was entirely contingent on the American partner’s goodwill. GlobalFoundries ultimately decided it preferred investing at home, pockets stuffed with federal subsidies. Not a single dollar, not a single machine ever landed on French soil.

So yes: nothing works. The Court of Auditors confirms it. Public money flows into corporate coffers with no meaningful oversight — something L’Éclaireur demonstrated exhaustively and a parliamentary inquiry later corroborated.

But the deeper scandal isn’t the opacity. It’s the total absence of strategy. Or rather: what passes for strategy serves no recognizable French national interest.

Back in 2022, when Emmanuel Macron and Bruno Le Maire — parked at ASML for a while when he left the Ministry of Finance; he is now reportedly eyeing the 2027 presidential race, because of course he is — unveiled the ST/GlobalFoundries alliance with great fanfare, an industry insider told us plainly that the whole thing was doomed.

The chip shortage that had triggered the panic was cyclical, not structural; everyone had piled in simultaneously, guaranteeing overcapacity the moment the cycle turned. Worse, the goverment sponsored projects were aimed squarely at the wrong target.

“The main shortages concerned semiconductors around 40 nanometers,” Fabrice Lallement, delegate for the electronics sector, told us at the time. “So we’ll always have problems. Because while we know how to design chips, a large part of production happens abroad — TSMC in particular. There’s a lot of noise around the 10nm node. But today, Renault and PSA need 40nm, not 10nm. The discussions we’re having now will determine what shortages look like in ten years.”

Neither the French nor the German projects were designed to fix the actual shortage — the now-structural tension around 40nm nodes. Why? Because both projects chased advanced technologies that attract the richest subsidies: FD-SOI for France at Crolles, 28nm for Germany in Dresden.

In the meantime, another sector vacuumed up the remaining investment: artificial intelligence. Which, as we argue at length, amounts as it stands today to an elaborate con with zero productivity impact and therefore zero growth contribution.

Were these industrial projects? Or political theater? At STMicroelectronics, barely anyone had heard of GlobalFoundries before Macron announced the partnership. “ST didn’t want to play ball with GF — it was imposed on them,” a source told us at the time. Just as the State — a minority shareholder in ST — had previously imposed the decision to kill R&D on the most advanced technologies.

That is how, ten years ago, ST was made to abandon 14nm FD-SOI — which subsequently found its killer application in 5G. A technology initially developed with public money through the Leti, later taken up by ST, whose patents were then sold off to GlobalFoundries. The same story repeated with 28nm FD-SOI, sold to Samsung. France: faithfully funding innovations it then hands to foreigners.

What strategy governs any of this? France has, on paper, an institution dedicated to exactly this question: the High Commission for Strategy and Planning. L’Éclaireur recommended abolishing it in 2024. We stand by that recommendation. We’ll explain why in a forthcoming piece.

As the techno-Nazis at Palantir have just published their Mein Kampf 2.0 — titled The Technological Republic (read it, it is terrifying) — AI has been deployed for over fifteen years to produce hundreds of thousands of civilian corpses (war crimes, each and every one) and serves as the engine of mass surveillance. In the editorial below, we have highlighted the huge ethical and legal fault lines running through military AI.

Even on the battlefield, AI delivers no added value — as proven by American defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran, and by Israel’s setbacks in Gaza (Hamas has still not been “eradicated”) and Lebanon (the IDF is being torn apart by Hezbollah). Hence the panic among the industry’s heavyweight players, who are desperate to keep this quiet. Hence the huge on-going PR offensive.

Let us proceed with our analysis of the economic reality of this indutry.

In the first part of this series, we showed that AI is absolutely not the "revolution" we are being sold — merely an additional layer of automation, whose effects will ultimately prove negligible compared to those of the personal computer, the word processor, and the spreadsheet.

When Oracle lays off 30,000 employees via a simple email, citing artificial intelligence as the justification, that is nothing but a pretext. The overwhelming majority of AI projects in large corporations — starting with the tech companies themselves — are failures, to the point where those same firms are rehiring the workers they claimed had been rendered redundant by AI.

The Oracle layoffs are a mechanism for guaranteeing shareholder value by engineering ever-larger transfers of added value from labour to capital. They are also a way of bracing for the severe economic crisis and the AI bubble implosion that is about to hit us — triggered by the war Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have unleashed in Iran.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s abandonment in 1975 of the Plan Calcul — launched by de Gaulle in 1966 — sounded the death knell for an independent French computing industry. Since then, we have been condemned to suffer the likes of Thierry Breton, who sank, dismantled, or sold off our national champions: Bull, Alcatel, Atos, and the rest.

In France, “computing” has come to mean software. But without hardware, no software runs. ChatGPT, Mistral AI, Claude, Grok and their ilk are only made possible by advances in hardware — processing power, data storage capacity, and network bandwidth. Without data centres, there is no cloud and no AI. Yet data centres are voracious consumers of electricity — both to run the servers and to keep them at optimal operating temperature. And electricity is a secondary energy source: producing it requires consuming a primary energy source — coal, gas, oil, nuclear, solar, wind, or hydro.

Today, more than half of all data centre construction projects worldwide have been cancelled or postponed. Why? Because nobody is foolish enough to keep pouring money into unprofitable infrastructure so that it can remain unprofitable. The critical materials shortage and the energy crisis have also taken their toll.

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If you believe the White House and its current occupant, Iran folded on everything. And America didn’t pay a dime.

• Trump reopened the Strait of Hormuz — which he himself had closed;

• Trump got Iran to stop funding and arming Hezbollah; and

• Trump got Iran to hand over its enriched uranium and abandon its nuclear program.

Victory!

Now let’s be serious for a moment. The one and only thing Iran actually agreed to is to resume talks.

By “unblocking” a strait that was never closed by anyone but the United States, Iran has just checkmated Washington.

Because here’s what that move actually unlocks: freedom of navigation cuts both ways. It now opens the door for other naval powers — French, German, Italian, Turkish, and potentially even Chinese — to move in and guarantee that very freedom. The result? A de facto international military presence that makes any Israeli or American resumption of hostilities virtually impossible.

Iran didn’t concede the board. It just invited the whole world to sit down at the table.

And the fine print makes it even sharper. This “reopening” comes with strings firmly attached: it holds only for the duration of the Lebanese ceasefire, and passage requires Iranian authorization. Every ship that transits does so on Tehran’s terms.

Israel is backed into a corner — and Trump was strong-armed into sitting on Netanyahu. Who, true to form, promptly sat on Trump right back.

Trump saw the trap snap shut fast enough. Hence the unhinged Truth Social meltdown, barking orders at NATO — NATO, of all institutions — to stay away. Or what, exactly? He’ll order a US Navy that is running low on ammunition and fuel, whose sailors are going hungry, and whose nearest resupply point is Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean — 4,500 kilometers from the Strait — to open fire?

On whom? For what? Toward what end?

The emperor is not only naked. He’s stranded.

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Salem Media Group (SMG) is a conservative Christian media conglomerate founded in 1974 and traded on the OTC markets — quiet enough to avoid scrutiny, large enough to reshape a nation’s political conversation.

SMG produces a remarkable gallery of podcasts: the Charlie Kirk Show (still going, though with plummeting audience, impervious to the assassination of Turning Point USA’s founder), the Larry Elder Show (former Republican candidate for Governor of California), The Right View with Lara Trump (well, well, well), the Dinesh D’Souza Show (you can’t be serious), America First with Sebastian Gorka (ah yes — the current Deputy National Security Advisor and Trump’s counterterrorism czar, moonlighting as a podcaster), and many more.

According to the last available annual report, SMG employs nearly 1,500 people, owns and operates 95 radio stations in major metropolitan markets, and syndicates its programming to approximately 2,700 affiliated stations.

SMG’s Director of Strategy is one Brad Parscale — Trump’s digital director during the 2016 campaign. Remember that name. It comes back.

Do you recall Cambridge Analytica? The British data-harvesting outfit that, in 2016, quietly stole the personal data of 87 million American Facebook users on behalf of the Trump campaign — co-founded by a certain Steve Bannon (what a small world)?

Because here’s how that particular rabbit hole was dug: it was on Bannon’s advice that Robert Mercer — one of the most invisible and most powerful figures in American conservative politics — created Cambridge Analytica in 2013, along with its Canadian subsidiary AggregateIQ. Both were branches of the British SCL Group, a firm specializing in strategic communications combining psychometrics, quantitative data processing, and artificial intelligence.

Mercer had already bought Breitbart News in 2012 — again on Bannon’s recommendation, the same Bannon who had run the outlet since its founding in 2007.

And Brad Parscale? He sits squarely at the center of the Cambridge Analytica affair. It was none other than Jared Kushner who personally recommended Parscale hire the firm — which raises no questions whatsoever, given that Mercer was hardly a major Trump campaign donor, and Bannon was certainly not a grey eminence of that campaign. The collaboration was so intimate that up to 13 Cambridge Analytica employees relocated full-time to Parscale’s offices in San Antonio, Texas at the height of the 2016 campaign.

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Thomas Massie is something else. The Republican congressman from Kentucky who forced by law the publication of the Epstein files against an administration that had promised it — then quietly buried it — has struck again. This time, alongside allies Tim Burchett and Lauren Boebert, he torpedoed the Trump administration’s push to extend Section 702 of FISA for another five years. The same provision that allows intelligence agencies to surveil any American without a warrant. The same provision Trump swore during his campaign to abolish. The House was recalled at midnight for a snap vote — a tactic that backfired spectacularly.

The extension was blocked. The administration bought itself two weeks, not five years.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 in the wake of documented abuses by the FBI and CIA throughout the 1960s and ‘70s — exposed by the Church Committee. It established a legal framework for intelligence-related surveillance, including a secret federal court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to authorize (or reject) agency requests. It was gutted by the PATRIOT Act in 2001, and again by the infamous Section 702 amendment in 2008, which opened the door to warrantless collection of communications and metadata.

Edward Snowden blew the lid off the whole operation in 2013, releasing thousands of classified documents proving the NSA was using FISA as cover for mass surveillance that was both illegal and unconstitutional.

Two weeks to draft, debate, and pass a reformed law? Good luck.

The irony here is almost too rich to be satirical: FISA Section 702 is the very instrument the Obama administration wielded against Trump’s own campaign team in 2016. It was the cornerstone of Russiagate — that sprawling operation to brand him a Kremlin asset, which poisoned his entire first term. Trump promised to kill it. Then he demanded to extend it. Draw your own conclusions about the man’s memory, principles, or care for the Americans who elected him.

It is worth noting what Section 702’s expiration also means in practice: the NSA no longer holds the authority to compel any American tech or telecom company to hand over the communications, emails, and metadata of foreign nationals outside the United States. That is not a footnote. That is a seismic shift.

Meanwhile, the European Union continues maneuvering toward generalized mass surveillance through the back door — cloaked in the language of child protection — in direct violation of EU treaties and binding rulings from the EU Court of Justice. We covered that this morning.

A pointed observation for the independent media landscape: instead of perpetually shrieking about censorship as the existential threat to democracy, perhaps it is time to grasp what is actually at stake. What is freedom of expression worth in the absence of privacy? The fundamental distinction between Europe and the United States is precisely this: in Europe, privacy retains genuine legal protection, and you cannot simply hoover up communications, metadata, and personal data at will.

Those who, instead of reasoing, manufacture hysteria over the unenforceable DSA, Chat Control, digital identity, and the European Commission’s laughable digital pass are, whatever their intentions, doing the establishment’s work for it.

Ursula von der Leyen has announced the launch of a universal, anonymous application — or so we are told. This European solution aims to restrict minors’ access to sensitive online content through a tool based on zero-knowledge proof cryptography — ZK proof. The technology would theoretically allow users to verify their age without sharing any personal data with platforms.

One thing is glaringly obvious: on this particular front — protecting children and teenagers in their online activities, and combating child sexual abuse material and other harmful content — Brussels has stumbled from failure to failure. Predictable failures, it must be said.

Need a reminder? Look no further than the collapse of Chat Control in its first iteration — the proposed regulation that would have compelled platforms to scan all communications, public and private alike, without exception.

Let us also recall the resounding success of forcing platforms — pornographic websites in particular — to verify the age of their users. That measure, adopted by a whole string of countries, ran headlong into the platforms themselves, who were not exactly cooperative, triggering a wave of legal battles and, as a neat side effect, a spectacular surge in VPN usage wherever the restrictions were actually enforced.

In short, the will to regulate and legislate is there — but turning that will into practice is quite another matter, one that shatters against a whole array of obstacles, technical and legal ones first and foremost.

Consider: the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for a minimum age of 16 to access social media — without, for all that, proposing any concrete mechanism to actually compel platforms or users to comply. And countless countries have road-tested all manner of solutions, with precious little to show for it.

The application announced by the European Commission — which is nothing more than a digital pass lifted straight from the Covid health pass playbook — now enters the scene. It presents itself as a third way for the Commission and member states to sidestep the pitfalls and the accusations of mass surveillance, without having to rely on platforms that refuse to play ball. France has already announced plans to fold it into its national digital identity wallet — which tells you everything about where Macron’s France stands on civil liberties.

With this app, the burden is neatly reversed. It will now fall on the adult user to prove their good faith by feeding an identity document into the application. That document is then verified against the issuing authority — the state, via its database or electronic chip — and validated through a real-time photo or video of the user’s face. “If everything checks out, the app retains only proof of majority and does not store identity data. It generates a QR code granting access to adult content,” Le Point reports.

Never mind that no IT system is hacker proof — and this application is no exception. Security enhancements notwithstanding, it took all of two minutes to crack it open.

Set aside, too, the fact that the system can equally be circumvented by a VPN — services that France is apparently moving to ban, as suggested by the hastily retracted remarks of Anne Le Hénanff, the minister for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, on France Info on January 30th.

But the problem doesn’t stop there.

The Temptation of Social Control, European-Style

The system promises not to transmit the user’s identity to platforms. No name, no date of birth, no photograph. That is the anonymity Ursula von der Leyen is selling. What the Commission president’s communications are rather less forthcoming about is not so much what the platforms don’t receive — but what those who designed and control the architecture of such a system, namely the states and national authorities, get to keep.

Because yes — the anonymity on offer is anonymity from Big Tech alone.

Beyond the sovereign identity data it already holds, the state, under this system, is in a position to know how many age certificates have been requested. In theory, not which sites were visited. Unless, of course, it cross-references its data with that of the platforms. And we have seen, with the DSA, just how flexible Big Tech can be on that front when pushed.

The risk is not merely one of increased state surveillance or tracking in the context of judicial investigations. It is the risk of something more insidious: the normalization of surveillance. See Italy’s deployment of a digital pass to move around during the Olympic Games. The risk lives also in the chilling effect on freedom of expression and access to information. And that says nothing of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities that a system as centralized as the EU Wallet inevitably courts.

None of this is paranoia. It is a structural risk — recognized and flagged by a broad consensus of cybersecurity experts, most of whom agree that age verification is not the solution. It is, in fact, as ineffective as it is dangerous, carrying the very real prospect that this age-verification tool is progressively repurposed and extended to other uses.

There is nothing conspiratorial about saying so. The European Commission states it plainly: “the solution is designed to be scalable and extend to other age groups (e.g. 14 and above or 65 and above), subject to the availability of appropriate registration modalities.”

A digital pass to shield children from adult content? Or a foot in the door toward broader social control? Protecting the most vulnerable is a noble aim, to be sure. But this is a slippery slope — and we are already on it.

The European Court of Justice, whose rulings carry the force of law, strictly prohibits mass surveillance. That is what is really at stake since 9/11. What the United States is pushing for — ramming through, with little regard for anyone's freedom of speech — is mass surveillance in Europe built on the same premises as in the US, along with the wholesale transfer of all data. The end of privacy, say what you will.

To set the scene properly: American Catholics form the largest single confessional bloc in the United States—some 67 million souls at a bare minimum—and the number keeps swelling thanks to Latino immigration and a steady trickle of converts. We are speaking, of course, of a coherent group marshaled under one centralized institution.

By contrast, America…

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The electoral system Viktor Orbán so meticulously engineered has turned against him. In 2011, the Prime Minister set to work remodelling Hungary’s democratic architecture to his own specifications: reducing the number of MPs, redrawing consti filled methodically, institution by institution, with Fidesz loyalists wtuency boundaries, and embedding rules designed to systematically amplify the dominance of the largest party — his party, Fidesz — in what amounted to a quiet bid for permanent power. His campaign for a fifth consecutive term ended abruptly on April 12th, when his so-called “rival,” Tisza party leader and self-styled pro-European conservative Péter Magyar, defeated him decisively.

The mechanism of his undoing? The very same first-past-the-post, single-round electoral system he had so assiduously cultivated — one not exclusive to Hungary, as British voters know all too well. Under its ruthless arithmetic, Magyar converts 54% of the vote into 138 seats out of 199, while Orbán, on 37%, is left to contemplate his diminished relevance from the opposition benches with a mere 54 MPs.

He built the trap. He walked into it.

To govern with a truly free hand — to legislate at will, as Orbán did before him — Magyar needed 133 seats, the two-thirds supermajority that unlocks Hungary's constitutional machinery. That threshold grants its holder the power to pass cardinal laws, overhaul the economic, judicial and media landscape from the ground up, and rewrite the Constitution itself.

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Translation to English of our piece “Intelligente Anarque” published on 31, January 2026.

Well, well. Very impressive, dear Elon Musk. Care to tell us exactly how much extra this latest “performance boost” to Grok Imagine is costing compared to the previous version—for an application whose practical utility barely exceeds that of the flamethrower you marketed back in 2018?

The honest answer is simple: real-time AI video generation is still far too expensive for the mass market. Credit where it’s due—Elon Musk at least has the decency to admit it.

OpenAI boasts that ChatGPT-5 is 25% more capable than ChatGPT-4. What they conveniently omit is that running ChatGPT-5 costs roughly four times more than its predecessor. To deliver that modest 25% gain, OpenAI had to triple its total computing power in 2025. In plain English: a 25% performance improvement triggers costs several times higher than the entire previous version.

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Are we supposed to congratulate Trump for agreeing to a ceasefire in the war he himself provoked — solely for the benefit of the State of Israel — and for negotiating on the basis of the ten points imposed by Iran, as instructed by that Lebanese-Australian influencer based in Dubai, Mario Nawfal?

What do they take us for — a bunch of prairie dogs?

The war launched by Israel and the United States is illegal. It is the first and gravest of all war crimes — a crime against peace, the very cornerstone of the Nuremberg Statutes.

The NATO Treaty — read it, it takes five minutes — likewise prohibits wars of choice and aggression. Preamble and Article 1.

The threats issued by Marco Rubio and the Trump administration — because Spain, the United Kingdom and France have refused the use of their airspace for the United States to obliterate Iran in service of Israel’s messianic delusions and to guarantee that insignificant speck its regional supremacy — are null and void. Legally, morally, and strategically: void.

This war serves neither the Iranian people nor the American people. The toxic relationship between the United States and Israel — built on corruption and blackmail — will have to change. Israel itself will have to change, profoundly and irreversibly, and will need to undergo a process of “de-messianization” equivalent to the denazification of post-war Germany. Without it, Israel will soon cease to exist. And Israel must be denuclearized under international supervision, to guarantee any durable regional balance.

As for those of our fellow French citizens who defend Israel tooth and nail and actively support the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated in Gaza — and let us call it what it is: a genocide — in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Syria and in Iran: the question of their loyalty arises squarely under Article 23-7 of the Civil Code1, given that they conduct themselves, in practice, as nationals of a foreign power.

Let them make their aliyah and hand back their French passport.

To legislate in France on behalf of a foreign state is an act of treason.

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The Iranians are smart. Rather than expending resources to keep Americans out — a costly and complicated proposition — it’s far simpler to let them walk in and spring the trap.

Here’s what we’re told happened: to rescue a crew member from an F-15E Strike Eagle shot down last Friday, the Americans used an unprepared strip — a disused agricultural airfield near Isfahan — to execute two assault landings and insert over a hundred special operations forces. Two C-130s allegedly got bogged down in the sand and had to be destroyed by the Americans themselves.

One conclusion can already be drawn with certainty: the moment American aircraft approach or enter Iranian airspace, they are engaged by Iranian air defenses. Whatever the Trump administration and the Israeli government claim, they do not have air superiority.

Until now, American and Israeli aircraft have struck Iran from a safe distance, relying on Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) — long-range air-to-ground cruise missiles whose stockpiles are now running dangerously low. Delivering Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), by contrast, requires closing the distance significantly, which dramatically raises the interception risk for the aircraft carrying them.

The improvised airstrip used in the operation sits less than 35 kilometers from Isfahan — in the heart of Iran — where key Iranian nuclear facilities are located and where the much-discussed 450 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% are reportedly stored.

Two possibilities, and only two:

• Either this was genuinely a rescue operation to recover the F-15E’s weapons systems officer — a colonel and deputy squadron commander from Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. An officer of sufficient intelligence value to justify deploying such overwhelming force. In which case, any future operation to seize the enriched uranium stockpile must be ruled out entirely — the risk calculus no longer adds up.

• Or this was a special operation with a dual objective: locate and seize the uranium stockpile, and recover the downed airman if possible.

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Donald Trump delivered his remarks yesterday with all the conviction of a man reading someone else’s eulogy. The speech was little more than a greatest-hits reel of his own Truth Social posts: the U.S. is close to achieving all its military objectives; Iran will be struck hard in the coming weeks, its energy infrastructure pulverized; Iran has lost the war, has no army, no navy, no air force left; the regime has been “decimated”1; Iran has no choice but to accept the deal or face total destruction at the hands of the most powerful military the world has ever seen. And so on.

We’ve heard this tune on loop since July 2025. What’s harder to dismiss is the question it raises: why is a sitting president staging a public Coué session — the old French technique of therapeutic self-persuasion — for an audience that can see the reality on the ground and whose majority opposes the war with Iran?

Is Trump being fed a curated picture of events by the gang around him — Kushner, Witkoff, Lutnick, Bessent, Miller, Graham, Cruz, and the rest — men whose interests, whatever they may be, demonstrably don’t align with those of the United States? Or is this simply the attention span of a man constitutionally incapable of staying focused on anything uncomfortable for more than five minutes?

The gap between the rhetoric and the reality is not subtle.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Every significant U.S. installation in the Persian Gulf is either destroyed or rendered off-limits — including the Al Udeid air base in Qatar, whose hosts have refused to allow it to be used in what they regard as a war of aggression. U.S. carrier groups cannot approach within 400 nautical miles of the Iranian coast. Tehran continues to strike Israeli and American targets across the region at will. Fewer than one in five missiles and drones is being intercepted.

Israel and the United States are in a state of total strategic defeat. Trump does not have the leverage to dictate terms. Iran does. Its conditions are clear: full withdrawal of U.S. military presence from the region; the exit of American companies — Palantir, HP, Oracle, JPMorgan, AWS etc.— operating under Pentagon contracts and designated as legitimate targets by the Revolutionary Guards; guarantees against future aggression; sanctions relief; and reparations.

A ground offensive, even a limited one to seize one of the islands controlling the Strait, is no longer a realistic option. The human and political cost would be prohibitive. The deployment of 82nd Airborne paratroopers and 2,500 Marines is theater — reassurance for Gulf monarchies that, contrary to mainstream coverage, are not urging Washington to press on with this war.

In fact, according to sources close to the matter, some Gulf monarchs are quietly signaling to Tehran through discreet channels that they may be prepared to deliver some of what Iran wants — up to and including expelling U.S. forces themselves and paying reparations directly. The fear of a new Arab Spring is that acute.

Europe, Russia, China, India and the rest of the world all have a shared interest in supporting such a resolution. It is the only path to reopening the Strait. And once U.S. military forces are out, the sanctions regime loses whatever teeth it still has — for everyone.

Trump faces a choice with no good options: stay stuck in the quagmire at enormous human, financial and political cost, with diminishing interception and strike capacity and zero diplomatic leverage — or cut his losses and absorb the political price of an open, unambiguous defeat.

Either way, the midterms in November look grim. One or more impeachment proceedings appear increasingly likely. If the Senate flips, he may find himself in Nixon’s position: resigned to resignation.

The man who staged the most remarkable political comeback in American history — who won the popular vote outright, dominated the Electoral College, and holds majorities in both chambers of Congress — has managed to torpedo his own presidency. He was handed a blank check. The mandate was to deliver for Americans. Instead, he spent it on Israel’s wars and the enrichment of the gangsters who surround him.

Trump built his platform on one core promise: no more wars. He broke it. The question now is whether history will record him not as the dealmaker he fancied himself, but as something rather different — the biggest loser you’ll ever see.

In the opening salvo of our investigation, we began proving a blunt truth: the prosecutions launched by France’s National Financial Prosecutor’s Office are little more than theatre — a smokescreen to obscure the true magnitude of the Epstein-Aidan scandal. Corruption is the instrument, never the payload.

You’re aware of the MICE acronym — the four classic levers for turning an asset: Money, Ideology, Coercion (blackmail), and Ego.

We laid out the standout chapters in Fabrice Aidan’s résumé: a French diplomat who also carries Israeli citizenship, who served in the Israeli Defense Force before sliding into the Quai d’Orsay, then being conveniently seconded to the UN. There he served as special assistant and later senior political adviser to Terje Rød-Larsen, the Secretary-General’s special envoy for the Middle East. Hardly the “mid-level diplomat” the official line keeps peddling.

Terje Rød-Larsen and his wife Mona Juul — two of the chief architects of the Oslo Accords — are now under corruption investigation in Norway for the generous gifts an loans Jeffrey Epstein showered upon them. Was the worm already in the apple from day one?

Everyone involved, of course, is innocent until proven guilty.

Mona Juul, a senior Norwegian foreign-ministry official, and Terje Rød-Larsen, a top UN civil servant — both former Labour ministers — quietly assembled private archives during the Oslo Accords talks that no one else could touch. Problem: Norwegian foreign-ministry records now show a glaring black hole covering January to September 1993, the most sensitive phase of the negotiations, as uncovered by Oslo University historian Hilde Henriksen Waage.

We won’t linger on the $5 million Jeffrey Epstein left in his will to each of the Rød-Larsen-Juul twins. Same playbook as with Jack Lang’s daughter: deferred corruption, a slow-release toxin virtually undetectable because a will stay sealed until the testator, who can modify this will at will, is dead.

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We thought everything had been said about ChatControl — the CSAM regulation (Child Sexual Abuse Material). How, under the guise of combating online child predation, the proposal would mandate the scanning of all communications before encryption, throwing open the door to constant mass surveillance of every European citizen.

How a supposedly temporary measure keeps playing extra time, reinventing itself version after version — all while critical elections loom on the horizon: Hungary, Germany, and France, each a potential turning point for the future of the European Union. That this obsession with censorship and speech control happens to coincide with those votes is, of course, purely coincidental.

The regulation stands a strong chance of shattering against the wall of European law — unless, of course, the real agenda is to quietly dismantle that wall.

A new chapter in the saga: on March 26th, the European Parliament voted against yet another extension of the temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive.

The ePrivacy Directive is the cornerstone of European legislation protecting privacy in electronic communications. It complements the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with more specific rules covering emails, texts, phone calls, and online messaging. In short, it is the primary bulwark against the violation of correspondence secrecy — which is nothing less than a fundamental right, as enshrined in Article 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Put plainly: the ePrivacy Directive makes the automated, blanket scanning of private messages by platforms flatly illegal. As does all jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU, which explicitly prohibits mass surveillance.

Which is precisely why the battle to carve out exemptions has been so relentless. Which is precisely why ChatControl exists.

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Charles Pasqua1 captured the French political art of survival bluntly:

“When you’re screwed by a scandal, you create a scandal within the scandal — and if necessary, another scandal inside that one, until nobody understands a damn thing anymore.”

The judicial equivalent for shielding those in power is saucissonnage — slicing the affair into thin, digestible segments so the full stench never hits the public nose at once.

The “Fabrice Aidan-Epstein” case offers a textbook specimen.

The Paris Prosecutor’s Office received a criminal referal from Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot in February 2026. Instead of handling the explosive whole, it promptly divested itself in favor of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF).

As Pascal Prache, the head of the PNF made clear in his communiqué, this probe targets only the narrow “Aidan volet”: suspicions of passive corruption of foreign public officials and complicity thereof.

The raid at Edmond de Rothschild (with Ariane de Rothschild present) and other sites deliver the required spectacle of action. Indeed, the deeds of Mr. Aidan exhibit so far no proven link with the Epstein case narrowly understood — that is, the three-decade sexual trafficking of minors and women that Jeffrey Epstein ran with the apparent protection of very powerful insitutions and people.

Who still hasn’t grasped that the young girls fed to and by Epstein — however unspeakable the acts — were not the core of the matter?

The machine ran on something far more valuable than cheap disposable flesh: access, intelligence, influence, favors, money, insider deals etc. within a sizeable chunk of the global elite.

We contacted the PNF with the following two precise questions:

• Does the PNF’s preliminary probe target only facts that occurred while Mr. Fabrice Aidan was employed by Edmond de Rothschild bank?

• Are there other ongoing investigations that would fall under different jurisdictions?

Ms. Bérénice Dinh, vice-prosecutor, secretary general and communications officer of the PNF, replied as follows:

“We do not wish to communicate further on this investigation. For reference, we previously issued a press release concerning the Epstein case on the opening of an investigation for aggravated tax fraud laundering involving Caroline and Jack Lang.”

Secrecy of the investigation, you’ll say. But our conversations with other sources inside the judicial and police apparatus reveal both a very real nervousness at the very top and a profound disconnect with the “field” over the charges selected and the chosen path to prosecute them.

And for good reason. As you’re about to see, this case is anything but business as usual - that is, for the regular Joe.

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The French Court of Auditors has sharply criticized public subsidies for renewable energies—but let’s be clear: its latest report targets only the public service charges for energy (SPE), not the full array of state support.

These SPE charges are the compensations paid by the french government to cover the extra costs of backing renewables. They bridge the gap between market prices and the guaranteed prices (via feed-in prices or premium payments) that producers pocket.

As the Court itself states, the report’s scope excludes major other expenses: grid connection and reinforcement costs (largely borne by network operators and recovered through the power transmission tariff), plus aid from other public and private players.

That widely quoted €26.3 billion figure? It represents the cumulative net burden on the state from 2016 to 2024 for these SPE charges alone—merely the visible tip of the iceberg. No one seems capable of precisely quantifying the full submerged mass:

• How much do grid connections, reinforcements, and renewable integration really cost?

• What price tag attaches to grid balancing made necessary by the intermittency of wind and solar?

• What about storage expenses?

• And don’t forget the indirect costs from curtailing or modulating nuclear output to give renewables priority on the grid.

Worse still, the heaviest bill to foot is yet to come unless the entire mechanism undergoes radical reform. This warning has echoed through multiple official reports for years—yet action remains timid at best.

The current system is volatile, unpredictable, and increasingly expensive for taxpayers. The Court is sounding the alarm: without tighter controls, better forecasting, and structural overhaul, these “green” commitments risk becoming a fiscal black hole.

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If there is one lesson to be drawn from the past five years, it is this: never entangle yourself in a neighbor’s conflict unless you are offering mediation. Ukraine made that clear. All of Europe allowed itself to be dragged by Washington into a proxy war whose real purpose was to permanently sever the continent from Russia — cheifly from its cheap, reliable energy. We are now paying the exorbitant price, and those who fell into that trap, who gutted European economies in the process, will have to answer for it.

Donald Trump has now leapt headfirst into the snare set by Israel, triggering a war that is illegal under both American and international law. On March 18th, under oath before Congress, Tulsi Gabbard stated plainly: Iran does not possess the means to build a nuclear weapon.

Joe Kent — who resigned two days ago from the leadership of America’s counter-terrorism apparatus — confirmed in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. This man sat at the apex of American intelligence. He does not speak carelessly.

He describes the Israeli playbook with precision: officials present fabricated intelligence, outright lies, to the White House. These fabrications are then simultaneously amplified by Tel Aviv’s media mouthpieces — Fox News, the New York Times, CBS, The Free Press, and the rest.

Day after day, every argument put forward by the White House crumbles. And the American people will not forgive Trump for starting yet another war — betraying his campaign promises — and worse, for losing it.

The fable endlessly recycled in mainstream media — that Arab states want to see the end of the Iranian “regime” — is just that: a fable. Not only do these countries, the Gulf monarchies chief among them, now regard Israel and the United States as the primary agents of chaos in the region, they watch with dismay and dread as Israelis systematically assassinate every potential interlocutor of a “regime” that refuses to collapse. With whom, exactly, does anyone plan to make peace?

Persia, civilization of three thousand years, will not disappear. Iran is a civilizational state. The Arab world knows this. Washington and Tel Aviv have placed these countries on the front line without their consent. One can reasonably conclude that this war will end on the day the last American soldier leaves the region.

And since the Iranians are fully aware that Israel's objective is the destruction of Iran as a civilization-state, they will fight to the last — because for them, this war is existential. For the Americans, it is not. And they are not seeking Iran’s obliteration.

Badr Albusaidi, Oman’s Foreign Minister and lead mediator in US-Iran negotiations, writing in The Economist, goes further: he observes that the United States has lost control of its own foreign policy, and that America’s friends must now help it correct course. The implication, delivered in impeccably diplomatic language, is clear: what Albusaidi is proposing, is a cordon sanitaire around the Hebrew state — the principal destabilizing force in the Persian Gulf and the wider Middle East.

He does not mince words:

“The American administration’s greatest miscalculation, of course, was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place. This is not America’s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it. Hopefully America’s commitment to regime change is just rhetorical, whereas Israel explicitly seeks the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and probably cares little about how the country is governed, or by whom, once this has been achieved.”

And further:

“The question for friends of America is simple. What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement? First of all, America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth. That begins with the fact that there are two parties to this war who have nothing to gain from it, and that the national interests of both Iran and America lie in the earliest possible end to hostilities. This is an uncomfortable truth to tell, because it involves indicating the extent to which America has lost control of its own foreign policy. But it must be told. (…)

It may be difficult for America to return to the bilateral negotiations from which it was twice diverted by the temptations of war. It will certainly be difficult for the Iranian leadership to return to dialogue with an administration that twice switched abruptly from talks to bombing and assassination. But the path away from war, hard though it may be for both parties to follow it, may have to lie through precisely this resumption..”

Donald Trump still does not appear to grasp the full dimensions of the situation for which he — together with Benjamin Netanyahu — bears ultimate responsibility. In the same breath, he forbids Israel from striking the South Pars gas field again, while threatening Iran with obliterating that very field should Tehran dare to retaliate against American aggression — part of which is being conducted from a base on Qatari soil.

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