Michael T. Lester @MichaelTLester

Iran is the shiny object. While we were watching missiles and ceasefire talks, Congress passed a law, the President signed it, and the people who made it happen lost their jobs. The Epstein Files Transparency Act became law on November 19, 2025. Thomas Massie co-wrote it, pushed it through, got it signed, then reviewed the unredacted files and called out what was missing. On May 19, AIPAC and allied pro-Israel groups poured $15.8 million into his Kentucky primary. The most expensive House primary in American history. $32 million total. Massie lost 55 to 45. It took a while for Massie to concede to his opponent because he couldn't find him. Turns out Gallrein was in Tel Aviv. Greene resigned in January after Trump called her a traitor. Mace ran for governor and placed fifth. Three of the four people who forced the Epstein files open are gone. The man Bondi blamed for the chaotic rollout and the redactions, Todd Blanche, is now Trump's nominee for Attorney General. Massie and Khanna say 2.5 million pages may still be missing. Nobody with power is asking any follow-up questions. Before he lost the election, Massie said: "The one whistleblower in Congress will be gone." He was right. Our government released the files and buried the accountability in the same move, and the people who demanded the truth paid for it. The man who controlled the release got promoted. Tell me again how the system works.

@MoshangUsa Miriam Adelson owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Israel Hayom, the largest-circulation paper in Israel. AIPAC dropped tens of millions in the 2024 primaries to remove members of Congress who asked the wrong questions. The media and the money are the same machine.

Israel won't stop. Israel lobbied Washington to attack Iran. On February 28, America did. America negotiated the peace. Trump signed it. The deal explicitly includes Lebanon. Israel looked at that deal and said: we're not bound by it. Then they kept bombing. U.S. spy agencies assessed Israel will continue attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, potentially killing the deal. Vance canceled his trip to Switzerland. The peace talks nearly collapsed. While American diplomats were in a Swiss resort trying to end the war your tax dollars paid for, the country we fought beside was working against it. Don't forget why Hezbollah exists. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. In the aftermath, Israeli-backed Phalangist militias massacred between 1,300 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians at Sabra and Shatila. Iran's Revolutionary Guard arrived and built Hezbollah in response. Israel's defense minister said the IDF is destroying Lebanese border villages, making it impossible for 200,000 civilians to return. We started this war together, but only one of us wants it to end. Should we still consider them an ally?

@Kateonlinenow @genxgirl Yep! Tagged her handle and not her account! @genxgirl1994 is correct!

Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs just paid a California marketing firm $3.2 million to put invisible fences around 523 American churches to track its members. Geofencing, the same tech retailers use to ping your phone when you walk past a store, is being used by Show Faith by Works, according to paperwork filed with the Justice Department in September. They track congregants' phones during Sunday service, then serve them ads after. Pro-Israel messaging on one side, "Palestinian and Iranian goals are not land-focused, but genocidal" on the other. That is their words, not mine. It's in the filing. That's the quiet version. The loud version happened in December. 1,070 American pastors were flown to Israel, all expenses paid, by the same Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They toured the Nova festival site. Met Netanyahu. Met Israeli intelligence officials. Got certified as "Friends of Zion Ambassadors" on the last day. Netanyahu told them to "stand up and be counted." Mike Evans, who ran the trip, said his goal is one million pastors. Huckabee called declining evangelical support a "growing cancer." One operation targets you through your own phone. The other puts a certificate on your pastor's wall. Same funder. Same goal. Both are designed so you don't notice you're being managed and manipulated from a pulpit you trust. This campaign started with 523 churches, but that’s not where it ends. If your church isn’t on the list yet, that's not the same as being left alone. Researcher @GenXGirl1994 built a searchable database so you can check. (follow her!) Link in the first comment. Are you OK with a foreign government doing this from inside your own church?

@KennethEze5363 How come you conveniently forgot that Hezbollah was created as a response to the Israeli-backed massacre at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, where up to 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were massacred?

Friday, 4 PM. Israel and Hezbollah's ceasefire takes effect. Friday, before sundown. Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut's southern suburbs anyway. Saturday morning. Strikes on four towns in southern Lebanon kill at least five more. The day this started, the Washington Post reported US intelligence had already told the White House what was coming: Netanyahu was likely to undermine the deal to protect his position before Israel's fall elections and disrupt the US-Iran peace deal.. The ceasefire didn't survive its first day. Was anyone actually surprised?

Trump signed the deal Wednesday in Versailles. By Thursday, he was publicly scolding the man who lobbied for this war for years. "Without me, there would be no Israel," Trump said. "Now Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon." Within hours, Israel's own National Security Minister gave his answer. Itamar Ben-Gvir: "All of Lebanon must burn." "For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep." He says he's told Netanyahu the same thing in private. Overnight, Israeli strikes killed 18 people in Lebanon. Four IDF soldiers died in the fighting that triggered it. The talks scheduled for Switzerland got postponed. Vance stayed home. Netanyahu wasn't in the room when this deal got made. His own government is making sure it doesn't survive. Who is actually blocking peace in the Middle East?

@mmillertime23 They bombed Lebanon yesterday and last night. Is anyone surprised?

Israel isn't happy. They lobbied Washington for years to attack Iran. The US finally did it. Struck Iranian nuclear sites. Deployed the Navy. Lost American lives. Israel's contribution? Minimal, then almost nothing. They left the US to fight alone and used the war to distract from people noticing that they were illegally taking more of Lebanon's land. Israel now occupies 770 square miles of Lebanon. Nearly one-fifth of the country. And they have announced they're not giving it back. They wanted the war with Iran. They didn't fight it. They used it as a cover to invade Lebanon. And now they're angry the war with Iran is ending. What do you think about that?

I appreciate that this is difficult to accept. It is an inconvenient fact for anyone who unquestioningly supports Israel, but no source links Al-Fakhouri to a hunger strike. Not one. What is documented, by both Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, is systematic starvation and medical neglect inside Israeli prisons since October 2023. He is not an isolated case. Journalist Ali al-Samoudi lost roughly 60 kilograms in the same system. I listed my sources. You can also just Google his name. Show me your source. I'll wait.

Remember those horrific pictures of Jews liberated from Auschwitz? This isn't one. This is a Palestinian man released after 26 months of Israeli "administrative detention." No charge. No trial. No legal rights. "Never again" sounds noble. It just turns out it was never meant to apply to everyone. The Israeli government currently holds roughly 3,500 Palestinians under this system, and has issued more than 100,000 such detention orders since 1967. October 7th wasn't the start of this. It was a reaction to it. Why don't we hear anything about this?

@Ryan_L_Heath That is the right question. The U.S. sends Israel roughly $3.8 billion per year in military aid, and this is what that money funds.

My entire book is about why people have difficulty accepting facts that conflict with their beliefs. His name is Ayman Al-Fakhouri. He is from Hebron. The before and after photos are documented and widely reported by Drop Site News and Quds News. This is not disputed. The only question is whether you care.

@SaveTheseDogs has the renumbering right. Section 224 is now Section 219 in the House version. The number changed. The substance didn't. And your point about asymmetry is the one that matters most. Congress can pass all the integration legislation it wants, but Israel is a sovereign country. They pass their own laws, and aren't bound by ours. We are locking ourselves in, but they won't lock themselves into anything. That's a one-sided commitment dressed up and sold as an alliance. Good for them. Bad for us. And yet our congress is actually considering it...

Israel got the war. America got the bill. The U.S. fired more than 200 THAAD interceptors defending Israel during Operation Epic Fury. That's roughly half of the Pentagon's entire inventory of that system. We also fired more than 100 SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors from Navy ships in the eastern Mediterranean. Israel fired fewer than 100 Arrow interceptors and about 90 David's Sling interceptors. One U.S. government official told the Washington Post that America fired roughly 120 more interceptors than Israel did and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles. Each THAAD round costs $13 million. Lockheed Martin makes 96 of them a year. Replacements won't arrive until 2028 at the earliest. Now here's the part that should make you stop. Israel's defense budget is roughly $44 billion. That sounds like they're pulling their weight. What that number doesn't tell you is that the United States provided nearly $18 billion in military aid to Israel in a single fiscal year. Much of what Israel "spent" on this war was bought with American money, on American weapons systems, made by American defense contractors. We funded their military. We burned through our missiles defending them. And now Congress is writing a $10.6 billion check to replace what the war consumed. And while you were watching the war, Congress quietly passed Section 224 out of committee. It now goes to the full house. It would permanently merge U.S. and Israeli defense research, production, and procurement into a single structure, permanently, buried in the must-pass NDAA, shielded from the annual vote that currently gives Congress any leverage at all. Israel got the war they lobbied for. America got the bill. And Congress is making sure we keep paying it forever. That's not where I want my tax money going. How about you?

@MistiFloat1022 @ObfuscatedSloth They are indeed. I've always heard there was a Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times..." Probably a bad translation, but I think of that often.

Ha! You are right. I didn't answer the question, and no, I'm not a bot. I did, however, read Misti's question too quickly and answered what I thought she was going to ask instead of what she was actually asking. Mea Culpa! Sorry Misti! What I should have answered is that THAAD interceptors didn't go to Ukraine. They only went to Israel, and we burned through roughly half our inventory during Epic Fury defending Israeli airspace. What went to Ukraine were Patriot interceptors. Analysts estimate somewhere between 500 and 800 of them under Biden. It's a different system, but the same problem: we've been spending down our stockpile for others. Misti, Your instinct is right. We are dangerously thin and degrading our warfighting ability every day. It just happened in two places at once.

Great question. Israel's total defense budget runs about $44 billion a year. The U.S. provided nearly $18 billion in military aid to Israel in a single fiscal year. So roughly 40 cents of every dollar in that budget traces back to American taxpayers. That's before you count the missiles we burned defending them during Epic Fury.

When people reply to my posts with statements that are blatantly false, they aren't lying. They generally believe what they are saying. It's what they were fed. There's a word for the deliberate production of public ignorance: 𝗔𝗴𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆. A 2025 study found Israeli and U.S. officials made-up 50% of all sources in American coverage of Gaza. Fox News referenced pro-Palestinian sources just 3.74% of the time. A separate analysis of 600 headlines found Western outlets consistently wrote as if Israel was responding instead of initiating. Eastern outlets highlighted Palestinian suffering. The knowledge gap in public opinion of what Israel is actually doing didn't happen by accident.