CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard meet in the Situation Room of the White House, Saturday, June 21, 2025. Portions of this photo have been blurred for security purposes. Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok.
+ One diplomat with knowledge of the pre-war talks, where Iran offered to give up its nuclear enrichment program, told the Guardian: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.” This is absurd. Trump sent Witkoff and Kushner because he thinks they’re both more loyal to him than Rubio or Vance.
+ Israel assassinated Ali Larijan, head of Iranian securing and one of Iran’s top diplomats, to stop any negotiated end of the war and drag the US deeper into it. In Iran, it will inevitably give more power to the most reactionary forces in the country…
+ Israel continues to hemorrhage support among Americans, across the political spectrum. A new NBC News poll found only 32 percent view Israel positively, down from 47 percent in 2023, while 39 percent see it negatively, up from 24 percent. The turn against Israel is occurring in parties and all ages, but most decisively among Democrats with positive views collapsing to 13 percent, and among young voters aged 18-34 at just 13 percent positive versus 63 percent negative. Sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have also flipped, with 40 percent now siding more with Palestinians compared to 39 percent for Israelis, amid Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
Net-Favorability of Israel
All: +6%
Democrats: -25%
Independents: -9%
Republicans: +46%
18-34 Year Olds: -35%
35-49 Year Olds: -6%
50-64 Year Olds: +12%
65+ Year Olds: +27%Echelon / March 16, 2026
+ The Democrats are a poll-fixated party on just about every issue, except Israel.
+ Ben Ehrenreich: “As a feature writer with more than twenty years of experience in the industry, I don’t think of magazines as A-tier or B-tier or whatever. I just think about whether they shilled for genocide.”
+ Marjorie Taylor Greene: “It’s just wrong to make Americans think that every single Palestinian in Gaza was a member of Hamas. That’s just not true. There were tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians murdered by these bombs that were dropped on them. And now the same thing is happening in Lebanon.”
+ On Tuesday, Joe Kent resigned as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of Trump’s war on Iran. In his resignation letter, Kent wrote that Iran posed no threat to the US…
+ No one this high-ranking resigned from the Biden administration over abetting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, which tells you a lot about the people who ran the Biden administration, most of whom should be hauled to The Hague.
+ Trump on Kent’s resignation: “I always thought he was weak on security. Very weak on security. It’s a good thing that he’s out.” Is this an admission that Trump spent more time evaluating the contestants on The Apprentice than he did on his National Security staff?
+ You don’t have to read too deeply between the lines of Tulsi Gabbard’s response to Kent’s resignation to get the gist: Trump does whatever the hell he wants, regardless of what we say, if he even bothers to listen.
The question is, why didn’t Gabbard walk out with Joe Kent? What does she expect to get out of this in the end, except an NDA she’ll be forced (or paid) to sign prohibiting her from saying what she really thought of Trump…
+ Nothing much will surprise me about Tulsi Gabbard, but I’m still curious as to what Gabbard gets out of working in the Trump administration. They’ve basically kept her in a closet for months. She doesn’t travel. She doesn’t make press appearances. She won’t even go on the friendly confines of Fox, where every question is set up for her like an at-bat during a T-ball game. She’s been kept out of White House meetings on Iran, Israel and Venezuela. No one inside the Trump decision-making circle seems to value or care what she has to say. What’s in it for her?
