Ken Klippenstein. FEMA’s New Mission: Domestic Terrorism

FEMA’s New Mission: Domestic Terrorism

The disaster response agency forgets the weather, embraces pre-crime

Ken Klippenstein July 28th 2026

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency, often criticized for its inadequate response to natural disasters like wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, has been assigned a new mission: “domestic terrorism.”

Now FEMA is shelling out grant money to state and local authorities to build up capacity to carry out pre-crime operations against “organized political violence,” as one FEMA information bulletin I obtained says.

The bulletin, dated July 9, instructs local authorities to prioritize “domestic terrorism” in their grant applications. Titled “Implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7…,” the document echoes President Trump’s emphasis on rooting out suspected domestic terrorists before an attack takes place.

To head off these attacks, the bulletin tells states what to buy: training to spot “social media-based indicators,” analysts to monitor “online behaviors and digital footprints,” and teams for “managing persons of concern whose behavior indicates a potential trajectory toward domestic terrorism.”

	FEMA Information Bulletin 273KB ∙ PDF file
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Some form of the word indicator — indicators, indicative, indicates — appears ten times in the eight-page FEMA bulletin. It is a favorite euphemism of law enforcement because it obscures what’s really happening: pre-crime. Indicators are something a person said or did that an officer has been trained to read as a sign of a crime that hasn't happened and may never happen. Under this approach, the old requirement that evidence of a crime come first before any investigation is replaced by a forecast. It’s vibes-based law enforcement, divination but with the imprimatur of national security respectability. And while it’s mostly only been used against real, organized foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS, it’s now being deployed against Americans.

To give you a sense of just how central pre-crime is to this approach, consider the following grant proposals the FEMA bulletin calls for:

• Learn “the latest tactics and trends used by domestic terrorism actors in order to recognize indicators prior to an attack.”

• “Prepare and train communities to identify and report threatening or concerning behaviors that may be indicative of larger threat plotting and/or activity.”

• Conduct “Surveillance and counter-surveillance training to detect pre-operational casing and hostile surveillance of domestic targets.”

As for why any state or local government would entangle itself in such fraught activities, a second document I obtained — from FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security — explains why. It contains a not-so-subtle warning to authorities that don’t adhere to the new domestic terrorism priority, saying:

“Failure to meet NPA [National Priority Areas] spending requirements will result in a hold on affected funds until compliance issues are resolved.”

Screenshot of Homeland Security Grant Program Notice

	Homeland Security Grant Program Notice 1.29MB ∙ PDF file
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That second document, a Department of Homeland Security grant program notice, is a $1 billion shopping list of available federal money. But there’s a catch: thirty-five percent, it says, must go to terrorism prevention. Another thirty percent is allocated for five designated Department of Homeland Security priorities:

1. “Supporting Border Crisis Response,” 

2. “Enhancing Election Security”

3. “Supporting Homeland Security Task Forces and Fusion Centers”

4. “Enhancing the Protection of Soft Targets/Crowded Places”

5. “Enhancing Cybersecurity”

The priorities track the president's own preoccupations. Just this month, Trump gave a primetime address claiming China had compromised the 2020 election. The “border crisis response” priority, meanwhile, points states straight at ICE's 287(g) program — which, as I've reported, turns local law enforcement into bounty hunters by paying them to do immigration enforcement, including bonuses tied to how many people they find. The “Homeland Security Task Forces” priority refers the new federal-local strike forces Trump created by executive order on his first day back in office to hunt cartels and enforce immigration laws. 

And the “crowded places” priority has its own ghost: the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, shot in front of a crowd at a university event last September.

That murder is what precipitated all of this. Three days after signing an executive order declaring “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, Trump issued NSPM-7 on September 25, 2025 — a national security order that opens with a reference to Kirk’s murder and builds a counterterrorism program meant to prevent the next one.

NSPM-7 asserts that political violence in America “does not emerge organically” but is the product of “sophisticated, organized campaigns.” It identifies the common threads it wants investigated: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” 

Until now, NSPM-7 has largely pointed at federal machinery, like the FBI and IRS. But a brief section toward the bottom of NSPM-7 reaches down to your county sheriff. It orders the homeland security secretary to develop grant programs to pay local law enforcement to go after domestic terrorism.

Screenshot of NSPM-7 order

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Washington knew this would happen, long before Trump entered the White House. 

FEMA was created in 1979 as an independent agency. But after the 9/11 attacks, in 2003 it was folded into the new counterterrorism-focused Department of Homeland Security. FEMA’s preparedness functions and grant programs were pulled out and scattered across the department.

That September, the undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response sent Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge a seven-page memo warning that the reorganization would cripple America's ability to respond to disasters. He was overruled. Two years later came Katrina.

By October 2012, a bipartisan congressional investigation reported that the Department of Homeland Security could not say how much it had spent on fusion centers (the state and regional intelligence hubs, built after 9/11, where local police, federal agents and analysts pool information). DHS’s own estimates ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The intelligence coming out of them was “of uneven quality,” the Senate concluded, finding it “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties." 

Reviewing thirteen months of fusion center reporting, investigators found nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat and no contribution to disrupting an active plot. Of 610 reports, 188 were never published, many because they lacked useful information or risked violating civil liberties protections. Among the reports flagged: a Muslim community group's book recommendations, parenting advice, and a motorcycle club's pamphlet advising members to be polite to police during traffic stops.

Fourteen years later, the machine is being handed a mandate to watch digital footprints for indicators of anti-American sentiment.

FEMA, meanwhile, has absorbed roughly a 14 percent workforce reduction since January 2025 while managing more than 300,000 projects across more than 600 open disaster declarations.

Even in my little corner of the world, in Wisconsin, I can see how desperately the country needs a functioning disaster response agency. Yesterday afternoon a tornado came through the Fox Valley, about a hundred miles northeast of where I live. The National Weather Service issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation warning, a designation it saves for the worst of them. Video of what it left behind is heartbreaking and all over social media today: homes torn open, everything inside gone. 

I’m sure the people who lost their homes will be relieved to know that they’re safe from domestic terrorism.

What is needed now is the thing FEMA was actually created to do, done by a civil agency neither militarized nor given over to an anti-political terrorism agenda. Instead we see a climate-change denying, domestic terrorism-obsessed administration creating its own disaster, with a do-nothing Congress standing idly by.

It’s insane how little media coverage stories like these get. Help me do more of them by becoming a paid subscriber (or chipping in via my GoFundMe here).

Iran war: even military superpowers have limitations

Reprinted from the UK Socialist Website, Left Horizons

 

Iran war: even military superpowers have limitations

28 July 2026

By John Pickard

Notwithstanding the comic machismo of US War Secretary, Pete Hegseth, and leaving aside the impossibility of taking seriously anything Donald Trump says, the latest ‘pause’ in the bombing of Iran has exposed the limits of US power in the region.

The war that Trump said would only last weeks is now five months old and it is proving more costly militarily, financially and politically than he ever bargained for. 

There is no getting away from the fact that the US military is stronger globally than any other, perhaps as strong as the next four or five put together. But its bombing of Iran has so depleted its Middle East resources – and without any noticeable effect on the willingness of Iran to fight back – that the US military chiefs have forced Trump to call a halt to bombing, at least for the moment.

Iran has claimed all along that its attacks on US bases in the region have been relatiatory, so now that the US has stopped bombing, Iran is also holding back. A few articles here and there in the US press have revealed the extent of the damage being done to US bases in the region and the cost to the US in materiel and hard cash. Trump is throwing billions of dollars at the war he started, and there is so far nothing plausible that he can brag about as a ‘victory’.

The last ceasefire collapsed in the first week of July, to be followed by nearly two weeks of relentless bombing of Iran, including many non-military infrastructure targets like road bridges and tunnels. The new US pause is not only due to mounting expense – the war so far has cost $40bn tax-dollars, according to Pentagon figures – but because American forces have seriously depleted their armoury.

The damage to the US bases, as a result of Iranian missiles, have been largely kept out of the  mainstream press, but reports beginning to come out suggest that it is considerable. The New York Times reported that some of the US bases in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait, that were attacked in the early period of the war, in March, became “all but uninhabitable”.

Huge financial cost of the war

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), made an assessment of the financial cost of the war damage just to US bases and came up with a figure of up to $5bn. While a large proportion of Iranian missiles are intercepted and shot down, it notes, a small proportion do get through, and in a large barrage the actual number of missiles can still be devastating.

Looking at ‘before’ and ‘after’ satellite photographs, CSIS notes, “The images make clear the Iranian strikes were precise. There are no random craters indicating misses or wasted assets. Most struck facilities were unusable afterward”. Moreover, in the context of fewer interception missiles being available, the prospect is for more Iranian missiles to get through.

The CSIS gives a list that includes aircraft destroyed or damaged, including four F-15 fighters, an AWAC aircraft, a refuelling aircraft, a ‘Warthog’ ground attack plane, as well as helicopters. But, a report to Congress in May said that at least 42 American aircraft, including unmanned drones, had been destroyed or damaged since February.

Air defence systems seriously depleted

Such aircraft losses represent hundreds of millions of dollars each, but the most significant losses triggering this new pause are those that have built up in recent weeks in air-defence: ie missiles and radar systems. In the early days of the war, an important missile defence radar array, part of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, was reportedly destroyed by Iran.

Map showing not one, but two potential choke points for Middle East oil

It has become clear that a war of attrition conducted from the air is proving extremely expensive, but, more to the point, it is ineffective. As has been said many times, you can bomb the Strait closed, but you cannot bomb it open.

Iran is learning lessons in its defensive war against the US and as a result more missiles are getting through the defence systems used by Gulf states and US bases. A former CIA military analyst told the Financial Times, that, “It seems that in Jordan they have been able to get increased penetration of missile defences and increased accuracy for their medium-range ballistic missiles. You have to assume, if you are an American planner, that Iran is making both technical and tactical tweaks from lessons learnt in past conflicts.”

Just as Trump was posting on his social media platform last week, that it was time to raise the stakes with Iran, it was reported by CNN that both JD Vance and General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned him off.

They raised concerns about escalating the war, because of the serious and ongoing depletion of resources available to the US military. The problem is that the US has been burning through precision munitions that take years to replace, while Iran is still holding a huge proportion of its original missile, drone, and rocket arsenal, despite months of strikes.

In an interview with CNN, a retired NATO Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley Clark, explained that the new US pause is an indication of US weakness. “If they [Iran] wanted to negotiate”, he said, “they would have come to us…the pause is a sign of weakness”. It was a signal to Iran, he argued, that Trump wanted their help to get out of the “fix” he was in.

The “weakness” of the USA position, is not a military issue (and Wesley Clark argues that the question of munitions depletion is secondary), but a political one. “We’ve got to either make up our mind to really go in and fight”, he adds, “or gracefully excuse ourselves and retire”. The problem that Trump has is that the option of “really going in and fighting” – in other words escalating and possibly using ground troops – is one bearing incalculable risks.

Wesley Clark raised the spectre of the early stages of the Vietnam war, when there were similar pauses in bombing. The implication of what he was saying is that this will become either another Vietnam, with all the political consquences of being bogged down in an unwinnable war, or a strategic retreat.

Pentagon criticised for its slow release of casualty figures

So far, eighteen US service personnel have been killed in the war, although the Pentagon has now reduced the number to 14. They have also reduced the number of injured in Operation Epic Fury to 417, but that is no small number. An article in the New York Times notes that the Pentagon has faced criticism for its coyness in releasing casualty figures and to confuse journalists further, it has now changed the way it reports them.

This war, from the standpoint of the US military, is one with relatively few casualties, certainly in comparison to the huge losses in Iran. But that is all the more reason why an escalation that carries the risk of much higher casualties is something the White House just cannot contemplate.

In the United States, there is overwhelming opposition to this war, and it is growing. Petrol has been over $4 a gallon for months on end and every time there is a new round of fighting and the Hormuz Strait is closed again – this time with the added threat of the closure by the Houthi allies of Yemen of the Strait of Bab al-Mandabwhich is narrower than Hormuz – the possibility of a fall in petrol prices recedes.

A war intended to last days is now about to enter its sixth month. Foreign policy strategists in Washington are urging that Trump recalibrates his war aims to two simple ends: perhaps a nuclear non-proliferation agreement and the re-opening of Hormuz – in other words back to where the USA and Iran were before the war was launched.

Trump’s only real aim now is to have enough wiggle room to present a dismal failure as a glorious victory. Whatever concessions he has to make to Iran, and many will be inevitable, he needs some headline-grabber to feed to the American people, whose tax dollars have been flushed down the tubes.

We are now around a hundred days until the mid-term elections in the USA. Trump will do his damnedest to gerrymander and fiddle the voting to manufacture wins for Republican candidates. But he can only do so much. If the voting against Trump is so overwhelming, then he will be like the old English King Cnut, demonstrably unable to stem an onrushing tide. 

Who Are the English? Michael Rosen Takes a Look.

I met an English guy from Durham recently and happened to mention I was English. When he found out I was born in Yangon (Rangoon) because my dad was in the British Army, he said I can't be English, I'm British. Needless to say, I didn't waste much time with this one.

Watching developments back home (England and the UK in general) I hear the right wing elements, the Reform Party types and the extreme right, who say the same thing; Pakistani's, Indians, Africans can't be English, only British, and there are efforts to bury that category. 

Unfortunately, this attempt to divert attention from the actual cause of social crisis gets an echo among sections of the population when there is no serious counter to the propaganda.  I went on to google images and typed in, English faces. Every image was a white person. Of course, the Irish can't be English, (not that they'd want to be) and they're white. White Chimpanzees, the British bourgeois referred to them on occasion. Skin color is the dominant means for undermining working class unity in the US and increasingly so in the UK it seems to me.

 

With immigrants being blamed for the economic crisis, we are seeing an increase in racism in the UK as well as Islamophobia. After all, England, like the US, is a white Christian country to these elements. And Islam is heresy. So is Judaism, and Jew hatred has a long history in England. The massacre of English Jews in York in 1190 is one of the examples of anti-Semitic assaults in England and it took an American Jew to inform me of that episode. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in the UK as well as the US. I believe the cause of this to a great degree is the barbaric policies , including genocide, of the Israel state whose leaders claim to be the official voice of the Jewish people throughout the world. Fortunately, in the UK and the US, young Jews are in the forefront of the movement against Zionism and Palestinian rights; clearly the best defense against anti-Semitism.

 

Not liking the search in Google images, I asked chatgpt why black people can't be English and got this response below. Now that's more like it. Below the image is a piece that Michael Rosen*  posted to his Facebook page countering this false view that there is a set definition as to what English actually is. In the last analysis though, the dominant division in capitalist society is class. For me, the central aspect of my identity is that I am working class. My life activity that put food in my mouth and a roof over my head has been as a seller of labor power, not a buyer of it. Richard Mellor

 

 

Who Are the English? Michael Rosen Takes a Look.

By Michael Rosen *

July 13, 2026

 

I see that the people I might dub the 'Englishists' are busy at work on social media trying to reinvent the colour bar and fire people from the England team. As with a lot of racism, they rely on ring-fencing groups of people according to this or that migration or invasion. In this case, the 'true' Englander is, in their books, the descendant of the Germanic migrations to what is now England (these Germanic peoples went elsewhere as well but this particular bit of ringfencing is only interested in what is now England). 

 

According to some historians these Germanic migrations began after the Romans left. Some doubt this and say that logically, Germanic peoples must have sailed and rowed across from Germanic countries well before that. As it happens the genetic evidence seems to dispute that, as I'll show in just a moment. 

 

So what is the latest information (according to AI) on the waves of migration before the Germanic peoples arrived? I suspect that the word 'English' and the phrase 'ethnically English' is going to be used by right-wing parties in the near future. At present, I can see on social media that they seem to be talking about, descendants of the Germanic peoples. 

 

Why have these racial purists excluded the English Celts? (I'm leaving out the Welsh and Irish Celts for the moment!) What happened to them? Or are they still here? 

One story is that the Germanic peoples shoved them into Wales and Cornwall. Another story is that the Germanic peoples intermarried with the Celts in most of England but less so in Cornwall and Cumbria. 

 

But then, hang on, who was here before the Celts? After all, weren't they European invaders? Yep. But hang on again. Whoever was here before the Celts, were they invaders? So who was here before them? And so on and so on? 

 

Clearly, when it comes to choosing the England team on a blood and soil basis (as all good racists should) we should dispense with these recent Germanic invaders and fill the team with those with the highest percentage of English Celtic DNA (or, if possible) with the DNA of the folk who came before the Celts - unless they were wiped out, of course.) 

 

Of course, this is all ironic. As you know, this construction of 'the English' as a Germanic type is shot through primarily with hatred of people of colour. All I'm doing here is pointing up that to create this Germanic type (in essence a reinvention of the 'Herrenvolk') they have to dispense with different branches of the Celtic parts of what is now the UK. Most laughably, this includes the 'English Celts' ie those people who (the DNA folks claim) have 'markers' on their genome going back to Celtic settlement in England (not in Wales and Ireland). In other words this racism has to be also racist towards pre-Germanic settlers on 'this land'! 

 

No surprise it's racist towards Irish, Welsh and Scots Celtic peoples, but it's grimly funny that it has to be racist towards English Celts. (In terms of where such people are most likely to live today, it's Cornwall and Cumbria, say the geneticists.)

 

For people who hate all this DNA stuff, you have my sympathy. By no means am I trying to reduce people, culture, language, or politics to DNA. And we must never forget that DNA studies of difference are talking about tiny, tiny differences. 

And, as geneticists have always pointed out: differences in DNA make-up between so-called different 'races' are no greater than differences between people within an alleged 'race'. However, I am interested in the 'markers' that modern geneticists use as they do show, I believe, stories of migration. 

 

Below, when it says DNA - they are not talking about a whole genome (the whole DNA package). They are talking about one or several markers that belong to a given group, and which, they claim, are distinctive of that group. 

 

[Geneticists reading this, please feel free to dive in on comments below]

Anyway....

 

So what did AI tell me about all this?

 

As follows:

1. The Anglo-Saxon Profile is Clear and Localized

The study (Oxford University) tracked the genetic signature of the Germanic Anglo-Saxon migrations that occurred after the fall of the Roman Empire (around 450 AD).

 

The Genetic Marker: This parentage closely matches modern populations in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

 

The Concentration: This Anglo-Saxon DNA is concentrated primarily in central, southern, and eastern England, where it makes up roughly 10% to 40% of the modern local genome.

 

2. The Indigenous "Celtic" Profile is Fragmented

 

The most surprising discovery was that there is no single "Celtic" genetic group. Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, the indigenous Celtic Britons were already highly localized.

 

Distinct Tribes: The study found that Celtic parentage in the UK splits into vastly different genetic clusters. For example, the Celtic people of Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Scotland are among the most genetically different from each other.

 

The Welsh Isolation: The Welsh genetic cluster showed almost zero Anglo-Saxon input, remaining the closest living match to the original, post-Ice Age indigenous settlers of Britain.

 

3. Anglo-Saxons Intermarried Rather Than Replaced

For centuries, historians debated whether the invading Anglo-Saxons completely wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England. The study settled the controversy:The Anglo-Saxons intermarried with the existing Celtic population.

 

Even in eastern and southern England—the heart of the ancient Saxon kingdoms—the remaining 60% to 90% of the DNA is still indigenous Celtic Briton. The incoming Saxons contributed a minority percentage to a massive, pre-existing Celtic genetic baseline.

 

Summary of Differences

The survey proves that Anglo-Saxon parentage (Germanic/Continental Europe) and Celtic parentage (Indigenous/Ice-Age Briton) are fundamentally different branches on the genetic tree. 

 

However, they do not exist in separate people today. Modern English parentage is a story of the two lines fusing together.

 

A DNA study of Britons has shown that genetically there is not a unique Celtic group of people in the UK. According to the data, ``(BBC Who do you think you really are? A genetic map of the British ...19 Mar 2015) — There was no single 'Celtic' genetic group. 

 

When is it thought that Celts started inhabiting what is now England?

 

The mainstream scientific consensus is that the people who became the Celts began inhabiting what is now England during the Middle to Late Bronze Age, specifically between 1400 BC and 800 BC.

 

For decades, historians believed Celtic culture didn’t arrive until the Iron Age (around 600 BC) via a sudden military invasion. However, a groundbreaking Harvard-led ancient DNA study completely reshaped this timeline:

 

1. The Bronze Age Genetic Shift (1400 BC – 800 BC)

By extracting DNA from nearly 800 ancient skeletons, scientists discovered a massive, peaceful migration from continental Europe (mostly modern-day France) into southern Britain (England and Wales).

 

 

This migration was sustained over centuries and was so significant that it altered half the genetic ancestry of England's subsequent population.Rather than a violent conquest, it was a steady integration of continental people who brought new ritual practices, trade links, and crucially, early Celtic languages.

 

2. The Iron Age Flourishing (800 BC – 43 AD)

While the genetic foundation was laid in the Bronze Age, the distinct "Celtic culture" we recognize today—hillforts, distinct curvilinear artwork, complex metalworking, and Druidism—became fully dominant during the Iron Age.

 

By 320 BC, Greek explorers like Pytheas sailed around the island and explicitly documented that the inhabitants were culturally and linguistically Celts (Keltoi).

 

3. "Continuity" Rather Than Arrival

It is important to note that the term "Celt" is largely cultural and linguistic rather than a biological group that suddenly showed up. The people inhabiting England did not just cross a border as "Celts"; they were a mix of the indigenous Neolithic stone-circle builders, Bronze Age migrants, and continental traders who slowly evolved a shared Celtic identity over a thousand years.

 

What do we know of the genetic make-up of who was living in what is now England before the Celts arrived?

 

Before the Celtic migrations arrived in what is now England around 1400 BC, the island's genetic landscape had already undergone two distinct, total population replacements.

 

Ancient DNA extracted from skeletons has revealed a detailed timeline of the people who occupied England during the millennia before the Celts:

 

1. The Bell Beaker People (2400 BC – 1400 BC)

Directly before the Celts, England was inhabited by the "Bell Beaker" culture (named after their distinct, inverted bell-shaped pottery).

The Genetic Horizon: 

 

Arriving around 2400 BC from the river deltas of northwestern Europe (modern Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium), they were part of a massive westward expansion of people carrying Eurasian Steppe ancestry.

 

The Turnover: 

A landmark Harvard Medical School study proved that the Beaker folk replaced 90% to 100% of the British gene pool in just a few centuries.

 

Physical Traits: The Beaker people brought the genetic variants for lighter skin, blue eyes, and lighter hair to the island. They also introduced the paternal DNA haplogroup R1b-M269, which became the dominant genetic signature of modern 

British men. 

 

By the time the Celts arrived, England's population was almost entirely composed of these Beaker-descended communities.

 

2. The Early Neolithic Farmers (4000 BC – 2400 BC)

The sophisticated society that the Bell Beaker people replaced consisted of the Neolithic Farmers, the very communities responsible for building iconic monuments like Stonehenge.

 

The Genetic Horizon: This population arrived around 4000 BC, tracing their deep ancestral origins back to Anatolia (modern Turkey). They migrated across the Mediterranean and continental Europe, bringing agriculture and livestock to Britain.

 

Physical Traits: 

Skeletal DNA shows that these Stonehenge-builders typically had olive-brown skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. When the Beaker folk arrived, this Neolithic genetic signature was nearly entirely wiped out, possibly due to a lack of immunity against continental diseases like the plague.

 

3. The Western Hunter-Gatherers (10,000 BC – 4000 BC)

Before the farmers arrived, Britain was populated by a sparse group of post-glacial Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

The Genetic Horizon: They re-colonised Britain after the glaciers receded.

 

Physical Traits: Famously epitomised by "Cheddar Man," this population possessed a genetic combination rarely seen today: very dark skin paired with striking blue eyes. When the Neolithic farmers arrived in 4000 BC, they caused a 90% genetic replacement of these hunter-gatherers, leaving only a tiny fraction of their DNA in the subsequent farming populations.

 

Summary of the Pre-Celtic Genome

When the Bronze Age "Celts" began crossing the channel around 1400 BC, they were not entering an empty land or encountering the people who built Stonehenge. They were stepping into an England populated by Beaker-descended communities who had light skin, high rates of the R1b gene, and deep roots in the continental European Steppes.

 

By they way, you may know that apart from my common ancestry with all human beings (which is the large proportion of all our DNA) my markers (and it is only specific markers) aren't part of any of this! I'm culturally 'Ashkenazi' and, say the geneticists, there are significant markers on my genome that says that these originate in a mix of the 'Levant' and what they call 'southern Mediterranean Europe' (ie Italy, Sicily, Malta and Greece.) More on that in my next post.

 

*Michael Rosen is a writer that writes children’s books and poetry. He has also directed plays. You can find out more about him by going to his website at; MichaelRosen.com.UK  He also has a You Tube channel: Kids’ Poems and Stories With Michael Rosen 

The Tiger Eats Its Keeper: On Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Arab States, and the Empire That Trained Its Own Executioner

Photograph: a man walks a tiger through Dubai.

The Tiger Eats Its Keeper: On Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Arab States, and the Empire That Trained Its Own Executioner 

By Sirantos Fotopoulos

7-25-26

 

In October of 2003, on a stage in Las Vegas built entirely on the proposition that a man could tame the untamable, a seven-year-old white tiger named Montecore closed his jaws around the throat of Roy Horn and dragged him into the dark behind the curtain. The show was called Siegfried and Roy, and for fourteen years it grossed 45 million dollars annually. For fourteen years it had grossed that sum on the premise that domination over a wild animal could be permanent, choreographed, and safe for a paying audience of 1,500 people a night. Horn had never once been so much as scratched during those fourteen years. He had built an empire of spectacle on the back of an animal whose nature he believed he had rewritten through decades of proximity and control. The tiger, as it turned out, harbored other ideas entirely. Whether Montecore was attacking Horn or dragging him toward what the tiger perceived as safety remains disputed to the present day, and it hardly matters at all. The point stands regardless of the animal's intention that night. The thing you cage never stops being what it always was underneath. It waits for the moment the choreography slips.

 

Six thousand miles east of that stage sits a kingdom that has spent fifty years perfecting an identical act. Saudi Arabia caged the hydrocarbon economy and called the performance modernization. It caged its own population and called the performance stability. It caged the international community's dependency on its oil and called the performance leverage. Mohammed bin Salman inherited the act from his father's generation and decided the trick needed bigger cats. He commissioned skyscrapers that mirror the sky for 106 miles. He commissioned floating opera houses and coral-reef ski resorts and a cube in Riyadh eight times the volume of the Empire State Building. He called the whole apparatus Vision 2030, and he staged it as a spectacle for an audience that included sovereign wealth funds, Formula One executives, LIV Golf players, and the credulous business press of three continents. The kingdom trained its zoo in public for a decade. This summer of 2026 is teaching a captive audience what happens when the animal remembers what it is.

 

A state built atop a single subterranean commodity finds itself with barely any structural need to develop the institutions that broad-based production requires. It needs barely any educated workforce beyond the technicians who run the wells. It needs barely any independent judiciary to adjudicate contracts between competing domestic industries because competing domestic industries scarcely exist. It needs barely any representative political settlement because the revenue arrives from beneath the ground rather than from the taxed labor of citizens who might, in exchange for taxation, demand a voice. Political economists have documented that pattern across a hundred years of extractive economies on every continent that has produced a single dominant export commodity, and the pattern reads the same everywhere, a state grows immensely rich and immensely brittle at the same time, rich in the commodity and brittle in every institution that would let it survive the commodity's decline. Saudi Arabia stands as the purest specimen of that pathology ever produced, because the Saud family faced no colonial metropole extracting the surplus abroad, no foreign administrator skimming the revenue before it reached Riyadh. The family kept the entire sum for itself and built the cage with its own hands, bar by bar, palace by palace, out of money that arrived from beneath the sand rather than from the labor of anyone the family needed to answer to.

 

Consider what the tamer actually trains when he trains a tiger to sit, to roar on command, to allow a man to place his head inside its jaws for a paying crowd. He trains a suppression of instinct so total that the animal appears to have forgotten it is a predator. The training itself never actually removes the instinct underneath. It merely buries the instinct beneath thousands of repetitions until the audience, and eventually the trainer himself, mistakes suppression for genuine transformation. Fifty years of oil wealth performed the identical function on a captive population inside Saudi Arabia's own borders. Subsidized fuel arrived as the first sedative dose. 

 

Free education arrived next, offered without any accompanying labor market capable of absorbing the graduates it produced. Public sector employment came bundled as a bribe for political silence rather than as genuinely productive work. Zero income tax got framed as generosity, functioning instead as a mechanism to sever the link between taxation and representation that every modern parliamentary tradition on Earth was built upon. A population sedated for two generations mistakes its own sedation for contentment, exactly as an audience watching a tiger balance on a ball mistakes the animal's suppressed instinct for genuine tameness. The instinct waits patiently beneath both the tiger and the citizen. 

 

The cage worked exactly as designed for seventy years running. Oil was discovered beneath the peninsula in 1938. Aramco was nationalized in stages across the years between 1973 and 1980. A state apparatus constructed around the principle that legitimacy could be purchased directly, cash for quiescence, subsidized fuel and public sector employment in exchange for a population unlikely to ask who governed it or how. The theorists of rentier statehood have a name for that bargain and it survives contact with any Riyadh taxi driver's daily routine. What the bargain never managed to solve, what it remained structurally incapable of solving, was the question of what happens when the oil well runs less profitable than the ambition built on top of it. Every ruling family in the Gulf has understood that question was coming since the 1970s. Mohammed bin Salman's answer was Vision 2030, unveiled in 2016, a program to diversify the economy away from oil before oil diversified away from Saudi Arabia. The tragedy, and it stands as a tragedy in the technical sense, is that the plan to escape the resource curse was itself financed entirely by the resource, staffed entirely by a state apparatus capable of nothing beyond extraction logic, and imagined entirely as spectacle rather than production. The kingdom tried to out-build its way out of a rentier trap using rentier money and rentier methods. It amounts to Roy Horn training a bigger tiger to solve the problem of the first tiger.

 

Consider what that spectacle has become in recent years. NEOM, the flagship, the 500-billion-dollar centerpiece of the entire Vision 2030 architecture, has been gutted from the inside by its own directors. The Line, promised as a 106-mile mirrored city housing nine million residents in a car-free linear utopia, sits suspended on all substantial new work until after 2030, the very year the whole program was named for. Population targets for the broader NEOM zone, once set at 1.5 million residents by decade's end, were quietly cut to 300,000 two years ago and now sit at a mere 100,000, a reduction of roughly 93 percent from the original promise made to the world's business press in 2021. Trojena, the mountain resort engineered to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games in a country whose average summer temperature exceeds 113 degrees Fahrenheit, will see zero further investment until after 2030 either, and the Games themselves were postponed indefinitely in January. The Mukaab, a colossal cuboid skyscraper planned for Riyadh, sits cancelled outright. Contracts for tunneling and dam construction awarded to a South Korean consortium and to the Italian contractor Webuild were terminated in March. Saudi Arabia now faces roughly 16 billion dollars in termination and cancellation penalties simply for having promised things it lacked the capacity to build.

 

None of the foregoing happens in isolation from politics. The Iran war that erupted this year amounted to far more than a coincidence alongside the unraveling of Vision 2030. It accelerated the unraveling and exposed the fiction beneath it. Commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed by more than 90 percent after the outbreak of hostilities. Iranian strikes on March 1 sent smoke over Jebel Ali port in Dubai while yachts fled the harbor on camera, the exact tableau of a Gulf luxury economy discovering in real time that luxury requires peace and peace was guaranteed by absolutely nobody. Qatar's Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas facility took a direct hit, cutting the country's LNG export capacity by nearly 17 percent for the next three to five years, a wound to a state whose government draws 80 percent of its revenue from that single gas field. Data centers in the UAE and Bahrain sustained damage severe enough that Amazon Web Services listed 31 disrupted services and told enterprise customers to migrate their operations elsewhere, an admission that the Gulf's bid to become the world's cloud-computing backbone had run directly into the region's oldest vulnerability, a war zone sitting beside a hostile neighbor across a 21-mile strait.

 

The tourism numbers alone tell the story of an empire's underlying fragility better than any position paper produced by a Gulf sovereign wealth fund's public relations office. In 2025, tourism contributed 178 billion dollars to Saudi Arabia's GDP, 70 billion to the UAE, 16 billion to Qatar. Those figures represented the entire non-oil diversification thesis given a dollar sign. Then came the first quarter of 2026 and arrivals across the Middle East fell by roughly 14 percent year on year, a decline the World Travel and Tourism Council estimated was costing the region's travel industry up to 600 million dollars per day at its peak. Forecasting models from Oxford Economics, published as the conflict intensified, showed a range running from an 11 percent contraction under a short conflict scenario to a 27 percent collapse should hostilities grind on for two months, with Gulf Cooperation Council states specifically facing a swing from an anticipated 8 percent expansion into a possible 26 percent decline. German cruise passengers found themselves stranded in the Persian Gulf while the strait sat closed to everything but vessels with Chinese or Russian ties. Hotels in the UAE and Qatar were forced to comp meals and rooms for travelers unable to leave. A region that spent fifteen years marketing itself to Europe and North America as a stable oasis discovered that stability, once it becomes a luxury product rather than a governing fact, evaporates the moment a missile lands within view of a five-star infinity pool.

 

The fiscal mathematics underneath the spectacle prove worse than the spectacle itself admits. Saudi Arabia's central government budget assumes a fiscal break-even oil price near 87 dollars a barrel. Once the full weight of Public Investment Fund obligations gets folded in, obligations to NEOM, to the Diriyah Gate heritage project, to a development package extended to Pakistan, to international bond service, the consolidated break-even climbs past 108 dollars a barrel by Bloomberg Economics' own accounting. Saudi output in April ran 3.4 million barrels per day below the OPEC+ quota, a gap the Hormuz disruption and damage to Eastern Province infrastructure rendered functionally impossible to close. The kingdom's finance ministry budgeted a 44-billion-dollar deficit for the full year of 2026 and burned through 33.5 billion dollars of it, 76 percent of the annual target, in the first ninety days alone. The Public Investment Fund itself entered the war holding roughly 15 billion dollars in liquid cash, the lowest level since 2020, against a portfolio exceeding 930 billion dollars in total assets and a sprawling network of commitments running from Lucid Motors to Nintendo to the Saudi Pro Football League. 

 

Aramco, the fountain from which every other institution in the kingdom ultimately drinks, generated a mere 18.6 billion dollars in free cash flow during the first quarter against a mandated dividend obligation of 21.89 billion, forcing the company to raise its own gearing ratio by 26 percent in three months simply to keep paying the government and the fund that depends on it. Here stands zero diversified economy weathering a shock. Here stands a single-commodity state discovering that every diversification project it built functioned as a further liability denominated in the very commodity it aimed to replace.

 

Every tiger act needs a supporting cast the audience never watches, the animal handlers who feed the beast, clean the cage, and absorb the risk the star performer is paid millions to appear immune from. 

 

The Gulf built its entire spectacle economy on a supporting cast of its own, and the story of that cast is the story of the region's actual character, stripped of the marketing budget. Qatar imported roughly two million migrant workers, a labor force nearly ten times the size of its own citizenry, to build the stadiums, roads, hotels, and metro lines for the 2022 World Cup. The workers arrived under the kafala sponsorship system, a legal architecture inherited from the era of British colonial administration that ties a worker's visa, ability to change jobs, and right to leave the country entirely to the permission of a single private employer. 

 

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Trade Union Confederation spent a decade documenting the results, passport confiscation, unpaid wages stretching for months, dormitories built for a fraction of the men crammed into them, and outdoor construction shifts conducted through desert afternoons exceeding 122 degrees Fahrenheit with rest breaks and hydration access left to the discretion of foremen paid to hit deadlines rather than protect lives. 

 

A Guardian investigation published in February of 2021 tallied more than 6,500 deaths among migrant workers from five South Asian nations alone during the decade of Qatar's World Cup preparation, a majority of them recorded under the vague administrative category of natural causes, a classification human rights investigators have repeatedly argued conceals heat stroke and cardiac failure brought on by extreme occupational heat exposure rather than examining it. Qatar's own organizing committee has acknowledged between 400 and 500 deaths connected to World Cup construction specifically, and just 3 deaths it classifies as directly work related among 37 total fatalities on stadium sites, a gap between official accounting and independent investigation that itself constitutes a form of testimony. This tragedy describes a workforce which a wealthy nation imported, then enslaved, worked past the edge of human tolerance in furnace heat, killed off, and buried under paperwork engineered to avoid a count. FIFA's own commissioned report in 2024 concluded that football's governing body bears responsibility for compensating the people who survived.

 

Saudi Arabia has watched this entire spectacle unfold next door and drawn precisely the lesson one would expect from a monarchy immune to embarrassment. The kingdom is scheduled to host the 2034 World Cup under the identical kafala architecture Qatar deployed, and Human Rights Watch's 2026 assessment finds migrant workers across Saudi employment sectors facing labor abuses that may amount to forced labor, with a large majority of migrant deaths still classified as natural and neither investigated nor compensated. Saudi authorities announced the formal end of kafala in mid-2025, a reform the kingdom's own state media promoted heavily to a Western audience already primed by NEOM's marketing department to believe in Saudi transformation, and yet the reform arrived alongside mass deportation sweeps that removed thousands of workers without due process and a labor penalty schedule that Amnesty International found had been quietly reduced for offenses including passport confiscation and denial of rest days. 

 

The kingdom executed at least 300 people in 2025, a figure surpassing every prior year on record and including at least two individuals convicted for crimes allegedly committed as children, along with a journalist put to death in June for the crime of speech. The same Public Investment Fund financing NEOM's cancelled towers finances the Saudi Pro Football League, LIV Golf, and a portfolio of global sporting and entertainment ventures that Human Rights Watch describes plainly as an instrument for laundering the kingdom's reputation abroad. 

 

The tiger act and the human rights record are the identical performance, staged for the identical audience, financed by the identical fund. Both depend on convincing spectators that the danger has been tamed. Neither one has actually removed a single tooth from the animal's jaw.

 

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain complete the pattern rather than complicate it. The UAE's own construction and domestic labor sectors depend on a migrant population numbering in the millions, the overwhelming majority from South Asia and East Africa, working under labor conditions that United Nations special rapporteurs and international labor bodies have flagged for identical abuses, recruitment debts that function as indentured servitude before a single day's wage is earned, employer control over exit visas, and a judicial system offering migrant workers close to no independent recourse against an employer who withholds pay or confiscates documents. Every skyline photograph the Gulf uses to sell itself to Western tourists and investors, every mirrored tower and floating opera house and climate-controlled ski slope, rests on a foundation poured by men who arrived in debt, worked in furnace heat, and in thousands of documented cases never went home. The tiger performs the trick under bright lights for a paying crowd. The men who built the stage the tiger performs on are never once invited to take a bow.

 

The regional pattern of decline confirms the diagnosis rather than complicating it. The UAE's Masdar City, once marketed as the world's first zero-carbon city, has been quietly reduced to a modest neighborhood indistinguishable from a hundred other Abu Dhabi developments. Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar all logged double-digit tourism contractions in the same quarter Saudi Arabia did, because the entire Gulf built a single regional brand, safety, luxury, frictionless capital, on top of a single regional fault line that Iran demonstrated it could rupture whenever domestic politics in Tehran demanded a demonstration. Every Gulf monarchy spent the 2010s and early 2020s selling the same magic trick to the same audience of sovereign investors and international tourists, funded by the same underclass of imported labor stripped of the right to leave. Every one of them now watches the curtain fall on the same stage at the same moment, because the trick amounted to something other than a trick, it was a bet, and the bet assumed the region's oldest and most dangerous neighbor would remain permanently docile in exchange for nothing.

 

The energy question sits beneath the whole apparatus like the foundation beneath a mirrored skyscraper nobody finished building. Every serious projection of global decarbonization trajectories through mid-century assumes demand for Gulf hydrocarbons declines, gradually rather than catastrophically, but declines steadily enough that a petrostate needs three decades of disciplined reinvestment to convert oil rents into a durable, diversified successor economy. Saudi Arabia held that entire thirty-year runway in its hands. It spent the runway building a linear city nobody will live in at scale, a ski resort in a desert that regularly exceeds 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and a cube-shaped skyscraper it later cancelled outright. It spent the runway on spectacle rather than on the unglamorous, uncinematic work of building institutions capable of taxing, representing, and retaining a population once the oil money thinned. The war with Iran merely exposed a vulnerability decades in the making rather than creating one. The war simply arrived early enough, and violently enough, to make the vulnerability visible to everyone at once, tourists and bondholders and ratings agencies included, years before the kingdom's own internal projections expected the reckoning to land.

 

What happens next follows the logic of the tiger rather than the logic of the trainer. Montecore required zero decades of provocation before he acted. He required a single broken procedure, one moment where the choreography slipped and the animal's actual nature reasserted itself over the fiction imposed on top of it. The Gulf states have spent fifty years imposing an identical fiction on a region defined by resource scarcity, sectarian fracture, and a hostile theocratic neighbor across a 21-mile channel that carries a fifth of the world's oil supply. They called the fiction stability and sold it as a luxury good to European retirees and American private equity funds, financed by a workforce with no vote, no union, and in thousands of documented instances no path home. Iran's 2026 campaign supplied the broken procedure on the geopolitical stage. A sustained campaign of years proved unnecessary to make the point. A single public demonstration sufficed, cameras rolling on fleeing yachts and stranded German cruise passengers, to reveal that the barrier between the spectacle and the danger existed only in the marketing material.

 

Every absolute monarchy carries within its own design the seed of the exact contradiction now devouring the Gulf, and the contradiction runs deeper than a single war or a single cancelled skyscraper. A hereditary system of rule asks an entire population, citizen and migrant alike, to accept that political legitimacy descends from bloodline rather than consent, in a century when every surrounding current in global politics runs the opposite direction. Ordinary people the world over have spent the last decade plus demonstrating in the streets against exactly that proposition, that an accident of birth should determine who commands an army, controls a treasury, or decides which journalist gets executed and which dissident gets a decade in prison for a tweet. 

 

The Gulf monarchies have purchased forty years of insulation from that current using oil revenue as an anesthetic, spending lavishly enough on subsidized fuel and public housing and imported spectacle that the anesthetic occasionally resembled genuine legitimacy. Anesthetic always wears off eventually, no matter the dosage administered. Every population sedated by cash eventually confronts the arithmetic underneath the sedation, and the arithmetic in 2026 reads plainly: declining oil revenue, a collapsing tourism sector, a sovereign wealth fund scraping the bottom of its liquid reserves, and a flagship city that will never remotely resemble the promotional video that sold it to the world. A monarchy can survive indefinitely only if it can indefinitely fund the bribe that substitutes for consent. The moment the bribe shrinks, the population underneath it remembers what every subject of hereditary rule throughout history eventually remembers, that nobody consented to any of it in the first place.

 

A civilization built on caste, on a citizenry that rules by blood and a migrant underclass that dies in service of stadiums it will never sit inside, cannot simply modernize its way around the fact of its own foundation. You cannot mirror-glass a monarchy into a democracy. You cannot brand your way out of kafala. You cannot build enough floating opera houses to make an executed journalist stay executed only in the past tense rather than the present one. The world outside the Gulf's carefully lit promotional footage has spent the last two centuries dismantling precisely that arrangement everywhere the arrangement previously existed, monarchies falling to republics, empires falling to independence movements, colonial labor systems falling, however slowly and incompletely, to the minimum recognition that a human being amounts to something other than a fixture of infrastructure. The Gulf states are asking the twenty-first century to make an exception for them alone, on the theory that enough oil money and enough Formula One races and enough Messi appearance fees can suspend a historical current that has swallowed every comparable arrangement that came before it. History has never once granted that exception to anyone who asked nicely, and the reasoning behind why a hereditary petrostate financing its own executions with the same fund that finances its golf tour should expect to become the first exception remains conspicuously absent.

 

Mohammed bin Salman will likely survive the present season, propped up by American security guarantees, Chinese capital hungry for a foothold, and a domestic security apparatus with every rival center of power already purged after a decade of crackdowns dressed up as anti-corruption campaigns. But survival of the man differs entirely from survival of the project, and the project, rather than the individual, is what Vision 2030 asked the world to bet on. A monarchy that financed its escape from the resource curse by borrowing against the resource, that built its diversification thesis atop tourism and sports revenue evaporating at 14 percent a quarter and a sovereign fund down to 15 billion dollars in liquid cash, that built its stadiums and skylines atop a workforce numbering in the millions with no vote and, in thousands of documented cases, no way home, has demonstrated the one lesson every extractive empire eventually teaches its own ruling class free of charge. The zoo stays tame only for as long as nothing forces the question, and something, sooner or later, always does. 

 

Roy Horn spent forty-four years insisting he had rewritten a tiger's nature through proximity, discipline, and love. The tiger needed ninety seconds to correct him. The Gulf has had fifty years and several trillion dollars to rewrite the nature of its own economic, political, and moral foundations. Iran needed a single season of missiles to remind the region, and the bondholders now assessing the wreckage of NEOM's cancelled contracts, exactly how much of those fifty years amounted to theater and how much amounted to structure. History is already writing the same verdict about the caste system underneath the theater, one execution, one deportation sweep, one unmarked grave in a labor camp cemetery at a time. The stage lights remain switched on for now. The curtain hangs still short of falling all the way. But as the tiger walks, it remembers precisely what it is, a wild animal, and it has finally noticed that the men holding the whip were never as many, nor as strong, as the domestic crowd of the caged and the buried dead standing behind them. Soon, the tigers will break free.