Americans would be wise to begin paying very close attention to a small rugged island in the northern Persian Gulf that few could locate on a map only weeks ago.

That island is Kharg Island (it’s sometimes spelled Khark Island.)

It is nothing less than the main distribution center for Islamic Republic of Iran’s oil.

At a moment when the United States and its allies are confronting the Islamic Republic during the ongoing military confrontation known as Operation Epic Fury, Kharg Island stands as one of the most consequential strategic locations in the entire Middle East.

If Iran’s regime derives financial oxygen from oil exports, then Kharg Island is the lung through which that oxygen flows.

I joined the Marine Corps because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was young, but not confused.

A dictator had crossed a border with tanks, absorbed a weaker neighbor, and dared the world to respond.

President George H. W. Bush did respond. He assembled a coalition, liberated Kuwait, and then stopped.

At the time, I felt frustration. If Saddam was the problem, why leave him in power? Why halt the advance when the job seemed half done?

I believed, as many did, that the first Gulf War should have ended with regime change in Baghdad.

That early conviction shaped my support for later wars. When we went into Afghanistan and then Iraq, I did not recoil. I thought we were finishing unfinished business. I thought we could remove tyrants and midwife stable democracies. I thought American power, applied with moral clarity, could reshape broken regimes.

But the decades that followed chastened that confidence.

We discovered that removing a regime is easier than replacing it. We discovered that democracy building is not an export commodity. We discovered that intelligence agencies and development bureaucracies cannot engineer legitimacy from abroad.

Endless deployments and open-ended missions taught many of us a difficult lesson. The U.S. should not be in the business of remaking other nations in its own image. We are not good at it, and it does not work.

But….

It can't possibly have been this easy. Right?

After the death of Ali Khamenei, the Iranian regime appointed an interim ayatollah to take temporary charge of the nation.

That may not have lasted long; reports that Alireza Arafi was killed shortly after his appointment have circulated, although they have not been confirmed yet.

Regardless, the constitution of the Islamic Republic requires the 88 mullahs on the "Assembly of Experts" to appoint Khamenei's permanent successor in a vote, which would normally take place in their Qom headquarters.

About that ...

The puzzle pieces are falling into place faster than the Deep State ever imagined. The case against the Clintons as a crime family, which I laid out in 2019 when I discussed their Deep State RICO conspiracy, has just been validated by fresh evidence.

John Solomon nails it with the “Clinton Corruption Files.” Irrefutable documents that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel sent to Congress in late 2025 confirm a “massive bribery operation” through the Clinton Foundation—specifically, foreign interest donations in exchange for State Department favors during Hillary’s tenure as Secretary.

Three FBI offices (New York, Washington, Little Rock) independently flagged pay-to-play, but Obama-era leadership obstructed the probes. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates (Obama’s No. 2 at DOJ) issued the kill order: “Shut it down.”

Whistleblowers reported buried evidence and blocked grand juries, while Russiagate was fast-tracked as the smokescreen.

This video sums up much of the new evidence…

How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support — and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed?

There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity.

The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory).

They begin insisting that a new existential threat requires immediate government intervention, novel legislation, ample funding, and public awareness of the impending danger.

So out of nowhere, the public is warned that the scorching planet will be inundated by rising seas in a mere decade.

Or that millions of transgender youth are our next civil rights frontier, given that they suffer in silence without political advocacy, new laws, programs, and the chance for “life-saving,” powerful hormonal treatments and radical sex-reassignment surgeries. Indeed, the travel time from an outlandish idea by the faculty lounge to liberal status quo is a mere few years.

Next, the media, hand-in-glove with academia, springs into action…

This story doesn't quite feature the gut-punch immediacy of Mexico's drug war escalating into a virtual civil war last week in and around Puerto Vallarta, but as a glimpse into the future, maybe it ought to send a chill or three down your spine.

According to a new Bloomberg story (paywalled, sorry), a weeks-long hacker campaign against the Mexican government culminated in January with a massive data theft of some of the federal government's most sensitive information.

"By the time it was over," Let's Data Science reported on Wednesday, "the attacker had stolen 150 gigabytes of sensitive data — including 195 million taxpayer records, voter registration files, government employee credentials, and civil registry data."

If you're thinking such a massive theft involved a team of hackers, years of planning involving a Stuxnet-like virus, or even physical access to Mexican government computer systems — think again.

The almost unprecedented hack was done by just one guy. Using Anthropic's Claude AI, despite all of Anthropic's safeguards against something exactly like this.

Summing up a report published Wednesday by Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security, Bloomberg wrote that some "unknown Claude user" simply made up "Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft."