THE ART OF THE MISDIRECT:

know some people are so broken they will never be able to muster a compliment for Trump, but the level of misdirection and coordination with Israel on this Iran attack was brilliant. Trump used his public platforms to lull Iran into complacency while privately coordinating with Israel. Trump and Netanyahu went so far as to meet privately this week to finalize things while publicly both leaking that Trump was urging restraint.

The problem here for the press corps is that so many of them hate Trump so much, they cannot nuance the cleverness of this. They must either approach it as Trump is a failure who even Israel does not respect or Trump is a liar who lied to everyone to get Iran.

The reality is everyone honest knows Iran has always been the liar, claiming it had no nuclear ambitions even as it plotted a bomb. The Obama/Biden policies helped Iran, which embedded agents within the Biden Administration. And Trump has turned the tables on it all, including probably taking advantage of Iran’s embedded agents to amplify his misdirection.

And now Iran has been set back significantly and the world is safer today.

But scream about Orange Man Bad if you must. The press corps that does not deal with the truth of what happened is just going to further discredit itself. They couldn’t detect Biden’s decline and cannot accept Trump’s calculated misdirection.

It’s amazing what allies can accomplish when they actually act like allies.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Called 911 After Trying to Pay for WHAT? “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn when not to call 911, how not to dine and dash, and all about California Man’s weird smuggling operation.”

DATA REPUBLICAN FOLLOWS THE MONEY SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO:

Full text:

🔍 I tracked funding from federal sources to final recipients, prioritizing direct paths (not via DAFs) whenever possible.

👉 IMPORTANT: most paths still went through Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs)—the black box of the nonprofit world. Unfortunately, it’s a common and opaque funding structure that deserves scrutiny.

💥 Explore it for yourself:
Click on “Federal Grant Flow” for any NoKings organization to open any visual flowchart, tracing dollars from origin to destination.
🖼️ Also, you can save any graph as an SVG and take it wherever you need.

📌 I’ll keep updating the database as more EINs come in. Got a group to investigate? Send it my email address with an EIN.

🧠 Let’s shine a light on influence laundering.

Here’s the link to her full report.

NEWS YOU CAN USE:

THAT’S WHAT XI SAID!

That’s right on-brand for the Manchurian Candidate:

America — literally and figuratively — dodged quite a bullet last year.

CHARLES COOKE: Yes, We Should Have Bombed Japan.

Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, has produced and released a video that depicts the horrific consequences of the American attack on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In the spot, Gabbard laments the “haunting sadness” that remains in that city, before insinuating bizarrely that there exists a political faction in the present-day United States that is jonesing to bring about global “nuclear annihilation.”

I am persuaded by the utilitarian case in favor of the bombings. I believe that, had the United States attempted to end the war by invading Japan, millions of people would have died in the fanatical fighting and the famines that resulted — and that most of those dead would have been Japanese and Chinese. I believe that, absent the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union may well have invaded northern Japan, divided the country in two, and changed the remainder of the 20th century for the worse. I believe, too, that, if Truman had opted to greenlight Operation Downfall, the war in the Pacific could plausibly have lasted for another two years — which, given that the conflict in the East began in 1937, after Japan brutally attacked China, would have pushed that catastrophe into its tenth year.

But, in all honesty, those considerations are subordinate to my primary calculus here — which is that there is no good reason that the terrible cost of concluding a war that was started by another nation ought to have been borne by its victims. By the conclusion of operations, any Allied invasion of Japan would have required the deployment of up to 7 million American men. Per contemporary estimates, the U.S. government expected that between 500,000 and 1 million of those men would have died. That being so, my question is this: In what possible universe would the president of the United States — a man who was elected to represent America, not the world — be morally justified in choosing that option, when the war could have been ended (and, indeed, was ended; that’s neither a hypothetical nor a counterfactual) by dropping two enormous bombs on the aggressor?

As Roger Kimball noted in 2023: The atomic bomb saved Japanese lives, too.

This year, the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb has given the controversy over the development and deployment of that awesome weapon a new urgency.

Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L. Simon is right: atomic weapons are “as close or closer to being used today than ever since World War Two because of the endless war in Ukraine.”

That is a sobering thought. To his succeeding questions “Was this worth doing? Was it moral to build such an extreme weapon?” I would answer “yes” and “yes.” I also, by the way, support our use of this most horrible weapon in Japan. Why? Because its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War Two. In so doing, it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. Data point: the military is still using the huge supply of Purple Hearts it manufactured in anticipation of an invasion of the Japanese home islands*.

But put the number of American lives saved to one side. The use of the bomb, by ending the war, also saved millions of Japanese lives.

This was widely understood at the time. In subsequent years, however,  a new, mostly left-wing, narrative has grown up which faults President Truman for using the bomb. Today, as Oliver Kamm noted in the Guardian, “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” are often used as a shorthand terms for war crimes.

That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave laborers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire — and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Historian Mark Felton made a video in 2021 on the US military still awarding Purple Hearts that were made near the end of WWII:

DISPATCHES FROM THE PAS-DE-CALAIS: Trump Drops an All-Time Troll on Iran, As What Happened Behind the Scenes Comes Into View.

In the aftermath of the first wave of strikes, speculation ensued about what President Donald Trump thought about the attacks. Early on, some on the right (with ulterior motives, in my opinion) claimed that Israel had gone rogue and defied the White House to undermine negotiations with the Mullahs. We are now finding out that wasn’t the case. I wrote in my initial piece on the attacks that there was no chance Trump didn’t bless these attacks, and it is now being reported that not only did he know, but he also participated in the subterfuge to throw Iran off the scent.

That seemed to be confirmed when the president put out the following post, which mirrored a longer post that slammed Iran for not taking the deal he put on the table.

Note: This is not the troll I’m talking about in the headline. That’s coming next.

Exit quote: “I know there’s a segment on the right (or who are ostensibly on the right) who are deeply anti-Israel (or worse) and desperately want to pretend the president was conned by the Israelis. He wasn’t. They are going to have to cope with that as they see fit.”

Read the whole thing.

Related:

Heh, indeed. Buried lede in the above tweet: apparently, prominent journalists can now actually pick up a telephone and call the president of the United States for a quote? This seems like a pretty bigly story in and of itself!

THE BUCHANANITE MOMENT IN LA:

The last time the phrase “Los Angeles riots” dominated the national headlines, Patrick Buchanan told a story about order being restored to the city.

“The mob retreated because it had met that one thing that could stop it,” he said at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. “Force, rooted in justice and backed by moral courage.”

President Donald Trump has been compared to Buchanan before. As streets burn in Los Angeles in defiance of federal immigration law, he may have the opportunity for his ultimate Buchananite moment as he sends in the National Guard.

These Los Angeles riots are even less defensible than those of more than three decades ago. Nearly all big-city riots end up only doing more damage to communities that are already hurting. These mobs are attacking the very legitimacy of immigration and border enforcement.

Republicans didn’t win the 1992 presidential election. In fact, they lost California in the Electoral College for the first time since the country went all the way with LBJ, the last president to federalize the National Guard against the will of a Democratic governor, back in 1965. The aftershocks of the 1990–91 recession, compounded by a promise-breaking tax increase signed into law by the GOP incumbent, still lingered.

Instead of Buchanan, Republicans renominated the incumbent who broke his pledge not to raise taxes, presided over the recession, and generally seemed more interested in the New World Order than American domestic affairs.

But in Bill Clinton, Democrats nominated someone who balanced his sympathy for Rodney King with a rebuke of Sister Souljah. Clinton was also the party’s first presidential standard-bearer in a generation to back capital punishment for murderers, just four years removed from the Willie Horton fiasco. Clinton promised to help pass a crime bill and hire 100,000 new police officers to patrol the streets.

But so far at least, there’s no pivot towards the center and sanity coming from today’s left: That Was Quick: Democrats Postpone ‘Sister Soulja Moment’ To Defend Illegal Immigrants and Rioters Waving Mexicans Flags on Burning Cars.

Related: More straight-up reportage from America’s Newspaper of Record: