"Iranian Sleeper Cells"

Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste

I’ve been on WBAI on and off all day discussing developments in our new war with Iran live on-air: you can catch me on stream if you would like to. What a stupid goddamn day.

This article’s ending has been edited somewhat since the original release

“There will either be peace, or there will be tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left.” Trump said in his 4-minute speech a few hours after he announced the total destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities: a thing he could not possibly know for sure at the time and which turned out to be false. “If peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill.”

Trump did not clarify what Iran would need to do for “peace” to be achieved. Stop bombing Israel? That can’t be it — they weren’t bombing Israel when Israel did a preemptive strike that wiped out their top scientists and several ranking military leaders. The warmongers told us we had to bomb Iran to stop them from gaining a nuclear bomb, but Trump claimed he’d accomplished that: a non-nuclear Iran can’t be the end goal either.

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chief of Staff John Daniel "Razin" Caine did little to clear up the confusion at their press conference this morning. Iran knows the exact steps it needs to make peace, they said: that makes one of us, I guess. Hegseth declared that regime change was not the goal but also that they undertook the mission “to neutralize the threats to our national interests posed by the Iranian nuclear program and the collective self-defense of our troops and our ally Israel.” Which presumably means Iran will also have to stop bombing Israel. Whether Israel will stop bombing Iran remains to be seen.

The truth, I suspect, was Truthed by Trump on June 17th: “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Roll over. Show your belly. Abandon your sovereignty and do exactly what we say.

Robert E. Lee surrendered unconditionally to Ulysses S Grant and the Confederacy ceasd to exist (though, as a reader points out, it came back in a different form). Emperor Hirohito unconditionally surrendered to General MacArthur and Imperial Japan ceased to exist. If Iran were to unconditionally surrender to Trump and Netanyahu, it too would cease to exist in its current form; America and Israel would determine what happens next. “Unconditional Surrender” is regime change by another name.

We are really, really bad at regime change schemes, but at this point it doesn’t matter. Iran will never take that deal because Iran does not care to commit suicide. This isn’t some pushover nation, it’s one of the region’s two major military powers with a large standing army and plenty of national pride. They will not surrender, unconditionally or otherwise; they will assert their national sovereignty, militarily or otherwise. They are already reportedly moving to close the Strait of Hormuz, the passage through which a fifth of the worlds’s oil travels. Marco Rubio has called the potential move “suicidal.” Escalation seems all but certain.

A few days ago, I wrote about infighting within MAGA’s already-fractured coalition over whether Trump should fight Israel’s war for them. I opened with a Steve Bannon quote, and I’m going to quote it again:

“If we get sucked into this war, which inexorably looks like it’s going to happen on the combat side, it’s going to not just blow up the coalition. It’s also going to thwart what we’re doing with the most important thing, which is the deportation of the illegal alien invaders that are here. If we don’t do that, we don’t have a country…this is actually, potentially a real civil war in our biggest cities.”

-Steve Bannon, The Tucker Carlson Show: 6-17-25

Bannon doesn’t hate forever wars because he values the sanctity of human life or whatever: he views such wars as distractions from his top priority of purging the Enemy Within and securing power internally. How can we send the military into Los Angeles if the military is busy destroying Iran?

As Maria says in The Sound of Music: when the Lord closes a door, sometimes he opens a window.

At 8:30 PM, less than an hour after Trump announced America’s military strike on Iran, NewsNation dropped an article: “White House monitoring possible Iranian ‘sleeper cells’ in US: Source.” The Biden and Trump administrations were/are concerned about domestic terrorists posing as everyday citizens, ready to strike when the Ayatollah calls upon them. According to the article, a February national security memo “claimed Iran has directed its proxy groups, including Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, to embed sleeper cells in the U.S. to be activated in support of potential terror activity.”

Nothing immediately wrong with this article: when you preemptively strike a state sponsor of terrorism, terrorism becomes something to worry about. But let’s fast forward to just after 10:00 PM when Matt Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington bureau chief, brought up the same concern on Steve Bannon’s War Room with slightly different wording:

“I think there is likely to be a lot of concern among Americans here at home about possible cyberattacks, about possible sleeper cells that are Iranian-aligned folks, Hezbollah-aligned folks maybe here, domestically, in the United States. I think [Trump’s] trying to deter that.”

That’s a little different than embedded Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad terror cells. “Hezbollah-aligned folks” sounds a lot more like the language these guys use to describe anti-genocide protesters.

Two hours later, Charlie Kirk posted the following:

Turning Point USA’s CEO jacking off to Red Dawn fantasies before the craters have stopped smoking would be very funny by itself, but becomes concerning in context. I did a quick Twitter search for other mentions of sleeper cells, and here is what I immediately found:

Source

Source

Source

The Trump regime has used “terrorist” rhetoric since the beginning. Support for Palestine is terrorism. Protesters in general are terrorists, often paid by our mortal enemies to sow discord and panic. Immigrants are violent illegal alien terrorists. People who deface Teslas are domestic terrorists. Democrats who ask for warrants? Implied supporters of terrorism, at very least. And on and on and on: this exhausting legacy of our failed War on Terror: our ancient boogeyman; this old, stupid fear.

But that fear didn’t feel stupid in 2001, or 2003, or for much of the rest of that decade. We were genuinely, actively, terrified, and we were willing to do anything to make that terror go away. We, as a nation, signed away our privacy with the PATRIOT act. We cheered indefinite detention and justified torture as an interrogation technique. We attempted to impose democracy by force in two countries and failed catastrophically in both of them. All these things, we did because we were terrified. We remembered 9/11, and the Madrid train bombings of 2004, and the London Bombings of 2005. Nothing has changed between then and now except temporal distance that lessens that fear. We are more than prepped, as a nation, to fear again. Exhibit A: American politicians and pundits currently falling for the exact same nuclear-weapons lie Bush told to get us into Iraq. It stands to reason that we remain just as susceptible, as a country, to terror.

There is a very real possibility that, if things escalate as they seem likely to escalate, we are going to see the kind of crackdowns Bannon and Kirk have yearned for all along. We could see the Insurrection Act invoked with bipartisan support. We could see the death of due process: not just for immigrants or anyone ICE decides might be an immigrant, but for everyone, as a matter of policy.

It’s a way out for Trump that had not occurred to me when I wrote that last article: a Reichstag Fire by proxy. The cultists get their apocalypse. The military-industrial complex gets its thousand pounds of flesh. And the national socialists get a shiny new boot to crush their enemies with. Everybody wins! I mean, except us. We lose really, really hard.

This is a dark vision that has not yet come to pass, and there are things we can do to thwart it. We must enlist now, today, in the war on terror — not on terrorists or terrorism or “designated terrorist organizations,” but terror itself, which leads people to surrender their rights and conflate dissent with treason. They will attempt to take advantage of America’s very reasonable concerns of retaliatory terrorist attacks on US soil and use them to make people fear their neighbors. They will tell us that crackdowns are the only way to keep people safe and that if they have nothing to hide, there’s nothing to fear. They will tell us that if we don’t sit down and shut up, we will be labeled terrorists too.

We need to do what we can not just to resist that terror within ourselves, but to help our neighbors fight it and to force the Democrats to fight it. The Dems have a history of cosigning things that have “national security” attached to them, because they’re poll-driven creatures who fear appearing weak on foreign policy. If they begin to make soft little surrender noises on any kind of first amendment violation or reduction of due process, we have to bully them as mercilessly as the red states have bullied their own Republican representatives at town halls over the past few months. There can be no compromise whatsoever, regardless of specific circumstances: we cannot give an inch.

People are wondering: will the military refuse to follow orders if deployed domestically? We should be asking ourselves the same question. As civilians, our orders do not come from a chain of command, they come from our legal code. Laws are meant to reflect morality, not determine it. At what point do some forms of disobedience become not only justified, but a moral obligation? America’s founders wrote an entire Declaration about this. It’s worth thinking about.

These are dark times, and getting darker. I wish this were more cheerful. But God opening windows? That works both ways. Unlike 2003, Trump has not bothered to feed the people over a year of propaganda before striking. According to Axios, only 16 percent of Americans support military action in Iran. 65 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of independents, and 53 percent of Republicans — 60 percent of the total population! — believe we should not get involved at all. Sure, some of those Republicans will change their mind because Trump did, but compare these numbers to sentiments about Iraq on the eve of that disastrous war. A few weeks before the invasion, 83 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats supported military action.

Anti-Trump protests are about to get a nitro boost of anti-war rage. Trump may have found a path to party unity — but he’s paying a terrible price.