Markwayne Mullin: The Same as He Ever Was

By Janis Baron

On Facebook 3-19-26

Thanks to David Muir for sharing.

Keetoowah Cherokee Troy Littledeer went to school with Markwayne Mullin, potentially our next DHS Secretary. He has followed Mullin’s life and career closely and wants to tell us what kind of person he is.

Troy Littledeer is a prominent award-winning Indigenous journalist and photographer. He is a member of the United Keetoowah Band (UKB) of Cherokee Indians and is known for his commitment to press freedom within tribal communities. In his words... 

***

 

I went to school with Markwayne Mullin.

 

I am not saying that to establish proximity. I am saying it because it matters to what comes next. When you grow up in a small town in Adair County, a rural county in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma near the Arkansas state line, you know people in a way that no Senate confirmation hearing can replicate. You know how someone carries themselves before they have a title.

 

You know what they were like when nobody was watching and nobody was voting and the only audience was a hallway full of kids who would remember.

 

Markwayne was the same then as he is now. He believed he was right. Not that you were wrong. That distinction matters. A person who thinks you are wrong is engaging with you. A person who simply believes he is right has already moved past you. He was already talking before you finished. He was already certain before the facts arrived.

 

That is not confidence. That is a habit. And habits do not require thought. That is exactly what makes them dangerous.

 

I have watched this man operate for years from a place I know better than he knows it himself, which is saying something because he grew up here too. I have watched him claim the Trail of Tears as his family’s story and then edit that claim out of his own website when someone asked a follow-up question. The Cherokee Phoenix reported the discrepancy in November 2018.

 

The language disappeared. No correction was issued. He said the original wording was imprecise. He did not provide his ancestors’ names when asked.

 

I have watched him insert legislative language targeting the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, the people most directly descended from the Old Settlers he publicly claimed as his own, into a federal appropriations bill that nobody was supposed to find. The tribe found it anyway. Through a Freedom of Information Act request.

 

Because that is what you have to do when the person writing the legislation does not want you to know it exists. An internal Bureau of Indian Affairs email obtained through that same FOIA request shows a senior federal official forwarding the language to government lawyers and asking them to confirm what it was designed to do. The man who sent the language to the federal government needed the federal government’s own lawyers to explain it.

 

I have watched him go on national television four days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman, outside her vehicle in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026, and declare the shooting justified. He told CNN anchor Jake Tapper that her vehicle became a lethal weapon.

 

He did not mention that his own brother-in-law, Brandon Rowan, was convicted of aggravated assault and battery upon a peace officer for striking a Westville, Oklahoma police officer with a vehicle at a roadblock in Adair County in December 2015. That case is public record. Adair County District Court, Case No. CF-2015-256. The CNN interview was Jan. 11, 2026. He did not mention it because he does not think about what he does not think about. That is not cynicism. That is the pattern.

 

I have watched him publicly support the Lumbee Fairness Act, a bill that would have granted federal recognition to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina through an act of Congress rather than through the established federal process every other tribe has been required to follow. All three federally recognized Cherokee governments, including the Cherokee Nation he claims as his own, formally opposed it. Their objections were entered into the Senate record. The bill continued to advance.

 

He doesn’t know any better is not an excuse. It is a reason. It is the reason a man who believes he is right without first being certain he is accurate should not be making decisions that affect sovereign nations, federal enforcement policy, and the lives of people who cannot afford the cost of his certainty.

 

Adair County has a 34% poverty rate. Stilwell’s per-capita income runs about $12,872 a year. The Cherokee Reservation is not a metaphor here.

 

It is the ground people walk on to get to work, to school, to the clinic. Federal policy is not abstract in a place like this. It arrives. It has consequences. And the people it arrives for deserve representation that starts with listening rather than talking.

 

I covered this community for more than two decades. I was the media director of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. I wrote an opinion piece about the federal funding freeze and what it was doing to Indian Country.

 

I was ordered to remove it. Months later, according to an account relayed to a tribal elder whose identity is being withheld to protect them from retaliation, a council member said the chief had conveyed that Mullin’s office indicated the tribe’s position could hurt its relationship with the senator. The elder shared that account with me directly. I have the documentation. The Indigenous Journalists Association gave me a free press award for the piece I was ordered to remove.

 

I want to be clear about something. This is not about politics. I have covered power in Indian Country long enough to know that the party affiliation of the person holding it matters less than how they use it. This is about a specific man with a specific record in a specific place that I know from the ground up. The record is public. The documents are real. The pattern is consistent.

 

He has been in positions of power long enough to have done real damage.

Now he is being considered for the cabinet position that oversees U.S. 

 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, border operations that intersect directly with tribal sovereignty, and federal law enforcement in communities that have spent two centuries watching federal power arrive without accountability.

 

At his Senate confirmation hearing on March 18, 2026, Mullin said in general terms that he respects tribal nations and would work with them on border and security issues.

 

No senator asked him about the $2.1 million in property his family sold to the Cherokee Nation in 2024. No senator asked him about the legislative rider his office drafted targeting the United Keetoowah Band. No senator asked him what he knew, and when he knew it, about federal enforcement actions involving Native Americans in communities his agency would oversee.

 

He answered the questions he was asked. That has always been the arrangement.

Here is Troy Littledeer's LinkedIn profile, so you can assess his legitimacy:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/troylittledeer

For readers abroad, Markwayne Mullins is Trump’s nominee for Homeland Security Secretary. He will have to be confirmed by the US Senate that the US Senate.

 

Michael Roberts: Iran and the US economy

Iran and the US economy

by Michael Roberts

The Iran war rages on.  Having failed to repeat his Venezuela option’’ ie decapitating the Iranian leaders and then getting Iran to surrender, US President Trump has been dragged into a long war.  So far, he has opted for escalation, cajoled by his advisers and forced on by unbridled attacks on Iran and Lebanon by Israel.  Strikes by both sides on so-called upstream gas production facilities in recent days are a significant escalation, with potentially long-term consequences. The latest strikes were the first time facilities associated with the production of fossil fuel energy had been hit in the conflict, rather than sites associated more generally with the oil and gas industry.

As I said in my first post at the outbreak of the attack by the US and Israel, that “two things need to happen before oil prices shoot up to $100/b or above. First, there must be significant and prolonged disruption of all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, given that the Strait carries about one in five barrels of oil in the world. Second, the missile and drone attacks must start hitting oil production installations. If those two factors come into play, then the oil price per barrel could be in triple figures.” 

This has come to pass.  Today, crude oil prices hit $116/b (before falling back to $110) and even worse, natural gas prices in Europe exploded to over €68 per MWh, thus reaching their highest levels in over three years.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) now reckons that the war in the Middle East is @creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market@.  “With crude and oil product flows through the Strait of Hormuz plunging from around 20 mb/d before the war to a trickle currently, limited capacity available to bypass the crucial waterway, and storage filling up, Gulf countries have cut total oil production by at least 10 mb/d. In the absence of a rapid resumption of shipping flows, supply losses are set to increase.”

Global oil supply is projected to plunge by 8 mb/d in March, with curtailments in the Middle East partly offset by higher output from non-OPEC+ producers, Kazakhstan and Russia following disruptions at the start of the year. The loss of energy imports and the rise in prices hits some countries more than others. Asia in particular, suffers, followed by Europe, while, at least for energy, the US economy is relatively least affected.

Indeed, one part of the US economy is benefiting, namely US oil companies.  They stand to receive a windfall of more than $60bn this year if crude prices maintain the levels they have hit since the start of the Iran war. Modelling by investment bank Jefferies estimates American producers will generate an extra $5bn cash flow this month alone following a roughly 47 per cent rise in oil prices since the conflict began.  The capitulation of Venezuela to US control is also enabling US energy companies to raise production and increase sharply revenues from the now highly priced Venezuelan oil exports.

But for the rest of the US economy, the sharp rise in energy prices, whether at the gas stations or in home heating and industry, is already starting to feed through to prices overall.   Even before the war started, US producer prices (ie the prices that manufacturers sell their goods to wholesalers and retailers) were on the rise.  The producer price index (PPI) rose 0.7% in February with fuel and related products up 1.1%.  That meant PPI inflation was up 3.4% from February last year. Inflation in the US was not heading towards the Federal Reserve target of 2% a year, but instead heading back up. 

As for economic growth, the second estimate of US real GDP growth in Q4 2025 was revised down sharply to an annualised 0.7% qoq, well below 1.4% in the advance estimate. The new estimate reflected downward revisions in every component of GDP: exports, consumer spending, government spending, and investment. US real GDP growth for 2025 is now estimated at 2%, down from 2.4% in 2024 and 3.4% in 2023, while per capita real income rose only 1.1% in 2025 and fell in the last quarter of that year.

Slowing growth in national output is now also accompanied by falling employment growth.  In January, the US economy lost 92,000 jobs. Job openings in the professional and business services sector have fallen to just 4.0 per 100 employees, the lowest since the 2020 pandemic slump and down nearly 60% since the peak of white-collar employment in 2022. When white-collar hiring slows this sharply, the rest of the job market usually follows. 

Now the Iran war will widen the scissors between slowing economic growth and employment and rising inflation – in other words, stagflation is the order of the day. Donald Trump’s one-time pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the US economy is too weak to handle oil at over $100 per barrel: “I don’t think this is an economy that is going to be able to handle $100 a barrel for oil, it’s just not,” EJ Antoni told the FT. “The economy is weaker than we thought it was, and inflation is worse than we thought it was.” New home sales plunged by 17.6% in January, the sharpest decline since 2013. 

This stagflationary environment has thrown the US Federal Reserve into a quandary.  Should the Fed raise its policy interest rate in attempt to curb inflation; or should it lower the rate to support employment and growth?  Yesterday, the Fed decided by a majority on the monetary policy committee to do nothing. The Fed increased its forecast for inflation this year and indicated that only one rate cut was likely in 2026, if at all. Far from heading towards the Fed’s target for inflation of 2%, inflation is now heading back towards 3% or above.  Today, the UK’s Bank of England and the ECB also held their policy rates.

Mainstream economists reckon that what primarily causes inflation is a rise in ‘inflation expectations’, a behavioural theory that this blog has refuted several times.  Five-year, five-year forward inflation expectations have not moved much in the last five years. Rising inflation had mainly a supply-side cause in the post-pandemic period and it will be the same this time.

The impact of the war is intensifying the widening gap between the rich elite in the US and the rest of American households – a gap that mainstream economists have called a ‘K-shaped’’ economy.  Spending growth has been notably faster at the top end of the income spectrum, while consumers at the bottom, who saw a brief burst of high wage growth post-pandemic, are now seeing wage growth slow.

Forbes magazine just released its latest annual ranking of global billionaires. The pace at which extreme wealth is rising is simply staggering.  According to inequality expert, Gabriel Zucman, the wealth of global billionaires has now reached the equivalent of 17% of world GDP.

The Iran war is also exposing new risks to the US economy that could trigger a financial crash. The 2008 global financial crash was not caused by high public debt, as many mainstream economists continually argue.  On the contrary, it was the meltdown in private sector debt that led to bailouts by government and then the rise in public debt followed.  In 2026, a private debt meltdown is again the danger. The recent report by an obscure financial analyst group, Citrini Research, on the future impact of AI caused a stock market sell-off in software companies before financial investors decided that there would be no crash in that sector.

However, what has become an issue is the possibility of defaults and bankruptcies in firms that have borrowed money, not from the traditional commercial banks, but instead from what are called private credit sources. In the past two decades, direct lending by private funds has become a crucial strand of the US financial system, providing credit to start-ups and other companies that would struggle to get bank loans or sell bonds. A classic private credit fund takes money from pension funds and endowments and locks it up for five years or more. That allows these private funds to make long-term loans to companies without fear that their investors will want their money back.  

But some of the big boys in private finance decided to attract pension funds and others to invest by offering “semi-liquid” funds, which promised investors quarterly access to their money, with the caveat that withdrawals could be capped at 5 per cent of fund assets to avoid fire sales.  These ‘financial products’ were a hit, attracting nearly $200bn investment and growing 60 per cent annually between 2021 and last year.

But these private credit funds are not regulated like commercial bank lending, so there is an inherent risk involved, just as there was with sub-prime mortgage lending in the financial crash of 2007-8.  It’s true that the size of the private credit market is relatively small compared to the total US loans market. Also, private credit funds are highly capitalised, with equity typically accounting for 65-80% of total assets more than six times the capitalisation of the banks, where equity represents about 10%.  As a result, the Fed’s 2025 stress tests found that even under severe recession scenarios, private credit would not threaten financial stability. Across the full spectrum of US credit markets, private credit has only a modest share of total credit outstanding. 

So there’s nothing to worry about? That is what they said about the mortgage companies that lent wildly in 2008.  Small cogs that clog up can also cause blockages for large cogs. As the US economy slowed, the private credit default rate (ie companies borrowing from private credit funds) has hit 9.2%. That’s higher than the 2008 bank loan default rate.

UBS says private credit defaults could hit 15%. That’s three times the peak bank loan default rate in 2008.

As a result, investors in private credit funds are trying to get out. And while most private credit funds have rules that limit quarterly redemptions to 5 per cent of assets — enabling them to “gate” (ie prevent) excess outflows — the exodus already echoes 2008.

Moreover, private credit and commercial banks are closely connected. “Banks are lenders, counter parties, service providers and, at times, backstops to non-bank entities,” observes Hernández de Cos, lamenting the “complex ecosystems of leverage, liquidity transformations and duration risk” beyond regulators’ control, which makes private credit a potential channel of systemic risk. US banks have $300 billion in exposure to private credit: Wells Fargo leads with $60 billion in loans to private credit funds. JPMorgan, which recently marked down software-linked loans and curbed lending, has $22 billion in exposure.

Goldman Sachs estimates that up to $70bn could flow out of private credit funds in the next two years and force the worst-hit managers to sell loans to meet redemption requests. And the longer the Middle East turmoil grinds on, the more risks will rise. Or to put it another way: the Iran war-private credit combination may not seem damaging enough to cause a global recession, but it could certainly spark a financial crash.

But maybe the AI technology boom will come to the aid of the US economy.  Some are arguing that already the US productivity of labour is rising faster as a result of the adoption of AI models and AI agents in companies.  In 2025, US labour productivity rose 2.8% compared to 2.3% in 2024, above the long-term historic average and above consensus forecasts.

Labour productivity is calculated as real GDP divided by hours worked. This can vary with changes in technology and in the amount of capital per worker.  But mainstream economists also look at total factor productivity (TFP), which is a measure of the growth in productivity not accounted for by increased capital investment or labour intensity. That is also picking up.

Everything depends on how quickly companies and their employees adopt AI models in their work and how far that spreads through the economy.  The St Louis Fed economists reckon that workers who used AI models could save 5.4% of their work hours, or 2.2 hours a week. But a 2024 working paper by Kathryn Bonney and others found that only 5.4% of firms had formally adopted generative AI as of February 2024.  That suggests that worker adoption remains mostly informal and won’t appear in productivity statistics.  

In a paper, Jed Kolko reviewed recent research on AI and its impact on the US labour market.  He concluded that @early research findings on AI’s impact on the labor market are inconclusive, weak signals about the future, and only one part of the AI research landscape.  And that @the commercial diffusion of the current generation of large language models (LLMs) is so recent that any lasting economic impact would likely take years to show up in employment, output, or productivity data.@

Current data from the Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey shows that fewer than one-fifth of firms are using AI in any capacity, and even fewer are using AI directly for producing goods and services. Indeed, the @transitional disruption from AI to date is not outpacing recent technological changes. The occupational mix has changed over the past three years at a similar pace to the years after the start of the commercial computer era (1984) and the commercial Internet era (1996) and has not accelerated since the release of ChatGPT.

So the hoped for productivity gains from shedding human labour and replacing it with AI agents still seem some time away.  Meanwhile, the huge investment bubble in AI could soon burst.  Take the leader in AI, OpenAI. It is a $730 billion company in invested assets, but last year it generated just $13.1 billion in revenue, losing $8 billion in doing so. This year, the losses could hit $14 billion, with cumulative losses reaching $143 billion by 2029!  These projected losses are five times greater than Uber accumulated before making a profit. OpenAI claims it will be profitable by 2029, but its AI model ChatGPT’s web traffic share has dropped from 86.7% to 64.5% in the last 12 months as Google’s Gemini eats into its market share. And the cheap Chinese DeepSeek can match the performance of ChatGPT at just 1/30th of the cost.

OpenAI needs 1.2bn paying subscribers to make a profit by 2029. That does not seem likely. OpenAI hopes to keep the loans and equity investments coming because it claims it can soon achieve an AI model that is super-intelligent, reasoning on its own at a superior level to the human brain. This is the AI companies’ ‘holy grail’, the moment of total enlightenment.  But the holy grail was just 19th century fiction. 

As Ruchir Sharma put it back last October, @America is now one big bet on AI@. It’s seen as the magic fix for every threat to the US economy.  But can it deliver?  More likely, there will be an AI financial bust first and possibly a recession before that question will be answered.  So AI as the saviour for Trump and the US economy remains an each-way bet.

An Irish Day. Not "St" Patrick's Day.

Sean O’Torrain March 17th 2013 

"Capitalism teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism are the strong devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and women is that of a glorified pig-trough where the biggest swine gets the most swill. James Conolly

 

This Patrick person spearheaded the drive into Ireland of Christianity which, along with British Colonialism and later British Imperialism one of the great destructive forces in Ireland. Along with beginning the break up the clan system ownership of land and opening the door to the landlords, Christianity meant the destruction of the place of women in the old Irish culture.  

Under the old laws women had much greater rights than under Christianity and landlordism and capitalism. Under these old laws for example women could divorce their husbands for seven reasons. These included if he got too fat, if he became impotent, if he talked about them behind their back, if he left a bruise on their skin. Another example was that rape was defined as including telling women lies to have sex with them. There is a legend that a woman went to petition Patrick to ask him to stop destroying womens’ rights.

The story is that he ordered his chariot driver to drive over her and killed her.

Here in Chicago there is the, "St Patricks Day" parade. I went one time but got so angry that I had to leave. Its run by an Irish American dominated union and local Irish American capitalist politicians. The leaders of the union involved and the local politicians want to claw their way up into American upper class life. 

This ambition of theirs would not be helped by celebrating the great revolutionary traditions of Irish history. I mean the Chicago bourgeoisie would not trust Daly (the former mayor) to be their front man if he was marching behind a portrait of James Connolly the great Irish revolutionary and socialist. 

 

So they have to sanitize the history much like they do with regard to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. To fill the vacuum this creates, they have the wee green people, the green river, the green backs pouring into the Irish American pubs. Then there is the pipe bands. I love the pipes but then the main band is the Chicago cops pipe band marching in Scottish tartans. Try enjoying the pipes when they are being played by an organization with their history of repression and murder of the Haymarket leaders, the union organizers, the Black Panthers. It’s not possible.

But I am managing to celebrate and to consider what it means to have been born in Ireland. I went to a show here where Colin Dunne was dancing and Liz Carroll was fiddling and after we read a wee bit of Joyce. To see these artist’s perform is to be reminded that in spite of everything neither the British ruling classes nor Christianity was able to destroy the Irish culture. When Liz Carroll plays the fiddle it’s like being home again. And when Dunne struts his arrogant aggressive feet across the stage it is to think of the generations of dancers who kept the dance alive. 

Now it is leaping out of the straitjacket that anti-sexual Christianity tried to keep it in, and being enjoyed by hundreds of millions across the world in spite of the attempt by the British ruling classes to wipe it out. And to read Joyce is to celebrate the powerful resilience of the spirit and the great drive to speak in our own words and our own thoughts. Wee Joyce was a fighter.

Tonight I am speaking at a meeting and party about the Derry uprising of 1969. This is being organized by the local chapter of the anti-racist action. These young people organize against the Klan and the various racist organizations. To the meeting/party tonight they have invited a Mexican anti-racist skinhead group and a Polish anti-racist skinhead group. I am looking forward to speaking about Derry and the events there. Hip Hop music will follow. It will be a wild night altogether. As a concession to my environment I got a friend to make a Leprauchaun. But not a bourgeois lep.

You know the bourgeois lep is smoking a pipe, obviously pushing the line of the tobacco lobby and he, its always a he, has a pot of gold. A store of capital in other words. Mine is a revolutionary lep. Instead of clenching a pipe in one hand he has a clenched fist raised above his head and under his arm copies of books by Connolly, Marx and Trotsky. No pot of gold. I am trying to get an artist to make me a female revolutionary lep.

I hope you all have a good time today and a few moments to think about the people who helped keep the culture alive. A couple of years ago here I organized a night of alternative Irish celebration. The theme of it was to say thanks to the struggles of Black America for their role in helping strengthen Irish culture. Part of the inspiration for the uprising in struggle in Ireland in the late 1960's was the Black revolt in America. The struggles that developed in the late 1960's in Ireland gave new vitality to Irish culture. At this time of year along with Connolly and Larkin and Davitt and MacCracken we should remember Malcom X, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King. 

The US Role in Iran: 1953 to 2026

From the Texas Reporter

 

Why many ordinary Iranians might sincerely see the United States as a terrorist nation

Try an exercise in perspective.

Imagine you are not an American reading this.

Imagine you are a shopkeeper in Tehran, a taxi driver in Isfahan, or a teacher in Shiraz. You are not a politician. You are not a soldier. You are just trying to run a business, feed your kids, and live your life.

Now imagine the history you grew up with.

⸻

1953 — Your democracy is destroyed

Your country once had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

He nationalized Iran’s oil industry so your country’s resources would benefit Iranians instead of foreign companies.

The United States and Britain respond by orchestrating the 1953 Iranian coup d’état.

Your elected government is overthrown.

The Central Intelligence Agency helps reinstall Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah.

He rules for decades as an authoritarian monarch.

From your perspective, the world’s most powerful democracy just destroyed yours.

⸻

1960s–1970s — Secret police rule

Under the Shah, a feared secret police force called SAVAK emerges.

Opposition figures disappear.

Political prisoners are tortured.

Dissidents are watched and arrested.

The Shah is armed, trained, and supported by the United States.

So from your perspective, the repression in your country is being backed by a foreign power.

⸻

1979 — Revolution explodes

Eventually the anger erupts.

The Iranian Revolution overthrows the Shah.

Soon after, the Iran hostage crisis begins when Iranian students seize the U.S. embassy.

Americans remember that moment as humiliation.

Iranians remember 1953.

Two nations remembering completely different histories.

⸻

1980s — War and tragedy

Then your country is invaded by Saddam Hussein, beginning the Iran–Iraq War.

Hundreds of thousands die.

The United States supports Iraq diplomatically and strategically during much of the war.

Then, in 1988, the U.S. Navy cruiser USS Vincennes shoots down Iran Air Flight 655.

290 civilians die.

Men. Women. Children.

To Americans, it is called a tragic mistake.

To many Iranians, it looks like their civilians were killed and the world moved on.

⸻

1990s–2010s — Sanctions crush the economy

Then come the sanctions.

Decades of them.

Financial sanctions. Oil sanctions. Banking sanctions.

Iran is locked out of the global financial system.

If you are that Iranian taxi driver or shopkeeper:

• your currency collapses

• medicine becomes harder to import

• inflation destroys your savings

• jobs disappear

And none of it was your decision.

⸻

2015 — A moment of hope

Then something changes.

Iran signs the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal.

Sanctions are lifted.

Frozen Iranian funds are released.

For a moment, ordinary people think the future might finally improve.

Businesses reopen.

Foreign investment begins returning.

Families start planning again.

⸻

2018 — The deal is abandoned

Then the United States withdraws from the agreement under Donald Trump.

Sanctions snap back harder than before.

Iran’s currency crashes.

Inflation skyrockets.

Your life becomes harder overnight.

From your perspective, the most powerful country on Earth simply changed its mind and crushed your economy again.

⸻

2020 — A national leader is killed

The United States kills Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport.

Americans see him as responsible for attacks on U.S. forces.

But in Iran, millions attend his funeral.

To many Iranians, it looks like a foreign power assassinated one of their top national leaders.

⸻

2025 — The United States bombs Iran

In June 2025, the United States carries out major airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, using bunker-busting bombs and cruise missiles. 

From the perspective of an ordinary Iranian, the world’s most powerful military just bombed their country.

⸻

2026 — War expands

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launch a massive wave of strikes across Iran targeting military infrastructure and leadership. 

Hundreds of strikes hit missile bases, command centers, and other facilities across the country.

Civilian areas are also affected in the chaos of war.

Then the bombing continues.

U.S. strikes hit naval targets in the Strait of Hormuz, destroying Iranian mine-laying vessels during the conflict. 

And more recently, U.S. airstrikes targeted facilities on Kharg Island, the hub for most of Iran’s oil exports. 

From the perspective of that Iranian shopkeeper or taxi driver, the most powerful country on Earth is once again bombing their nation.

⸻

So imagine how it looks from their side

You didn’t plan coups.

You didn’t write nuclear policy.

You didn’t control the government.

You just tried to live your life.

Yet the history you lived through includes:

• your democracy overthrown

• decades of sanctions crippling your economy

• civilian airliners shot down

• your leaders assassinated

• your country bombed repeatedly

• your oil exports targeted

• your currency collapsing again and again

So when Iranian leaders call the United States a terrorist nation, many Americans dismiss it as propaganda.

But if you were the one living through this history…

You might see the world very differently.

⸻

Understanding this perspective does not mean supporting Iran’s government.

But history looks very different depending on where you stand.

And if we want peace, we have to understand how the people on the other side see the story.