FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.In forty-eight hours the Supreme Court closed its term and rewrote who runs the government. Six to three, again and again — a number that tells you how fixed this Court has become. It gave Donald Trump the agencies, opened the money spigot, and let the states decide who counts as a girl. Then it drew exactly two lines it would not let him cross: it would not erase the Fourteenth Amendment, and it would not hand him the Federal Reserve.On Tuesday’s Fivestack, Zev counted the five rulings down — least significant to most — with guest Anne P. Mitchell, the Stanford Law professor and federal-law author who writes Notes from the Front. (Dean Blundell was out sick; Mitchell stepped in at short notice.) What follows is the countdown, the words the justices actually wrote, and the impact measured in numbers.5️⃣ The Court Lets the States Decide Who’s a GirlFor three years Lindsey Hecox fought Idaho’s law to try out for the Boise State women’s track team, and a West Virginia middle-schooler, Becky Pepper-Jackson, fought to stay on her school squad. On June 30 the Court ended both fights at once, upholding state bans on transgender girls in girls’ and women’s sports. Kavanaugh wrote it. The vote was 6–3.Mitchell put her finger on the move that should trouble even people who welcome the result: the Court resurrected “separate but equal.” A century of race cases held that separate is inherently unequal. Here the majority says the opposite — that limiting girls’ teams to “biological females” is “substantially related” to an important government interest, and so it stands. The ruling leans on the meaning of “sex” when Title IX passed in 1972, before the country was having any conversation about gender identity. “It’s funny,” Mitchell noted, “how they only do that when it’s to their ideological advantage.”The reach is total. This is the Supreme Court, not a circuit — it is now the law of the land. Twenty-seven states already ban trans girls from school sports; every public school and university in them, K-12 through the NCAA, now operates on solid constitutional ground. Sotomayor, in dissent: “to the Court, the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious.” The majority, she wrote, lets states bar every transgender athlete “even if the facts show” no competitive advantage — moving the goalposts to answer the constitutional question without the record to support it.🎯 THE GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT — The Next Fight Is Already HereThis week’s GroundNews.com’s Blindspot is the sequel the Court already greenlit: it granted review of the assault-weapons bans in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois — the first direct ruling on AR-15-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, with about a dozen state bans hanging on it. Arguments come this fall. Mitchell, who says she hasn’t missed a call yet this term, expects the bans struck. Power, then money, now the guns — the same six justices, one case at a time.Sign up for the blindspot at groundnews.com/fivestack and get 40% off of their vantage plan.4️⃣ Trump Tried to End Birthright Citizenship — and LostOn day one of his second term Trump signed an order stripping citizenship from babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented and temporary residents. Eighteen months later Chief Justice Roberts told him no, 6–3: children born here to parents “unlawfully or temporarily present” are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and “are citizens at birth.” The challengers’ reading, Roberts wrote, “commanded only a dissent in 1898, and neither time nor circumstance has changed the fact it is not the law.”Mitchell traced the stakes back to the worst day in the Court’s history. The Fourteenth Amendment exists because of Dred Scott — the 1857 ruling that Black Americans born on this soil were not citizens. The amendment was the country’s answer. Her takeaway: even a Supreme Court can be overruled by the people who wrote the Constitution to begin with. “They are only one of three — I argue four — branches of government,” she said. “The fourth being we the people.”The number behind the ruling is enormous. Roughly 255,000 to 260,000 babies a year — about one in nine U.S. births — had their citizenship riding on this case, and the order reached past the undocumented to the children of H-1B workers, international students, asylum seekers, and DACA recipients. It is Trump’s biggest defeat of the term. And the warning sits in the dissent: Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, wrote 90 pages arguing the other way. The three justices who wanted to read the amendment down are still on the bench.3️⃣ The Court Opens the Spigot — Unlimited Party MoneyA Watergate-era cap on how much a party could spend hand-in-glove with its own candidate just fell. In NRSC v. FEC, Kavanaugh wrote for a 6–3 majority that coordinated-spending limits “necessarily abridge political parties’ freedom of speech.” One of the original plaintiffs, back in 2022, was a Senate candidate named JD Vance — now the Vice President, who will run on a case he helped bring.Mitchell flagged a detail most coverage skipped: the suit was filed under Biden, but by the time it reached the Court, the Trump DOJ agreed with the plaintiffs. The justices had to appoint outside counsel to defend the limits at all — and you have to wonder how vigorous a defense the law got with no administration behind it. The result rewires the money. A single donor’s reach jumps from $7,000 given directly to a candidate to roughly $500,000 routed through the party — a 70-fold widening, by Justice Kagan’s math — and the party can now operate in lockstep with the campaign. Republicans are cheering louder than Democrats, Mitchell said, because “they’re the party of a massive amount of money behind the donors.”The throughline is Citizens United. That ruling freed the outside money; this one frees the inside money, the party and the candidate spending as one. Kagan, in dissent, warned it “ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.” Watch the airwaves in contested districts as November approaches.2️⃣ The Fed Survives — But Read the Fine PrintHere the show did what Narativ exists to do: correct the headline. Every outlet reported that the Court let Lisa Cook keep her seat at the Federal Reserve. Mitchell stopped Zev cold. “That’s not what it says.”What the 5–4 ruling actually did was send Cook’s case back down. Trump moved to fire her over an allegation of mortgage fraud surfaced by Bill Pulte; the Court found she had never been given a chance to answer it, and remanded so she can present her defense. Along the way the majority wrote an exhaustive history of why the Fed, created by its own statute, has always stood apart — but it pointedly did not announce a blanket rule that Fed governors can only be fired for cause. As Mitchell put it, Trump probably wishes he had fired Cook without stating a reason at all. Had he done that, she’d have gone the way of Rebecca Slaughter.Why it ranks second on a list where it touches one person: this is the board that sets interest rates, that steers inflation, affordability, the direction of the whole economy. A president who can install a majority on the Federal Reserve can manipulate the cost of living heading into an election. The Court drew its second line here — not out of principle, but because even this majority knows a president who can fire the Fed chair on a whim can crash the bond market. The line held by a single vote.1️⃣ The 90-Year Wall Falls — Trump Can Fire Them AllThe biggest ruling of the term overturned a unanimous 1935 precedent. For ninety years, Humphrey’s Executor held that a president could not fire the members of independent agencies just for disagreeing with him. On June 29, in Trump v. Slaughter, Roberts erased it 6–3. The case began when Trump fired FTC commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya in 2025 with no cause, citing only Article II.Mitchell called the animus by name. Roberts has been gunning for Humphrey’s since 2010, chipping away case by case, shopping for the right plaintiff and the right moment for fifteen years — a Federalist Society long game, with Trump as the figurehead willing to bring the suit. The Chief Justice wrote his contempt into the opinion: “if anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it.” This was never really about Slaughter. It was about who is allowed to work in government.The impact is structural: more than two dozen independent agencies — the FTC, the SEC, the FCC, the NLRB, and the rest — lose their insulation. Congress built them bipartisan on purpose, so the referees couldn’t be fired for the call. Now they answer to one man. Mitchell offered her “cynical hope” — that Trump has already done most of the firing, so the damage may be priced in. Zev was less sanguine: a president who has spent his term gutting the government of anyone who opposes him will go as deep as the law now lets him. The enforcement machine has one master, and he has shown he will use it.ALSO FROM THE BENCHTwo rulings barely made the headlines, and Mitchell brought both to the table. In Chatri v. United States, the Court held that pulling a person’s cell-phone location data from Google is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant — Americans have “a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location information.” Against an administration building a Palantir-fed database to geolocate people, that is a real limit. And in a quieter blow to Trump, the Court let states count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day, even if they arrive after — even as the USPS floats a rule demanding states hand over their voter rolls. Mitchell’s advice: use a drop box, not the mail.THE PATTERNRead these decisions as one move. The Court expanded executive power, opened the money, upheld the culture-war ban, and reached toward the guns — and where it stopped Trump, it stopped him narrowly and for reasons of self-protection, not principle. The Fourteenth Amendment was too plain to erase; the Fed was too dangerous to hand over. Everything the Constitution’s text or the bond market protected survived. Everything else moved toward the Oval Office. That is not a term of decisions. It is a transfer of power — and the only check left standing is the one the justices can’t touch: a November election.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.The fight isn’t over; it just got more expensive. Subscribe to Narativ for the intelligence behind the news — and Know Sooner.Guest: Anne P. Mitchell writes Notes from the Front at annpmitchell.substack.com.Thank you Lesley Jane Seymour, Robin Payes, Lalisa, Noble Blend, Michelle C. Funk, and many others for tuning into my live video with Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ Leon Black Faces the Committee — $170 Million for “Tax Advice”Leon Black sits for House Oversight tomorrow, and Zev set the stakes: $170 million paid to Jeffrey Epstein over the years for what Black calls tax and estate planning. Narativ has reported that much of it ran through tax swindles — including the art-deal scheme the show investigated a few weeks ago, which Zev called one of the most egregious examples of how Black and Epstein conspired to steal from the American taxpayer.Zev set expectations low for the testimony itself. Black, he said, will follow the Bill Gates script — a 30-year friend of Epstein who claims he never knew, who will obfuscate, define the word “me,” and offer no real accountability. But Black is 1A in this story alongside Donald Trump: the financial crimes reach back to the 1987 crash, the $62.5 million he paid the US Virgin Islands in 2023 to escape prosecution, and the money that moved between Black and Russian women. Black has been photographed beside Vladimir Putin, and he traveled to Moscow with Trump in 1996. The money, Zev noted, keeps leading the same direction.4️⃣ The Real Cost of Venezuela Comes HomeTwo earthquakes leveled the towns west of Caracas on Wednesday night. The toll climbed through the show — at least 188 dead, and rising — in a country the United States captured in January and has occupied ever since. Marco Rubio has already sent resources, and Zev noted the policy itself is sound: you endear yourself to a people you now hold.But Dean landed the contradiction hard. He reminded viewers of Hurricane Helene’s wreckage still unrepaired across North Carolina, of the Texas floods that killed children at Camp Mystic, of FEMA money Trump refused at home — while resources flow to Venezuela to protect oil. When you seize a nation, you seize its rubble too. The bill for empire doesn’t stop when the cameras leave.3️⃣ A War He Calls “Over” Keeps ClimbingThe Iran war’s price tag won’t stop rising. The administration sent Congress an $87.6 billion supplemental — $21 billion for munitions, $17.3 billion in operations, $12.1 billion classified that no one outside the room can see. And that number, Zev stressed, leaves out the biggest line: nine US sites hit in the first 48 hours, carriers in dry dock, dozens of aircraft destroyed. The real cost runs toward $200 billion.Dean pushed it further — fold in the restitution and the deal-servicing meant to reopen Gulf investment, and the figure approaches half a trillion dollars for a war Zev called foolish to enter and worse to lose. That’s money, the two noted, that could have funded healthcare, the affordable housing Trump just abandoned, or the debt. Instead it went to a war the president promised he’d never fight.2️⃣ Two 6-3 Rulings in a Day — The Court Guts TPS and AsylumThe Supreme Court spent the spring letting lower courts slow Trump down. Thursday it stopped pretending — twice. One 6-3 ruling ends Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, stripping protection from roughly 350,000 to half a million people who have built decades of American life and now face removal. The second revived border “metering,” capping how many asylum seekers can apply each day and turning the rest away at the door.Zev flagged the human edge: Syrians sent back may face a hostile new regime as potential opponents; Haitians return to the most poverty-stricken country in the hemisphere. Dean named the design beneath the law — not protecting Americans, but vilifying everyone else, a cudgel sharpened since “they’re eating the pets.” Justice Sotomayor, dissenting from the bench, said the ruling “extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”1️⃣ The Postmaster Enforces an Order the Courts Already StruckThe breaking story, and the one the show argued matters most: Postmaster General David Steiner testified Thursday that the Postal Service will withhold mail ballots from any state that won’t surrender its voter rolls. Asked directly by Senator Gary Peters whether USPS would still mail ballots to a non-complying state, Steiner answered: “No.” A federal judge struck down the underlying executive order a day earlier. Steiner is enforcing it anyway.Dean called it plainly — an attempt to run January 6th through the mail — and read the order aloud: DHS directed to mash Social Security, immigration, and State Department records into citizenship lists; USPS, built by Congress to stay out of politics, turned into the gatekeeper of who may vote by mail. Combine that with the SAVE Act, he warned, and you build double jeopardy for anyone without a passport or driver’s license, anyone who changed their name, every woman who married last year and no longer matches a federal list. Zev traced the wider machine — the career election officials at DHS replaced by 2020 deniers, Pulte now atop ODNI, a multi-department assault on November. The courts may not stop it in time. That’s the alarm.THE PATTERNRead the five together and the shape is unmistakable: a regime spending half a trillion abroad while refusing FEMA at home, deporting the desperate while pardoning El Chapo’s people, and rewriting the rules of the next election through a mailroom and a barcode. Zev and Dean kept returning to one word — colonialism — and one comparison: Vladimir Putin. The cost of the Trump presidency, Zev said, will dwarf even the $80 trillion Narativ has tracked. But Dean closed on the read beneath the desperation: these are cornered rats, a fingernail from The Hague, and that fear is exactly why all of it is happening at once. Stay calm. Call your senator. Fight.Narativ publishes the full investigation of Trump’s USPS midterm play today. Subscribe at narativ.org to read it.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Uncomfortable Truth by Monica, LC - Silence is Complicity, Grace Lovelace, julie elder, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Denver Riggleman came on to break down five stories. He left having broken news of his own: the former Republican congressman and intelligence officer told Zev Shalev he is “at 99%” to run for governor of Virginia — and to run unaffiliated, as a one-man “party of the rational.”The reveal landed at the end of an hour that kept circling one idea. A president too weak to wait — collapsing abroad, sinking at home — is rushing everything, blaming everyone, and selling a peace nobody believes, while the guardrails that used to catch him are being pulled out one at a time. Filling in for Dean Blundell, Riggleman brought the credential that made the day’s intelligence story personal: fifteen years in the Air Force, a posting at the NSA, and four oaths to the Constitution. Here is how the five fit together.5️⃣ The Green-Slime LagoonTrump painted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue” for the 250th. The dark coating cooked the water, the algae bloomed, the paint peeled — and the president blamed vandals he cannot produce, routing reporters to the Interior Department and an investigation of “six people” while offering no evidence of his own.Riggleman read it as the whole administration in miniature. “An inveterate liar is going to inveterately lie,” he said. “It’s like, don’t believe your lying eyes.” The decision tree behind the pool, he argued, is the same one behind everything: “How does it help me? How does it help my buddies? How does it bind them to me? And where do we make money?”Zev called it the work of “the distraction president” — a man spending taxpayer hours on the color of a pool while the country slides. The vandals always appear. The proof never does.4️⃣ Pulte’s PurgeA housing-finance executive with no intelligence background now runs America’s spy agencies. Bill Pulte, the new acting Director of National Intelligence, began purging staff this week and ordered 300 to 400 of the roughly 1,000 employees at the National Counterterrorism Center identified for firing — the one center built to stop the next 9/11.This is where Riggleman stopped laughing. He worked alongside the NCTC in uniform, and he tied the cuts directly to the Iran fallout: an administration raising the risk of terror attacks while gutting the ability to detect them. “Whether you get shot on purpose or shot on accident, you’re still getting shot,” he said. He went further — calling the combination “treasonous,” and arguing there is no longer “baseline truth in the intelligence apparatus anymore. It’s whatever Trump wants.”His verdict on the larger pattern: the people who tell a president inconvenient truths are being replaced by people who won’t.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.3️⃣ The World Already VotedPew’s new 36-country survey put numbers to the freefall. A median of 23% express confidence in Trump’s handling of world affairs — below Putin, below Xi. Seventy-four percent disapprove of his handling of Iran. In Canada, the share calling the U.S. a reliable partner fell from 83% in 2022 to 35% today; in Germany, “considers our interests” cratered from 60% to 23%.Zev played the tell: Trump explaining why he signed the Iran deal at Versailles — “he knew my weakness, because I think Versailles is one of the great places.” A president drawn to palaces while allies walk away. Riggleman’s worry ran past the polling to the people behind it: that the world will not trust America “for generations,” because America is the country that elected this twice.2️⃣ The Deal That Isn’t a DealTrump says Iran agreed to inspections; Iran’s foreign minister says no procedure exists. Asked when inspectors would actually arrive, Trump said it himself: “At the appropriate time. There’s no rush.” Strip away the public squabbling and the talks are advancing — but on Tehran’s terms, with the nuclear question pushed to the next stage of a 60-day clock.Riggleman refused the fantasy that Iran will now play nice “after we assassinated their head of state.” The reported $300 billion, he warned, flows straight back into the IRGC and Iran’s proxies — and likely back to Trump-aligned companies through reconstruction, Starlink, oil and Hormuz tolls. His sharpest line cut at the strategy: “Think about how inept you have to be to be the country that actually invoked sympathy for Iran.” His read on the timeline was bluntly political — the rush is about the midterm hangover, not human lives, which is why the deal is unlikely to truly close.1️⃣ The Counterforce — and the WedgeFor years the question was where the answer to Trumpism would come from. Tonight it was on the ballot in New York, where Zohran Mamdani spent his capital to drag the party left — and the dividing line, race after race, was Israel. Zev’s call: support for Israel becomes the single biggest issue into November, a binary that follows voters from the primary to the general. Riggleman agreed it is “one of the three legs of the stool” being eaten away — alongside the economy and healthcare cuts in red districts, and the Epstein files he insists won’t go away.But Riggleman, who once took AIPAC money and felt the leash, warned the left against its own version of the right’s mistake: “reciprocal radicalization.” Zev likes democratic socialism as policy — he lives with it in Canada — but doubts its candidates survive a general electorate. His answer was the news of the night: a serious look at an independent run for Virginia governor, a state where a plurality can win and national money can flow, refusing AIPAC and JPAC alike. “What if I just told the truth? What would that look like?”THE PATTERNRiggleman’s grimmest line was also his thesis: “They won the money game. We have to win the future of America game.” The pool, the purge, the polls, the deal and the primary are one story — a corrupt, cornered administration converting the government into a revenue stream while dismantling the institutions that could stop it, and using Israel to split the opposition. He put the stakes in plain terms: the midterms still likely break toward Democrats, the House flips, the Senate lands near 50-50 with Vance the tiebreaker — but 2028, he said, “terrifies me.”And then the man who took the oath four times said he is 99% in. Whether a former spy running up the middle in Virginia is a dream or a strategy, the hunger he is betting on is real. The counterforce to Trumpism may not come from the left or the right. It may come from the exits.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Amy Gabrielle, Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, and many others for tuning into my live video with Denver Riggleman! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

NARATIV FLASH SALE FOR TODAY ONLY: 50% off our annual rate forever. New subscribers only. Five stories Friday, one tell. A presidency that polishes the facade while the substance rots underneath. A reflecting pool painted flag-blue for the 250th, now a green swamp. A ballroom rising where the East Wing stood. A ceasefire that lasted 42 minutes. A cultural landmark missing $17 million. And a stack of Epstein names the Justice Department insists are nothing. Zev and Dean ran the countdown 5 to 1 — and every story pointed the same direction.5️⃣ The Ceasefire That Lasted 42 MinutesThe guns over Lebanon went quiet at 4 p.m. local — and stayed quiet for about 42 minutes before Netanyahu resumed bombing. The truce, brokered by the United States and Qatar, exists to prop up the memorandum Trump signed with Iran this week, whose very first point demands “permanent termination of all war on all fronts, including Lebanon,” and the protection of Lebanese sovereignty. Israel’s far right answered in real time: Itamar Ben-Gvir vowed to wipe Lebanon off the map, Bezalel Smotrich echoed him, and the bombs kept falling.Zev floated the read that the public rift between Trump and Netanyahu may be stage-managed. Trump told Axios that Netanyahu “will do anything I tell him” and that the Israelis “do as I say” — a strange boast for a man whose ceasefire collapsed in under an hour. Behind it sits the leverage: a reported $300 billion routed toward Iran, a president at 28 percent, and a deal he needs more than he needs peace.The opening Zev keeps naming: a Democratic Party with the nerve to stand for a democratic Israel, not just an American one — the thing that turned a desert into a tech power in the first place.4️⃣ The Bedroom War and the Book Nobody Should BuyMaggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change lays out the imperial presidency in domestic detail. Melania holds the master bedroom; Trump was pushed into the second-floor living room and wanders the residence pocketing furniture she picked, until her staff began labeling her things to keep them. He called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a “pussy” to his face over tariffs; Lutnick rebranded himself Trump’s “$25-billion-a-month pussy.” Staff relay the nighttime archaeology — chip bags, Starbucks wrappers, ice cream cartons on the floor, fresh carpet relaid in his bathroom daily, super glue and fake gold pressed onto the Oval Office walls.Zev and Dean told viewers to keep their $59.99. The Narativ objection is not the gossip — it’s that the authors sat on Epstein-related material for months to sell a book, and that the silence touched the real world, shaping how members voted on the Epstein Transparency Act. Zev noted it isn’t the first time. The same instinct surfaced in yesterday’s conversation with Lev Parnas: information held back from the people who needed it.One more receipt landed the same day — Giorgia Meloni flatly calling Trump’s claim that she “begged” for a photo invented. “Italians don’t beg.”3️⃣ A Judge, a Tarp, and the Missing $17 MillionA federal judge ordered the administration to keep the Kennedy Center open for the summer, with plans for public access and programming due by June 18 — a check that follows the board takeover and the name change a court already reversed. The tarp over John F. Kennedy’s name still hangs, because Trump won’t let it stand without his own name above it.The detail that hasn’t traveled, and the one Dean pulled forward: roughly $17 million in operational money has gone missing from the Center’s accounts since Trump’s people took the keys. The judge’s order opens the door to discovery — where the money went, and why the regime won’t produce the financials. Zev noted a new for Trump Crimes Commission. Dean tied it to damnatio memoriae — the Roman practice of chiseling a disgraced name off every wall — and offered it as the platform: remember exactly what was done, and take the name down from everything it touched.2️⃣ The Survivors Call Blanche’s BluffActing Attorney General Todd Blanche has said for months the Epstein files hold nothing left to prosecute. This week, survivors and the family of Virginia Giuffre walked into James Comer’s office with the Justice Department’s own files — pulled from the Transparency Act release — and handed the Oversight chairman a list of more than fifteen names. They are calling Blanche’s bluff, weeks before his confirmation hearings.The names are not new; they are the ones long suspected and now corroborated in the files — Jes Staley, Leon Black among them, with George Mitchell and Bill Richardson now deceased but the conduct still mappable. The cases Blanche calls closed are not closed.Dean’s turn was the sharpest of the day: these women have done the government’s job for three decades, showing up for the hundredth time with a list because the FBI and the committee won’t come to them. The courage is theirs; the cowardice belongs to everyone who makes them carry it. Dean named the people filling the gap the institutions won’t — Ellie Leonard, Lev Parnas, Julie Brown, Kait Justice.1️⃣ The Donor, the No-Bid Deal, and the Green PoolThe story that opened the show and closed it. The New York Times reported the National Park Service skipped competitive bidding and handed a $1.7 million contract to a firm tied to John Cafaro — a Trump donor, a Mar-a-Lago member, twice convicted on bribery-related charges, and, by every sign, not a pool guy. The pool turned green. The separate $14.7 million blue waterproofing job is peeling off the bottom in sheets; CBS’s Scott McFarlane filmed what looks like a swamp; the White House tweeted that the pool was “totally clean.” It will not be ready by July 4th.It is the whole administration in one photograph. A non-problem Trump created by trying to gild it. Public money steered to a crony with no bid and no questions. And the work doesn’t even hold. Everything he touches turns green.THE PATTERNZev's frame closed it: read the five as a single operation. Corruption, money laundering, captured media, espionage — the Epstein machine — even crypto, all injected to make the country ungovernable and to make Americans stop believing in the project. While that runs, the president tends the facade — the ballroom, the arch, the reflecting pool — and lets the people pay the gas prices his war drove up. Twenty-eight percent approval. An Iran deal already unraveling. The fix Zev keeps pressing is the only one that matches the scale: a Democratic plan with teeth — real accountability, the rule of law, and the long memory to make it stick.🔥 The Summer Sizzler is live. The reporting that gets there first is 50% off — FLASH SALE TODAY ONLY: our lowest annual price ever. And you can lock in the rate forever. The Lincoln Reflecting Pool turned green because a donor with a bribery record got the no-bid job; Narativ readers saw the machine behind it coming from day one - in 2016 and we’ve been calling correctly ever since. Our promise to you: Know Sooner.Thank you Beth Cruz, Cathy R. Payne, LeftieProf, Stephanie Munoz, Micheal Scott, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Five stories, one motion. On Thursday the president pulled America back from almost everything it has held for eighty years — the alliance that contained Russia, the war he says he ended, the courts that check him, even the Israeli hawks he used to arm. Each retreat left a space, and into every one of them someone else is already stepping. That was the through-line of today’s Fivestack.5️⃣ Vance Tells Israel “You Can’t Kill Your Way Out”For the first time, a senior Trump official said it to Israel’s face. JD Vance — who helped negotiate the Iran framework — named Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and dismissed their revolt against the deal as a “freakout,” warning Israel to “wake up and smell the reality.”It’s a real crack in a coalition that has run on lockstep support for Netanyahu’s government. Trump wants the war closed so he can bank the win; Israel’s far right wants it open. Watch the daylight widen — this is the rare fight where the administration is to Jerusalem’s left.4️⃣ Four Presidents, One Stage — Obama Opens His Center on JuneteenthWhile the sitting president gutted NATO, four former presidents shared a stage in Chicago. Barack and Michelle Obama dedicated their $850 million center with Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and Bono performing and Clinton, Bush and Biden in the seats; the doors open to the public Friday, on Juneteenth.Dean took the turn the moment earns: this is the counter-image to the rest of the board. One definition of America was being dismantled in Washington today. Another was being enshrined on the South Side.3️⃣ “Your Moscow Will Burn” — Ukraine’s Biggest Strike on the CapitalA day after Trump shrugged him off at the G7 — “it has no impact on us, we’re thousands of miles away” — Zelensky made Moscow impossible to ignore. Ukraine’s largest drone barrage of the war shut all four Moscow airports and set fire to a refinery feeding 40 percent of the city’s gasoline.“If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well,” Zelensky said. Russia’s hard-liners answered by demanding the Kremlin “strike the enemy mercilessly.” The front line hasn’t moved in months; the war is climbing into the skies over both capitals — and that escalation is exactly what a vacuum invites.2️⃣ The Court Decides Who Is a CitizenThe Supreme Court closed its term on the question of who counts as American. Trump v. Barbara tests the order he signed on day one stripping birthright citizenship from children born here to parents without permanent status — a 160-year guarantee written into the Fourteenth Amendment.Whether the justices strike the order outright or simply shrink the power of any single judge to block him nationwide, the term ends the same way: with the presidency larger than it was. The same bench is also deciding how freely Trump can fire the heads of independent agencies.1️⃣ Hegseth Guts NATO — Trump Hands Putin the OpeningThe biggest story of the day was the quietest in tone and the loudest in consequence. In Brussels, Pete Hegseth cut — effective immediately — about a third of the U.S. forces Washington would send to Europe in a crisis, including strategic bombers allies can’t replace for years, and opened a six-month review of the rest. He called NATO “a paper tiger and a one-way street” and mocked allies for spending on “gender equity and climate change.”The assets he pulled are the exact ones that would blunt a Russian push into the Baltics, Poland or Romania. This is the authoritarian tell of the day: America retreating from the alliance built to contain Russia, on the same morning Russia’s capital is burning and its hawks are calling for a wider war. Trump didn’t end a war today. He cleared the path for the next one.THE PATTERNPut the five together and the shape is unmistakable. NATO, Ukraine, the Court, Israel — across every front, Trump is pulling America inward and downward, and the power he gives up doesn’t vanish. It moves to Moscow, to the bench, to whoever is willing to fill the space. The counterweight stood on a stage in Chicago today, four presidents deep. The question for the summer is whether that’s memory or a map.Subscribe to Narativ — the Fivestack runs Monday to Friday at 3 PM ET. Know Sooner.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Truthsayer, Jeanne Elbe, Courtney M 🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈, Kim G, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Dean Blundell opened the show with a line that held up for the next hour: the decline has been televised. Wednesday handed Zev Shalev and Blundell a president who surrendered a war abroad and tightened the screws at home on the same afternoon — paying Iran to stop a war he started, fencing off the park where Americans protest him, switching off a company that defied him, and holding the nation’s intelligence leadership hostage to a voter-suppression bill. Five stories, one man, one move repeated: Donald Trump treats the world as something he commands, and on Wednesday the world stopped pretending to obey. The countdown ran 5 to 1.5️⃣ The Surrender He’s Calling PeaceTrump and JD Vance signed an Iran agreement by video on Monday and spent three days calling it the end of a war. The leaked 14-point memorandum tells the real story, and Zev walked through it line by line: Iran pockets more than $20 billion in frozen assets on day one, draws on a reconstruction fund the show pegged at $300 billion or more, sells its oil sanction-free, and promises — in writing — nothing it can’t walk back in sixty days. There is no enforcement mechanism. Long-range ballistic missiles never appear in the text. Iran’s own Supreme National Council called it a victory over the United States and Israel, and as Zev put it, it’s impossible to argue with them.Blundell ran the arithmetic of the war that produced this “win”: thirteen dead American service members, hundreds wounded, thousands of Iranian civilians killed, precision munitions spent down so far the administration quietly invoked the Defense Production Act to rebuild the stockpile — all to reopen a strait that was open before, for maybe two months, with tolls. The deal rests on a ceasefire Israel never signed. The first time Netanyahu fires into southern Lebanon, it collapses. Zev’s verdict: a structure built to fail from day one, kept alive only long enough to get Trump to November.4️⃣ The Plot That Showed Up Right on TimeThe FBI announced it had foiled a plan to attack the White House UFC card with explosive drones. The next morning, the Justice Department walked into appeals court and cited that very plot to argue Trump should finally get his ballroom — the one with a drone port and a drone-proof roof, the one a judge halted and the Senate parliamentarian defunded. Zev and Blundell didn’t buy it for a second. A terror scare with no detail attached, converted overnight into roughly $600 million in taxpayer help for the president’s vanity project, fit a pattern the show has named before: an assessment arrives without evidence and leaves as policy.3️⃣ Fencing the People’s ParkTrump moved to ring Lafayette Square — the protest ground directly across from the White House — with a permanent fence, letting officials shut the public out at will. Zev, who has stood in that square, named the point plainly: it is the one place a real, rolling protest against this president would form, and a permanent fence makes sure he never has to hear it. The same contractors building the ballroom got the call. Authoritarianism rarely announces itself; sometimes it just pours a footing.2️⃣ Ninety Minutes to DisappearThe White House gave Anthropic less than ninety minutes on Friday to pull its newest AI models offline, and six days later the company still can’t get a straight reason. Anthropic’s staff say they’re being targeted. Zev pointed past the official cybersecurity story to the thing nobody’s naming: three weeks ago, the company’s co-founder stood with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican to help unveil the pontiff’s first decree on the dangers of AI — a company at war with Trump siding with the one authority the White House can’t strong-arm. Blundell added the money underneath it: Anthropic refuses to let the government buy a single share or wire its models into weapons targeting and surveillance. Defy the regime, embarrass it in Rome, and the flagship goes dark in ninety minutes. The state deciding which company is allowed to exist is the story.1️⃣ Holding the Nation’s Secrets HostageFrom the G7, Trump canceled his own DNI nominee’s Senate hearing and said the quiet part out loud — the country gets no confirmed intelligence chief until Congress passes the Save America Act, his proof-of-citizenship voter bill, and reauthorizes FISA on his terms. Bill Pulte, a mortgage official with no national-security experience, stays in the chair. A president can’t actually cancel a Senate hearing; he can only strong-arm the senators in his own party who never wanted Pulte to begin with. This wasn’t a nomination fight. Trump put the nation’s intelligence leadership on the table as a chip to rewrite who gets to vote.THE PATTERNThe show ended where the man did: not on a plane home, but at Versailles, where Trump delayed his return to dine in what he called “the real deal,” a “place of gold.” Zev let the address answer itself — the palace of let them eat cake, the one that ended in a guillotine. That is the through-line of all five stories. A president who wanted the Reflecting Pool painted American blue and watched it turn Iranian green; who wants a surrender to read as peace, a fence to read as security, a blackout to read as cybersecurity, and a hostage play to read as a nomination. He gives the order. Reality keeps handing him green. The decline is televised now, and on Wednesday the whole world watched it without laughing with him.The Fivestack airs Mon–Fri at 3 PM ET. Subscribe at narativ.org to watch the full episode and Zev’s breakdown of the “I am the boss” moment — Know Sooner.Thank you Lev Parnas, Cat: Poli-Psych, Beth Cruz, Cathy R. Payne, Lalisa, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Donald Trump spent Tuesday losing. He lost a Vice President’s defense on live daytime television, lost his closest foreign ally in an Israeli courtroom, lost a court fight over his immigration freeze, and — on the show’s biggest story — signed away a decade of American pressure on Iran in a deal he admits he hasn’t read. On The Fivestack, Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell counted five stories down from five to one, and every one of them pointed the same direction: a regime running on cover stories, and an opponent who keeps winning in court while the President signs surrenders abroad.5️⃣ Vance Wanted the List. Now He Buries It.JD Vance went on The View to sell a memoir about faith and walked into an Epstein buzzsaw. He told the hosts “we’re not holding anything back,” then spent two minutes explaining why two and a half million pages remain sealed. He called himself “kind of a conspiracy theory on the Epstein stuff,” waved off the New York Times report that he ran Situation Room strategy on the files, and kept reaching for the same alibi: “I was inside the room.”Ana Navarro did the work the Vice President would not. Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act under duress, she said, only after Republican women — Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — refused to fold, and after he dragged Boebert into the Situation Room to break her. “That’s all true,” Vance conceded. As the team has reported, Trump has since spent months destroying the four Republicans who forced those files open. Two of them are the women Navarro named.4️⃣ Netanyahu Loses the RoomWhile Vance defended the President, Benjamin Netanyahu was losing in a Jerusalem courtroom. On the last day of cross-examination in his fraud trial, the Israeli Prime Minister’s pardon request collapsed and Netanyahu began shouting at the bench — “you’ve done something never before done” — until the judge told him he’d answered the question and to move on.Zev read the courtroom defeat against the Iran deal Trump is about to sign over Netanyahu’s objections. Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe told the show Netanyahu will do anything to derail the peace, because the war is the only thing keeping his coalition — and his freedom — intact. Netanyahu says the deal signed Friday “will not bind” Israel. The man who helped put him in power is walking away from him in real time.3️⃣ Narativ Exclusive — The First Lady’s Russian FriendThe show’s exclusive came from a story Zev published hours before air, built on an interview with Amanda Ungaro, a former partner of Paolo Zampolli. Zampolli is the modeling agent who brought Melania Knauss to America nearly thirty years ago, stayed close the entire time, and now holds an ambassadorship for global partnerships he received, Zev reports, through her. According to Ungaro, the First Lady and Zampolli remain close enough to text constantly.Peeling back who Zampolli is, Zev’s investigation found at least two Russian women working for him out of a UN sports body he runs — one tied closely to Vladimir Putin, the other, known as “Lana,” who Zev reports previously worked for Jeffrey Epstein. The crossover between Epstein’s world and Zampolli’s, long blurred, comes back into view, along with the open question Zev put on the table: in a friendship this durable and this useful, is Zampolli the First Lady’s handler? The reporting also raises a harder question — whether Melania Trump was involved in the deportation of someone close to Zampolli who may have known too much. Zev said the piece was checked and re-checked fact by fact before it ran.2️⃣ Blindspot — The Court Loss the Left IgnoredThis week’s Ground News Blindspot was a Trump defeat the left barely covered. U.S. District Judge John McConnell vacated the USCIS directive that froze asylum, green-card, and work-permit decisions for 39 countries — ruling the freeze likely unlawful. By the coverage breakdown, the right carried the story and the left looked away from a win on its own side.It is the cleanest example of the day’s theme: the rule of law held, a judge struck down an unlawful order, and the audience that should have celebrated it never heard. FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.1️⃣ The Surrender PackageThe number-one story was a capitulation. Dean and Zev laid out the terms of the Iran deal: roughly $324 billion flowing to Tehran, with $150 billion due this month; oil and petrochemical sanctions suspended; the naval blockade lifted within thirty days — already underway, with Iranian supertankers sailing the Strait of Hormuz, which reopens under IRGC management. U.S. forces withdraw from the Gulf. Iran’s missile program stays fully intact. In exchange, America gets a pinky promise to talk about uranium. Trump signed it without reading it, and says he’ll read the text aloud, word for word, for the first time on Friday.How Tehran pulled it off is the part that lingers. Per DropSite News reporter Jeremy Scahill, confirmed by additional sources, Iran’s negotiating team added two senior psychologists — specialists in dementia, cognitive impairment, and antisocial behavior — after April’s Islamabad talks went south. Their job was not policy. It was to assess the President’s mental state, which they judged “very mentally ill and extremely impaired,” and to route every message through mediators tuned to that assessment. Once Iran started managing Trump’s psychology, an Iranian official said, “we got exactly what we wanted.” Dean’s full sourcing is at DeanBlundell.substack.com.THE PATTERNFive stories, one point Dean kept coming back to: if you are looking for hope, it is in the losses. Trump lost the files argument, lost his ally in court, lost the immigration freeze, and is about to lose decades of leverage on Iran — and a foreign adversary did it by studying his mind and telling him what he needed to hear. The cover stories hold the coalition together: Vance’s “full transparency,” Netanyahu’s war, the modeling-agent friend nobody was supposed to examine. Underneath them, the man at the center signed a surrender he hasn’t read, and the people who told the truth about the files are the ones being erased.Narativ is reader-supported. The Zampolli investigation and the daily Fivestack are the work of a small team. Subscribe at narativ.org to get it first — Know Sooner.Thank you Lev Parnas, Cat: Poli-Psych, LeftieProf, Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Lori Modafferi, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ The Green on the MallTrump’s $14.2 million repaint of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — a deeper “American flag blue” ordered up for the country’s 250th — turned green with algae within days of completion. The Interior Department calls the bloom “residual,” a hangover from supply lines that sat dormant during construction. The mechanism was no mystery to Dean, who’s built and owned pools: drop a dark coating into a shallow, slow-moving basin and you grow algae — a problem flagged in advance and waved off.Zev pulled the metaphor all the way out — the toxic sludge taking over the pool right after Trump’s attempt to fix it is exactly what he’s done to the whole American system. Dean capped it: the most photographed pool in America, at the feet of the man who ended slavery and the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, remade to look better and emerging covered in sludge — “everything this guy touches rots.” It rhymed with the rest of the weekend’s vanity projects: the Kennedy Center name tarped over on a judge’s order, a planned “Trump Promenade” at the Lincoln Memorial, the Rose Garden paved, the East Wing torn down for a ballroom. Polish the facade, ignore what’s rotting beneath it.4️⃣ Amanda Ungaro and the Friend Trump Has Kept LongestThe show turned to Zev’s Thursday interview with Amanda Ungaro, who asked to be described as the mother of the son of Paolo Zampoli — an envoy inside the Trump administration and, by Trump’s own history, his longest-running friend, dating to 1985. Ungaro alleges that as she fought for custody, Zampoli used his government connections to have her arrested by ICE, held three and a half months, and deported, while their son stayed behind. These are her allegations; Zampoli has not answered them publicly, and he has not been removed from his post.Ungaro also described being put on Epstein’s plane once, at sixteen, among other girls who looked to her like students rather than models — her only meeting with Epstein. Her stronger ties, Zev noted, run to the Trumps, and to Melania in particular. From there the questions get heavier: why Melania stays close to a man swimming in Russian intelligence and oligarch connections, whether that relationship was ever what it appeared, and why the First Lady, told of Ungaro’s deportation, did nothing. The Narativ team is careful to mark these as open questions, not findings — but they are the questions a follow-up, and a separate Deutsche Bank–Epstein investigation teased for later this week, intend to press.3️⃣ Washington Switches Off an AI by MemoAt 5:21 p.m. on June 12, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick signed an order barring Anthropic from serving its newest models — Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — to any foreign national, down to Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees. Unable to sort nationality in real time across a global user base, the company shut both models off worldwide. The stated rationale was a national-security concern over a jailbreak; Anthropic’s own statement, read on air, says the government supplied no written specifics, that the flagged vulnerabilities were minor and already discoverable by other public models, and that the company had red-teamed the system with the U.S. government and the U.K. AI Security Institute for thousands of hours.Zev’s read went past the cover story. Anthropic and OpenAI are heading to public markets at the same moment, and Anthropic has refused to sell shares to anyone in the Trump orbit. More pointedly, Zev tied the move to his own beat: tools that can chew through millions of documents are exactly what an investigator uses, and Lutnick is a subject Zev is still chasing — specifically his dealings with Tether. The theory on the table: the crimes in those files were built to evade human eyes, not machines, and someone would rather the machines stay off.2️⃣ The First Trillionaire — Built on Public MoneyElon Musk became the first person worth more than a trillion dollars when SpaceX priced its IPO — a fortune two decades of federal contracts, loans and grants helped build, with no equity ever flowing back to the taxpayers who took the risk. The stock ran hard out of the gate, but the warning lights were the story. SpaceX carries 18,712 bitcoin — about $1.3 billion, the eighth-largest corporate crypto stash — on its balance sheet, and as index funds scoop up a company this size, that exposure lands in ordinary 401(k)s and pension funds.Dean brought the outside view: a weekend conversation with a hedge-fund manager who called the IPO “the ultimate rugging” and refused to buy a share for his clients — a company never profitable, with no third-party customers, flying to space mostly for itself and the U.S. government, on a valuation with no runway to justify it. He sketched the same machinery underneath: government money, Ontario pension money, Chinese loans now spent, all lashed to everything Musk owns. The kicker came from the weekend’s Reuters reporting Dean cited — 58 wallets in the Trump universe up $616 million while roughly 754,000 wallets lost $700 million on the Trump and Melania meme coins. Same con, Dean and Zev agreed; only the wrapper changes.1️⃣ Iran Collects the Tolls — Trump Calls It PeaceTrump landed at the G7 declaring the Iran war “finished” and the Strait of Hormuz “permanently toll-free.” Neither holds. In an eleventh-hour concession nobody saw coming, he handed Iran the right to charge tolls through the strait — by the show’s math, on the order of $2 million a tanker — a permanent inflationary tax on every economy that ships through it, and a revenue line running straight to the regime.The terms, as published by Iran’s own news agencies and not yet matched by any American document, read like surrender: roughly $24 billion in frozen assets released — half before final talks even begin — the naval blockade lifted within 30 days, the strait reopening “if Iran determines,” U.S. forces pulling back from around Iran, and a reconstruction package of at least $300 billion that Vice President Vance, on Good Morning America, acknowledged Gulf states are being asked to fund. The detail that should “detach your retina,” as Dean put it reading the Iranian text: Iran’s missile program and its support for Hezbollah and the Houthis are reportedly removed from the agreement entirely — which is why Netanyahu is signaling he’ll keep troops in southern Lebanon. Zev’s emphasis ran to the money: the tolls and the unfrozen billions leave the regime permanently richer and stronger.If it were a good deal, Zev noted, Trump would sign it himself on Friday. Instead he’s skipping the Geneva ceremony and sending Vance, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to put their names on it. The open question the team keeps returning to: how much is Trump personally making on the way out the door.THE PATTERNRun the five together and the shape is the same every time — a loud announcement laid over a quiet extraction. A “peace” that funds the regime and taxes the world. A trillion-dollar IPO the public can’t share but will absorb when it falls. A government that deregulates AI in theory and kills a company’s product by memo in practice. A monument repainted to look new and already turning to sludge. The surface is managed; the rot keeps coming up underneath. Friday’s signing is the next test of which one the public ends up believing.The Fivestack airs Monday–Friday at 3 PM ET. Subscribe for the full countdown, the investigations behind it, and what cracks next. The Amanda Ungaro interview and the follow-up are at narativ.org. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The FiveStack with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev is broadcast LIVE Monday-Friday at 3 PM ET at Narativ.org and it’s 100% free. Sign up today and never miss a show. Trump spent Thursday governing by press release — and got caught at every turn. He named a new spy chief on Truth Social, posted a ceasefire Iran says never happened, and let the rest of the machine grind on: a Supreme Court finishing off the Voting Rights Act, a Justice Department indicting protesters while the named walk free, and a New Mexico crime scene dug to bedrock with nobody allowed to look. Five stories, one tell — the performance is the policy now, and the institutions built to call it are folding instead.5️⃣ The Supreme Court Finishes Off the Voting Rights ActThe Court gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this week and cleared Alabama to run the GOP map a three-judge panel had already called intentional race discrimination. The map stands. The discrimination finding doesn’t. Alabama heads into the 2026 midterms with six Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic — the lines drawn, the remedy removed.Dean and Zev tied it back to the rot underneath: a billionaire’s court that decides one day for the Constitution and the next for Trump’s immunity, with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, Alito, and Roberts as the standing exhibit. Zev pointed to Denver Riggleman, who had the receipts on Ginni Thomas and January 6th and asked for a subpoena — until Liz Cheney said no. The point isn’t a single ruling. It’s that the body meant to be the last check keeps choosing not to be one, and stops pretending to be embarrassed about it.4️⃣ Zorro Ranch — the Hole, the Blackmail, the Next NamesSomebody carved a hole the size of forty-seven Olympic pools out of Epstein’s New Mexico ranch — 155,000 cubic yards, 20 to 25 feet deep, next to the main house. Narativ’s shadow analysis of drone and satellite imagery shows a squared, leveled structure that appeared around 2014–15 and vanished this year. Eddie Aragon dates the dig to late January, early February — before the Epstein files went public, and before the search. The likeliest read, Zev’s read, is a crypto-mining vault tied to Epstein’s crypto years, not the biolab the speculation wants; either way, the timing is the tell. You don’t move forty-seven pools of dirt to resurface a garden.The cover-up is the story now. New Mexico’s AG was told to stand down by the federal government. No mainstream outlet will touch the dig. And it widened on air: Bill Gates testified this week — on the record, for the first time — that Epstein tried to blackmail him, vindicating the reporting Zev first broke in 2019. Todd Blanche and Kash Patel are now set to be hauled in. Leon Black is next. The ground proves something was there; the silence proves someone wants it gone.3️⃣ The DOJ Indicts Eight Protesters While the Named Walk FreeThe Justice Department indicted eight pro-Palestinian activists it says ran a harassment campaign against University of Michigan officials and the Jewish Federation of Detroit to force the school to divest from Israel. Set that beside the segment that came right before it — the names in the Epstein files walking free — and the two speeds of this DOJ are the whole point: fast on dissent, frozen on the powerful.Dean carried it north. Hours after a Toronto officer was killed investigating a shooting at the U.S. embassy, Trump’s ambassador Pete Hoekstra used a symposium to lecture Canada about buying American booze and F-35s. Same regime, same instinct — punish, posture, alienate — whether the target is a Michigan protester or a neighboring country.2️⃣ Clayton Replaces Pulte at DNI — the Cold OpenThe show opened on the break: minutes before air, Trump posted to Truth Social that Jay Clayton is his pick to run national intelligence, pushing Bill Pulte out eleven days before he was due to take the chair. It’s about FISA. With Section 702 lapsing and Republicans in open revolt over arming Pulte — a man who’d used his housing post to chase mortgage-fraud claims against Trump’s enemies — the President swapped in a company man: former SEC chairman, current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a Sullivan & Cromwell alumnus.Zev’s read: Clayton is a serious figure, which is exactly why he won’t last long — Trump would rather have a loyalist than a professional, but with the midterms 150 days out and his approval at 27 percent, he needed the appearance of seriousness. The swap quiets the FISA fight and buys a veneer of integrity heading into an election. The intelligence chair changed hands by social-media post, the same way this President now does everything.1️⃣ Trump Fakes an Iran Ceasefire — and Iran Says It Never HappenedFor the second straight night the U.S. bombed Iran, and Trump promised a third — “very hard tonight” — and threatened to seize Kharg Island. Then, at 1:28 p.m., he reversed it on Truth Social: he’d “canceled the scheduled strikes,” he wrote, citing a deal approved by the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, and a half-dozen more. Zev fact-checked it live. Iran’s IRGC rejected the claim as “totally baseless” — no agreement, no memorandum, no consultations. An Israeli officer told Channel 12 the same: nothing reached, no one talking.So the headline beat of the war was a ceasefire that exists only in a post. Dean and Zev read it as theater for the markets — telegraph a strike, cancel it, move oil and equities into the weekend, repeat. Hegseth fronts the announcements while the CENTCOM commander stays off-camera. Inflation sits at 4.2 percent, Iran still effectively holds the Strait of Hormuz, and the war runs on a president’s clock with no vote in Congress and no fact behind the latest claim. The bombs were real this week. The peace was a press release.THE PATTERNThursday was a day of governing by post — a spy chief named, a war called off, a deal invented — and a day of institutions declining to say no: a Court that won’t, a DOJ that won’t, a federal government that told New Mexico to stand down. The performance and the impunity are the same machine. The open question for next week is the only one that matters: who is left with the power to check him, and what cracks first when they keep choosing not to use it. Amanda Ungaro starts answering tonight.The Fivestack airs Mon–Fri, 3 PM ET. Tonight on Narativ Live, 7 PM ET: Amanda Ungaro — former partner of Epstein associate Paolo Zampoli — in her first long-form interview. Subscribe free at narativ.org to watch live; paid subscribers get every replay and the full archive.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Petrena Wilbur, LeftieProf, Lalisa, Leah Anderson, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Three men spent a decade selling the same product: invincibility. On Tuesday, all three ran out of it at once. Trump got booed out of his own city. Putin watched Ukraine torch his supply lines and his hometown. Netanyahu’s government kept crumbling while his last patron edged toward the door. And running underneath every one of them — the Epstein files, still naming names. Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell stacked the day from the smallest humiliation to the largest, and the through-line wrote itself: the strongman act only works until the room stops playing along.5️⃣ Booed Out Of His Own BuildingTrump walked into Madison Square Garden expecting a coronation and got a verdict. The second his face hit the jumbotron during the anthem, tens of thousands of Knicks fans drowned out the music — middle fingers up, “f**k Trump” chants rolling courtside. The control room yanked him off the screen within seconds. Fox News dubbed in cheers anyway.He spent the rest of the night asleep beside James Dolan, the MSG owner riding an $8 billion development deal that runs straight through Trump’s desk. Asked later about the reception, Trump insisted he heard “mostly cheers” — a man narrating a different reality back to himself in real time.You can measure exactly how much it stung by what he did next. Roughly an hour after the boos, Trump greenlit a major ICE surge into New York City. Booed in public, he answered with force — the tell of a 27% president who can’t take a room he doesn’t own. He’s skipping Game 4.We found our next story on Groundnews.com using their Blindspot feature 4️⃣ Putin Is Losing Crimea — And No One Will Say ItThis week’s Ground News Blindspot is the biggest story MAGA media won’t put on a screen: Putin is losing, badly, and the mainstream won’t report it because it embarrasses the president who bet everything on him. Zev walked through what Navy veteran Ken Harbaugh brought back from two weeks on the ground in Ukraine — Odessa, Kharkiv, the Donbas, Kyiv.The map is turning. Ukraine controls the land bridge into Crimea and has spent five weeks picking off the radar and air-defense protecting the M14, Russia’s only land-based resupply route to the peninsula. More than 400 fuel tankers, destroyed. The Black Sea Fleet, gone. Crimeans now queue six to twelve hours for gas — some wait two days — in an oil-producing country reduced to horses and buggies. Russian speakers and FSB officers are quietly pulling out. Ukraine retook the 600-square-kilometer Kinburn Spit. A refinery in Dagestan burned Tuesday; neighborhoods near Moscow evacuated.For years Putin promised Russians the war would never reach home. This week it reached St. Petersburg and Moscow’s suburbs, because the air defense that should guard them is busy guarding oligarchs’ homes instead. The myth was the whole product. The myth is gone — and the silence around it is the story.3️⃣ Netanyahu Crumbles — And Trump Walks AwayThe third strongman is cracking from inside and out. Netanyahu’s coalition is falling apart at home: the ultra-Orthodox parties walked, stripping his majority and forcing the country toward elections. Abroad, even his oldest insurance policy is lapsing — Trump.The pattern of the week told the whole story. Trump tells Netanyahu to stop the strikes; twenty minutes later, Israel hits. Trump says stand down on Lebanon; thirty minutes later, Hezbollah targets in flames. Netanyahu never wanted the peace deals because he was never interested in peace — but the leverage he spent fifty years building inside American politics is finally draining away. Democrats are done with him. Republicans are tired of him. And the grip he held over Washington is loosening exactly when he needs it most.There’s even a quiet quid pro quo hiding in the rubble: the CNN merger Trump still has to approve, the kind of favor that used to flow automatically between allies and now hangs as a question mark. When the favors stop being automatic, the alliance is already over.2️⃣ Iran Downs A U.S. Apache — And Trump Promises A Deal AnywayTuesday morning, Trump said Iran shot down a U.S. Army Apache — the first American helicopter lost since the war began — and declared the U.S. “must, of necessity, respond.” The crew was rescued and is safe. The reported weapon: a roughly $20,000 Shahed drone against an $80 million machine. The IRGC denies it. On day 100 of this war, it’s gotten easier to weigh Tehran’s denials against the administration’s claims.In the same breath, Trump said a deal with Iran was in its “final throes.” It’s a familiar throes. The New York Times counted the times he’s promised a deal “in a couple of days” since the war started: 37. Once every two and a half days, sometimes twice in one. He’s posted some version of “everything’s going to be fine” more than a hundred times — even floating that he “can’t wait to meet the new Ayatollah,” the man now leading the regime whose predecessor Trump tried to kill. Escalation and reassurance in a single sentence isn’t a contradiction he’s failing to manage. It’s the only move he has.1️⃣ Epstein’s Right Hand Says She Saw NothingLesley Groff sat at Jeffrey Epstein’s side for twenty years. Her name appears in the files more than 150,000 times. On Tuesday she told the House Oversight Committee she scheduled the massages, ran the calendar, coordinated the travel — and somehow never knew the girls were children. Survivors didn’t believe a word of it. Neither did the room.It’s the same defense every insider reaches for. Lutnick: I had no idea. Wexner’s circle: I didn’t know. Now Groff, who managed the day-to-day more directly than Ghislaine Maxwell did after 2008, claims two decades of pure ignorance while booking three and four appointments a day with girls in school uniforms. She returned to work for Epstein after his conviction — after the court record spelled out exactly who he was. By her own account, she scheduled calls between Epstein and Trump, though she insisted they came before the presidency. When those calls happened is its own piece of news waiting to surface.Bill Gates testifies Wednesday. And here’s the thread that ties the whole show together: Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump are all features of the Epstein file. The strongmen cracking on camera this week are the same names that keep surfacing in the documents — three men who built empires on what other people didn’t know, watching the record finally catch up.THE PATTERNThe masks are off. For years Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump ran the same play — project strength, control the cameras, never let the room see weakness. This week the cameras turned on them. A booed president narrating phantom cheers. A czar losing a peninsula he swore was safe. A prime minister abandoned at home and abroad. None of them care about their countries or their people; each one has only ever been running the same survival algorithm — stay in power, stay relevant, stay out of jail. And the Epstein files, naming all three, are the reminder of where that kind of power came from in the first place. It took Putin twenty-six years to fall this far. The other two are moving faster.The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3 PM ET. Narativ Live returns Wednesday — and Thursday, Zev sits down with Amanda Ungaro for a live interview you won’t want to miss. Subscribe at narativ.org so you know sooner.Today’s Blindspot — Putin’s collapse in Crimea — came to you from Ground News. See what one side won’t show you: groundnews.com/fivestack, 40% off.Thank you Ellie Leonard, LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, Cathy R. Payne, LeftieProf, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

ON NOW! OUR FLASH SALE: 50% OFF ANNUAL PLANS - FOR FIVE HOURS ONLY ! ENDS AT MIDNIGHT ET The strongman act runs on a single assumption: that no one gets to say no. Monday, on five different fronts, someone did. A fired anchor said it to the network that bent toward the president. The man who built the Hunter Biden smear said it about his own operation. A reporter on a Wisconsin farm said it until Trump walked off the set. A federal judge said it to the name on the building. And an Iranian missile barrage said it loudest of all — by forcing Israel to stand down and exposing the rift Washington can no longer hide. Five stories, one crack running through all of them.5️⃣ “There Is No Democracy Without Journalism”Scott Pelley got fired from 60 Minutes, and this weekend he told the New York Times what it felt like: the death of a spouse. Thirty-seven years at CBS, forty-two years married — “that’s the depth of my devotion.” Then he named the cause. CBS’s new editorial chief, Bari Weiss, put “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events” — a level of political interference Pelley said he had never seen in nearly four decades.The breaking point was a story. Weiss wanted protesters painted as more violent and Renee Nicole Good cast as a domestic terrorist aiming her car at police. Pelley looked at the same footage and refused — she wasn’t that person, and he wouldn’t make her one. He stopped being a “team guy” the moment he wouldn’t lie. The new executive producer, Nick Bilton, then accused Pelley of physically assaulting him, only to retract it in the room the second Pelley denied it. No one was fired for the false accusation. Pelley was fired for the truth.Zev, who covered alongside Pelley in his CBS years, vouched for the man behind the patriotism — the correspondent who sat on the steps of the tour bus writing notes, who crawled through deserts and slept in foxholes filling with water. Asked about Trump calling him a “stiff” who doesn’t care about his country, Pelley’s answer landed like a verdict: he’s never worn the uniform, but he’s been shot at in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait for this country — and he’s not aware the president has ever done the same. “There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. And that is why I am a journalist.” The lawsuit, Dean noted, is coming sooner than people think.4️⃣ The Man Who Built the Laptop Lie Sat Across From Hunter BidenFor a decade the hottest topic in American politics was Hunter Biden’s laptop. The second-hottest was the man who helped engineer the operation behind it. This weekend, on Dean’s “Coffee & Tea with Lev and Dean,” both men sat at the same virtual table — Lev Parnas, the Giuliani fixer who went hunting for Biden dirt, and Hunter Biden, the human being that machinery was pointed at.Parnas said plainly what he’s already said under oath. The laptop held the nudes, the footage of addiction, the wreckage of a man deep in his disease — and nothing else. No espionage. No foreign agent. No corruption. The other eighty percent, the Biden-crime narrative that nearly turned an election, was invented. Parnas knows because he was inside the machine that built it. The man Marjorie Taylor Greene put on the House floor in graphic detail sold $225,000 of his own paintings; the families running half-million-dollar access clubs and routing rare-earth and Kazakhstan deals through the White House go unmentioned.But the segment wasn’t a takedown. It was an amends. Parnas apologizing to Hunter was part of his recovery; Hunter — early in his own sobriety — accepting it was part of his. Two men who no longer have to hide, Dean said, looked freer than anyone in MAGA. Both Zev and Dean see something the GOP should fear heading into 2026 and 2028: a comeback story America tends to love, run by a man who owns every receipt instead of running from them.3️⃣ Trump Walked Off the FarmKristen Welker asked Trump for evidence. He didn’t have any. Pressed on his 2020 fraud claims and the $1.776 billion “weaponization” fund that could compensate the January 6 rioters who beat police, Trump ran the routine Zev has watched a hundred times — lean in, raise the voice, the finger in the face, the blowup. Then the question came one more time. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” He crushed his lapel mic underfoot and left. “I’ve had enough.”The walkout is the answer. He’ll hold court for hours when he’s winning; the instant the questions reach the money and the mob, he’s gone. And the target, both hosts noted, is rarely random. The cabinet members he’s fired, the reporters he savages — overwhelmingly women, met with a contempt he saves for them alone. The rage isn’t new. It’s the oldest thing about him.2️⃣ The Name Comes DownMonday the Kennedy Center deleted Trump’s name from its website — not by choice, by court order. A federal judge ruled the renaming illegal: Congress named the living memorial to John F. Kennedy, and only Congress can change it. The board he packed had voted in December, the signage went up overnight, the merch hit the gift shop. A single paragraph from the bench unwound all of it.And tonight he walks into Madison Square Garden for the NBA Finals, where the welcome is an eight-foot iron fence, TSA-level screening, and a Knicks crowd told there will be no tailgates and no watch parties because one ego insisted on coming. He was booed at the Commanders game. He was booed at the UFC card in Miami. Humiliated in the courts downtown and on his own home court uptown — same day, same man.1️⃣ Israel Loaded the Reprisal — and Didn’t Fire ItIran hammered Israel. Israel loaded its response. And then, within the hour, it stood down. No retaliation on Iran. Not because Netanyahu blinked — because Trump made him. The rift the Fivestack has tracked for weeks just crossed out of name-calling and into the kinetic: real bombs, real missiles, real lives, and a public fracture between Washington and Jerusalem that neither man can paper over now.The reveal is the weakness underneath it. Trump doesn’t need these two to stop hating each other; he needs the war to stop so he can wear the peacemaker’s crown — and he can’t make it stop. Iran has no elections to lose. Trump does, at roughly 30% approval, with the war bleeding him at home. So every time he announces a deal is near, Israel strikes, Iran strikes back, and the lie gets exposed again. Two days ago he insisted he was the shot-caller. Twenty minutes later Netanyahu bombed Iran anyway.Iran read all of it and played it flawlessly. It proved Trump weak, proved the United States weak, and proved the alliance that once attacked it is now breaking apart — the best position Tehran has held in a generation. The danger sits with an Israel that hasn’t grasped where this leads: a future without American backing, telling itself it can go alone. Zev’s read is the one to carry forward — this rift doesn’t shrink from here. It grows, and grows, and grows.THE PATTERNThe performance of strength depends on never being contradicted. Monday the contradictions arrived all at once — from a newsroom, from a reformed operative, from a reporter, from a judge, from an adversary half a world away. The Kennedy Center name didn’t come off because Trump relented; it came off because a court made him. Israel didn’t holster the reprisal because Netanyahu chose peace; it holstered because the alliance is cracking and the weaker partner felt it. Strip away the convoy and the bulletproof glass and the packed boards, and what’s left is a man who can’t take a question, can’t win a war, and can’t keep his name on a wall. Told no, five times, in a single afternoon.The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3PM ET with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. Watch the full episode and subscribe at narativ.org. Hunter Biden’s sit-down with Lev Parnas — “Coffee & Tea with Lev and Dean” — is at deanblundell.substack.com.Thank you This Will Hold, Lyudmila and Daniel, LC - Silence is Complicity, Dr. Eric Lullove, Robin Payes, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell and Lev Parnas! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

For eight days the most photographed man alive went unseen — no podium, no rope line, no walk to Marine One. The last live sighting was May 27th, the day after his third Walter Reed visit in thirteen months; since then, only a Truth Social feed running twenty-seven posts a day and one pre-recorded interview the White House wouldn’t date. We asked the question all afternoon: where is the president? Then, as the show was ending he answered it — Trump surfaced in an Oval Office press conference, his first live appearance in over a week. The press event doesn’t erase the eight days, or the staged-tape pattern, or the cardiologists asking why a man needs three physicals and four cognitive screens in a single year. Where has the president been for over a week and did the White House implement what was essentially a cover-up to mislead the country about his health?5️⃣ Iran reopens the war — and the cameras look awayAt dawn, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired missiles and drones into Kuwait and Bahrain, killing one and wounding more than sixty at Kuwait’s airport, after a U.S. Hellfire crippled an Iranian tanker bound for Kharg Island; by midday the U.S. struck back at Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. The truce Trump and Netanyahu broke three months ago is finished, the Fifth Fleet’s neighborhood is under fire, and American outlets barely covered the worst day of the Gulf war in months — the silence around the strike as telling as the strike itself.4️⃣ Three elections, one directionTuesday, three in five Los Angeles voters backed someone other than Mayor Karen Bass, sending reality-TV villain and registered Republican Spencer Pratt — AI ads, Trump-world applause and all — into a November runoff in a city that votes Democratic four to one; the same day, the Supreme Court let Alabama erase a Black congressional district 6–3 and unsigned, and Trump reached past the border to endorse the right-wing candidate in Colombia’s race. One day, three contests, one project — bend the electorate until it returns the right result — though Iowa, where a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor just lost his primary to an anti-Trump Republican farmer, is a reminder the map cuts both ways.3️⃣ The fund dies, the immunity livesTodd Blanche told a Senate panel the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund is dead, then kept the part that mattered: the settlement still bars the IRS from ever auditing Trump, his family, or his companies, and he wouldn’t put the reversal in writing. The fund was always the decoy and the audit shield the prize a manufactured lawsuit was built to buy — and a judge is now asking whether the whole arrangement was a fraud on the court, with answers due June 12th.2️⃣ Purge the investigators, seat the attackersElias Irizarry was nineteen when he carried a metal pole onto a Capitol balcony on January 6th; Trump pardoned him in 2025, and someone then seated him inside the Pentagon office that runs hostage rescue and embassy security — every desk top-secret cleared — the same week the Justice Department’s list of FBI agents who worked January 6th sits marked for removal and Trump hands the whole intelligence community to mortgage chief Bill Pulte. Even Republicans flinched: Thom Tillis won’t back Pulte for DNI, and Scott Bessent confirmed on camera he’d once threatened to “kick his ass” — but the pattern holds, purge the people who investigated the attack, install the people who carried it out, and leave the seats that protect Americans abroad empty.1️⃣ The 60 Minutes bloodbathScott Pelley said Bari Weiss was “brought in to kill” 60 Minutes; Tuesday night he was fired “for cause,” no payout, and Wednesday Weiss called it “the path that he chose” — so Pelley, who kept a transcript, answered with receipts: management told him to inject “falsehoods and bias” into a politically sensitive story, politicians were invited to pick their own correspondents, one report came within nineteen minutes of not airing, and when he asked why Weiss fired Tanya Simon, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi without cause, the answer six times was “I’m not answering that question.” Trace it back and it doesn’t end at Weiss: CBS paid Trump $16 million to settle his junk suit, that cleared Trump’s FCC to approve David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount, Ellison installed Weiss — Trump didn’t fire Scott Pelley, he built the thing that did, and Lesley Stahl and Bill Whitaker may be next.THE PATTERNFive stories, one hand: a war abroad, the courts and the ballot at home, the tax code bent for one family, the security services staffed with loyalists, and the most trusted newsroom in America hollowed out — all of it moving while the man whose name sits over it stayed out of sight for eight days. He’s back on camera now. The damage he left running while he was gone is still in plain view.The FiveStack with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev is broadcast LIVE Monday-Friday at 3 PM ET at Narativ.org and it’s 100% free. Sign up today and never miss a show. Thank you Lev Parnas, LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, Lalisa, Sarah, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.5️⃣ Six States Vote — and Only One Date MattersSix states held primaries Tuesday — California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota — and the one worth watching is Iowa, where Randy Feenstra is the only Republican carrying a Trump endorsement, a quiet test of whether that endorsement still moves a state cooled on the president by the economy and the war. Read the rest honestly and it tells you less than the cable graphics will pretend: California is its own animal, and everywhere else the loyalists and far-right performers win the primary and then lose the general. None of it settles anything until November — the only poll that decides whether any of this can be undone.THIS IS THE GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT FOR TODAY GO TO GROUNDNEWS.COM TO READ IT, AND REMEMBER FIVESTACK VIEWERS GET 40% OFF THEIR VANTAGE PLAN. 4️⃣ “You’re Crazy” — Trump Turns on NetanyahuIsrael drove its offensive against Hezbollah deeper into Lebanon on Monday, and the escalation threatened the Iran deal Trump has chased for weeks — so Trump got Netanyahu on the phone and, by Axios’s account, unloaded: “You’re crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” He killed a planned strike on Beirut on the call, and by evening Israel held off the capital, even as Tehran announced it was suspending talks and Trump told CNBC the negotiations had “started to get very boring.” Hold it at arm’s length, though: every one of those quotes traces to the single reporter who has sourced every collapsed ceasefire of this war, whose stories keep landing in the same 24-hour window, making Trump look reasonable and buying Netanyahu another reprieve from his own courtroom. The quotes may be true. Trump may be right that Bibi belongs in a cell. But there is still no deal — six ceasefires, six collapses, and billions in suspiciously well-timed trades around each one.3️⃣ “She Was Brought In to Kill It” — Pelley Torches 60 MinutesScott Pelley does not say things like this — the gold standard of American network journalism stood up in a staff meeting Monday and accused CBS News chief Bari Weiss of murdering 60 Minutes to the face of the man she’d hired to do it, telling new executive producer Nick Bilton he would never be respected, never be welcome, before Bilton walked out and the room applauded. “She does not love this place,” Pelley said. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s doing exactly that.” That was a resignation in all but name, and it tells you the kill is real: Weiss installed Bilton after “Black Thursday,” when she cut veteran EP Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega in one stroke, and CBS is now reportedly sounding out a new host — one name floated is Joe Rogan. You don’t hand the show that sets the country’s daily agenda to an outsider on the orders of a Netanyahu apologist unless wrecking it is the point. Paramount settled Trump’s lawsuit rather than fight it. This is what came next.2️⃣ The Fund They Swore Was DeadThis is the story the right wasn’t telling its audience Tuesday: Todd Blanche sat before a House appropriations subcommittee at four o’clock to defend the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund his Justice Department built to pay Trump’s allies, and the administration’s claim that it’s dead is a lie of omission — Judge Leonie Brinkema only paused it through June 12, the money still earmarked and waiting, which is why lawmakers spent the afternoon demanding confirmation it’s actually killed and not just parked until the cameras leave. Trace how it was born and you see why even Republicans flinched: Trump’s DOJ filed a ten-billion-dollar suit against the IRS, dropped it when the court signaled no merit, then announced a settlement on a lawsuit that no longer existed — what Sheldon Whitehouse calls fraud on the court and on the taxpayer, an investigation now reopened. Strip the legal language and it’s a billion and a half dollars routed toward a man who’ll need to pay people in a contested midterm — and Blanche had to answer for Epstein in the same chair, where eighteen survivors say he lied under oath in May.1️⃣ Trump Hands the Spies to a Name in Epstein’s LedgerWe broke this at the top of the show because it couldn’t wait for the count: Tuesday morning Trump named Bill Pulte — thirty-seven, the housing regulator they call “Little Trump,” a Mar-a-Lago member who bought into the orbit with donations and the 50-year-mortgage pitch — acting Director of National Intelligence, keeping his housing job and the Fannie and Freddie chairmanships while taking the CIA, the NSA, and sixteen more agencies without one hour of intelligence experience. We’ve watched what he does with access: Pulte is the man who mined private mortgage data through his housing perch to refer Lisa Cook, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell for fraud — indictments that went nowhere — and a man who manufactured fraud cases from housing files can manufacture an election-fraud narrative from intelligence files, just in time for a midterm Trump knows he’s losing. Then there’s the part the wires won’t touch: Pulte’s father, the developer Mark Pulte, appears in Epstein’s own emails — Epstein spelled it “Pulty,” which is why it never surfaced in a search — named as one of three men in the staged auction of the Maison de l’Amitié, Epstein setting the floor, “Pulty” the counter-bid, Trump the buyer who walked away with it before the house was flipped to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev at a fifty-million-dollar markup, with Mark Pulte later buying half of it himself at his own markup. We published how that deal was done months ago, in Epstein’s words. Now the son of a man inside that laundering scheme runs American intelligence — and Trump didn’t pick him despite the Epstein thread; he’s spent the week exalting that network, handing Tom Barrack, another name from the files, the embassy in Turkey. The circle is closing, and it’s closing inside the government.THE PATTERNTrump is afraid, and frightened men pull their loyalists close. That’s all Tuesday was — not a strategy so much as a reflex. The spy agencies to a man whose family launders with Epstein. A slush fund kept on life support to bankroll what comes next. A newsroom hollowed so it can’t report any of it. A war run by mood and a single reporter’s access. He surrounds himself with people a little dumber than he is and just as exposed — families with as much to lose as his own — because the guilty don’t testify on each other. Six states voted Tuesday. In November the rest of the country gets the only answer that still counts. Use it.This is Narativ. We get there sooner. If this is the reporting you want in your inbox before it’s anywhere else, subscribe — free or paid — and bring someone with you. The work only holds if you do.Thank you Lev Parnas, Marnie Screams Into the Void, Noble Blend, Natasha Young, PJ Schuster, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Donald Trump just killed his own slush fund.Minutes before we came on air — a senior administration official told Axios the President’s $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund is, in their words, “dead for now.” Trump built that fund out of a lawsuit he filed against his own IRS, then aimed it at the people he calls victims of lawfare — a pot of taxpayer money critics said could cut checks to January 6 convicts. Judge Leonie Brinkema froze it Friday. Both parties turned on it over the weekend. And rather than defend it in open court on June 12, Trump pulled it himself.Here’s why that matters to you: it was your money — $1.776 billion of it — and he just walked away from it. Trump doesn’t walk away unless the fight is already lost. What’s next: the June 12 hearing is still on the calendar. A dropped plan is not a dismissed case. Watch that date.That was supposed to be number four tonight. It’s now the day’s biggest retreat. Here’s the rest of the countdown.5️⃣ THE TAPE THAT NAMES MELANIAThe number five story on the countdown today: a voicemail surfaced this weekend that drags the First Lady back into the Epstein story. Amanda Ungaro — the model who flew Epstein’s plane out of Paris as a teenager, then spent two decades with the man who introduced Donald to Melania, Paolo Zampolli — released a recording she left for Zampolli. On it, Ungaro alleges Melania worked as an escort tied to Epstein’s circle, and that Zampolli brokered the silence that buried it.We tell you what she says, not that it’s true. But Melania answered a rumor with an unscheduled White House denial back in April — and now there’s a tape, in the voice of someone who says she was there.4️⃣ THE FUND HE COULDN’T DEFENDNumber four is the story that broke at the top — so we’ll keep it short here: Trump’s $1.8 billion lawfare fund went from frozen to dead in three days, killed by his own retreat. The live thread is June 12, when Judge Brinkema’s hearing can put the underlying IRS settlement under oath.3️⃣ 70 PERCENT OF GAZA — AND A MILITARY MERGER IN THE NDAAThe number three story on the countdown today: Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his army to seize 70 percent of Gaza and told his commanders to strike the southern suburbs of Beirut. That’s a ceasefire turning into occupation. And while the bombs fall, the House quietly wrote Section 224 into its 2027 defense bill — a measure that fuses the U.S. and Israeli militaries on AI, cyber, and “data fusion,” which means your military’s data becomes Israel’s.The Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman calls it deeper integration than the U.S. holds with any country on earth. Why it matters: only 30 percent of Americans back Trump’s Iran war, and Congress is binding the two armies tighter anyway — in a defense bill, where nobody’s looking. What’s next: watch the floor amendments before this NDAA leaves committee.2️⃣ OIL SHOCK — BRENT TOPS $97The number two story on the countdown today: oil just told you the war is back. Brent crude jumped past $97 a barrel and U.S. crude past $94 within hours of Iran threatening to keep the Strait of Hormuz shut. One-fifth of the world’s oil moves through that strait.Here’s what it costs you: gas is already up 45 percent since this war began. When the White House says “calm” and the market says “$97,” believe the market — it has no reason to lie.1️⃣ IRAN WALKS — THE CEASEFIRE COLLAPSESThe number one story on the countdown today: the February ceasefire is gone. Over the weekend U.S. forces struck Iran’s coast, and Iran fired two ballistic missiles at American troops in Kuwait — both intercepted. Then Iran’s Revolutionary Guard-linked Tasnim agency signaled Tehran would walk away from the talks and keep Hormuz closed. That last part is Iranian state media — we attribute it, we don’t bank it.Meanwhile Trump spent the weekend telling Congress the war was “terminated” — on paper, to beat the War Powers clock — while the strikes kept flying. The fighting is the fact. The “peace” is a press release. What’s next: the next 48 hours tell us whether Tehran makes the walk-out official.The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3 PM ET. If this is the reporting you want more of, subscribe — it’s how we keep doing it.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Cat: Poli-Psych, LeftieProf, Peter W Shuster, Deeanna Burleson, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

By the time Dean introduced Scott MacFarlane, a federal judge in Washington had already ordered Donald Trump’s name peeled off the Kennedy Center within 14 days. By the time we got to story five, the Freedom 250 concert Trump is planning for the South Lawn had collapsed from nine acts to three. By the end of the hour, the day’s argument was sitting in plain view — everything he touches is rotting in his hands, and Washington is starting to peel away.5️⃣ FREEDOM 250 COLLAPSES TO THREETrump’s “Great American State Fair” was announced 48 hours ago with nine performers. By Friday it was down to three: Vanilla Ice, Flo Rida, and Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory — and Williams may also bail.Morris Day and the Time said they were never contacted. Martina McBride said the booking agent misled her about who was running it — Trump’s “Freedom 250,” not the congressionally chartered “America 250.” The Commodores walked. Bret Michaels — winner of Celebrity Apprentice, a man who in Dean’s line “would suck the chrome off a bumper for Donald Trump” — said no.The lineup didn’t collapse over politics in the abstract. It collapsed because nobody wants the stink. Vanilla Ice is the floor.4️⃣ THE SOUTH LAWN LOOKS LIKE A TRAILER PARKWorkers are parking on the White House lawn. Cranes, gaudy flags, chicken-coop fencing on the public side of the wrought iron. Behind it: the East Wing hole that may one day become Trump’s bunker — with hospital, drone port, and glass roof — and the UFC-branded Freedom 250 stage going up alongside.Steve Schmidt called it a used-car lot. Dean called it a hoarder’s yard. Scott — careful as ever — called it the worst possible optics during a moment his community is afraid to fill the tank. Gas is eight dollars a gallon in parts of California. Inflation jumped to 3.8%. Beef is up. And Trump is building a circus on the South Lawn.Jackie Kennedy would have set fire to the contractors.3️⃣ BONDI BLAMES BLANCHE, REFUSES TO ANSWER ON TRUMPPam Bondi arrived at the House Oversight Committee Friday morning under DOJ supervision — Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights and as polarizing a figure as the agency has, sitting next to her. Then she pointed at her former deputy. Todd Blanche ran the Epstein release. The redaction errors were his. The decisions were his.On every question that touched her conversations with Donald Trump about the Epstein files, Bondi refused to answer. As Zev put it on air: that sounds like a confession. The Republicans on the committee didn’t show. Only James Comer. Friday before a holiday weekend, no oath, no cameras, no recording — a closed-door designed to die in a transcript nobody reads.Outside the room, survivors were pushed aside in the hallway so Bondi could enter unaccosted. Liz Stein — who was twenty-one and a college senior when Maxwell and Epstein found her in 1994 — refused the country’s framing afterward, on camera: not Republicans versus Democrats, not conspiracy versus cover-up. The crime of sex trafficking. More than a thousand identified victims. A Department of Justice that redacts survivors’ names and protects perpetrators.2️⃣ JUDGE FREEZES THE $1.776B SLUSH FUNDFederal Judge Leonie Brinkema temporarily blocked Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund Friday morning. A hearing is set for June 12.The fund is the proceeds of a settlement Trump engineered with the IRS against himself — taxpayer money running to his allies through a vehicle even Republicans are walking away from. Brian Fitzpatrick first. Then Mike Flood of Nebraska, an off-the-radar Republican in an off-the-radar district, on the record trashing it. When Mike Flood is naming the slush fund a slush fund, the politics have cracked.The fund froze the same morning a different judge took Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center. Two courts. One Friday. Both pushing back on a Department of Justice that has stopped doing the work.1️⃣ TRUMP’S NAME COMES OFF THE KENNEDY CENTERU.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper halted the planned closure of the Kennedy Center and ordered Trump’s name removed within 14 days. Trump’s regime had been preparing to shut the building down on the Fourth of July.The lead plaintiff was Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee who was muted during the board meeting when the resolution to rename the building was voted through. They left her on mute. She sued. She won. Preservation groups joined her and won with her.The regime will appeal — they always do — and the order may get peeled back. For now, the cameras will be there when the letters come down. The federal courts are doing the work the Department of Justice will not.THE PATTERNFive stories. One Friday. A judge takes Trump’s name off a Washington landmark. A second judge freezes the cash vehicle he built for his friends. A former Attorney General arrives with a DOJ minder, blames her deputy for the Epstein cover-up, and refuses to answer a single question about her conversations with the president. The South Lawn looks like a carnival hauled in for a one-night stand. The concert collapses because Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are the floor of who will still take the booking.The story for the next 6 months is fatigue. Not outrage. The kind that bleeds through every issue at once — the slush fund, the $300 billion he’s promising Tehran, the eight-dollar gas, the Epstein cover-up, the cars on the White House lawn. Trump’s presidency is in free-fall, and we’re all too tired to deal with it, but now is not the time to fade away, or he’ll take us all down with him Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Ang Traders, Grace Alexandra Hayden, Leah Anderson, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell and Scott MacFarlane! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ EVEN THIEL FLEES TRUMPThe donor decamped. Peter Thiel — the venture capitalist who funded J.D. Vance into the vice presidency, the founder of Palantir, the PayPal-mafia patron whose money built the operational core of MAGA — has moved his family to a twelve-million-dollar mansion in Barrio Parque, met Javier Milei at the Casa Rosada this afternoon, and bought a tract of land near Punta del Este in Uruguay that observers suspect will house a bunker, making Argentina his third escape hatch after New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and a Maltese passport in 2022. The man who built the surveillance company the Trump regime uses to vacuum up Americans’ data, and whose Valor Equity Partners took a forty-million-dollar Epstein injection around the 2016 election, does not believe the country he funded will hold — and Buenos Aires is the kind of city a man chooses when his name is about to come up under oath in Washington.4️⃣ TRUMP’S FACE ON THE $250 BILLThe Washington Post reports that two Treasury appointees, Brian Beach and Andrew Brown, ordered the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to prototype a $250 banknote with Donald Trump’s face on it — specifically, the Fulton County mugshot taken when he was booked on the Georgia election-interference indictment — and the bureau’s printing director was reassigned within weeks of flagging that federal law forbids putting a living person on U.S. currency. George Washington was asked at Mount Vernon whether his face belonged on American money; he said no, because that, he said, was what kings do. Two and a half centuries later, Trump’s appointees are doing it anyway, with the booking photograph of the man as he stood charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election — and the very fact that the country now needs a $250 note is the symbolic confession that today’s dollar buys what yesterday’s hundred used to.3️⃣ TRUMP JUDGE GREENLIGHTS MAIL-IN VOTING POWER GRABFederal judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee, a Federalist Society alumnus — today denied the plaintiffs’ request to block the executive order Trump signed March 31 restricting mail-in voting and ordering DHS, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Postal Service to build a federal voter list, ruling that the case is not ripe and the plaintiffs lack standing because the order has not yet caused them concrete harm. He invited them to return when it has, and a parallel case before Judge Talwani in Boston hears argument June 2 on the same question. The procedural posture matters less than the practical one. The executive order continues to operate, the federal voter list build continues, and the mail-in restrictions roll forward into a midterm. 2️⃣ NAVARRO STEERED $620 MILLION TO DON JR.ProPublica documented today what Denver Riggleman has been reporting at Narativ for four months: Peter Navarro — Trump’s senior counselor, the man Don Jr. visited in prison and to whom Don Jr. dedicated a book — personally called the Pentagon and directed the Office of Strategic Capital to lend six hundred and twenty million dollars to Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth startup whose investors include Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm 1789 Capital, which took an undisclosed stake three months before the loan was announced and watched Vulcan’s valuation run from roughly two hundred million to roughly two billion dollars in the months that followed. Across Vulcan, the drone parts firm Unusual Machines, and the one-point-six-billion-dollar Kazakhstan rare-earth mine, Eric and Donald Jr. have now built a portfolio worth roughly three-point-two billion dollars in eighteen months, almost all of it on sole-source contracts and federally-greased deals from their father’s regime — and the Republican Party that spent two years investigating Hunter Biden over a few hundred thousand dollars sits silent at this. Their silence is the answer.1️⃣ INFLATION HITS 3.8% — TRUMP STALLS IRAN DEALThe April inflation reading came in at 3.8 percent, and the back-to-back monthly jumps of 0.9 percent in March and 0.6 percent in April mark the sharpest two-month spike since the 2022 surge — worse than anything Trump produced during his first term — while the Iran deal that would cool the oil price sits unsigned on his desk, he tells reporters he “won’t rush” it, and overnight U.S. and Iranian forces traded fresh strikes east of Bandar Abbas as Tehran fired a missile toward Kuwait. Trump is not defending the U.S. dollar — he is deliberately breaking it, because his personal stablecoin and his crypto portfolio, which independent reporting now estimates at roughly twenty billion dollars in Bitcoin and crypto futures, depend on the dollar’s continued devaluation, and every American paying more at the pump and at the grocery store this summer is paying, very directly, into Donald Trump’s personal hedge against the country he is running.🎯 THE PATTERNTake all five stories together and the day tells itself. The donor is fleeing because he does not believe the country he funded will hold. The Treasury is engraving the president’s mugshot on a banknote that should not exist because the dollar is being deliberately gutted. A Trump judge is handing the regime the machinery to thin the voter rolls before the midterms. The president’s senior counselor handed the president’s son six hundred and twenty million dollars through a Pentagon loan. And inflation is hitting the worst short-term spike since the pandemic surge because the Iran deal that would cool it sits unsigned. Add this week’s firings at CBS — Sharon Alfonsi, Tanya Simon, Cecilia Vega, Dragan Mihailović, Matthew Polevoy, all gone under Bari Weiss — and the press is being purged at the same time the currency, the courts, and the contracts are. The same hand is moving every piece. It is not a series of scandals. It is one operation, run in plain view, and every American is paying the bill while the people running it move their money offshore.Read The Narativ daily at narativ.org. Subscribe to support independent reporting that the captured press will not do.Thank you Caro Henry, Robin Payes, Debbie Hupp, LeftieProf, Lalisa, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

1️⃣ THE CABINET MEETING THAT WASN’TOn Tuesday the White House posted that Donald Trump’s six-month physical had “checked out PERFECTLY.” On Wednesday at 11:56 AM the president sat down at his own Cabinet table and proved otherwise. Within the hour he threatened to bomb a US security partner — “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up” — confused Oman with Iran, then confused Venezuela with Iran in the same answer, then claimed America produces double the oil that Russia and Saudi Arabia produce combined, a number that is not real. He looked gaunt. Dean called him a skeleton with a wig. The shoulders sunken, the cadence slow, the pauses long enough that the room had time to wonder whether the sentence was coming. Cardiologist Jonathan Reiner is on the record about “extreme somnolence.” Rick Wilson said it plain on television this morning — the president is dying. Marco Rubio looked at the wall. Pete Hegseth looked at the floor. The Secretary of State responsible for the Iran negotiation and the Secretary of Defense responsible for the war it followed sat shooting darts with their eyes trying to get the president to stop talking. He kept going. Trump told the country that allowing the cameras in was the most transparent thing any administration had ever done. He may well be right. Every American who turned on a television at noon today saw exactly what his staffers have seen for months: the president who leads the free world cannot lead a meeting.5️⃣ KENNEDY CATCHES SNAKES, BLAMES CIRCUMCISIONWhile the Cabinet meeting unfolded, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services uploaded a video of himself catching two snakes barehanded on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s Palm Beach patio. His wife, Cheryl Hines, can be heard begging him to stop — Bobby, please. Bobby told the camera the snakes were water moccasins, venomous; they were Black Racers, non-venomous; he did not know what he was holding. They were mating, which is why they bit him. Forty-eight hours later the same Bobby Kennedy sat at the Cabinet table and told the country circumcision causes autism, citing two studies whose lead reviewer called their methods “truly appalling.” This is the same Bobby Kennedy who cut the head off a whale and drove it home on his Jeep, who staged a dead bear in Central Park as a bike-accident victim, whose Vice President admitted yesterday he is on the “RFK nutrient diet” but will not say what is in it because “I’ll get in trouble for it.” The pseudoscience used to be a podcast bit. Now it is federal health policy. And the man delivering it does not know a Black Racer from a water moccasin.4️⃣ TEHRAN TURNS THE INTERNET ONEighty-seven days after Iran cut its national internet — the longest national shutdown ever recorded — Tehran flipped the switch back on Wednesday. Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref called it “the first step toward free and regulated access,” the word regulated doing the work. A regime does not reopen its country when it has lost. Iran has been letting only 25 ships through the Strait of Hormuz in a 24-hour window against a pre-war average of more than 100 — Tehran controls the tap. Their people will see the videos the regime wants them to see: the 42 US military aircraft downed, the USS Gerald Ford in dry dock for two years, more than two-thirds of US munitions and interceptors in the region depleted. Trump told his Cabinet “we don’t need oil, we don’t need the straits, we don’t need anything.” His allies in Europe and Asia need the straits. Inflation needs the straits. If Trump thinks he forced regime change in Tehran, he is delusional. The new leaders of Iran are the same — if not worse — than the ones before.3️⃣ ALFONSI WALKS, CBS BURNSSharyn Alfonsi’s last day at 60 Minutes was Saturday. She left after nearly twenty years at CBS and published a statement today naming editor-in-chief Bari Weiss as the executive who killed her CECOT segment on migrants vanished into El Salvador’s prison system. CBS leadership’s behavior, Alfonsi wrote, was “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting” — “a chilling message to the entire newsroom.” She said she has learned exactly what it costs to hold the line; hold it anyway. Weiss was installed in October by Larry Ellison, Benjamin Netanyahu’s biggest American backer. Ellison’s son David runs Paramount-Skydance, one regulatory approval from buying Warner Bros Discovery and putting CBS News and CNN under one roof with Weiss above both. The Netanyahu interview that aired on CBS a few weeks ago was handpicked by Netanyahu’s office, edited with the prime minister signing off on every syllable. CBS News is no longer CBS News. It is a lobby group for Donald Trump and his friends and a news service for Benjamin Netanyahu. Sharyn Alfonsi went scorched earth on her way out because there was no one left inside the building to fight beside her.2️⃣ TRUMP HANDS TALARICO A GIFTWithin minutes of being declared the Republican Senate nominee in Texas, Ken Paxton — twice indicted on securities fraud, impeached by his own Texas House in 2023, accused of using his office to help a donor who employed his mistress, friend of the pedophile Adam Hoffman whom he helped cut a sweetheart deal, twice unfaithful to his pro-life Christian wife — was met by James Talarico’s first general-election video. “Ken Paxton is the most corrupt politician in America. He embodies the broken political system we’re running against. It’s puppet politicians who serve themselves and their billionaire mega donors instead of serving us. It’s time to come together: the People vs. Ken Paxton.” Talarico is 37, a Presbyterian seminarian, a Texas state representative, and the best Democratic fundraising story in the country — $27 million in the first quarter, more than every Republican Senate candidate in any state combined. He launched the People vs. Paxton Tour tonight at Rich’s Houston, timed to the third anniversary of Paxton’s impeachment. Cook Political Report moved Texas from Likely Republican to Lean Republican within the hour. The Senate Leadership Fund’s $342 million in fall ad reservations did not include Texas at this scale; they planned for Cornyn. Trump may have forced Cornyn off the board, but in doing so he handed Talarico exactly the foe Democrats prayed for. The rescue money for Paxton comes out of Alaska, North Carolina, Maine, and Ohio — the four seats Democrats actually need to take the chamber. Trump handed his party a Texas problem and his opponent a national platform on the same Tuesday night.THE PATTERNTrump is losing his grip. The Cabinet meeting showed a president no longer sharp, no longer coherent, no longer able to recall the names of countries his own military is at war with. He told the room he doesn’t care about November, claiming Paxton’s win shows how much support he really has. He did not see the gift he had just handed Democrats. It is the same shoot-before-you-think instinct he used to start the Iran war he is now losing, the same instinct his acolytes used to pull Sharyn Alfonsi’s CECOT story and run her contract out, the same instinct Bobby Kennedy uses to grab snakes he cannot identify and federal health policy he cannot defend. Every political move has consequences. A president who cannot tell Oman from Iran is not thinking clearly about the consequences of his next one. Day 493. That’s why you need to know sooner.Follow Dean: deanblundell.substack.comThank you Ellie Leonard, Leah Anderson, Micheal Scott, Ms.Yuse, Rachel-We are Renee and Keith, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Iranian officials told Washington Monday to ignore Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts about a peace deal. They are, in the words a Tehran back-channel briefing used and the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Axios, Reuters and Al Jazeera later confirmed, “political theater for a domestic audience.” By Tuesday afternoon that read covered every story on Fivestack. The president walked into Walter Reed and walked out posting one word in all caps. He pulled his full cabinet to Camp David for tomorrow because the strike he ordered Monday collapsed the talks he had claimed Friday were nearly done. He demanded eight Sunni states join the Abraham Accords on one phone call and the line went silent. A federal court in Birmingham — two Trump-appointed judges on the panel — told Alabama its gerrymander was not “particularly complex or close.” And our own investigation published this morning showed where the money funding Jeffrey Epstein’s operation came from: a 1911 Georges Braque still life, a $30 million round-trip wire, and a bank that sat on three sides of the same table. Theater up top. Machinery underneath.5️⃣ Walter Reed — Trump’s “PERFECTLY” and Nothing ElseDonald Trump walked into Walter Reed Tuesday and walked out posting one word in all caps on Truth Social: PERFECTLY. That was the entire disclosure of the fourth publicly disclosed medical exam of his second term — the third Walter Reed visit in thirteen months. He turns eighty in June. Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Dick Cheney’s former personal physician, went on CNN and laid out what the camera shows: hand bruises covered with makeup (the White House said “handshakes”; Reiner called the explanation “not credible”), severe acute-chronic edema in the ankles, daytime somnolence putting him to sleep in the Oval and possibly at Arlington on Memorial Day. April 2025 released full bloodwork. July gave a diagnosis and no results. October went vaguer still and the press office sat on it until December. Today: one word. The succession question lives in the room nobody is allowed to enter.TODAY’S GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT IS: Read it at GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.4️⃣ Court Tosses Alabama’s 6-1 Map — SC Republicans Defect to Save ClyburnA unanimous three-judge federal panel in Birmingham — two of them Trump appointees — refused Tuesday to let Alabama use its 6-1 congressional map for the November midterms, ruling in a 79-page opinion that the map “intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution” and that the question was “not particularly complex or close.” AG Steve Marshall promised an immediate Supreme Court appeal. Hours later in South Carolina, state Senate Republicans broke ranks and joined Democrats to kill a similar GOP map that would have eliminated the last majority-Black district in the state — preserving the seat of Representative James Clyburn, the first Black member of Congress elected from South Carolina in nearly a century. The Supreme Court gave the GOP the rule last month with its Louisiana decision weakening the Voting Rights Act. The rule still required something Alabama could not produce: a map that did not intentionally crack Black voters.3️⃣ Trump’s Election EO — and the NDA They Want Every Federal Employee to SignTrump’s executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” is the document voting rights groups warned about for two years — it restricts voter access, punishes states that make voting easier, and grew out of a seventeen-page draft that proposed declaring a national emergency to seize federal control of the 2026 midterms. Stacked on top this week: a White House proposal requiring every federal employee, including contractors, to sign a nondisclosure agreement banning any information that disparages the president or the administration. The whistleblower carve-out is paper; the regime’s track record with whistleblowers is doxx, swat, hand the address down to the incel army. Federal employees work for the public, for Congress, for the law — not for the president. The line runs from the EO to the NDA to the DOJ’s “mega masters” deporting people who missed a court notice. One machine.2️⃣ Narativ Exclusive — Black, Epstein, and the $30 Million BraqueOur investigation published this morning begins with one wire instruction Jeffrey Epstein sent his lawyer Darren Indyke: “ok to wire the 30 million.” On the deadline day of a §1031 like-kind exchange — midnight, November 23, 2016 — a U.S. Virgin Islands trust Epstein controlled bought a Giacometti and Georges Braque’s 1911 Le Guéridonfrom Apollo co-founder Leon Black for $30 million. The “buyer” was Epstein. The “fee” was money Black had just paid him — round-tripped Southern Trust → Southern Financial LLC → the Haze Trust → back to Black. Bank of America sat on three sides of the wire. Six months later Christie’s sold the Braque for $8.8 million; the Haze Trust netted $7,725,000 in fewer than two hundred days. A Ukrainian MC2 model who flew to Sochi the week of the sale pocketed a $772,500 “commission” on a sale she did not broker. Senator Wyden’s Senate Finance minority calls it a sham conveyance: $1.3 billion in deferred U.S. tax that funded Epstein’s offshore operation. Black testifies to House Oversight on June 26.1️⃣ Trump Strikes Iran — Talks Pause, IRGC Vows Retaliation, Cabinet Moves to Camp DavidWhile Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi were in the air Monday bound for peace talks in Doha, U.S. warplanes sank two Revolutionary Guard speedboats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and struck missile launch sites near Bandar Abbas, Iran’s major southern port and naval base. By Tuesday afternoon Ghalibaf was on a plane home — talks paused. The IRGC promised a “decisive reciprocal response.” Supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father after U.S.–Israeli bombs killed the elder Khamenei on the war’s opening day February 28, told the region American military bases are no longer safe. Trump moved Wednesday’s full cabinet meeting to Camp David. Days earlier he had phoned the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain on one call and demanded they all join the Abraham Accords as the price of peace; Pakistan rejected him on the line, and the silence ran long enough that Trump joked into the line, “are you still there?” U.S. intelligence assessments leaked this month confirm Iran retains thirty of thirty-three missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, seventy percent of its mobile launchers, and seventy percent of its prewar missile stockpile. And the Iranians told Washington this week to ignore Trump’s Truth Social posts about the deal — political theater for a domestic audience.🎯 The PatternThe Iranian foreign ministry gave us the day’s frame for free. Political theater for a domestic audience — the Truth Social posts, the PERFECTLY medical exam, the all-Sunni Abraham Accords ask, the election integrity EO, the federal NDA, the gerrymander dressed in civil-rights drag. Theater for the cameras at the top. And underneath: Bank of America on three sides of a $30 million wire that funded Jeffrey Epstein’s operation. A federal panel in Alabama with two Trump appointees on it telling the state its gerrymander is racist on its face. State Senators in deep-red South Carolina killing their own party’s map to save Clyburn’s district. A chronic-insomnia diagnosis the White House will not let the doctor speak. A cabinet meeting moved to Camp David because the talks the president claimed had succeeded had just been shattered by the strike the president ordered.A man who lights the building, calls the fire department, and asks for the credit — and a country whose institutions are deciding, one Trump-appointed judge and one state senator at a time, whether they are still willing to play the part assigned to them.Day 492. That’s why you need to know sooner.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.SubscribeWe do this reporting because no major outlet will. Subscribe at narativ.org. The Leon Black–Epstein investigation is the first of several. The receipts are real, and the room is full.— Zev ShalevThank you Robin Payes, LeftieProf, Leah Anderson, Lalisa, Jeanne Elbe, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. 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A pollster tied to Fox put Donald Trump’s approval at 31 percent today. Twenty-five is the number that ended Nixon. A president at 31 and sliding can no longer make his own party afraid of him — and on Thursday, his own party stopped pretending to be. The Senate killed the billion dollars he wanted for his ballroom. The House moved to take away his power to wage war. Two dozen Republicans lined up to kill the fund he built to pay the people who stormed the Capitol. Five stories, one engine: a cornered president, and the arithmetic that cornered him.5️⃣ The Ballroom Dies on a TechnicalityTrump wanted a billion dollars of public money for the ballroom going up on the White House lawn. He buried it inside a spending bill and called it Secret Service security. He did not get it.He lost it on a technicality, which is the only way anything stops this White House anymore. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse walked through the kill: the White House is a public building under the Environment and Public Works Committee, and it sits on national park land under Energy and Natural Resources. Republicans wrote their reconciliation bill without instructions to either committee. Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich sent their lawyers to argue the funding was therefore defective. The parliamentarian agreed in a day. Bye-bye, billionaire ballroom.What’s left is the question of why a president needs a billion-dollar fortress at all. Trump talks about drone ports and snipers and keeping the world safe. The likelier read is the one Dean gave it: this is a bunker, and a man builds a bunker when he does not plan to leave. The same afternoon, a commission of his own appointees approved his triumphal arch by the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The fortress and the monument, waved through on the same day. Trump noticed only the second one — “I finally get good news,” he said.4️⃣ The Democrats Disown Their Own AutopsyFor months the Democratic National Committee sat on its own report into why Kamala Harris lost. On Thursday, Chair Ken Martin released it — and stapled a note to the front saying the party “cannot independently verify the claims presented.” He published the autopsy and disowned the coroner in the same motion.Martin did not release it because he wanted the answers. He released it because hiding it had become the bigger story. So the report — which faults the Biden White House for never preparing Harris and says she “wrote off rural America” — hit every front page with the party’s own fingerprints smudged across it. The Democrats had a reckoning to write and a plan to write. They published a draft they refused to sign.This is the only story today that did not break against Trump by breaking toward someone. On a Thursday when every lever of his power jammed, the party built to replace him spent the morning arguing with its own paperwork. A 31 percent president is beatable. He still has to be beaten by somebody.3️⃣ Good Night, ColbertStephen Colbert taped the final Late Show on Thursday night, 11 years after he inherited the desk and a decade as the most-watched host in late night. CBS calls the cancellation “purely financial.” Colbert calls it what it followed: Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over a 60 Minutes edit — a payment Colbert named a “big fat bribe,” made while the company needed federal sign-off on an $8 billion merger.This is media capture in its most comfortable form — not a censor, a spreadsheet. The company settles, the merger clears, the loudest nightly critic of the president goes dark, and nobody has to say the word. Bari Weiss now runs the newsroom. The ratings are gone. A historic network is dying a quiet, self-inflicted death.The miscalculation is that it works. Late night is where the men at the Yankees game get their politics — the ones who do not read the Post and would never call themselves political. Kill Colbert, and every host still standing inherits a reason to swing harder and a martyr to swing for. Jon Stewart, on Colbert’s couch this week, named the future better than any pollster: a day when the country “repudiates this putrid administration,” he said, and the joyful noise from its bowels makes Hungary’s break from Orbán “look like an Amish Sabbath.”2️⃣ One Vote From the End of the Iran WarLast week the House split 212 to 212 on whether to pull the United States out of Trump’s war with Iran. A tie fails, and the war went on. On Thursday the arithmetic moved: Jared Golden, the lone Democratic holdout, said he would vote yes, and the House headed back to the floor. The final count is unconfirmed as this posts — but the count was never the real story.Watch what actually turned those votes. Not conscience — Dean called it the butterfly effect, and the plainer word is self-preservation. Trump spent sixteen months primarying the Republicans who crossed him: Thomas Massie for wanting the Epstein files, Bill Cassidy for voting against him nine percent of the time. The survivors looked at a 31 percent president and did the math. A vote to claw back war powers is no longer a vote against a strongman. It is a vote with the wind.It comes the same day Tehran hardened. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, ordered that the country’s near-weapons-grade uranium stay inside Iran — the exact concession Trump promised Israel a peace deal would deliver. So Trump now sits between a Congress moving to forbid him from fighting the war and an enemy refusing to give him a reason to stop. He owns the Strait of Hormuz, he says. What he owns is a war he cannot win and cannot end — and gas prices that will carry it into November.1️⃣ The Slush Fund — and the Quiet HalfHarry Dunn and Daniel Hodges held the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The men who beat them were pardoned. On May 20, those same men started filing claims against a $1.8 billion federal fund — and Dunn and Hodges sued to freeze it before a dollar moved.Read the claims out loud. One January 6 defendant who served 1,075 days wants $30 million. Michael Caputo wants $1.8 million “today.” Mike Lindell went on Fox to ask for $400 million. This is not compensation for a wrong. It is a down payment on the next one — money to keep the people who stormed the Capitol once ready to do it again. Two dozen Republicans now say they will help kill it, more than the math requires.The money was never the deepest part of this. The same settlement that created the fund barred the IRS, forever, from auditing Trump, his family, or his companies — and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a memo handing the Trump family permanent immunity from financial crimes, past, present, and future. So ask the obvious question: what is inside those sealed returns that is worth this much trouble to bury? Narativ has spent years tracing the Epstein money, and that trail runs through tax filings and financial records exactly like the ones Blanche just sealed. The fund is the loud half of this story. The immunity is the quiet half — Trump shredding the records while the country argues about the payouts.THE PATTERNAdd up the Thursday. The Senate took the ballroom. The House moved on the war. Two dozen Republicans turned on the slush fund. Even CBS folding and the Democrats fumbling their autopsy run on the same current — a 31 percent president generates no fear, and a strongman nobody fears is just a man. None of it was courage. Every Republican who found a spine this week found it in a poll. But the machine Trump built to make himself untouchable — the fund, the immunity, the war power, the ballroom he never has to leave — runs on fear, and the fear is draining out. He spent the day asking for good news. He should have been counting votes.The Fivestack airs weekdays at 3 PM ET with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. Subscribe free or paid at narativ.org — paid subscriptions push this reporting in front of more people.Thank you Lev Parnas, Ellie Leonard, This Will Hold, LC - Silence is Complicity, Story Carrier, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

DEAN BLUNDELL WAS OUT TODAYFive stories led the Fivestack today, and they were not five separate stories. Together they show a government doing two things at once. Abroad, it is redrawing the map. At home, it is rewriting the rules so the people in charge never have to answer for anything.Here is the day, counted down.5️⃣ The Castro Indictment Is About Cuba, Not 1996In Miami today, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment of Raúl Castro — Fidel’s younger brother and Cuba’s former president — over the 1996 shootdown of two planes flown by the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Four men died in that attack. It happened thirty years ago. There is no new evidence and no new witness.An indictment like this does not arrive thirty years late for legal reasons. It arrives because someone needs it now. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, opened the press conference by calling the charges “the first step” of several. What has already happened tells you what the next steps are: a gas blockade choking Cuba’s fuel supply, and a CIA director in Havana over the weekend. A CIA director does not drop into a country being squeezed that hard unless Washington is planning for what comes after the government that runs it.What comes after is the point. Raúl Castro is in his nineties. He will likely never stand trial. He will be removed from Cuba, brought to the United States to face the charges, and the Castro era will end — the same way Venezuela’s ended, with Nicolás Maduro pulled out of his residence and jailed in Brooklyn and a compliant management class left to run the country. This is not a court case. It is Cuba being pried out of the Russian and Chinese orbit and turned into an American client state. Greenland, and Canada should pay attention4️⃣ Xi Hosts Putin While the Western Alliance DriftsWhile Castro’s indictment played in Miami, Xi Jinping hosted Vladimir Putin in Beijing. The official agenda was energy and arms. The real message was the picture itself.Days earlier, Donald Trump had made his own trip to Beijing and come home with an order for 200 Boeings and a verbal promise of help on Iran — and nothing else. Putin’s visit was staged as the contrast: Russia elevated, America diminished, the Moscow–Beijing partnership on full display. That partnership is neither new nor loose. Russia and China are working a thirty-year strategic plan built around a melting Arctic, which will cut the trade routes between China and Europe and between China and North America by roughly a third. China now funds Moscow — a reversal of the Soviet years — and the two move together on military and trade.Trump told the world Xi had promised to stop arming Iran. The weapons in Iranian hands are Chinese. So are the weapons in Russian hands. The country supplying the enemy in a war America is fighting is the country its president flew to visit. Cuba and Venezuela leaving the Russia–China orbit is one half of the realignment. This is the other half, and it is not moving America’s way.3️⃣ The “Ballroom” Is a Military BaseTrump has stopped calling it a ballroom. Pressed today on whether the funding was in trouble, he said the building is going up — and then described what it actually is. The roof is a drone port. The structure is bulletproof. Underneath it is a full hospital. “It’s also a strong military position for our people,” he said. A military installation on the grounds of the White House, with a ballroom on top as the cover story.He once promised private partners would pay for it and no taxpayer money would be touched. That was a lie. One billion dollars in Secret Service funding, tied to the East Wing, has been written into the Senate’s ICE bill — the border-enforcement package — where almost no one would think to look for it. The bill funds a sharp surge in deportations. It also quietly funds the president’s fortified compound.2️⃣ 42 Aircraft Down — A Cost the Pentagon HidTrump keeps saying he won the war with Iran. The budget says otherwise. Forty-two American military aircraft have been lost or damaged in the fighting, and the Defense Department never reported it.The number exists only because the Congressional Research Service reverse-engineered it from the war’s spending. The war was first priced at about $25 billion. A later reassessment added $4 billion. That $4 billion gap is the aircraft: four F-15E Strike Eagles, an F-35A, an A-10, seven KC-135 tankers, an E-3 Sentry AWACS, two MC-130J special-operations planes, an HH-60W rescue helicopter, twenty-four MQ-9 Reaper drones, and an MQ-4C Triton. Iran shot or knocked them down in its response to the original US–Israeli strike. A won war does not cost a country two dozen Reapers and a stealth fighter, and it does not require the Pentagon to hide the count.1️⃣ Trump May Never Face a Tax Audit AgainNarativ broke the core of this one yesterday, live on air. Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. The settlement created a $1.776 billion fund — money with no real connection to the leak, bundled into the deal anyway. Then, late yesterday afternoon, a rider appeared.The rider is the story. It shields Trump from any audit or scrutiny of his past tax returns — and not only his. His family. His corporations. The sister corporations. His partners. As written, Donald Trump never has to face a tax audit again. It may be challenged in court. He has spent decades beating every attempt to examine what he has done, and there is no reason to assume this time is different.What the shield buries is the point. In 2016, the year he won the White House, Trump paid $750 in federal income tax. And Narativ’s investigation into the Epstein financial network keeps hitting the same wall — the Maison de l’Amitié, the Palm Beach mansion Trump bought and resold to a Russian oligarch at a markup of more than $50 million, the proceeds reaching him tax-free in a deal long read as Russian money laundering. Proving any of it requires the tax records. The rider is built so that no one ever gets them.THE PATTERNFive stories, one direction. Abroad, the map is being redrawn — Cuba and Venezuela pulled toward Washington, the Western alliance drifting while Moscow and Beijing consolidate. At home, the president is making himself and his family untouchable: a war whose true cost is concealed, a militarized White House paid for in the dark, a tax shield with no expiration date.The realignment of power and the escape from accountability are the same project. You move the borders and you move the rules at the same time, and you count on each story being too big and too fast for anyone to hold. Watch who lines up behind it. This week Jeff Bezos sat down with CNBC, called Trump “more mature, more disciplined,” and said he was “on the side of America” — the same Bezos whose company paid $70 million for a Melania documentary worth a fraction of that. The powerful are not resisting the realignment. They are paying to be on the right side of it.Narativ is reader-funded and ad-free. Subscribe to get the Fivestack, Narativ Live, and our ongoing investigation into the Epstein financial network — including tonight’s special report, Beneath Zorro, on what really happened underground at Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Rick Elizondo | R3Zondo, Jai C. Porter🇨🇦, Skutt Hope, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Donald Trump’s former personal defense lawyer — sat in front of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday morning and did five things in one hearing. He defended a $1.776 billion fund that pays Jan 6 rioters out of the Treasury. He answered for Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal prison transfer, which followed his own private interview with her in Tallahassee. He was cornered, after months of refusal, into agreeing to meet the Epstein survivors. He quietly signed and posted a second document that gives Donald Trump and every Trump entity forever-immunity from IRS audits. And while none of it triggered the follow-up question it should have in the room, the Office of Government Ethics revealed last week that Trump personally traded stocks 3,700 times in the first quarter alone. One hearing. One man. Five fronts.5️⃣ HOW THE PRESS IS BURYING THE AUDIT PARDONRead the major wires Tuesday afternoon. Most of them led with the slush fund — the $1.776 billion fund that pays Jan 6 rioters. The audit pardon, the second document Blanche signed Tuesday that gives Trump’s family and businesses forever-immunity from IRS audits, ran most often as a paragraph nine inside a Trump-IRS settlement story. The New York Times broke it as an “expanded agreement.” Reuters called it “an updated provision.” Most cable coverage Tuesday afternoon did not mention it at all. The Intercept called it “theft far worse than Watergate.” Fox didn’t run it.GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOTThe biggest story of the night is being filed as a footnote on the bigger story of the morning. Ground News flags the stories one side of the press is ignoring and shows you the framing gap on the same screen — bias rating, factuality score, source ownership, all built in. Tuesday is exactly why we use it. 40%off the Vantage Plan below:4️⃣ TRUMP TRADED 3,700 TIMES IN Q1 — CRAMER GOES SILENTThe U.S. Office of Government Ethics disclosed last week that Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Reporter Judd Legum, on Substack, has been tracking the receipts — Apple shares bought the day Trump publicly praised Apple, Thermo Fisher shares bought the day Trump toured a Thermo Fisher plant. The cleanest insider-trading paper trail an American president has ever produced. CNBC’s Jim Cramer was handed the news on air Monday and could not speak for ten seconds. Wall Street’s loudest voice did not have a word.3️⃣ BLANCHE, CORNERED ON THE EPSTEIN SURVIVORSIn a separate exchange in the same hearing, Blanche was pressed on whether the Justice Department would meet with the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. The senator asked him directly: “Will you reach out to them?” Blanche tried legalism. “Any lawyer can reach out to the Department of Justice.” The senator pressed again — would Blanche personally call the victims, since the lawyers had already tried. Blanche, eventually, after a minute of dodge: “Of course, yes, absolutely. That would be great. I would like to meet the survivors.”2️⃣ “THE PRESIDENT’S CONSIGLIERE”A senator pressed Blanche on his trip to Tallahassee last year, where Blanche personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell — an interview under “queen for a day” immunity where she could say whatever she wanted, without consequence. “Why did he send you down to talk to her?” the senator asked. Blanche: “He didn’t send me. I went.” The senator: “Yes, I do, frankly. Because you know...” “You’re a very gifted lawyer. But from my perspective, you have very little faith to the Constitution and the people of America, and you’re the president’s consigliere.” Blanche: “Your perspective is completely wrong, Senator, respectfully.” The senator: “Well, I think the facts will prove me right.” 1️⃣ TRUMP’S GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD The New York Times published a second document Blanche had signed Tuesday and quietly posted to the Justice Department’s website. Section C: “The United States releases, waives, acquits, and forever discharges each of the plaintiffs from...” pursuing any claim, examination, damages — and the affiliated-parties clause extends to “trusts, parents, sister or related companies, affiliates and subsidiaries.” Every Trump entity. Forever. No more audits. Brian Morrissey — Treasury’s general counsel, confirmed by the Senate seven months ago — walked out of the building Monday night. He wasn’t resigning over the slush fund. He was resigning over the perpetual cover. Mitchell, live on Narativ: “Todd Blanche doesn’t even have the authority to say that about the United States. He is not the United States.” The lawsuit was dropped before any judge could review a settlement. What Blanche signed is a contract. Contracts break. State attorneys general are already being briefed. The lawsuits are being drafted.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Today’s Fivestack was brought to you by Ground News. Forty percent off the Vantage Plan at groundnews.com/fivestack.Thank you Suzanne Sky, Skutt Hope, PJ Schuster, Micheal Scott, Courtney M 🇨🇦, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Xi Jinping couldn’t have choreographed a more picture perfect display of the decline of the American empire than showed up in Beijing today. True to form, Trump didn’t miss an opportunity to sing Xi’s praises while ignoring the harsh realities that his host was aiding an abetting Iran - the very enemy that has locked his presidency into freefall since the war he began more than 60 days ago. 5️⃣ Day Two in BeijingXi opened with cooperation, partnership, the “Thucydides trap.” He also opened with a threat: handle Taiwan wrong, the Chinese Foreign Ministry readout said, and “the two countries would collide or even enter into conflict.” The threat was in the official Chinese readout. Trump’s response was a hymn. “You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway.” He praised the children — “They were happy. They were beautiful” — the same beat the Epstein files have taught us to listen for. He praised the delegation he had dragged across the Pacific with him. He bowed Xi through the door first on the way out. Please, sir. After you. Please.Dean said it on air and we’ll say it again here: this was not a summit. It was a surrender, choreographed by Beijing, accepted by a president too broken by his own Iran war to refuse. Xi got 200 Boeing jets and a working assumption that Taiwan is now his to take when he wants. Trump got a sentence. China will stop arming Iran. We have heard this sentence before, in 2019 and again in 2023, and each time the shipments resumed through front companies, Gulf transit hubs, and the same secret routes the Joint Staff was mapping when it wrote this week’s assessment.4️⃣ The Pentagon Already KnewA confidential intelligence assessment landed on Gen. Dan Caine’s desk this week. Washington Post‘s John Hudson broke it at 12:10 AM ET. The Joint Staff intelligence directorate ran it through the DIME framework — diplomatic, informational, military, economic — and produced one conclusion in four colors of ink: China is winning the war Trump started.Since the Iran war launched February 28, Beijing has sold weapons to the Gulf allies the United States is sworn to defend, kept the world’s energy moving after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, watched the Pentagon burn through the Patriots, THAADs, and Tomahawks Washington would need to defend Taiwan, labeled the war “illegal” in its messaging, and pulled Thailand, Australia, and the Philippines closer. Trump carried the assessment to Beijing in the same plane as Elon Musk and Jensen Huang and Marco Rubio. He did not let the report change the script. Beijing has no incentive to stop arming Iran. Beijing has every incentive to keep the war bleeding.3️⃣ The Men on the Epstein TapeYesterday Narativ published the enhanced audio from Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, dated February 2013. Ehud Barak — former Israeli prime minister, former defense minister, named only as a “former prime minister” by Virginia Giuffre in her book and described as one of the most violent men inside the network — sat with Larry Summers and Epstein and asked, on tape, to be bought. He did not want to end like Gerhard Schröder, he said. He wanted a quiet five million a year and a useful job and a friend in the Kremlin. Weeks after the dinner, Barak flew to St. Petersburg and met Vladimir Putin. A million-dollar wire from oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — sanctioned by the United States since 2018 for facilitating malign Russian activity — arrived in Barak’s Hyperion E.B. account.One name on Barak’s books that surfaced in the reporting today: Scott Bessent. Half a million dollars a year. The Treasury Secretary who is sitting on the unreleased Treasury files on Jeffrey Epstein is in a financial relationship with a man Putin paid to do whatever Putin asked.2️⃣ Lutnick Lied Eight TimesHoward Lutnick sat in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building on May 6 and answered ninety-six pages of questions under penalty of 18 U.S.C. § 1001. The Oversight Committee released the transcript last night. Narativ’s reporting catches him in eight contradictions. The seven-million-dollar townhouse that transferred from Epstein’s trust to Lutnick for ten dollars. The “four emails in one day” that the DOJ files show were closer to two hundred and fifty, one of them listing the names, ages, and sexes of the children coming to the island. The AdFin stock purchase Lutnick signed five days after a lunch on Epstein’s island. The nanny resume Epstein’s accountant sent for a man who had no children of his own. The Maxwell parties two whistleblowers independently described. The October 2025 statement that Epstein was “the greatest blackmailer ever” — walked back under oath, and in walking it back, confirming the regime is sitting on the proof.The FBI’s January 2025 Cabinet screening returned twenty-six hits on Lutnick. A closed money laundering case. A RICO violations case. Three Suspicious Activity Reports. The note in the processing file: Queries were not conducted on Epstein and Maxwell due to the sensitive nature of the case. Nineteen days later, the Senate confirmed him fifty-one to forty-five. The committee asked him about the massage table, the mask collection, the scaffolding, the Frick Museum. The committee did not ask about Tether — the foreign stablecoin that lent Lutnick’s dynasty trust an undisclosed sum a day after he sold Cantor to his children, secured by everything the trust owns. Senators Warren and Wyden’s deadline for Lutnick to answer eight Tether questions is today.1️⃣ The War China Runs ThroughWe opened with Beijing. We come back to Beijing. The summit Trump went to Beijing to ask for help at is the summit Beijing planned around the war Trump started. The Pentagon already knew Xi would not stop arming Iran because Xi has no reason to stop and every reason to keep bleeding the United States dry. China and Russia have both vowed to veto any UN resolution to clean up the Hormuz blockade. Pakistan, India, Turkey are reaching for the only oil left to reach for. Allies are rerouting around Washington. Trump told reporters before takeoff he didn’t need anyone’s help. He landed asking for it anyway.Trump promised America would humble Iran. Iran is humbling America. China is the bank.THE PATTERNEhud Barak’s multi-million dollar deal with Vladimir Putin, as described by Barak himself on a recording made at Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in 2013, and Trump’s supplication to Xi in Beijing happening in real-time are a decade and a world apart, but they are products of the same malign forces that have corrupted our politics and defiled what America’s founders had demanded. We, the people, are greater than just one man, and we, the people, determine the course of American destiny—not a worn-out casino owner well past his best before date. This president may have bowed in surrender to Xi, but we, but the people, stand strong for the America we know we can be. The choice in front of us is not the choice Donald Trump is making for us. It is the choice we make for ourselves, in our neighborhoods, our cities, our states, in the oath we take in November.\Narativ is reader-supported. The Lutnick investigation, the Barak tape, the Bessent connection — all of it is paid-subscriber work. If you can subscribe, you keep this reporting going.Subscribe to Narativ →Watch The Fivestack — Thursday, May 14, 2026. Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. Full episode →Read Dean’s companion piece: Nero on the PotomacThank you Ellie Leonard, Amy Gabrielle, Cat: Poli-Psych, Robin Payes, Iulia Huiu, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ TRUMP LANDS IN BEIJING — XI SENDS A DEPUTYAir Force One touched down at Beijing Capital at 7:50 PM local time, 7:50 AM Eastern. Three hundred Chinese children in blue and white uniforms waved American and Chinese flags. The man at the foot of the stairs was Vice President Han Zheng. Xi Jinping was not there. He will receive Trump on Thursday morning. Melania did not make the trip. The first lady stayed home.The choreography of the welcome was deliberate. The Chinese president sent his deputy to the tarmac. The American president walked off the plane with billionaires and a Hollywood director accused by six women. Xi made Trump wait a day for the photo. The trip is officially about trade and Taiwan. Trump arrived in Beijing with the Iran war burning $4 billion of US weapons every fourteen days, the Strait of Hormuz frozen, his tariffs surviving on a court reprieve, and CPI printing 3.8%. Xi sets the terms Thursday. The trade concession Xi extracts is the news.4️⃣ BRETT RATNER FLIES TO CHINA WITH TRUMPDean called it on air. The flying Epstein memorial. Among the cabinet and the CEOs on Air Force One — Musk, Cook, Huang, Fink, Solomon, Schwarzman, Hegseth, Rubio — was a name no one expected. Brett Ratner. Accused in 2017 by Olivia Munn, Natasha Henstridge, and four other women of sexual harassment and assault. Another woman accused him of rape; he sued, then dropped it. Elliot Page accused him of outing him on the X-Men set at eighteen. Forced out of Hollywood at the peak of MeToo.Ratner directed the Melania documentary for Amazon. Two-thirds of the New York crew asked not to be credited. Crew members described “chaos” on set. He lived at Mar-a-Lago while filming it. The Epstein files name him — emails confirm he was used by Epstein as a bridge to other people for nearly a decade. There is a photograph of Brett Ratner shirtless and embracing Jean-Luc Brunel, the modeling agent who scouted underage girls in Europe for Epstein and who killed himself in his Paris cell in 2022.The Hollywood Reporter says Ratner is scouting locations for Rush Hour 4. Not buying it. He is on the plane because the plane is full of men who knew what Epstein was and stayed in the room. The Palm Beach hearing on Tuesday put a fourteen-year-old, an Uzbek model named Rosa, and a 1996 whistleblower named Maria Farmer on the record as survivors of that network. The same week, the President of the United States flew the network’s documentarian to Beijing on Air Force One. The signal is the choice. The choice is the signal.3️⃣ UAE SECRETLY STRUCK IRAN IN APRILThe Wall Street Journal reported overnight that the United Arab Emirates carried out a covert military strike on Iran in April — an attack on the Lavan Island refinery in the Persian Gulf. The Trump administration knew. The Trump administration welcomed it. The Iran war is no longer a US war. It is a Gulf coalition war, fought partly in the open and partly in shadows, and the White House is quietly recruiting more Gulf states to join the strikes.Iran’s parliament speaker says the Islamic Republic’s military is “ready to teach a lesson” to any aggressor. Qatar accuses Iran of “weaponising” the Strait of Hormuz and “blackmailing” Gulf states. Iran today accused Kuwait of attacking it. The whole region is fragmenting into a multi-front war, and the United States is the player making it possible. Israel is doing everything under the umbrella of US security. Kuwait is doing everything under the umbrella of US security. The UAE struck Iran with US blessing.And the receipt is on the water. The USS Gerald R. Ford, flagship of the American navy, limped out of Greece this week. Iran damaged it badly enough that it is going to dry dock for two years. Two years. Bob Kagan — one of the country’s longest-serving war hawks — wrote in The Atlantic that the war is lost. Donald Trump’s response to Kagan was to call Americans who report on the lost war guilty of “virtual treason.” That is the word he used. Treason.2️⃣ PATEL PULLED FBI COUNTERINTEL OFF IRANSenator Chris Van Hollen pressed Kash Patel yesterday on three things — the Atlantic reporting on his drinking, the journalists Acting AG Todd Blanche just announced he would subpoena, and the FBI counterintelligence agents Patel quietly pulled off the Iran threat beat. Patel lashed out. Patel accused the senator of drinking on the taxpayer dime. Patel agreed on the record to take an alcohol-use-disorders test. And Patel admitted the counterintel agents had been moved.The reporters who covered the Iran war — the same reporters Blanche is now subpoenaing — have been telling the country for weeks that the FBI’s Iran threat unit has been gutted. Patel confirmed it under oath. The FBI counterintelligence agents responsible for catching Iranian threats inside the United States were pulled off the case at the same time the Iran war was widening into a Gulf coalition war. Brian Driscoll, the former FBI second-in-command fired in March for refusing to assemble political-target lists, has filed a lawsuit revealing that thousands of FBI agents — including the child-trafficking units — were reassigned or fired.Bloomberg’s verdict this morning, in a column written by the editorial board: “Patel FBI Senate Hearing — He’s an Embarrassment and a Risk.” The captured bureau is no longer protecting the country. The captured bureau is protecting the man at the top.1️⃣ DOJ SUBPOENAS WSJ REPORTERSThe biggest story of the day. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer until January, the man Trump credits with keeping him “out of jail” — has now actually subpoenaed Wall Street Journal reporters over Iran-war leaks. The WSJ publisher fired back today, calling the subpoenas “an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering.” The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called it a return to the surveillance regime curtailed after Trump’s first term. Bondi rolled back the Biden-era restrictions on subpoenaing reporters before Trump fired her on April 2. Blanche stepped in and walked through the door Bondi opened.The trigger was Trump’s reaction to Kagan. The reporters telling Americans the Iran war is lost. The reporters telling Americans the war is costing $29 billion. The reporters telling Americans the UAE secretly struck Iran. Trump passed Blanche a stack of news clippings with a sticky note that said “treason.” Blanche complied.The Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch. The Wall Street Journal is now fighting Donald Trump’s DOJ in court for the right of American journalists to do their jobs. When Murdoch sues Trump over press freedom, the room has flipped. The First Amendment is being dismantled in plain sight by a man whose only qualification is loyalty.THE PATTERNThis morning Trump deplaned in Beijing in front of three hundred Chinese children waving American flags and the lights of a state visit. The men who got off the plane with him are the men who funded him, hung around Jeffrey Epstein, built their fortunes in China, and now need Xi Jinping’s permission to keep them. The host of the banquet is arming the enemy Trump cannot defeat. The aircraft carrier sent to defeat that enemy is going into dry dock for two years. The reporters telling the story are getting subpoenaed by Trump’s former defense lawyer. The FBI Director who could investigate the threat has been pulled off the beat. The Justice Department is preparing to charge a former president. And the American president told the country on the South Lawn yesterday that he does not think about Americans’ financial situation. Day 479.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Courtney, Lalisa, Yolanda D., Maureen Drews, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.The Fivestack was supposed to count five stories but we could not turn our eyes away from today. Lev Parnas walked out of a Florida Senate hearing on Jeffrey Epstein, called in, and the show became one story. The story is what Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has done to the women who survived Epstein —Today’s show is dedicated to them. 5️⃣ THE HEARING REPUBLICANS WOULDN’T HOLDHouse Oversight Democrats drove to West Palm Beach. The committee in the majority — the Republicans — refused to convene the hearing in Washington. So the minority held it themselves, in the county where federal prosecutors handed Jeffrey Epstein his 2008 sweetheart deal, across the bridge from Mar-a-Lago.Security was tight. Local press showed up. Jim Acosta walked in. Tara Palmieri walked in. Katie Phang walked in. The major networks did not. Lev Parnas got the call from the Oversight team the night before, drove down, sat in the room, and live-streamed the hearing publicly because the committee told him he could. Schumer was not there. Jeffries was not there. Massie was not there. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not there. Survivors who waited thirty years for a hearing got the hearing they could organize themselves, and only one of the two parties came.4️⃣ MARIA FARMER, THIRTY YEARS LATERMaria Farmer was the first witness. She was not in the room — she had just been discharged from the hospital after twenty-three nights in the last month, several of them in the ICU. She recorded her statement and the committee played it. The voice was not strong. The statement was steel.“My name is Maria Farmer. I am the whistleblower who reported Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Les Wexner and others to the FBI 30 years ago in 1996.”She walked through the file. The 1996 report to the New York City 6th Precinct. The commanding officer who told her local police could only handle the local arson and to take the rest to the FBI. The FBI agents who said they recognized some of the names. The thirty years of nothing that followed. The 2006 federal trial they pulled her into and then the sweetheart deal that closed it. The death threats. The arson threats to her apartment. The Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The brain tumor. The Addison’s disease that landed her in the ICU last month.She wants her FBI file. She has FOIA’d it. She has sued for it. The government’s most recent response told her they will get back to her in November 2027.She named the women whose lives the FBI’s inaction cost — Virginia Giuffre, Anushka DiGiorgio, Chante Davies, Marika Chartone, Danny Benski, Jenna Lisa Jones, Ashley Rubright, Jennifer Rose. She called Virginia “the backbone of this case” and “the shining star and guiding light” the survivors are still walking behind.3️⃣ ROSA — DOXED 540 TIMESThe next testimony broke the room. Rosa came to New York at eighteen from Uzbekistan, signed by the MC2 modeling agency, paid one hundred dollars a week. The agency took her passport. The agency paid her enough that she could not leave. She was trafficked.She had spent the last decade rebuilding. She had been a Jane Doe — her name redacted from every court filing in every case. The redaction was the only thing standing between her past and her present life.In January, Donald Trump’s DOJ released the Epstein files in compliance with the Transparency Act. They unredacted her name. Five hundred and forty times.“I kept my identity protected as Jane Doe. I woke up one day with my name mentioned over 500 times. While the rich and powerful remain protected by redaction, my name was exposed to the world. Now reporters from across the globe contact me. I cannot live without looking over my shoulder.”A congresswoman in the room asked her what justice would look like. Rosa told her that’s not the survivor’s job. That’s the lawmaker’s job. Enough with the survivors being pressured to testify.2️⃣ THE 14-YEAR-OLD AND THE BRIDGEThe fourteen-year-old from the other side of the bridge testified next. Lev described it on our show — across the Royal Park Bridge from West Palm Beach to Palm Beach island, you have trailer parks on one side and Mar-a-Lago on the other. The fourteen-year-old grew up watching the lights.Her parents were addicts. She walked across the bridge. Epstein’s network picked her up. She was trafficked. She survived. And when she finally made it back to a sheriff’s deputy who was, in the lawyer’s words, “trying like a superhero,” three private attorneys flew in — Roy Black, Alan Dershowitz, and a third New York lawyer — and ran the case into the ground. Private investigators dressed as Palm Beach sheriff’s officers intimidated the witnesses. Dershowitz produced grade-school records that the girl had smoked weed once. The reputation got dismantled in the local paper. The witnesses dropped.But here is the part Lev could not get past. The DOJ told the fourteen-year-old she could be prosecuted herself. For prostitution. At fifteen and sixteen years old.She asked the question on the record. Is there even a statute for that? Is there a criminal statute for a 15-year-old to be charged with prostitution?🎯 GROUND NEWS BLINDSPOT — TODAYThe Palm Beach hearing was on today’s Ground News Blindspot — a story being covered by local Florida press and Substack, and quietly ignored by the major national networks. The second Blindspot story today was Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announcing the DOJ will subpoena reporters who receive classified information about Iran-war leak investigations. Sixty-four percent of the coverage of that second story is right-leaning, celebrating “accountability.” The left-leaning and center coverage is thin. The two Blindspots share the same DNA — Trump’s DOJ choosing which truths the country gets to hear, and which journalists are allowed to report them. Ground News tracks the bias spread on every story so you can see who is covering it, who is hiding it, and where your news is steering you. Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.1️⃣ THE DOXING WAS THE POLICYThis is what we keep telling you on Narativ. The cruelty is not a byproduct. The cruelty is the design.Trump’s DOJ had two options when it released the Epstein files. Redact the survivors and reveal the perpetrators, or reveal the survivors and redact the perpetrators. They did the second one. Five hundred and forty unredactions of one woman’s name. The accusations against Trump in the files — those got cut. The names of the trafficked women — those got published. The lawmaker in the room said it on camera: we’re pretty sure he did this to make these women shut up. Lev was sitting in the gallery. He could not disagree.And while the doxing was running, Trump was firing the FBI agents who could have helped. Brian Driscoll, second-in-command at the Bureau, told Anderson Cooper this week that he was fired for refusing to put together political-target lists. Driscoll’s lawsuit names thousands of FBI agents — including the child-trafficking units — who were reassigned or fired. The Acting Attorney General is Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer, the man who, in Trump’s own words on tape, “kept me out of jail.” Blanche announced today that reporters who write about DOJ investigations will be subpoenaed. He posted it on X.Maria Farmer cannot get her own FBI file. The reporters trying to read the Epstein files are now legal targets. The fourteen-year-old who walked across the bridge was almost prosecuted herself. Rosa cannot stop looking over her shoulder. And the men whose names are still redacted in those files are on a plane to Xi Jinping with Elon Musk and Tim Cook.THE PATTERNThe captured Justice Department is not protecting the survivors. The captured Justice Department is protecting the perpetrators by re-traumatizing the survivors. Lev called it the Epstein class — the people in the powerful seats on both sides of the aisle who have reasons to keep the file half-redacted forever. The hearing today in Palm Beach was the work the captured DOJ refuses to do, done by the minority party with no subpoena power and no cameras. It was also the work Narativ has been doing in our Epstein archive for years.Maria Farmer waited thirty years and ended up in the ICU. Rosa rebuilt her life and lost her redaction. The fourteen-year-old got told she could be prosecuted herself. The country has now been told, in the same week, that the reporters covering the case will be subpoenaed and the former president who oversaw the original assessment of who installed Trump is the new target.Across the bridge from Mar-a-Lago, the women showed up. The cameras did not. The Republicans did not. The Acting Attorney General is threatening every journalist who would have covered it. Day 478. Maria Farmer wants her file. The country needs to want it for her.The Fivestack airs Mon–Fri 3 PM ET. Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. [narativ.org]Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Lyudmila and Daniel, Robin Payes, LeftieProf, Leah Anderson, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The plan today was a five-story countdown . The plan did not survive Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes.Sunday night, the prime minister of Israel walked onto Bari Weiss’s captured CBS — “Breitbart Light,” as Dean Blundell called it about thirty seconds into the show — and effectively told the American people that he gets to decide when their war with Iran ends, what their soldiers will be asked to do, and what their citizens may say on social media. Donald Trump sat off-screen in Washington and posted backup in all capital letters. “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE… AT A MUCH HIGHER LEVEL.”We started number five. We never got there. The whole hour turned into one Fivestack on one story — the captured presidency, the cudgel, the criminals, and the gas-station line that is coming for everyone in fourteen days. Here is what landed.5️⃣ Breitbart Light at 60 MinutesThe format used to mean something. Sixty Minutes used to be where presidents and prime ministers got asked hard questions in front of seventeen million Americans. Sunday night, under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, the foreign prime minister of Israel got to sit and tell the American host that the United States must continue his war, must send American troops into Iran, must police what Americans say online — and the host nodded along.Dean called it on air. “That was the most dystopian interview I have ever seen from that capacity.” The s**t-eating grin, he said, gave it away. Netanyahu knew he had captured the American presidency, and the network anchor was pretending not to notice.This is the first stack: the country lost its premier interview slot to a foreign leader on prime time, and the host treated it as a courtesy call.4️⃣ The cudgel and the hate crimeInside the same interview, Netanyahu told the world he intends to “fight back” against people on social media who say negative things about Israel. He did not define negative. He did not define Israel. He did not need to.What he gets out of this play is something nobody talks about on cable news: every time he calls a critic of Bibi Netanyahu an anti-Semite, the actual anti-Semites in America and Canada are handed permission to attack ordinary Jews. Jewish Canadians are one percent of the country’s population and the target of seventy percent of religious hate crimes there, Dean said on air, citing the most recent figures from the agencies that protect Jewish communities in Toronto. Cafe Landwer — a beloved Jewish-owned breakfast chain in Toronto — has been attacked with bags of vomit at its doors. Not because it is Israeli. Because it is Jewish.“He doesn’t care about the American Jews at all,” Zev said on air. “He is using the fact that American Jews are liberals as a way to make them targets.”Sixty-nine percent of American Jews voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump have not forgiven any of them for it.3️⃣ The sect that captured Israel — and what it did with the keysMalcolm Nance walked Zev through it on Narativ Breaking News this morning. Dean walked Zev through it again on the Fivestack this afternoon. The story is the same story.In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union started flowing into Israel. Russians arrived under the Law of Return on the slimmest claim of Jewish heritage. Big argument whether half of them were Jewish at all. Mobsters. Intelligence officers. Oligarchs. Hand grenades in Ashdod bars. Some stayed and turned the Israeli political map hard right. Many lily-padded off to Florida — where they continue their work today.The result, six presidents later: an Israeli government aligned with Moscow on most things that matter, an Israeli prime minister friendlier to Vladimir Putin than to seventy percent of his own diaspora, and an Israeli right whose loudest voices speak a Russian Jewish brand of politics that has very little to do with the liberal socialist Zionism that built the country.“This is a movement by a corrupt criminal organization that has seeped its way into the world’s democracies,” Zev said today, “and has taken over Israel’s democracy and installed Bibi Netanyahu as a strongman figurehead. And it is doing the same thing in America.”That is not a metaphor. That is a thirty-year trafficking operation that ends with a foreign prime minister on 60 Minutes telling Americans what they may post online.2️⃣ Bibi funded Hamas. Bibi killed JCPOA. Bibi needs Iran.Two facts that do not appear in the Sunday night interview, and that Dean and Zev put on the table again today.Benjamin Netanyahu approved the cash flow from Qatar to Hamas in Gaza for years before October 7. That is on the record. He built up the enemy he then declared he had to wipe out. The same play, exactly, that Donald Trump runs every time he needs a villain.And in 2012, when Barack Obama was running for re-election and pursuing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, Netanyahu backed Mitt Romney from a foreign capital. He sandbagged Obama’s foreign policy for seven straight years. When the JCPOA finally passed in 2015, Netanyahu went on a global speaking tour to destroy it. Donald Trump killed the deal in his first term as a favor to him.“He needs Iran to be his enemy,” Zev said on air, “because that is what gives him the power. Otherwise he does not stay in power.”The man on 60 Minutes Sunday night demanding a third American strike on Iran is the same man who fed Hamas, killed the deal that would have ended the nuclear standoff, and now wants American soldiers to go to Natanz and Fordow and Isfahan and dig his enemy out for him.1️⃣ Fourteen days to the gas-station lineThis is where it lands. Not in foreign policy. In Akron. In Calgary. In Tampa.Bloomberg’s research, which Malcolm Nance walked Narativ through this morning and Dean walked the Fivestack through this afternoon: physical oil already trades fifty to seventy-five dollars above the futures price. First-week-of-June oil-shock stress arrives. By September, if conditions do not change, every refinery, every pipeline and every bunker in the Western world runs dry.Dean’s translation, on air, for the people who do not read Bloomberg: six dollars a liter for gas, eight for diesel, and a line at the pump that the country has not seen since the Carter administration. “This is 1979 all over again. All over again.”The president who started this war by tearing up Obama’s deal in 2018 — because, in the words of Ken Harbaugh on Dean’s show last week, “Obama is Black” — is the same president who now has to explain to his MAGA base why their summer vacation costs three times what it cost last year, why the flight to Disney was cancelled, and why the gas station has a line that goes around the block.The country that elected Donald Trump in 2024 to bring prices down is about to pay the highest energy bill since Jimmy Carter — to make Benjamin Netanyahu happy.THE PATTERNFive threads. One story. Three criminals.Vladimir Putin in a bunker in Krasnodar, his honor-guard parade rolling World War II tanks across a CGI sky. Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes calling for the third war in five years against the enemy he built. Donald Trump on Truth Social in capital letters, his arsenal empty, his Senate being investigated for telling the truth out loud, his DOJ purging its own prosecutors over the last fight.All three of them facing prison if they stop running. All three of them willing to set the world on fire to keep moving. All three of them propped up by the same Russian organized criminal network that has been doing this work, patiently, since the Soviet Union opened its borders.Six years ago, Narativ reported that the Trump–Netanyahu axis was an espionage operation, not a foreign policy. This afternoon on the Fivestack, Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev arranged the rest of the pieces on the table — Bari Weiss’s CBS, the Toronto bakery attacks, the Chabad sect, the Qatar cash to Hamas, the 1979 gas line — and let the audience land the verdict.They are not three different stories. They are one criminal enterprise wearing three different flags.And in fourteen days, the bill comes due at every gas station in America.Thank you Caro Henry, Elaine Cimino, Peter W Shuster, Leah Anderson, Lalisa, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

THE GOP’S ELECTION FIX IS INFour to three Friday morning. Virginia voters had passed the redistricting amendment 52-48 four weeks ago — a margin of about three hundred thousand votes — to undo the Republican-favored 2022 map and flip up to four GOP-held House seats. Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote for the majority. The legislature, he held, took its second vote on the amendment four days before the last day of early voting in the special election, denying voters the chance to elect delegates with a known position on the proposal. Chief Justice Cleo Elaine Powell wrote the dissent. The majority, she said, had “broadened the meaning of the word ‘election’” to include the early-voting period — “in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election.”Three hundred thousand votes erased on a four-day calendar argument three of seven justices said was not the law. The Trump nationwide gerrymander — Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, Florida — was already running. Issue One had Republicans at an eight-seat structural House edge before Friday. After Friday, ten to twelve. Earliest Virginia voters can re-do this: 2028. Earliest a redrawn map could matter: 2030.Trump celebrated on Truth Social. Governor Abigail Spanberger said her office is considering “every legal pathway forward.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called it a constitutional crisis. Denver Riggleman put up a post Friday morning calling Virginia what it is — the death of the United States by way of the redistricting map. The cheating is no longer hidden. It is being adjudicated. And on Friday, four justices in Richmond ruled in its favor.5️⃣ HACKERS RANSOM 275 MILLION STUDENTSShinyHunters walked into Canvas Wednesday night and walked out with the personal data of every student logged in across roughly nine thousand schools worldwide. They left a ransom note on the login screen. The schools have until May 12 to pay.Two hundred seventy-five million user records — names, emails, student IDs, private messages — across the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Instructure runs the back end of American higher education. One ransomware crew turned the lights off.4️⃣ USA TIPS: OWES MORE THAN IT MAKESApril hiring beat the forecast — 115,000 jobs added against a 67,000 projection, unemployment steady at 4.3 percent. The Labor Department slipped a second sentence into the same release: the Iran-war drag is “only beginning to emerge.”By the time it does, total federal debt has already crossed total U.S. economic output — a line crossed only briefly during the pandemic and after World War II. Trump added seven trillion in fifteen months. Justin Wolfers stopped saying recession this week. He started saying depression.The hiring number flatters the surface. The fundamentals are running the other way.3️⃣ TRUMP TARIFFS DOATrump’s first tariff scheme died at the Supreme Court in February. He rolled out a 10 percent backup version. The U.S. Court of International Trade killed that one Thursday — invalid and unauthorized by law — in a 2-1 ruling that found the president “overstepped the tariff power Congress had allowed.”Two for two inside ninety days. Canada, who watched the rulings come in, diversified its trade out of the U.S. months ago. The EU deal Brussels signed last quarter is unwinding. Xi will know all of this before Trump’s plane lands.The federal courts are still tearing up Trump’s executive orders. The state courts, as Friday’s Virginia ruling showed, have started writing them in.2️⃣ CHINA SENSES US WEAKNESS, EYES TAIWAN China’s foreign-policy class is now reading the Pentagon’s munitions ledgers in public — and saying out loud what Washington will not admit. Hu Xijin called America “a giant with a limp.” Trump meets Xi in Beijing next week claiming the Iran ceasefire is “intact” — hours after Iranian strikes resumed and U.S. forces fired back overnight.About half of America’s long-range stealth cruise missile stockpile is gone. Ten times the annual Tomahawk buy has been fired. Twenty-four Reapers downed. The war is running at $1.8 billion a day — more per day than Iraq or Afghanistan ever cost. The Washington Post’s satellite investigation this week confirmed Iran has hit far more U.S. bases than the Pentagon admitted. The contractors who would replace the missiles cannot build them at war pace.Eighty percent of the U.S. military in the Iran theater has stopped pretending it knows why it is there. The retired admirals and generals are silent — afraid for their pensions, afraid of a president using the resolute desk to settle scores. Beijing is no longer asking whether America can defend Taiwan. It is calculating when.1️⃣ THE OIL CLIFF IS COMINGBrian Hook, Biden’s former Iran envoy, laid it out on Bloomberg this week. The oil cliff lands at the end of this month. Physical shortages start in poor countries no one is paying attention to. Then Vietnam and Thailand. Then Japan and Korea. Then here. You can fly out of the U.S. on cheap jet fuel. You cannot get back.By month’s end, a quarter tank is $120. By next month, the queues start. By the month after, your SSRI prescription has the same supply-chain problem as the gas pump — refined-petroleum derivatives are inside it. Domestic plane tickets are up thirty percent already; a friend of the show paid $600 for a seat L.A. to Vegas that cost $200 two weeks ago.This is the bill the jobs report did not show. It is the bill the tariff regime cannot block, because the courts blocked the tariff regime. It is the bill the depleted military cannot fight off, because the depleted military burned its inventory in Iran. And it is the bill the institutions are no longer set up to absorb, because Friday morning a state Supreme Court erased the votes of three hundred thousand Virginians on a four-day calendar argument.THE PATTERNWhen you’re making less than you owe, when courts overturn the will of the people, when your elections are rigged, the president calls a reporter a b***h, the military brass is too afraid to speak out, and the worst oil crisis in history is about to get worse. Our democracy isn’t just running on empt, it may need a total overhaul to restart Three-time Trump voters are now telling reporters they were idiots. Nick Fuentes — a name we have never put in a Narativ piece — declared himself an anti-Zionist Democrat this week. Three thousand six hundred Justice Department lawyers have walked or been pushed out in the last fifty days. The former Pentagon press secretary said the brass is silent. The president spent Friday morning yelling at an ABC reporter in front of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool — which his administration is repainting Bahamas-blue for the king’s visit, with Thank you, President Trump, for making D.C. clean and safe posters lining the barricades around the World War II memorial.A country whose institutions stop holding does not stay this country. America’s hardcore Trump base is angry. Its working class is broke. Its vote in Virginia just got erased. Its retirees are about to spend a hundred and twenty dollars on a quarter tank of gas. Its military has nothing to fire if Beijing moves on Taiwan. Its president is repainting the reflecting pool while the marble cracks.The Fivestack airs Monday through Friday at 3 PM ET on Narativ.org. The Narativ newsletter and Narativ.org subscriptions are 35% off through the end of May. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The President of the United States lost the Saudis. The Commerce Secretary forgot his story. A federal judge found a lost note by Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk’s ex-partner says she’s done with right, and Ted Turner — the man who built 24-hour news — died on a day tailor-made for cable news..Trump declared “Operation Project Freedom” on Truth Social Sunday. He told nobody — not Mohammed bin Salman, not Oman, not Kuwait, not the UAE — that he was going to launch a U.S. Navy escort mission through the Strait of Hormuz that needed their bases, their airspace, and their overflight rights to function.Saudi Arabia revoked all three.Within thirty-six hours, Project Freedom was dead on the tarmac. Trump called MBS to fix it. The call did not fix it. The White House dressed up the retreat as a “great progress” peace deal. Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei went on Al Mayadeen Thursday morning and called the proposal “unrealistic,” demanding war reparations as a precondition for any agreement. The Iranians sent the deal back like a wrong order.5️⃣ Mullin’s customs law — DHS reaches into CanadaThe U.S. Department of Homeland Security used a 1930 customs statute — Section 1509 of the Tariff Act, written to verify duty payments on shipped merchandise — to subpoena Google for the full digital life of a Canadian who criticized ICE on X. Hundreds of similar subpoenas have gone to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord since the start of the second Trump term, aimed at anyone who criticized ICE or pointed to ICE locations. The 2017 Inspector General audit of the same statute found one in five Section 1509 summonses exceeded the agency’s legal authority. CBP folded then. DHS has not folded now.4️⃣ The note the DOJ never hadWednesday evening, Judge Kenneth Karas unsealed a yellow legal-pad note in White Plains. The text: “They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” / “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.” / “NO FUN… NOT WORTH IT!!”Epstein’s cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione — a former NYPD officer convicted of murdering four people — found the note in a graphic novel after Epstein’s July 2019 jail-cell incident and kept it. It sat in his court file for years. It is not in the three-million-page Epstein Files Transparency Act release. The Justice Department admits it has never seen the document.It surfaced because The New York Times petitioned the court to unseal it. Without that petition, it would still be a sealed exhibit in a federal courthouse.3️⃣ Lutnick under not-oathHoward Lutnick did not testify Wednesday. He gave a transcribed interview, off-camera, not under oath, in front of the House Oversight Committee for more than four hours. By the end of it the Republican chairman, James Comer, was telling reporters Lutnick had not been truthful.The story keeps refusing to stay still. The first version: Lutnick met Epstein once in 1998, saw the massage table, was disgusted, never spoke to him again. The second version, as the files came out: Lutnick sat next door at 11 East 71st Street for twenty-one years, did Adfin with Epstein in 2012, kept Cantor Ventures correspondence going through 2014, took his wife and four children and a full deployment of nannies to Little St. James in December 2012, accepted a $50,000 contribution from Epstein for a 2017 dinner honoring himself, and emailed Epstein about a museum expansion through 2018.Wednesday produced version three. Lutnick, who had told a podcast that Epstein was one of the greatest blackmailers of all time, told the committee that he had simply been speculating and that Epstein never engaged in blackmail. The podcast audio exists.Rep. Ro Khanna, on camera afterwards: “If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript, he would have fired Howard Lutnick.”Marjorie Taylor Greene has now publicly described Trump telling Pam Bondi that the Epstein files would hurt his Mar-a-Lago friends. Lutnick is one of those friends. Behind the not-oath, behind the closed doors, the cover-up is still operating in real time.2️⃣ One receipt, no defection — Ashley St ClairThe Washington Post ran Ashley St Clair’s account this morning. She named one chat — “Fight Fight Fight.” She named one administration figure inside it — James Blair. She told the Post the right-wing online influencer machine is paid, scripted, and coordinated. The press treated the interview like a confession.It was an interview.She did not call the FBI. She did not call the RCMP. She did not call NATO StratCom in Riga. A real defector from a foreign-funded influence operation goes to investigators with the contracts, the names, and the wire transfers — and goes to journalists only after that. Christopher Wylie did it with Cambridge Analytica. Frances Haugen did it with Facebook. Cassidy Hutchinson did it with January 6. The Tenet Media indictment did the work for the influencers who never came forward.Musk sent St Clair $2.5 million as part of the paternity dispute. She has been in the right-wing influencer economy since at least 2020. Six years of cash flow is a career, not an awakening. The contracts, funders, and other names are still missing. And Narativ has tied Elon Musk — the father of her son — to the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus. The mother of his child went to WaPo, not the FBI. The receipts are still missing.1️⃣ Turner gone — the man who built 24-hour newsTed Turner died Wednesday at 87. Lewy body dementia. The brash Atlanta yachtsman launched CNN in June 1980, when nobody in the industry believed news could fill twenty-four hours and the rest of cable went to dead air after midnight. He gave a billion to start the United Nations Foundation in 1997. He bought the Atlanta Braves. He kept buffalo on more land than anyone alive.Turner sold the company. The company sold the news. The 24-hour cycle he built to chase truth around the planet is the same cycle that ducked four of today’s biggest stories on its own air.He was no saint. Jane Fonda’s account of being married to him is its own reckoning. Dean said it on the show — sure, he was a piece of work. But Turner believed a country deserved to know what was happening to it as it was happening. He believed news belonged on the air the moment it broke, not at six-thirty after the editor decided what mattered. He bet on the audience. The bet paid. The audience is still there.What he built is no longer chasing the story.The patternFive stories, one news cycle. Saudi Arabia denied a U.S. President basing rights for an operation he announced on Truth Social. Iran called the deal a face-saving fiction and demanded reparations. DHS used a customs law about widget shipments to subpoena a Canadian. A federal judge had to release a document the DOJ had never bothered to find. A sitting Cabinet member admitted he had been lying for twenty years about a convicted sex trafficker. A right-wing influencer handed in one chat name and called it a defection.Six years ago Narativ wrote that the Epstein network was an espionage operation, not a sex scandal. Six years ago Narativ wrote that the influencer economy on the right was a paid information operation. Six years ago Narativ wrote that the Trump-Russia file was a kompromat file, not a paperwork dispute. The stories of this week are not new stories. They are the same story, finally surfacing.The man who built cable to chase that story died Wednesday. The cable he built is no longer doing the work.We are.35% off annual subscriptions on RN — Subscribe to Narativ.org. Subscribe to deanblundell.substack.com. The 24-hour news cycle is no longer chasing this. We are.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Robin Payes, Marnie Screams Into the Void, Grace Alexandra Hayden, Deeanna Burleson, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Today the President of the United States looked at a sustained naval battle in the Strait of Hormuz and called it a skirmish. The Senate looked at a billion dollars for a ballroom and called it modernization. The Met looked at a hundred-thousand-dollar seat and called it culture. A Canadian province being bought through Dutch troll farms got called a poll. And the Kremlin called the coup talk a psy-op while Putin hid in a bunker. Five stories. One muscle-memory move from power: take the thing that’s happening, and call it something else. Our job today was to give it back its real name.5️⃣ Where’s Putin?Vladimir Putin fired the head of his air defenses today. A Ukrainian drone slipped past three layers of Russian air-defense — S-400, S-300, Pantsir — and slammed into a luxury apartment block on Mosfilmovskaya Street, four miles from the Kremlin and less than two from the Russian Defense Ministry. Gen. Viktor Afzalov is gone. Putin himself is in an underground bunker in Krasnodar, on the Black Sea coast, weeks at a time. He has not visited a single military facility in 2026. Cooks, photographers, and bodyguards are now banned from internet-connected phones; surveillance cameras have been installed inside their homes.The May 9 Victory Day parade is four days away. The Duma announced today that there will be no military equipment in this year’s parade. According to reporting we cited on the show, ruling-party MPs have been told not to attend in person — Putin is keeping the political class away from his own movements. Through intermediaries, the Kremlin asked Zelensky for a temporary stand-down on May 9. Zelensky’s reply: only if it becomes a full ceasefire and Russia withdraws.When the Kremlin issues an official denial of a coup, that is the story. Putin is not afraid of NATO. He is afraid of the man down the hall.4️⃣ High Fashion Sells OutThe Met Gala raised seats to one hundred thousand dollars last night. Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos co-chaired — ten million to host. Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York, refused the invite. Beyoncé wore a feathered skeleton. The next morning, the Pulitzer Prize Board gave its Public Service medal to the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.Inflation is at a four-year high. Gas is approaching six dollars a gallon in parts of the country. Twenty-eight million Americans are off Medicaid. Seven hundred and ten thousand medical bankruptcies are projected for the year. And the most prestigious prize in American journalism and the most expensive seat in American culture got settled in the same forty-eight hours, by the same family.High fashion and high journalism are now the same room. They will tell you these are unrelated. The room is the room.This story is today’s Ground News Blindspot. It is barely registering in U.S. media. It is being soft-pedaled inside Canada. We caught it because Ground News flagged it. Get 40% off Vantage at groundnews.com/fivestack.3️⃣ Is Alberta Going to Secede? — Today’s Ground News BlindspotStay Free Alberta delivered more than three hundred thousand signatures to Elections Alberta. The threshold is met. A province-wide referendum on independence is now mandatory, with the earliest vote in October. That is the surface story. The buried story — the one Dean walked through on the show — is the operation underneath it.David Parker, who took over the United Conservative Party and built “Take Back Alberta,” is the same political operator behind Tucker Carlson’s Alberta tour and the convoy network. His new vehicle, the Alberta Republican Party, has been working alongside U.S. figures including Pete Hoekstra and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Per the reporting Dean laid out on the show, half a billion U.S. dollars has been offered as a “transitionary loan” to deliver Alberta to the United States.The disinformation pipeline was exposed this past week: more than forty YouTube channels and hundreds of social-media accounts run out of the Netherlands, paid by MAGA-aligned U.S. money, flooding Alberta with secession content. Inside that operation, the personal data of 2.9 million Albertans — names, addresses, banking information, voter rolls — was funneled into a piece of software called the Centurion app distributed through the Alberta Republican Party. It is now the largest privacy breach in Canadian history. The RCMP raided David Parker’s office and the UCP’s office. Premier Danielle Smith is, this same week, hosting a “Freedom Free Canada” symposium with Pete Hoekstra and Mike Pompeo on Canadian soil.Sixteen percent of one province, foreign-funded, is trying to walk a hundred-percent of its oil out of the federation. Alberta is not seceding. The people running the play might be going to prison. The pattern is the play. Trump did more to break Canada in eighteen months than fifty years of separatist movements managed on their own.2️⃣ The GOP Tries to Slip in a $1B BallroomLate Monday night Senator Chuck Grassley unveiled legislative text for one billion dollars in “East Wing Modernization Project” security as part of the Senate’s reconciliation bill. The bill text states that the money cannot be used for “non-security elements.” Grassley’s spokesperson says it does not fund the ballroom. The White House spokesperson says it does. Take your pick.A federal judge halted aboveground construction last month; an appeals court stayed his order; concrete and rebar continue to go up. Fifty-six percent of Americans oppose the ballroom; twenty-eight percent support it. Reconciliation requires only a simple majority — no filibuster, no Democrats. The same bill carries $38.2 billion for ICE, $26 billion for CBP, $1.5 billion for DOJ, all funded through September 2029.Trump promised the ballroom would be paid for entirely by private donors. The donors keep the ballroom. The country pays for the bunker underneath it. As Dean put it on the show: the bunker sits under the ballroom, so you kind of need the ballroom to cover the bunker.When you can’t get the appropriation through Congress, you call it security. When you can’t get past the judge, you keep pouring concrete. When you can’t pass a budget, you call it reconciliation.1️⃣ Trump Calls It a Skirmish — Two Destroyers, Six Boats, the UAE HitWe opened the show with this. We closed the show with this. Off the top of the broadcast we told you what the Pentagon would not.The USS Truxtun and the USS Mason — two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers — ran a sustained Iranian attack overnight to enter the Persian Gulf. Multiple bearings of small boats. Anti-ship cruise missiles in flight. Shahed drones overhead. Apache gunships called in. Six Iranian fast-attack boats sunk. Cruise missiles knocked down. Anonymous reports from service members back to family members described it as “hell on earth for hours.” The destroyers got two commercial vessels through — including a Maersk ship reportedly carrying U.S. military equipment that had been stuck inside the strait. A larger column tried to follow and turned back under fire.Then this morning, Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon lectern and described “a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait” delivered as “a direct gift from the United States to the world.” He claimed six Iranian ships tried to run an American blockade and were turned around. They weren’t running a blockade. They were the gunboats that engaged the destroyers. He didn’t mention that immediately after the destroyers cleared, Iran bombed the Fujairah oil terminal in the UAE — half of Oman’s oil distribution outside the strait, on fire. That terminal is a U.S. financial interest. He left it out.The April ceasefire was extended indefinitely. Trump declined yesterday to confirm it still holds. Iran’s parliament speaker told Iranians today: “we have not even begun yet.” Israeli warplanes are coordinating their next round of strikes with Washington. Brent crude is above $112 a barrel. Gas at the American pump is $4.46 a gallon and climbing.Trump won’t call it a war. The Pentagon won’t call it a war. The footage from the Apache gun cameras is calling it. The Wikipedia entry that’s already gone live is calling it: 2026 Strait of Hormuz campaign. A war he names is a war he has to defend in Congress under the War Powers Resolution. A war he calls a skirmish lives in the Pentagon press room and the Truth Social feed and nowhere else.The country pays the price for a war the President refuses to name.🎯 The PatternTwo destroyers ran a battle in the Persian Gulf. The President called it a skirmish. The GOP put a billion dollars for a ballroom in a security bill. They called it modernization. A man paid ten million dollars for a chair at the Met. They called it culture. A province with three hundred thousand signatures, half a billion in foreign money, and 2.9 million breached records wants out of Canada. They called it a poll. The Kremlin is in lockdown over a coup nobody will name. The state media calls it a psy-op.This is power’s first move every time. Take the thing that’s happening and call it something else. Take the war and call it Project Freedom. Take the ballroom and call it security. Take the foreign-funded breakaway and call it grassroots. Take the bunker and call it a parade.Naming things back is the entire job of journalism. That is why we did the Fivestack today, why we will do it again tomorrow, and why your subscription is the thing that keeps it possible.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Thank you Caro Henry, Iulia Huiu, LeftieProf, Niamh Cooper, Fran, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The FiveStack with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev is broadcast LIVE Monday-Friday at 3 PM ET at Narativ.org and it’s 100% free. Sign up today and never miss a show. We opened cold today with breaking news out of FBI HQ: Kash Patel is now threatening to sue anyone who calls him “J. Edgar Boozer.”Yes. Really. The FBI Director — fresh off losing a defamation suit against former assistant director Frank Figliuzzi (he lost because there was evidence he’d been drunk at work) — is apparently so rattled by the new nickname that he’s lawyering up.This is what passes for federal law enforcement in 2026: an FBI Director who indicts James Comey for posting a photo of seashells, and threatens lawsuits against anyone who notices he’s hammered.Dean nailed the through-line: the Epstein class is the victim class. They have so many skeletons that the only available defense is offense. Get angry first. Insult. Threaten. Sue. Anything to keep you from looking at what’s actually in the closet.This is not a coincidence. This is the operating system. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, reportedly said the President has “an alcoholic’s personality” — brazen first, defensive when challenged. Patel has the same profile. Hegseth too. The administration is staffed top to bottom with people maintaining a facade so exhausting it requires chemical assistance.J. Edgar Boozer is just a lawsuit today, but with these guys in charge, it could be a criminal referral.THE SEASHELL STANDARDThe Acting AG went on Fox over the weekend trying to explain why James Comey is being prosecuted for posting “8647” with seashells — when 8647 merch is currently for sale on Amazon in dozens of variants.His answer: “Every single case depends on the investigation that’s done.”Translation: selective prosecution. They have nothing else. The seashells are the case. They’re trying to shove a square, ridiculous peg in a round hole, and they know it.This is exactly the Patel playbook scaled up: when the facts won’t carry the indictment, threaten the messenger.5️⃣ GERMANY GOES, CARNEY WALKS INTO ARMENIATrump pulled 5,000 troops out of Germany — a 14% drawdown — directly retaliating against Chancellor Friedrich Merz for telling the truth: that the United States has been humiliated by Iran and has no exit plan from its own war.Trump’s response: call Merz “totally ineffective.” Yank the troops. Cancel the long-range missile deployment. Make Germany less safe to soothe his own ego.There is no strategic logic. Two real reasons: appease whatever’s left of Vladimir Putin, who’s currently in hiding — and punish a NATO ally for speaking the truth out loud.Meanwhile in Yerevan: Mark Carney just walked into the European Political Community summit — the first non-European head of government ever invited — and cracked the American empire in half. Carney told the room: “The international order will be rebuilt — but it will be rebuilt out of Europe.”That’s the funeral oration for Pax Americana, delivered by a former Bank of England governor who runs the country sharing the world’s longest undefended border with the United States.A non-NATO NATO is forming in real time. Canada is in. Britain is in. Ukraine is in. The bloc is moving without us — and Trump is too busy yanking troops to notice.4️⃣ THE FBI BECOMES ICE WITH BETTER SUITSThe Intercept reported today that the FBI has reassigned 6,500+ agents — roughly 25% of its workforce — to immigration enforcement. That’s a 23x increase over baseline.The agents are being pulled from child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, counterterrorism, and financial fraud.Kash Patel — J. Edgar Boozer himself — is gutting the bureau’s actual mission to chase landscapers and dishwashers.How is the FBI any different from the Gestapo at this point? Same agents, same powers, pointed at brown people instead of oligarchs. The deep state isn’t being dismantled. It’s being repurposed.3️⃣ ALITO BLINKEDJustice Samuel Alito — yes, that Alito, the author of Dobbs — issued an order this afternoon temporarily restoring nationwide access to mifepristone by mail, pharmacy, and telehealth. He stayed Friday’s Fifth Circuit ruling on Louisiana’s request. The order holds until at least May 11 while the full Court considers emergency petitions from Danco and GenBioPro.Don’t pop champagne. The man who told us women lost a constitutional right because the framers didn’t write it down just bought time, not a victory. The drug used in two-thirds of US abortions is one full-court vote away from being unmailable.But here’s the tell: even Alito blinked at the Fifth Circuit. That’s how extreme the lower courts have become — the Dobbs author is now the firewall.The rights apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s here. It’s just on a temporary administrative stay.2️⃣ RUDY OFF THE VENTILATORRudy Giuliani is breathing on his own this afternoon after being put on a ventilator over the weekend. The 81-year-old has pneumonia, complicated by the restrictive airway disease he developed running toward the towers in 2001 — the moment that built the entire mythology he then handed to Donald Trump.He’s still listed as critical but stable at a hospital near Palm Beach. Family and primary doctor at his side. Spokesman Ted Goodman: “He is winning this battle.”Dean’s verdict, on the record: “I don’t give a f**k about Rudy Giuliani.”And he’s right. The man brought the Russian mob into New York by gutting the original five families. He gave Sammy Gravano the snitch deal that let Donald Trump walk away. He spent his late career as the world’s most corrupt bag-man — disbarred, bankrupted, indicted in Georgia and Arizona.Even the famous Ground Zero walk toward the towers? Zev’s increasingly convinced it was staged. Anyone who’s watched Giuliani since knows he’s the biggest wimp in the world — not a man who runs toward chaos unless someone scripted the scene.The 9/11 air he breathed in 2001 is finishing what the legal system started.1️⃣ PROJECT FREEDOM IS A WAR PLANTrump launched “Project Freedom” today — 15,000 troops, 100+ aircraft, guided-missile destroyers, and unmanned platforms — to escort commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz.Within hours: Iran’s IRGC fired what it called “cruise missile warning shots” at US Navy destroyers near Bandar-e-Jask. CENTCOM denies any ship was hit. The UAE confirmed an ADNOC tanker was hit by two Iranian drones — Abu Dhabi calling it an “Iranian terrorist attack” and “piracy.” Lebanon banned IRGC activity and started requiring visas for Iranians. Tehran said any US transit is a ceasefire violation. Trump rejected Iran’s 14-point peace proposal as “not acceptable.”The numbers right now: gas at $4.45/gal — up 50% since the war began. US: 13 dead, 381 wounded. Iran: 3,375 killed including 376 children, per the Iran Health Ministry.Trump didn’t end the Iran war. He rebranded the next phase. “Project Freedom” is a euphemism for a Hormuz convoy war — and the bodies are real.The world is leaving. The bag-men are dying. The war is back.The FiveStack with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev is broadcast LIVE Monday-Friday at 3 PM ET at Narativ.org and it’s 100% free. Sign up today and never miss a show. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The FiveStack with Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev is broadcast LIVE Monday-Friday at 3 PM ET at Narativ.org and it’s 100% free. Sign up today and never miss a show. PLUS get 35% off annual subscriptions this weekend only.5️⃣ The 60-Day DodgeTrump sent letters to Congress today claiming the Iran war “has terminated” and that hostilities ended on April 7. The Senate killed the war powers resolution 47–50 last night, the sixth time in eight weeks, with Maine Republican Susan Collins crossing for the first time. Asked at the rope line why he would not seek congressional authorization, Trump said “no other country has ever done it” and called the requirement “totally unconstitutional,” then claimed the United States was “in the midst of a big victory” — “a victory like we haven’t had since Venezuela.” Pete Hegseth’s Senate Armed Services testimony Thursday was tighter: “the 60-day clock pauses or stops in a ceasefire.” Collins answered him in eight words: “It is not a suggestion; it is a requirement.” Shalev said the President was telling Congress in writing that hostilities ended on April 7 — forty-eight hours after he posted himself with a gun on Truth Social and renamed the Strait of Hormuz “the Strait of Trump.” Blundell called it the phase of the presidency where Trump just says anything: “delusional.”4️⃣ The UAE WalksThe United Arab Emirates formally walked out of OPEC and OPEC+ today — the first major-producer departure in nearly six decades — after sending Central Bank Governor Khaled Balama to Washington in late April to negotiate a $20 billion dollar swap line with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The UAE walked anyway. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund killed LIV Golf the same week and announced an 80/20 retreat home from Western investing. Saudi US Treasury holdings dropped $14.7 billion in January alone. Bloomberg’s headline on April 6 said the loop is broken. Blundell named what he sees as the through-line: the Trump family’s net worth has tripled since the inauguration, the payments from the Gulf states for Trump-branded properties are crypto-denominated, and the President “doesn’t give a f**k about your 401” because his future is in Bitcoin. Shalev: if the President wants to kill the dollar down the line, the war is the lever, the petrodollar reversal is the consequence, and crypto is what replaces it.3️⃣ Workers Over BillionairesThe May Day general strike was under way across 600 cities today, with 750 events and 500 organizing groups behind the Workers Over Billionaires slogan. Charlotte-Mecklenburg closed its entire school system because too many staff called out. Blundell said America online is active but America in the streets is not — and called for the kind of full general strike “every housewife in America” mounted during Prohibition: a refusal that did not end until the law itself bent. The number Ro Khanna laid on Hegseth at oversight Thursday is the one that lands: $5,000 per American household, the average cost of the Iran war. Shalev noted that Department of Justice prosecutors also released new “casing” video of White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter Cole Allen — the dog and the officer at the gym door, the magnetometer being torn down, the long rifle materializing somewhere off-camera — questions that Jeanine Pirro’s narrative is not answering.2️⃣ Rome Answers ICEAt 11:07 this morning Pope Leo named Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala — smuggled into the United States in a car trunk in 1990 after three failed attempts to flee El Salvador’s civil war — as the next bishop of West Virginia. He also elevated Howard University chaplain Robert Boxie III, who has called the Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion “un-American” and “un-Christian,” to auxiliary bishop of Washington. The appointment came on May Day and twelve hours after Trump signed a Department of Homeland Security funding bill that pointedly excluded Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. Shalev called the move the institutional rebuke from Rome that the Senate would not deliver. Blundell, no friend of organized religion, granted the point: “humanity is a big deal.”1️⃣ The UFC On The LawnForty-five days from now the White House will host its first ever Ultimate Fighting Championship card on the South Lawn — a 15,000-person arena to be built on the people’s front yard. Trump made the announcement personally, said the UFC would bring “some of the greatest champions in the world,” and confirmed construction begins shortly. Kash Patel’s FBI has separately contracted UFC fighters to train federal agents. Blundell called it a carousel of stupidity meant to distract from gas prices, the war, and the Treasury slide. Shalev tied it to Trump’s last UFC appearance — the homoerotic ringside compliment to a fighter the President called “the most beautiful man” — and to the broader spectacle: a fifteen-thousand-seat cage match staged on the lawn of the people’s house while the constitutional check on the war fails six times in eight weeks.Five fights happened on Friday May 1. Trump won none of them. The Senate would not stop the war but Susan Collins crossed and the next vote will be 48–49. Iran offered exactly what a serious negotiator should accept and Trump told CNN he was “not satisfied.” The first American pope put an undocumented Salvadoran in a bishop’s seat in Trump country. The United Arab Emirates flew to Washington for a swap line and walked out of the cartel anyway. And the President of the United States is building a UFC arena on the front lawn while gasoline averages $4.39 a gallon. We are not supposed to be looking at the dollar. We are supposed to be looking at the war. Look at the dollar. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Jai C. Porter🇨🇦, Stuart Cohen, Dannys, Lori Modafferi, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ Hegseth Grilled — “Obliterated” Doesn’t Add UpPete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine took chairs in front of the House Armed Services Committee at ten this morning to defend a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. Hegseth told the chamber that Iran’s nuclear facilities had already been “obliterated” before Trump launched the war, then told Adam Smith the war was justified anyway because “they had not given up their nuclear ambitions.” Pentagon finance chief Jules Hurst III put a $25 billion price tag on what he called “Operation Epic Fury,” with two destroyed C-130s in the bill. Hegseth attacked Democrats and critical Republicans as “reckless, feckless and defeatist.” “He’s blowing it,” Blundell said.4️⃣ Bondi Will Testify After ContemptHouse Oversight Democrats forced a date out of a fired Attorney General by filing a contempt resolution. Pam Bondi is on the Oversight calendar for May 29 only after Robert Garcia and Summer Lee made clear they would pursue charges that carry jail time. Trump fired Bondi April 2 over the Epstein files, and the Justice Department had previously argued her subpoena “no longer obligates” her testimony. “Compelling her to show up is 75% of the game,” Blundell said.3️⃣ Oil Climbs — UAE Walks OPEC FridayBrent crude opened at $116.53 this morning and settled at $114.62 in the afternoon, up roughly 3% on a Trump Truth Social post and a Defense Secretary on the Hill. Alex Vindman walked Hegseth through the rest of the math: Brent has moved from $72 the day before the war to $117 today, and oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is down 81%. The United Arab Emirates leaves OPEC on Friday — third-largest producer, fifty-eight years inside the cartel. Howard Lutnick, the man supposed to broker the Gulf rescue and whose family trust is borrowed against Tether, did not arrive in time.2️⃣ The Court Turns the Clock BackAt ten-fifty this morning the Supreme Court split six-three in Louisiana v. Callais and gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Alito wrote that the statute “should not have imposed liability on Louisiana” for the second majority-Black district that elected Cleo Fields. Justice Kagan delivered the dissent from the bench and warned any state can now “announce a partisan gerrymander” and walk free. Sunday’s Texas ruling already locked in five Republican House seats; today’s opens the rest of the South — Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina. “It becomes apartheid-like,” Shalev said. “Jim Crow,” Blundell answered.1️⃣ Cole Allen Never Fired a ShotThe Washington Post reviewed the high-resolution Hilton surveillance video this morning and reported what Truth Social did not. Cole Tomas Allen ran sixty feet with his shotgun pointed at the ground; a Secret Service officer fired four times; there is no muzzle flash from Allen’s gun. Bullet holes in the wall match handgun rounds, not buckshot. Allen was on a different floor from the president, four locked doors and another magnetometer away. While the Post was publishing, James Comey walked into an Alexandria courthouse to answer for an Instagram photo of seashells arranged into the numbers 8647 — an indictment Blundell called “the most embarrassing paragraph in recent federal legal history.” Three days ago Narativ called this presidency the one that cries wolf. The video is consistent with that read. There was no actual assassination attempt. There was a security breach the administration is using as a prop — to indict Comey, threaten Disney’s eight ABC stations, and let the Defense Secretary call critics “feckless” on the floor of the House.The president invents the threats he wants and prosecutes the people who notice. The court rewrites the law that limits him. The cartel that priced the world for sixty-five years cracks Friday. The fired Attorney General testifies on May 29 because two House Democrats made her. King Charles read Magna Carta into the chamber yesterday and laid a wreath at Ground Zero this morning. Friday closes the sixty-day War Powers clock. The calendar is doing the foreign policy. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, Amy Gabrielle, Natasha K., LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.5️⃣ Carr Comes For Kimmel And DisneyFCC chair Brendan Carr opened an investigation into ABC and Disney on Tuesday, threatening eight broadcast licenses over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue delivered three days before the Washington Hilton incident. Kimmel had quipped that Melania Trump carried “the glow of an expectant widow.” Carr’s office is folding the line into the administration’s case that critics of the president are inciting violence. Shalev framed the move alongside the Comey indictment as one signal repeating in different rooms. “We live in this time when everything this man says is designed to protect the Epstein class and treat him and everybody in it as if they are the victim class,” Shalev said. The license threat lands the same week the Justice Department began treating opposition speech as criminal conspiracy.4️⃣ UAE Walks Out Of OPECThe United Arab Emirates announced it will leave OPEC on May 1, ending nearly 60 years inside the cartel that has set global oil prices since 1960. The exit removes 13% of OPEC’s production capacity and lets Abu Dhabi price its own barrels. Blundell called it “devastating for oil barons, robber barons around the world.” The timing matters. May 1 is also the day the 60-day War Powers resolution comes due in the Senate with the Iran war still unresolved, and Iran sits inside OPEC. Shalev noted the Trump-floated rescue mechanism for Gulf finances may have collapsed inside the same conversation. The cartel that priced the world for sixty-five years is cracking on the day the Senate has to vote on the war.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.3️⃣ Comey Indicted Over Seashells PhotoActing Attorney General Todd Blanche filed a second indictment against former FBI director James Comey on Tuesday, this one built on an Instagram post in which Comey arranged seashells on a beach into the numbers 8647 — shorthand for 86 the 47th president. The first indictment collapsed when prosecutors admitted they had nothing. Blanche’s office is now charging Comey as a criminal conspirator in what the administration is calling the fourth assassination attempt on the president, the Saturday-night magnetometer breach at the Washington Hilton. The theory of the case is that an Instagram post months ago helped produce a man rushing the Secret Service line on Saturday night. “Cash Patel is cosplaying,” Shalev said, “and the fact that Patel feels like he can arrest Jim Comey is ludicrous.” The indictment turns critic speech into a federal felony.2️⃣ Senate Sends GAO Into The Epstein FilesA bipartisan group of senators announced Tuesday that the Government Accountability Office will investigate the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and a New Mexico colleague signed the request. The GAO is the legislature’s independent watchdog, and its findings carry weight in both chambers. Shalev called it “the first trustworthy official investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and the Justice Department’s handling” of the documents. The timing was not accidental. Epstein survivors held a separate event in Washington on Tuesday demanding to meet King Charles, who declined. The Senate moved while the world watched.1️⃣ King Charles Puts Trump On Notice In CongressKing Charles III addressed a joint meeting of the United States Congress on Tuesday, the second reigning British monarch to do so after his late mother in 1991, and methodically dismantled the Trump regime’s worldview without naming the president once. Trump was absent by protocol. Charles cited Magna Carta on “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” He described the Saturday Hilton incident and said “such acts of violence will never succeed.” He named Ukraine — “that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people” — and both parties stood and applauded. He praised diversity, interfaith respect, climate stewardship, and the rule of law. He closed on Lincoln’s Gettysburg line that the world “may little note what we say, but will never forget what we do.” Blundell called it “the greatest repudiation of Donald Trump in modern history.” Shalev described what he had just watched. “The king of England put Donald Trump on notice.”The pattern across Tuesday is one signal repeating in five different rooms. The bipartisan GAO move, the cartel exit, the indictment of a former FBI director over a beach photo, the FCC threats against a comedian, and the king of England standing in the chamber where the laws are made and reading the founding documents back to the people who wrote them. The institutions that survived the last century are deciding what to do about this one. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Noble Blend, Rhiannon Frater, Carole, Stuart Cohen, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ DC Rolled Its Eyes And Wolf Blitzer Lost A ShoeThe first thing the room did when the shots rang out was nothing. Wajahat Ali was outside the Hilton when it happened, held back by police as the perimeter went up. “Everything was chill,” Ali said. “The residents of D.C. just rolled their eyes. People are like, did someone try to shoot this mother effer? You think it’s real? You think it’s staged? No one cared.” Inside, Lev Parnas described after-parties continuing as the cops shut down every intersection. Steve Schmidt giggled. Dean Blundell, also inside, said the suspicion was universal. “It was, give me a f*****g break.” The corporate-media reaction broke the other way. Wolf Blitzer told viewers he lost a shoe. He told viewers he thought the shooter was coming for him. “I said, just watch,” Ali said. “One of these corporate media reeks is going to make it all about themselves and talk like they’re in Fallujah. And right on cue, Wolf Blitzer.”4️⃣ MAGA Got Its ThreadsWithin twenty-four hours, every right-wing influencer was on the same line. Rudy Giuliani, Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok, GOP lawmakers — we need the ballroom, in unison, before the ballroom had been cleaned. Ali pointed to Ashley St. Clair, the Elon Musk associate who has gone public about how the messaging works. “All these influencers are on the same threads, and they get told to do this, and it’s like pay for play. You do this, you’ll get rewarded. You’ll be a good soldier.” On Saturday it was the ballroom. On Sunday it was the ballroom and DHS funding. By Monday afternoon, Karoline Leavitt was at the lectern naming Hakeem Jeffries, Josh Shapiro, Alex Padilla, Elizabeth Warren, Adam Schiff, Ed Markey, JB Pritzker, Ayanna Pressley, Monica McGyver, and Jimmy Kimmel — declaring their words “indistinguishable from the manifesto.” The threads, in real time. “Donald Trump talks about the ballroom,” Ali said. “They all talk about the ballroom.”3️⃣ Cole Allen Was A Hotel GuestCole Tomas Allen never reached the ballroom. The Washington Post reported Sunday he was on an upper floor of the Hilton, four locked doors and a flight of stairs away from where Donald Trump was speaking. He had been booked into a hotel room that night. “He’s a resident of the hotel that night,” Shalev said. “That gives you all sorts of access.” Allen has a Caltech mechanical-engineering degree, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory fellowship, a master’s in computer science, and a Teacher of the Month award from C2 Education in Torrance. He is described, in Ali’s words, as “a brilliant guy, Caltech, makes video games on the side for fun, a Christian, a teacher, very smart, very kind, very nice.” Lev Parnas allowed that radicalization explains some of it. Dean and Zev pushed back. “Why would he bother going all the way upstairs to the actual main entrance to get his way in when he was already inside?” Shalev asked. “The whole thing just reeks.”2️⃣ Lev Said Butler Was StagedLev Parnas, who spent the first hours of the WHCD aftermath defending against staging conspiracy theories, said something different on the show. “After a lot of investigative work, a lot of listening and watching what transpired, I truly will say that I believe that the Butler assassination attempt was staged.” He said the same kind of operation had been planned for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and “didn’t work out.” He cited the survival of Cole Allen as evidence that this one was different — “they do not leave witnesses.” But on Butler, where Thomas Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper and Corey Comperatore was killed in the crowd, Parnas’s position is now on record. The first three armed men to come for Donald Trump in twenty-one months were, according to Wajahat Ali, all former Trump voters in their twenties who had been radicalized. The pattern is starting to settle into a sentence Parnas will say out loud.1️⃣ The Crackdown Has BegunNarativ predicted this morning, in The President Who Cried Wolf, that the manifesto framing would be deployed against the broader Epstein-investigative and political opposition.Hours later, Karoline Leavitt named the list at the lectern. Eight Democratic elected officials and one late-night host whose statements were, in her construction, “indistinguishable from the manifesto.” Trump on Truth Social demanded ABC and Disney fire Jimmy Kimmel for an “expectant widow” joke about Melania that ran four days before the shooting. The political product extracted from one Saturday night now stacks: the ballroom, DHS funding, the Kimmel scalp, the named list. Each new day produces another. “If indeed this was not staged, it is incredibly convenient,” Blundell said. “If there’s one thing the Trump regime knows how to do, it’s to take stuff like this and turn it into leverage, turn it into political capital.”The Saturday-night security failure at the Washington Hilton became a Monday-afternoon target list. The list will widen.History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Nicole, Amy Gabrielle, Lyudmila and Daniel, Eric Lullove, Cathy R. Payne, and many others for tuning into my live video with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali and Lev Parnas! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.5️⃣ The Soldier Who Bet On His Own MissionFederal prosecutors unsealed an indictment overnight charging a U.S. special forces soldier with using classified information about the Maduro raid to place cash bets on the outcome. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who reports to the Joint Special Operations Command and helped plan and execute the operation, placed 13 Polymarket bets between December 27 and January 26, turning $33,000 into more than $409,000. “That’s 13 bets because the operation kept moving,” Shalev said. “So he had to keep moving. It’s pretty obvious what he did.” Trump, asked about it from the Oval Office, called prediction markets “somewhat of a casino” and said he was “never much in favor of it.” Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket’s advisory board. A $500 million oil futures bet minutes before the Maduro raid forced the former SEC watchdog to resign weeks ago after she pointed at the Trump family. “These predictive market people,” Blundell said, “obviously have a very close relationship with trend-setting, news-making people who understand when and how some of the world’s worst or best events are going to happen.”The Polymarket story is a n example of a story we only found on GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.4️⃣ Ellie Leonard Transcribes The Wolff-Epstein Emails And Exposes The PR ManEllie Leonard, a Narativ contributor who publishes at The Panicked Writer, has transcribed 1,800 pages of emails between Michael Wolff and Jeffrey Epstein — believed to be the only complete read of the entire correspondence. Her reporting establishes that Wolff was Epstein’s paid reputation repairman, writing clean-up pieces including a 7,000-word whitewash for The New Yorker after Epstein’s conviction for procuring an underage prostitute. Shalev noted Wolff’s email volume to Epstein spiked the moment Virginia Giuffre surfaced her Prince Andrew and Epstein allegations, as Wolff worked to discredit her and the journalists covering the story. “He looks like the biggest weasel and leech in the entire Epstein files now,” Blundell said. Leonard has been harassed by Wolff and Michael Cohen for the reporting. The publishing houses that kept handing Wolff book deals, both hosts said, knew exactly what they were buying.3️⃣ The White House Scraps The Records Law And Clears The Filing CabinetsThe Washington Post reported at 5 a.m. Friday that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional on April 1, and the next day White House Counsel David Warrington sent every Executive Office staffer a memo rewriting the rules. Mandatory became “should.” Prohibited became “whenever possible.” The 2017 version required staff to use official email; the new version suggests they do. “He’s doing something really bad right now,” Shalev said of the timing. Blundell added that the memo lets the administration “hide all the records, delete whatever they want” with no paper trail once they leave office. The post-Watergate law was written to stop exactly this. The White House just walked away from it.2️⃣ GOP and Dems split On A Maxwell Pardon And Ehud Barak’s Cousin Runs The OperationHouse Oversight Chair James Comer said yesterday his committee is split on pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for testimony — testimony that Shalev forecast will clear both Trump and Clinton. Two additional exit ramps are active: a direct pardon from Trump and a motion to vacate the charges at the Southern District of New York. Shalev’s Narativ.org reporting this morning names Daphne Barak — cousin of Ehud Barak, himself accused by Virginia Giuffre — as the operator of a four-year PAC campaign to spring Maxwell, hiring operatives to harass survivors on social media. “Half the committee facilitated the rape and the abuse and possibly the murder of hundreds, maybe thousands of children from around the world,” Blundell said. “And half of them are split.” Marjorie Taylor Greene said publicly that Trump himself ordered Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche to bury the Epstein files. Blanche, now the attorney general, ran Maxwell’s interview before her transfer to a minimum-security camp.1️⃣ Trump Sinks To 33 Percent And The Women Are GoneAP-NORC has Trump at 33 percent approval, his second-term low, and the internals show the floor caving. Women: 28 percent. “When everyone realized Nixon was done was when he hit 25 percent,” Shalev said. “And women right now are trending three points above that.” Hispanic approval 25 percent. Black 14 percent. Independents have collapsed from 60 percent to 23. Even the Republican base has softened to 68. The Iran war is the accelerant, with Brent crude at $107 and gas above $4 heading into the midterms. The White House Correspondents Dinner lands tomorrow — a staged victory lap as the numbers say the opposite. “These numbers are the real indicator of how much America hates the president of the United States,” Blundell said.A soldier bets on his own mission while Polymarket quotes odds on the Maxwell pardon, the records law goes dark, and the 33 percent president walks into a correspondents dinner built to look like a victory. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Robin Payes, Noble Blend, Miss Myra, Jeanne Elbe, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ Laura Loomer LosesA federal judge in Florida, a Clinton appointee, granted summary judgment to Bill Maher and HBO, killing Laura Loomer’s $150 million defamation suit before it reached a jury. “Summary judgment, which means the judge laughed at it,” Blundell said. The suit targeted a September 2024 Real Time bit in which Maher named Loomer as the president’s likely mistress. Her own deposition sank the case — her income went up in 2024, she still flies on Trump’s plane, she still gets into the White House, and she could not name one person whose opinion of her had changed. Witnesses testified she had told them she “gave Trump the best b*****b of his life,” and her father, Jeff Loomer, reportedly declined to rule out another involuntary psychiatric hold for her, saying he could not deny the claim. “Laura Loomer is the president’s mistress,” Shalev said. “That’s why she has access to the president. In this case, these b******s are a national security risk.”4️⃣ The New Navy Secretary Is Interesting On day 55 of the Iran war, Trump ordered the US Navy to “shoot and kill” any Iranian boats laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. In the same 24 hours, Pete Hegseth fired Navy Secretary John Phelan 13 days into the job and installed Undersecretary Hung Cao as acting. “It is stunning that in the middle of a war, this guy has been on the job for 13 days, has now been ousted because essentially he disagreed with what the president was asking him to do,” Shalev said. Cao, a Christian nationalist with a documented record of evangelical-cult rhetoric and race-based KKK jokes on The War Room, once warned that Monterey, California, was becoming a witchcraft capital. “The guy who thinks Monterey is going to become the witchcraft capital of the world is now in charge of the United States Navy,” Shalev said. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has already seized two commercial ships and left a third stranded, and Trump says there is “no time frame” on ending the war.3️⃣ Lutnick Continues Epstein Cover-Up Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified at House Appropriations this morning. Rep. Madeleine Dean confronted him directly — “Why did you lie to the New York Post about your relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?” — then laid out the Lutnick family tariff-refund scheme Rep. Jamie Raskin is now investigating. Lutnick deflected every Epstein question to his May 6 House Oversight interview, the same line he used on Sen. Chris Van Hollen in the Senate the day before. “Let the record reflect,” Dean said. “You’re dodging the question. The cover-up continues.” Dean closed by calling on him to “resign before you are fired.” Nobody on the committee asked about Tether — Cantor Fitzgerald, now run by Lutnick’s son Brandon, custodies the $132 billion in Treasuries backing the stablecoin, took a $600 million stake that Tether itself financed through a loan to the Lutnick family trust, and is now reserve custodian for USAT, the new GENIUS Act stablecoin. “Tether is a crypto company that owns Lutnick’s family fortune and owns Cantor Fitzgerald and has it rigged,” Shalev said.2️⃣ Senate OKs Ice Surge In Pre-Dawn VoteTrump reposted Michael Savage’s Newsmax segment to Truth Social — a screed calling India and China “hellholes,” attacking ACLU attorney Cecillia Wang by ethnicity, and invoking Andrew Jackson’s defiance of the Supreme Court on Cherokee removal, misattributed as “Stonewall Jackson.” “It’s the most racist thing I’ve ever read in my life that a president has ever put out,” Shalev said. The SCOTUS majority signaled on April 1 that it will strike down Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, with a ruling by end of June, and Savage’s Jackson reference is the framework: if the Court rules against him, ignore it. In the same overnight cycle, the Senate cleared S.Con.Res.33 at 3:49 AM, 50-48 party-line, setting the framework for ICE and Border Patrol funding through FY2035. “They are moving at lightning speed before the next 195 days to take control of the United States elections,” Blundell said. ICE staffing announcements are expected inside 72 hours.1️⃣ Eric Trump, Pentagon Robotics ManufacturerEric Trump went on Fox Business this morning to celebrate a $24 million Pentagon contract awarded to Foundation Industries, a robotics firm where he serves as Chief Strategic Adviser and investor. The product is Phantom 2, a humanoid robot to be deployed to Ukraine to inspect and transport weapons on the frontlines. Maria Bartiromo congratulated him on air. Combined with Donald Trump Jr.’s $620 million Pentagon loan in December and the brothers’ stakes in drone maker Powerus, rare earth magnets, and related plays, the family has now collected “about $770 million now that they’ve made from government contracts in the last 12 months,” Blundell said. Scott McFarlane’s reporting catalogs the parallel bucket list — Trump pushing to replace Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill, mint a new $250 note with his own face, rename Dulles Trump International, rebrand the Washington Metro “WMAGA,” and fund NIH research into “Trump derangement syndrome.” “He wants the world to look like his brain,” Blundell said.Loomer sued herself out of court, the Navy Secretary got purged mid-combat, the Commerce Secretary ran out the clock, the president pre-positioned defiance of the Supreme Court, and the president’s son rolled up $24 million of the Pentagon on live TV. Corrupt administration, top to bottom. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Cat: Poli-Psych, LeftieProf, Noble Blend, Leah Anderson, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

FIVESTACK just posted our biggest live Substack audience ever — 6,000 of you watched us as we were live. Thank you for spending your time with us. Come back every day! Monday -Friday at 3 PM ET5️⃣ Patel’s “Never Intoxicated” Presser — And Who Trump Hires On PurposeThe FBI Director of the United States of America stood at a DOJ podium yesterday and told a room of reporters he has “never been intoxicated on the job.” That’s the sentence. That’s what we’re doing now. Acting AG Todd Blanche stood beside him — Patel’s boss, for those keeping score — and told reporters he hadn’t read The Atlantic story he was there to dispute, but assured everyone parts of it were “blatantly false.” Reporting he hadn’t read. Blatantly false. Sure, buddy.Patel’s response to the allegations that he’s had “bouts of excessive drinking” and unexplained absences from the Bureau? A $250 million defamation lawsuit, a rant about the “fake news mafia,” and a cute line about being “an everyday American who loves his country [and] loves the sport of hockey” — that last one a reference to video of him chugging beers with the US Olympic gold medal hockey team in February. An everyday American. Running the FBI.Zev’s point cut to the bone: this is who Trump hires on purpose. Not despite the red flags — because of them. Compromised people are controllable people. Patel was put there to do two things: protect Trump and punish Trump’s enemies. Everything else — the Atlantic reporting, the 700 agents reassigned, the unexplained absences, Jamie Raskin launching a House investigation today and demanding Patel submit to an alcohol test under penalty of perjury — is noise around the core function.As I said on the show: “He’s doing the job he was hired to do. The drinking is the side quest. The Bureau being hollowed out is the main quest.”4️⃣ Lutnick Calls Canada “Insulting.” Shaheen Tells Him Why.Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick walked into a Senate Appropriations hearing today to defend the 2027 budget and instead got handed his ass by Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Last Friday at a Semafor event, Lutnick’s assessment of Canada’s trade negotiating strategy was, and I quote, “They suck.” Today he doubled down, calling it “outrageous” and “insulting and disrespectful to America” that Canadian provinces won’t stock American spirits on their liquor shelves.Howard. Buddy. My guy. You want to know why they won’t stock your bourbon?Shaheen laid it out plainly: Canadian tourism to New Hampshire is down 30% year-over-year. Tourism is the second-largest industry in her state — 70,000 jobs. Small businesses on both sides of the border are cratering. Her question, which Lutnick could not answer: “How does insulting our closest ally and neighbor help the businesses in my state of New Hampshire, and states all across this country, who are hurting because of the loss of Canadian business and tourism?”Lutnick’s response was to lecture her about how Canada “leans on” the $30 trillion US economy, as if that was the gotcha. Shaheen came back with the line of the day: “When we have allies and partners, we should try and work with them — not insult them.”As a Canadian, let me translate for Howard: we’re not buying your liquor, we’re not visiting your states, we’re not signing your deals, and we’re not going to. You called our Prime Minister a governor. You called our country the 51st state. You tariffed us for fun. We have long memories and short tempers and we are done. The Carney government said today they’re in no rush. Why would they be? Every day Lutnick opens his mouth, Canada’s leverage goes up.3️⃣ MTG: Trump Personally Told Bondi To Bury The Epstein FilesMarjorie Taylor Greene went on the Shannon Joy Show yesterday and said the quiet part on a megaphone: Donald Trump “flat out” told then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, “Do not release the Epstein files.”Per Greene, Trump was “blocking everybody” — Bondi at DOJ, Speaker Mike Johnson in the House, Majority Leader John Thune in the Senate. His stated reason, in Greene’s telling of their final conversation before he branded her a traitor and she resigned from Congress: “My friends will get hurt. People you know, Marjorie. People at Mar-a-Lago.”Let me say that part again, slowly. The President of the United States told his Attorney General to suppress federal evidence in a child sex trafficking investigation because his friends at his private club might get hurt.Greene is not a credible narrator on most days. On this one, the corroboration is doing the work. She said essentially the same thing to The New York Times in December. Bondi reportedly told Trump in May that his name is “all over the files.” The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Bondi for a deposition on the redactions and the 53 pages of FBI interviews NPR confirmed were scrubbed — she didn’t comply, claiming the subpoena doesn’t apply because she’s no longer AG. And the “client list” Bondi vowed to release in February 2025? Suddenly didn’t exist by July.Zev connected it to a pattern we’ve tracked for two years: the Epstein story is not a sex scandal. It’s a compromise operation. Seventeen or eighteen countries now have open Epstein investigations. London is dismantling the network in real time. The question is no longer what was on Epstein’s island. It’s who got put where because of what was on Epstein’s island — and whether the sitting President of the United States is one of them.2️⃣ Mask Off — China Is Arming Iran. The Touska Is The Proof.On Sunday, the USS Spruance fired on and boarded the Iranian-flagged container ship MV Touska in the Gulf of Oman as it tried to run the US naval blockade into Bandar Abbas. Six hours of warnings ignored. Rounds into the engine room to disable the propulsion. Marines on deck. The ship is part of the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines — IRISL — which the US sanctioned in 2019 as “the preferred shipping line for Iranian proliferators.”Here’s the part that matters. The Touska‘s last stops before Iran: Gaolan port in Zhuhai, China, and Taicang port north of Shanghai, per satellite analysis. Gaolan is known — per The Washington Post — for shipping sodium perchlorate, a key precursor for solid rocket fuel that Iran needs to rebuild its missile program. US security sources say the cargo is “dual-use”: metals, pipes, electronic components consistent with ballistic missile manufacturing. Nikki Haley — and I cannot believe I am about to favorably cite Nikki Haley — said it on X: the ship “was headed from China to Iran and is linked to chemical shipments for missiles.”This is not speculation anymore. This is a boat. With a captain. Loaded in a Chinese port. Pointed at Iran. Full of missile-grade chemicals. In the middle of a ceasefire the United States is trying to negotiate.China’s response: “concern” over the “forcible interception” and a demand that everyone honor the ceasefire. Last week they denied arming Iran and threatened “countermeasures” if Trump imposed a 50% tariff over it. Today the Touska is sitting in US custody like a subpoena with an anchor.The mask is off. China is the quartermaster. The war Trump says he won is being resupplied in real time by the country he’s flying to meet with next month.1️⃣ Trump Loses Iran. Ceasefire Goes Indefinite. London Meets Without Him.And here it is. The top story. The one that reframes everything below it.Trump announced yesterday afternoon — on Truth Social, of course — that he’s extending the Iran ceasefire indefinitely. No end date. No deadline. Until talks “are concluded, one way or the other.” This from the man who said four days ago an extension was “highly unlikely.”What actually happened: the talks collapsed. Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Islamabad for a second round of negotiations — with Witkoff and Kushner in tow, the same geniuses who brought you the Gaza disaster — was scrapped. Iran’s Foreign Ministry said there were no negotiations to attend. Tehran wants the naval blockade of Hormuz lifted before they’ll even sit down. Trump refuses. Khamenei hasn’t signed off on anything. The Iranian government, per Trump himself, is “seriously fractured.” He’s not wrong. But neither is he winning.Meanwhile, in London and Paris, the grown-ups are meeting. Forty countries on a UK-chaired call earlier this month — France, Germany, Canada, UAE, India — planning a neutral multinational mission to secure the Strait of Hormuz. The United States was not invited. France and Britain have explicitly framed the initiative as separate from Washington’s blockade policy. Macron and Starmer co-chaired. Merz said Germany would contribute mine-clearing. Meloni showed up in person.And — the part that should end careers if journalism still existed — the UK is set to announce legislation next month moving Britain closer to the European Union, explicitly because the Iran war has soured the “special relationship” with the United States. The war Trump started. The ceasefire he can’t close. The allies he insulted. The strait he can’t reopen. London is quietly de-coupling from Washington and re-coupling to Brussels, and the American press is covering Kash Patel’s bar tab.On Chinese social media, they’re already calling Beijing the real winner of the Iran war. A Weibo user’s line of the week: the White House’s “credit score” wouldn’t be enough “to unlock a shared bike.”The ThroughlineFive stories. One spine.Trump hires broken people on purpose (Patel). He insults the allies who’d bail him out (Canada). He protects the network that compromised him (Epstein). The adversary arming the enemy he’s “at war” with is the same country he’s flying to see next month (China/Touska). And while he loses the war, the allies he mocked are quietly building the post-American order without him (London).This is not five stories. This is one story told five ways. And the story is: the American presidency is being run by a compromised man, staffed by compromised people, losing a war to a coalition of compromised states, while functional democracies quietly step around him.Zev’s closing line on the show: “The adults are meeting in London. The drunks are at the podium in Washington. Pick a side.”Thank you Leah Anderson, Micheal Scott, Sandra Tuttle, Kim G, 🇨🇦 Natalie Woodn’t 🇨🇦, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.5️⃣ Vance Off The Plane, China On The BoardVice President JD Vance didn’t even bother traveling Islamabad for talks on Iran, trump claimed it was for security concerns but no Iranian delegation had left for Pakistan. On CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump described intercepting an Iranian vessel carrying “things on it, which wasn’t very nice,” calling the cargo “a gift from China, perhaps” — the first time a sitting U.S. president has described Beijing rearming Tehran’s air defenses. Former Iranian negotiator Mohammad Marandi posted a public warning telling Iranians to leave the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait immediately, and said ships near the Strait of Hormuz should prepare to abandon. A direct threat to US vessels who have been blockading Iranian ports. Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Tehran has “new cards on the battlefield,” language Blundell read as confirmation of the Chinese systems. A Daily Mirror report said Trump asked Joint Chiefs chair Dan Caine for a full ground invasion of Iran and the nuclear codes over the weekend, and that Caine walked out of the meeting. The ceasefire ends tomorrow night.4️⃣ Ukraines Counter-Offensive Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Tuesday that the Druzhba pipeline, the Soviet-era crude artery Ukrainian drones knocked offline in January, is repaired and ready to resume. The restart unlocks the €90 billion EU loan that Budapest had been blocking and releases the next Russia sanctions package Hungary had vetoed. Overnight, Special Operations Centre Alpha of the Security Service of Ukraine hit the Samara line dispatch station — the mixing point where high- and low-sulfur crude becomes the Urals export blend — cutting Russian production by as much as 40 percent. In the same window, Peter Magyar won Hungary’s election on a platform of forcing Viktor Orbán out and redistributing Orbán’s captured media licenses. Ukraine now runs 85 percent self-sufficient on munitions and air defense and has signed production deals with the same Gulf states that stopped buying drones from the Trump crime family. Two levers on one pipeline of money: Washington squeezes Iran’s barrels off the market and lifts Russia’s ledger; Kyiv cuts the ledger at Samara and drops Budapest’s veto.3️⃣ Palantir Puts It In WritingPalantir Technologies posted a 22-point manifesto to X over the weekend — billed as a summary of CEO Alex Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, co-authored with head of corporate and legal affairs Nicholas Zamiska. The planks include “hard power in this century will be built on software,” a call for universal national service and an end to the all-volunteer force, a claim that “the question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose,” a line that “the post-war neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” and the assertion that “some cultures have produced vital advances. Others remain dysfunctional and regressive.” Blundell’s piece, which went viral within hours of publication, called Palantir the first private corporation in recorded history to fuse four powers civilizations had kept apart: the surveillance apparatus of the state, the targeting engine of the military, the ideological machinery that decides what information travels, and the patronage of Jeffrey Epstein — who put $40 million into the company and corresponded with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk for five years after his conviction. Blundell called it “the digital East India Trading Company,” the private corporate army that ran sovereign states for 150 years until the Crown absorbed it into the Royal Navy. The current Vice President is funded by Thiel; the man behind the manifesto is Karp.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.2️⃣ The Epstein Test Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, told the Senate Banking Committee he would not be “a sock puppet” and vowed independence from the White House. Elizabeth Warren raised Warsh’s pre-disclosure holdings in Jeffrey Epstein-era financial vehicles during the hearing. Mark Carney endorsed the nomination on the basis of having worked with Warsh years earlier. Blundell’s read on air: Warsh may be a technocrat of some narrow competence, but any confirmed business with Epstein after the 2008 conviction is a single disqualifier Warsh has not yet answered. “Would he be a puppet? No one knows,” Blundell said. “But if he did any business with Jeffrey Epstein post-conviction, he should be kept as far away from America’s leading financial regulatory body as humanly possible.” Republican Senator Thom Tillis has a separate hold on the nomination tied to the Justice Department’s criminal inquiry into Jerome Powell. Republicans hold a 12–10 margin in committee; one Republican no-vote ends the nomination.1️⃣ Hegseth Kills The Flu Shot Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that the United States military will no longer require any service member to take the flu vaccine — effective immediately, voluntary for all active duty, reserve, and Department of Defense civilians. Hegseth framed the reversal in religious terms: “Your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable,” and told the force that “that era of betrayal is over.” The Department of Defense has required the flu vaccine for 77 years, since the late 1940s. Blundell’s on-air read: the order is not a health policy — it is a loyalty transaction aimed at the 19 to 20 percent of service members who swear evangelical allegiance alongside their oath to the Constitution. “Pete and Donnie are trying to carve away a certain group by giving them what they want,” Blundell said. “I did this for you. You need to do something for me when the time comes.” Context: the same weekend, Joint Chiefs chair Dan Caine refused Trump’s request for the nuclear codes and walked out of a meeting about a 200,000-soldier ground invasion of Iran. Hegseth is buying a cohort because Caine is not.Washington’s oil blockade lifts Russia’s ledger while the Vice President is funded by the company writing the next regime’s playbook; the same week, the Secretary of Defense trades a 77-year military vaccine mandate for a loyalty cohort while the Joint Chiefs chair walks out on a ground-invasion briefing. The pieces are moving in the same direction. The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, Andy Collen, Noble Blend, Skutt Hope, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ The Strait of ‘Iran’, Open but ChainedIranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open” on Friday morning. President Trump quote-posted “THANK YOU!” in all caps and then, in a second Truth Social post the same morning, confirmed the U.S. naval blockade would remain in force “until such time as our transaction with Iran is 100 percent complete.” “It’s easy to be cynical when you hear pronouncements of victory,” MeidasTouch Chief Washington Correspondent Scott MacFarlane said on The Fivestack, noting the conspicuous Republican silence and Ann Coulter’s reaction: “yay, the strait that was open before we began bombing is open again. Everybody pretend this is a huge victory for Trump, so he’ll end this catastrophe.” Host Zev Shalev pointed out that the ceasefire depends on Hezbollah, which is not a party to the agreement, and on a prospective Axios-reported deal unfreezing $20 billion in Iranian funds in exchange for uranium. “It sounds a lot like the Obama deal,” Shalev said. Wyoming Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis, declining to mention the president by name, told reporters she had “record food pantry needs right here, right now, this week” in her state.4️⃣ Mejia Wins New Jersey in a BlowoutProgressive Democrat Analilia Mejia, backed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, won the special election to fill Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill’s House seat, defeating Republican Joe Hathaway by a wide margin. “That suburban New Jersey district is not blue-blue,” MacFarlane said. “Democrats fought like hell to win that seat in 2018. They fought like hell to preserve it in ‘20, ‘22, and ‘24. If that’s uninteresting, if that’s not contested in a serious way, it’s a barometer of where things are headed.” Trump has predicted a Republican landslide in November; thirty-six House Republicans have already announced they will not seek reelection — a record. Shalev noted that the administration’s urgency on Iran is reading less like foreign policy and more like campaign management.3️⃣ The Blanche CoupActing Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense attorney, is converting the Department of Justice into a one-man enforcement arm, Shalev said. Blanche this week told his department to “move on” from the Epstein files while 2.5 million documents remain sealed. His office moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of a dozen Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. And Blanche is personally overseeing an expanding criminal inquiry into former CIA Director John Brennan, with six or more witnesses queued. U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, MacFarlane reported, separately filed a motion Friday seeking to have the Justice Department refund restitution fines paid by a pair of January 6 defendants — money that had been earmarked for the victims’ fund covering the 140 police officers injured that day. “That symbol means something,” MacFarlane said. “We are still auditioning for Trump’s approval.”2️⃣ Oil Prices and the Limits of the Victory LapCrude prices tumbled on Araghchi’s announcement — WTI down roughly 12 percent, Brent down 10.5 percent — but gasoline prices at the pump are unlikely to deliver relief before November, and Republican campaign strategists know it. “Gas prices go up by an elevator,” MacFarlane quoted his former CBS colleague Jill Schlesinger. “They go down by a slow spirally staircase.” At a Thursday press opportunity, Trump, asked how much longer Americans would pay high gas prices, replied, “Well, they’re not very high.” “He doesn’t seem to have a real grasp on what his economy is doing to the everyday person,” Shalev said. MacFarlane’s harder point: “Trump’s running the Biden playbook. Which failed. It doesn’t work.” The GOP’s midterm plan — run hard on the Trump tax cuts this spring — has been swamped by pump prices and grocery receipts.1️⃣ Warning: The January 6 Blueprint Is Back, from Inside the White HouseFormer Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman, who served as senior technical advisor to the House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack, joined the show to walk through his newly published analysis tying Trump’s March 31, 2026 voting executive order to the 2020 playbook drafted at South Carolina’s Tomotley Plantation. “Tomotley Plantation was bought by Lin Wood for about $7.9 million,” Riggleman said. “Tomotley is where they gathered everybody right after the election, right after November 3rd, to come up with a plan to use executive orders and legal frameworks to steal the election.” The 2026 executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile a federal Citizenship List, gives the Postmaster General uniform rule-making authority over mail ballots, and provides criminal prosecution authority over state and local election officials who do not comply. “Jamie Raskin likes to say the biggest indicator, the biggest symptom of a forthcoming coup is a recently attempted coup,” MacFarlane said. Riggleman’s alarm is that the same network — Flynn, Powell, Byrne, Waldron — has simply moved from a hotel conference room to inside the White House, with more sophisticated tactics and no Pat Cipollone left to block them. “When you pardon people who tried to overturn an election, you really have eliminated the moral hazard and the safety net,” MacFarlane said. Seditious conspiracy, he reminded viewers, “means you conspire to overturn the government or democracy or an election. It’s hard to think of a more fundamentally pernicious thing to do.” The Department of Justice is now trying to vacate those convictions.The Iran story is the distraction. The Blanche story is the coup. The big story rises in the East — and the next one starts at the ballot box. History rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Jim Bourg, Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Robin Payes, Iulia Huiu, LeftieProf, and many others for tuning into my live video with Scott MacFarlane! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Trump stepped onto the White House lawn on his way to Vegas today and said something that may actually be true: Iran is close to agreeing to no nuclear weapons — not for 20 years, not for 30, but permanently. He also confirmed the second aircraft carrier was sent “in case we don’t make a deal” and said if they do, “it’ll be leaving very soon.”We’ve heard “close to a deal” before. But this time was different. The Lebanon-Israel 10-day ceasefire is confirmed. Netanyahu and Lebanese President Aoun spoke directly for the first time in 34 years. A photo op is expected at the White House this week. Pakistan’s mediation is holding. The S&P hit a record high. Something is moving — even if we’ve been fooled before.I said you’d have to give him at least some credit if he gets it done. The problem is the price. “He’s able to solve these things by sacrificing all the things America used to stand for,” Lawrence said. “Liberty, equality, justice, diversity. He says, well, I’ll get rid of all of that and then I can solve the wars. Of course you can — because then you’re not in disagreement with anybody.”On Trump’s press gaggle:The inflation numbers he was crowing about this morning? The ones he called “incredible”? The IEA said this morning Europe has six weeks of jet fuel left. Gas is $4.14 nationally. Real wages are down. The S&P is pricing in a peace deal that hasn’t been signed. Dana called it perfectly: “I only hear diarrhea of the mouth. None of this is really true or happening.”Trump claimed he has now “solved 10 wars.” He was at 8 this morning. He added two in an hour on his way to the airport.On the Pope:Trump, Vance, and Mike Johnson are all attacking Pope Leo XIV now — four consecutive days. Leo was in Bamenda, Cameroon today calling the world “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” who spend billions on killing. Giorgia Meloni — Trump’s closest European ally — defended the Pope publicly. Trump attacked her too. The Archbishop of Canterbury stood with Leo. Bishop Barron, on Trump’s own Religious Liberty Commission, called the attacks “entirely inappropriate.” WaPo’s Karen Tumulty: evangelical leaders who stayed silent through two terms are starting to speak.As Lawrence said: “Politics is addition. He keeps subtracting.”On Swalwell:This show went deep on Swalwell today — deeper than most. Lawrence and Dana landed somewhere important: it’s harder when it’s our side. “I wanted him to be a good guy,” Lawrence said. “I thought there’s got to be one good guy who could lead the Democratic Party.” Dana: “There is a grief with that. You don’t want to believe it.”The discussion went to something bigger — the predator class, the pattern of men at the highest levels of power choosing abuse, and the asymmetry of accountability between parties. “If you’re going to be that kind of guy, you’ve got to be a Republican,” Dana said. “Because it’s only the Democrats who are busy policing themselves.”Lawrence’s answer to that was the one worth sitting with: “If there is no party actually advocating for justice and the rights of women — we need to be better. If we’re not, the Democratic Party deserves to die and we need to build another one that actually is.”The Senate blocked war powers for the fourth time — 47-52. The NYT says Republicans are privately anxious. The IEA says six weeks. The ceasefire expires in five days. The election EO is quietly already in effect — 75 career election officials replaced, 10 of whom worked to overturn 2020. Check your voter registration. Now.Dean Blundell returns next week. And next week on Narativ — the most explosive investigation we have ever published. Subscribe now so you don’t miss it.Follow Lawrence Winerman and Dana Dubois: Daily Whatever ShowSubscribe to Narativ: Narativ.orgThank you NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, Robin Payes, Fran, Leah Anderson, ShālahBPookie - TheRebelCrone, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Pakistan’s army chief was in Tehran as we went to air today. The ceasefire expires April 21. Three American aircraft carriers are closing in. The diplomacy and the military buildup are happening simultaneously — and as Olga put it on today’s show, it feels exactly like a trap.“The Americans are piling all their resources into a part of the world where you can’t really escape,” she said. “It’s a tiny sliver of water they have to protect. Iran has two routes they can block — 20% of global goods through Hormuz, another 15-20% through the Red Sea with the Houthis. We’re on a timeline. Iran is not.”Here’s what we covered today.BREAKING — PAKISTAN IN TEHRANField Marshal Syed Asim Munir landed in Tehran within the hour before we went live, meeting with Iran’s Foreign Minister in an emergency bid to extend the ceasefire. Pakistan’s PM Sharif is simultaneously in Saudi Arabia, heading to Turkey and Qatar. The US has not formally agreed to extend the ceasefire. The White House says it “feels good about a deal.” Treasury Secretary Bessent — who called the Strait of Hormuz “the Straits of Vermouth” at his press briefing — promised gas with a three in front of it by summer. The S&P 500 hit a new high. Markets are betting on a deal. Six days left on the clock.5. CONGRESS CRACKS, TEXAS RISESEric Swalwell is gone. Ruben Gallego called him a predator who led a double life — then gave a press conference that raised more questions than it answered. James Talarico, 36, former public school teacher, just announced $27 million raised in Q1 — 98% small dollar, all 50 states, polling within three points of both Cornyn and Paxton. Democrats haven’t won statewide in Texas since 1994. The party is losing California and finding its future in Texas on the same afternoon. The Senate war powers vote happens this week.4. SEBASTIAN GORKA WANTS COUNTERTERRORISMJoe Kent resigned as NCTC director in March, on the record, rejecting Trump’s claim that Iran posed an imminent threat. Now Sebastian Gorka — who called the Iran war “Operation Epic Fury” and said “God bless our warfighters” — wants the job. Olga, who investigated Gorka in 2015, confirmed on air that he was photographed with the Order of Vitéz, a Hungarian group with Nazi ties. “We went from a white nationalist to literally a Nazi,” she said. The position requires Senate confirmation. The same Senate voting on war powers this week.3. POPE LEO VS. TRUMP, DAY 4Pope Leo landed in Cameroon. English-speaking separatists declared a three-day ceasefire in his honor. Trump attacked him for the fourth consecutive day. Conservative Catholic bishops on Trump’s own Religious Liberty Commission are now publicly rebuking him. “Who attacks the Pope?” Olga asked. “You’d have to have screws loose.” Trump also went after Italian Prime Minister Meloni — a former ally — for defending the Pope. Politics is about addition. He keeps subtracting.2. FIVE IMPEACHMENT ARTICLES AGAINST HEGSETHHouse Democrats filed five articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth today — abuse of power, war crimes, serious misconduct. They won’t pass. That’s not the point. “Trump is going to use him as a scapegoat,” Olga said. “The worse things get in Iran, the more he’s going to pile it on Hegseth.” The double-tap strike in the Caribbean. The Signal chat. The disclosure of classified information while Whitcoff’s phone was in Moscow. It’s all being documented now. Every Republican vote to protect him is a vote Democrats run against in November.THREE CARRIERS, THE RED SEA, AND A TRAPThe USS George H.W. Bush is rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Three carriers in theater by ceasefire expiry. Iran this morning threatened to shut all trade in the Persian Gulf, Sea of Oman, and the Red Sea. The Houthis have done it before. Nine Iranian vessels have turned back. Six German ships are stranded in the Gulf. Treasury sent warning letters to two Chinese banks. Trump told Fox Business the war is “very close to being over.” He has said this repeatedly.“He was sold a war he didn’t understand,” Olga said. “He thought he’d come in, have Israel assassinate the Ayatollah, and that’s it. This is an ideological regime. They will die before submitting to the West. And Iran knows Trump has already blinked — he’s worried about gas prices, the economy. He wants out. They have the upper hand and they know it.”THE BIGGER PICTUREOlga closed with something worth sitting with. China and Russia provided satellite targeting data on US and Israeli positions. Russia provided 50+ Israeli targets to Iran. North Korean troops rotated through Ukraine. The axis is coordinating. Trump called Xi, who said China wasn’t sending MANPADs to Iran. “What is the likelihood that Xi would tell him — yeah, we’re sending MANPADs to the Iranians?” Olga asked. “He’s going to say of course not. And Trump takes his word for it.”Meanwhile Orbán — the linchpin between the Kremlin’s operations, the MAGA movement, the AFD, France’s National Front, the Heritage Foundation — lost power in Hungary this week. “They’re on the Titanic,” Olga said. “We just can’t let up.”Dean Blundell returns next week. Two special guest co-hosts tomorrow — details coming.Follow Olga Lautman: OlgaLautman.Substack.comSubscribe to Narativ at Narativ.orgThank you Lev Parnas, Beth Cruz, Ang Traders, ESBC NFL And SportsBetting, Grace Lovelace, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

There’s a pattern hiding in plain sight. Each story today reads like a separate news cycle. A military standoff in the Persian Gulf. An election office captured by loyalists. A congressman accused of rape. A new pope who refuses to blink. A Canadian prime minister reshaping the Western alliance. But pull back and look at all five at once, and what you’re watching is a single crisis playing out across five fronts simultaneously — the story of a government that has isolated itself from the world, captured its own institutions, and is now confronting the consequences.Zev Shalev and former Republican congressman Denver Riggleman broke it all down on today’s FIVESTACK. Here’s what they found.🚨 BREAKING: China Defies the BlockadeThe numbers tell the story before anything else does. Before the Iran war began, more than 120 ships per day were moving through the Strait of Hormuz. In the past 48 hours: 28 total.That is what a blockade looks like — until a sanctioned Chinese tanker pushed through it today anyway.China has warned it will keep the Strait open. And Denver Riggleman, who spent years in NSA intelligence, isn’t treating this as posturing. He flagged that China may be arming Iran with FN-6 MANPADs — infrared, shoulder-fired missiles. The reason that matters: radar warning systems don’t detect them.“That’s how you shoot down jets,” Riggleman said.Meanwhile, the strategic picture is darkening for Washington. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov is in Beijing. Saudi Arabia is pressing Trump to stand down. The coalition Trump needed to make the blockade stick is not there — because Trump spent years systematically alienating the people who might have been in it.“Xi and Putin don’t like him anymore,” Riggleman said. “He’s isolated who he wanted to be our new allies.”Zev Shalev brought it back to the money — as he always does, because the money is always the thread. Trump’s net worth went from functionally broke to $6.5 billion, plus $10 billion in crypto. There’s the “Board of Peace” — $1 billion per country entry fee, nine or more countries in, $1.25 billion of USAID funds funneled into it, with contracts flowing back to Trump-linked companies. Eric Trump invested in Israeli drone company Extend eleven days before the Iran war started. There’s a $750 million contract vehicle, and a $20 billion Andurel contract awarded in March.Zev’s framing: “A criminal organization inserting itself into every global monetization process.”The blockade isn’t just a military story. It’s the business model.5. The Swalwell AccuserA woman held a live press conference in Beverly Hills today with attorney Lisa Bloom. She is a model and software entrepreneur. She says she met Eric Swalwell in 2018, that she knew his wife was pregnant, and that he offered to help her software company make connections.On their third encounter, she says she believes he drugged her drink. She arrived at his hotel room incapacitated. She says he raped her, and that he choked her until she lost consciousness.“I thought I died,” she told the press conference.Denver Riggleman had history with Swalwell — he went after him hard over the Fang Fang Chinese intelligence story, and Swalwell reached out to him directly during that period. Riggleman was careful about the legal dimensions of today’s accusation, but he didn’t hedge on the pattern.“Past performance is indicative of future performance,” he said.Zev was blunter: “Of all the politicians you would have hoped would have turned out to be a decent guy, he ain’t.”For the record: Swalwell has not been charged. But the press conference was on the record, with counsel present, and the specificity of the allegations was not vague.4. ProPublica: Trump Gutted Every Election SafeguardProPublica published the receipts today. Seventy-five career election integrity officials are gone. They were replaced by twenty-four loyalists. Ten of those twenty-four actively worked to overturn the 2020 election results.Running point on “election integrity” for the federal government is now Heather Honey. Zev’s assessment: “She made this s**t up. Everything she said was completely false.” She was present at Michael Flynn’s February summit where activists pressured Trump to declare a national emergency to seize control of the midterm elections.Denver Riggleman, who has tracked election interference architecture since January 6th, walked through what’s coming next: Executive Order 14248, being drafted by the same Sidney Powell, Cleta Mitchell, and Patrick Byrne network that tried to overturn 2020. The draft order would nationalize elections, authorize the seizure of voting machines, and mobilize ICE in election contexts.Riggleman pushed back against the simple version of the “steal” narrative, but his nuance made the danger more precise, not less:“You can’t steal 50 states. But when you’re talking about specific swing districts — 70 to 80 districts that really matter, down to one county — that’s where you have trouble.”Why is Trump doing this now? Riggleman had a direct answer: “He’s doing this to stop the investigations that are going to come out of the House if Democrats take over — the impeachment process. He knows how much corruption, how much grifting is going on.”The conclusion isn’t pessimistic, but it is blunt: “If it’s too big to rig, there has to be an overwhelming mobilization of voters in 2026.”3. Pope Leo XIV Doesn’t FlinchTrump attacked Leo XIV on Truth Social. Called him “WEAK on Crime.” Claimed credit for his election. Then posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, deleted it, and told people it was “me as a doctor.”Leo’s response: “I have no fear of the Trump administration.”Today, Leo sent a formal letter warning of “majoritarian tyranny.”Denver Riggleman has watched the Trump movement from the inside — he has family members who believe Trump is “the imperfect vessel executing spiritual warfare.” He watches the Jesus meme and reads something important in it: “I think he believes now what’s being said about him. He’s drank a lot of his own bathwater. The Jesus meme is a tipping point.”Zev saw the strategic self-destruction clearly: “He’s giving away the mantle of moral authority to the Pope. Saying to Pope Leo, yeah, you go tell everyone what’s right and wrong, I’m just going to keep being the criminal.”And for those worried about Leo’s durability in this fight: “The papacy survived Attila, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler. It will survive Truth Social.”2. Carney Wins the Majority. Canada Builds What America Abandoned.Mark Carney secured a parliamentary majority through Monday’s by-elections — 174 of 343 seats. The man who ran explicitly on “Canada is not for sale” now has a mandate.Zev said what used to be unthinkable to say on an American broadcast: Canada could become “an adversary, a competitor to the United States. I can’t even believe we’re saying those words.”Riggleman was specific about what’s been lost: “Canada could be the leader as a trusted partner of NATO, because right now America is not trusted by any country in the world.”On Friday, Starmer and Macron host a Paris summit — forty nations. The description: basically doing NATO without the United States, against the United States.Riggleman’s verdict on where MAGA’s isolationist project has landed: “MAGA wanted a nationalistic, isolated government. And they got all they voted for.”On JD Vance specifically, Riggleman — a military veteran — did not mince words: “A Lima Delta. He doesn’t have the moral compass to be a true American on the world stage. He’s a joke. He’s an embarrassment.”1. The Blockade (The Full Picture)Everything in today’s show runs back through the blockade — the Iran war, the drone contracts, the Board of Peace grift, China’s defiance, Lavrov in Beijing, Saudi Arabia pressing Trump to stand down.Zev’s closing read: “Donald Trump is about as isolated and alone in the world” as the blockade cracks around him.Denver Riggleman, who has spent years learning to follow money through intelligence networks, stripped it to its core: “The main objective of the Trump family is to make money. The longer he can draw this out, the more money they pour into their pockets.”The blockade isn’t holding. But that might not be the point. For the people profiting from the conflict, every day it continues is a revenue event.The PatternStep back. Look at all five stories at once.A military blockade the world refuses to honor. A Congress in active ethical collapse. An election apparatus being captured in broad daylight, piece by piece, loyalist by loyalist. A pope who became the moral authority Trump created by attacking him. And Canada, with Europe, quietly building the new Western alliance — without Washington at the table.These are not separate news cycles. They are one story about a government that has systematically dismantled every check that might have stopped it, alienated every ally that might have supported it, and is now discovering that the world doesn’t actually need its permission to keep moving.The blockade is the metaphor. And it’s cracking.THE FIVESTACK airs weekdays on Narativ. SUBSCRIBE TO Denver Riggleman, former U.S. Congressman (R-VA) and former NSA intelligence officer.Thank you Lev Parnas, Natasha K., Robin Payes, Lucia Romano, MBA, Suzanne Sky, and many others for tuning into my live video with Denver Riggleman! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. 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Wajahat Ali of The Left Hook is sitting in for Dean Blundell, who’s away. Before the countdown, Zev and Waj tore into Donald Trump’s escalating holy war with Pope Leo — the blasphemous AI image of Trump as a healing Christ-figure, his tarmac slam calling the first American Pope “a very liberal person” who “likes crime,” and his press conference insistence that the image was just “me as a doctor.” As Waj put it, “this man is the most blasphemous, hedonistic vulgarian we’ve seen in a long time.” The broader picture: allies are walking away. Chrystia Freeland told MSNBC that America is “behaving in ways that are very hard for us to understand.” Canadian tourism to the U.S. is down 35%. Denmark is hardening around Greenland. NATO refused to help force open the Strait of Hormuz. “If this mother-effer did nothing except play golf for the past year and a half,” Waj said, “America would be better off.”5️⃣ Swalwell’s Campaign Collapses in 48 HoursCalifornia Congressman Eric Swalwell, 45, was the frontrunner to replace Gavin Newsom until Friday, when the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN published sexual misconduct allegations from four women, including a former staffer. By Sunday night his campaign was suspended. “Even milk from Saturday is more fresh than Eric Swalwell,” Waj said. “If someone suspends their campaign, that means there’s a there there.” The bigger question is whether he stays in Congress. Zev noted the obvious hypocrisy: “It’s very difficult to explain how you can keep him in office when you’re also asking for complete transparency on Epstein. Those two things can’t coexist.” Waj connected it to the larger pattern — Weinstein, Diddy, the Epstein class, Madison Cawthorn getting axed the moment he mentioned Republican orgies. “You scratch my back, I scratch your back, you hide my scandal, I’ll hide your scandal.” The demand: a culling.4️⃣ Bondi Refuses Epstein Subpoena in Open Cover-UpFormer Attorney General Pam Bondi was subpoenaed to testify tomorrow before the House Oversight Committee on the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files. She won’t show. The DOJ says she doesn’t have to because she’s a private citizen now — a dodge Zev called “absolute ridiculous.” Former presidents testify. Former First Ladies testify. Former Secretaries of State testify. “Now we’re saying a former Attorney General somehow doesn’t have to, if they’re involved in the crime that is the cover-up?” Waj called it bigger than Watergate: “This Epstein cover-up is the biggest political cover-up I’ve seen because it spans years, multiple players, foreign countries, banks, so many powerful people. And the person mentioned the most in the Epstein files is Donald Trump.” Zev and Waj also dug into Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez reporting on Zorro Ranch, and circled back to Melania’s unprompted six-minute podium denial — the Barbra Streisand effect in real time.3️⃣ Orban Falls in Historic Hungarian LandslideSunday in Budapest, 16-year authoritarian Viktor Orban — Steve Bannon’s original “Trump before Trump” — was voted out in the biggest democratic rebuke of the global far-right in years. Peter Magyar’s center-right Tisza party took 138 of 199 parliamentary seats, a constitutional-majority wipeout. JD Vance was sent to rally for Orban. Netanyahu’s son was sent. Russia meddled. None of it worked. “Fascism, Orban, Netanyahu, MAGA, Trump, and strongmen are not inevitable,” Waj said. The winning message wasn’t identity politics — it was anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption, anti-brogarchy. Zev flagged the precursor signal for November: Magyar came out of nowhere in two years, and American voters are sick of the same thing. “The Epstein story is the Rosetta Stone that shows people it’s a big international cabal of powerful wealthy men raping girls and getting richer.”2️⃣ Turkey Charges Netanyahu With Genocide — 4,596 YearsIstanbul prosecutors formally charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 34 senior Israeli officials with genocide and crimes against humanity over the October 2025 interception of the Sumud Gaza aid flotilla — the one carrying Greta Thunberg. The indictment could carry 4,596 years in prison. Waj pointed out what mainstream coverage missed: the week before Israel’s illegal war with Trump kicked off, former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett openly said “Erdogan’s next,” and Ben-Gvir doubled down. “So Erdogan’s like, all right, mother-effers, this is my retort.” The Turkish military is not a paper threat — effective in Libya, effective in Syria. “You don’t want to mess around with Turkey, folks.”1️⃣ U.S. Navy Blockades Iran as Allies Refuse to JoinAt 10 a.m. Eastern this morning, the U.S. Navy began enforcing a full maritime blockade of all Iranian ports at the Strait of Hormuz — one of the most consequential military actions in the Middle East in decades. The trigger: failed peace talks in Istanbul, handled again by JD Vance. Iran called the bluff. NATO refused to join. The allies said no. “If the world’s most powerful superpower cannot force Iran to open up the Strait through threats of force, that makes us look weak,” Waj said. “If Iran is not flinching to our threats, that makes us look weak. And the fact that our allies are not coming to our aid — it makes us look weak and unreliable.” Enter China. Zev’s closing read: Netanyahu needs a forever war to stay out of jail, Trump needs a forever distraction to stay out of the Epstein files, and the world is quietly choosing a different superpower to align with.A Jewish journalist and a Pakistani-American Muslim lawyer, teaming up against fascism, corruption, and rapists — on a Monday afternoon in April 2026.SUBSCRIBE TO WAJ AT THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali.TOMORROW: FORMER CONGRESSMAN Denver Riggleman IS IN FOR DEANThanks to all our guest hosts this week pitching in this week. Please subscribe and follow them. The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Cat: Poli-Psych, Caro Henry, "Sushi"(Jen) of MIND HAVEN, Robin Payes, and many others for tuning into my live video with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

DEAN IS OUT THIS WEEK5️⃣ Melania’s Epstein Press Conference BackfiresIn an unprecedented move, First Lady Melania Trump held a surprise press conference in front of the White House press corps to deny any knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse, any relationship with Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell, and any involvement in criminal activity. The denial came just hours after Brazilian former model Amanda Ungaro — who was brought into Epstein’s orbit at age 16 by modeling agent Paolo Zampoli, the same man Melania claims introduced her to Donald Trump — posted a blistering message on Twitter addressed directly to the First Lady: “I was around you for 20 years. Shut your mouth when speaking about me because I will expose everything I know.” Ungaro, who recently described in a Globo Television interview being on the Lolita Express as a teenager surrounded by 14-to-16-year-old girls while Epstein and Maxwell disappeared into the back bedroom, went further: “I will take legal action against you and your pedophile husband.” Lev Parnas, who has sources close to both Ungaro and the Trump inner circle, revealed that he’s been working with Congress to secure sworn testimony from Ungaro before the Oversight Committee, and to subpoena the Epstein confession tapes author Michael Wolff is reportedly sitting on. Meanwhile, FBI 302s and archived emails place Melania squarely in Epstein’s world during the late 1990s — including a sworn statement from one of Epstein’s assistants that it was Jeffrey who introduced Melania to Donald, not Zampoli. “She perjured herself so many times in that statement yesterday, just from my sources and the things we’ve been looking into,” Parnas said. The question isn’t whether Melania was part of Epstein’s world — the evidence overwhelmingly suggests she was. The question is what she did there, and why the cover-up continues from the White House itself.4️⃣ Trump’s 250-Foot Monument to HimselfThe White House released new designs for a proposed 250-foot triumphal arch to be built near the Lincoln Memorial along the Potomac River. When a CBS reporter asked President Trump who the arch was for, he pointed to himself and said, “Me.” The structure would tower 100 feet above the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and 150 feet above the Lincoln Memorial — a monument to a president who preserved the Union, now dwarfed by a vanity project for one who is dismantling it. This comes on top of the $400 million White House ballroom, the renaming of the Kennedy Center, and a planned presidential “library” that more closely resembles a condo hotel. “We’re living in an authoritarian country right now, folks, because in normal democracies, things like this don’t happen,” Parnas said. “There would be people that would tell them no. But we threw that out the door because now Donald Trump says I want an arch and you got people lining up saying, where do we sign, sir?” With inflation surging to a two-year high and Americans struggling with rising energy and food costs, the ostentatious monument is the ultimate let-them-eat-cake moment from a president who keeps building palaces while the country burns.3️⃣ Iran Peace Talks: The Three Amigos Head to PakistanVice President J.D. Vance departed Joint Base Andrews for Islamabad to lead weekend peace talks with Iran, joined by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — a delegation Zev Shalev described bluntly as “a Russian asset, a Saudi asset, and probably an asset for Peter Thiel and the Russians.” Before boarding, Vance offered his negotiating philosophy on Iran’s nuclear enrichment: “My wife has the right to skydive, but she doesn’t jump out of an airplane because she and I have an agreement.” The talks come as the two-week ceasefire buckles, with Israel killing 300 people in Lebanon on Wednesday alone while claiming Hezbollah isn’t covered by the truce. Iran accuses the U.S. of violating the ceasefire. The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. And Russia, as Parnas pointed out, is laughing all the way to the bank — profiting from the chaos on both sides of the oil price swings while its ally Pakistan hosts negotiations that go nowhere. “What I’m hearing is the people that Trump is dealing with are people that Vladimir Putin has connected them to,” Parnas said. The talks aren’t designed to succeed. They’re designed to look like diplomacy while the war machine keeps running.2️⃣ Hungary Could End Orban’s 16-Year Reign SundayHungary holds parliamentary elections this Sunday that could end Viktor Orban’s 16-year grip on power, with independent polls showing opposition leader Peter Magyar of the Tisza Party leading by double digits. In a remarkable display of election interference, Trump posted a full endorsement on Truth Social urging Hungarians to vote for Orban, calling him “a truly strong and powerful leader with a proven track record of delivering phenomenal results.” Three days earlier, J.D. Vance stood on a stage in Budapest and called Trump on speakerphone to deliver the endorsement live — though Trump sent him to voicemail the first time. The critical question now is what happens if Orban loses. “Does he leave? How does he leave?” Parnas asked. “If Trump didn’t leave, is Viktor Orban just going to say, you know, OK?” Vance has already laid the groundwork, pointing to supposed Ukrainian interference in Hungary’s elections — an absurd claim given Ukraine is fighting for its survival. Expect Orban to contest any loss, claim fraud, and lean on Trump for support. It’s the authoritarian playbook, running in real time.1️⃣ Kamala Harris Signals 2028 Run — But Is This the Right Time?At Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in a packed Times Square hotel ballroom, former Vice President Kamala Harris gave her most explicit signal yet about a 2028 presidential run. When Sharpton asked directly if she’d run again, the crowd erupted chanting “Run again! Run again!” Harris waited for silence, then said simply: “I might.” Parnas was unequivocal in his response: the timing is wrong. “We need fresh blood. Enough with the Trumps, the Bidens, the Harrises. We need to move on,” he said. His argument was strategic, not personal — any 2028 announcement now plays directly into Trump’s hands by giving MAGA something to unite against ahead of the midterms. “Right now it’s Trump against Trump’s accomplishments or problems. You put somebody into that race, now all of a sudden Biden’s in the mix, the past is in the mix.” With the economy cratering, inflation surging to 3.3 percent, a war with no exit strategy, and a government still partially shut down, Democrats have everything they need to win the midterms on the merits. The last thing they need is a premature 2028 horse race handing Trump a foil.The Epstein cover-up, the monuments, the sham peace talks, the authoritarian playbook abroad and the 2028 question at home — every story today comes back to one thing: whether Americans are paying close enough attention to stop what’s happening before it’s too late.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Lyudmila and Daniel, Karen Hinton, Leah Anderson, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ Canada’s Endless Acronym Becomes an Elon Musk OpA clip of NDP MP Leah Gazan using the full “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” acronym on the floor of Parliament exploded online after Elon Musk amplified it through Alberta separatist David Parker of Take Back Alberta, who repackaged it as proof that Canada is forcing citizens to rattle off a 15-letter identity pledge. “That is an op,” Dean said flatly on the show. “One woman, Leah Gazan, not very well respected in this country.” Zev, who is gay, gently pushed back on the acronym sprawl itself: “I remember the time when it was just the LGBT community. It was fine. Now it’s this endless acronym.” The pair agreed the underlying cause — missing and murdered Indigenous women — deserves real funding, and that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s $7 billion cut to Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations is the actual scandal being buried under the viral mockery. Instead, the American right has hung a caricature on Canada that has nothing to do with how Canadians actually talk about identity or advocacy.4️⃣ $1.5 Billion Traded in Five Minutes Before Trump’s Iran CeasefireWhile Melania sucked up the oxygen, Zev flagged what may be the bigger financial story of the week: roughly $1.5 billion moved through prediction markets and oil in the five minutes before Donald Trump abruptly reversed his threat to “destroy Iranian civilization” and pivoted to a ceasefire posture. “People are getting hugely rich off the American military,” Zev said. “This man knows how to play the media. He knows how to play the market. And he’s doing it for mucho bucks right now.” The ceasefire itself is already wobbling, NATO allies are openly refusing to bail Trump out, and the president spent the day not on war strategy but on a rage-post against his own former MAGA influencer base. The pattern Zev and Dean kept returning to is that every military spasm of this presidency has come with a suspiciously well-timed trade, and no one in Congress is treating it like the securities-fraud story it increasingly looks like.3️⃣ Pam Bondi Tries to Dodge Her SubpoenaFormer Attorney General Pam Bondi is now claiming she doesn’t have to appear before the House Oversight Committee on the 14th because she’s “no longer in the DOJ,” and the White House has quietly co-signed that dodge. Scott McFarlane, joining the show fresh off his departure from CBS News, reported that Republicans on the committee are not celebrating the move. “They haven’t ruled it out,” Scott said of reissuing the subpoena to private-citizen Bondi. “The fact that they haven’t declaratively said now she’s off the hook means she’s not off the hook.” Lev Parnas, working his own sources, said Chairman James Comer is “getting a lot of pressure” from Nancy Mace, Thomas Massie, and other Republicans who want Bondi back under oath. The legal hook matters: as attorney general she couldn’t plead the Fifth, but as a private citizen she can — which, Zev noted, is almost certainly why the administration engineered her exit from DOJ in the first place. Scott’s framing stuck: the Epstein files are “a chronic condition” for the Trump administration, and Bondi’s disappearing act is making it worse.2️⃣ Trump Melts Down on Truth Social at Tucker, Megyn, Candace, and Alex JonesIn what Dean called “the longest Truth Social post he’s ever put out, the angriest he’s ever been,” Trump unloaded on Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones — the same MAGA influencer ecosystem that put him in the White House — calling them “low IQs,” “nut jobs,” “bankrupt,” and “losers just trying to latch on to MAGA.” He mocked Tucker as “a broken man” who “should see a good psychiatrist,” dragged Alex Jones over the Sandy Hook lawsuits, and sneered at Megyn Kelly over the Rosie O’Donnell debate moment from a decade ago. “He has no defenders,” Zev said. “He has no one left, you know, in the world to defend him.” Dean read the meltdown as evidence the regime’s shelves are empty: “The tariff shelf is empty, the excuse shelf is empty, you’ve got his entire media influencing ecosystem turning on him. Something’s afoot, friends.” That Trump is spending a wartime afternoon writing a multi-page screed at his own former cheerleaders tells you exactly how bad the internal picture looks.1️⃣ Melania Trump’s Unprecedented Epstein Denial Is a Preemptive StrikeThe First Lady, who almost never speaks publicly, walked in front of the White House press corps this afternoon and delivered an on-camera statement denying she was ever friends with Jeffrey Epstein, denying Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump, and demanding Congress hold a public hearing for Epstein’s victims. She named The Daily Beast. She named James Carville. She named HarperCollins UK. She called the reporters “devoid of ethical standards, humility, and respect.” Scott McFarlane, texting live with Epstein survivors during the segment, relayed their reaction: “It’s all a deflection from Pam Bondi and a ploy to put the burden back on survivors.” Lev Parnas was blunter: “She wouldn’t have come out unless there was chaos going on.” Lev connected the dots to Michael Wolff’s recent appearance on Michael Cohen’s podcast, where Wolff said he has tape of Epstein describing Melania having sex with Trump on a plane — an admission Lev says he has already forwarded to Congress. “Trump, knowing Trump the way I know him, for him to have Melania come up and seeing her as angry as she was, this is definitely preemptive. Something’s about to break.” Zev pointed to Narativ’s own reporting from the Epstein Files — a 2016 congratulatory email placing Trump meeting Melania on a weekend Epstein-Florida trip, and a 2019 sworn FBI proffer from a former Epstein assistant stating Epstein introduced Melania to Donald — that directly contradicts the story Melania told from the podium today. Dean’s read cut to the heart of it: “The Epstein files were dead and buried in the court of public opinion for the last month. And for her to come out and reignite this conversation… she’s like, let me make it way worse.” The First Lady of the United States does not break a years-long public silence to deny a story that’s already out. She breaks it to get ahead of one that’s coming.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you J Dziak, Cat: Poli-Psych, "Sushi"(Jen) of MIND HAVEN, LC - Silence is Complicity, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell and Scott MacFarlane! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ Vance Campaigns for OrbánVice President JD Vance spent day two of his Budapest visit openly campaigning for Viktor Orbán ahead of Hungary’s April 12 parliamentary election, a vote Orbán’s Fidesz is trailing in for the first time in more than a decade. Zev called the trip a transparent audition. “Vance is desperately trying to position himself as being outside of this war, being anti this war, being anti-Israel, so he can assume the mantle as the next president of the United States,” he said. “He might be sounding very reasonable these days compared to the president, but that’s all showmanship. Behind all of this is a dictator in waiting who’s going to be probably more brutal and more calculating than the current one we have.” The VP of the United States, interfering in a NATO member’s election on behalf of a leader Zev described as “another fascist dictator who lives at the mercy of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin,” was treated in Washington as a footnote. It isn’t one.4️⃣ Bondi Defies the Epstein SubpoenaFormer Attorney General Pam Bondi informed the House Oversight Committee today that she will not appear for her April 14 deposition on the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files. The DOJ, now run by Deputy AG Todd Blanche, argues the subpoena became moot the moment Trump fired her last week. The committee, which issued the subpoena with five Republicans voting in favor, disagrees and is weighing contempt. “Pam Bondi is not going to appear in front of the oversight committee. That’s a big deal,” Zev said. “The reason she was fired is because she doesn’t want to testify. So by firing her, by losing her position as the Attorney General, she no longer feels like she needs to comply with a subpoena, which means she’s obviously hiding something — obviously hiding something from the American people and protecting the president of the United States of America for the crimes he committed.” Five House Republicans already broke ranks on the subpoena. Contempt needs three.3️⃣ Israel Bombs Lebanon — 100 Strikes in 10 MinutesWithin hours of the Iran ceasefire announcement, Israel launched what the IDF is calling its largest coordinated strike of the war: more than 100 targets across Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in under ten minutes, without warning. Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported at least 89 killed and more than 700 wounded in the initial wave, with later reports citing 250 dead. Israel says the ceasefire does not cover Hezbollah. Pakistan, the mediator, says it does. “Israel has decided to use this opportunity when America had the ceasefire to go after, indiscriminately, it looks like, civilians in southern Lebanon and Beirut,” Zev said. The campaign now carries an official IDF name: Operation Eternal Darkness.2️⃣ Iran Shuts the Strait of Hormuz — The Ceasefire Is Already DyingLess than 24 hours after President Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, Tehran halted all oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the Israeli strikes on Lebanon. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard aerospace commander warned, “Aggression towards Lebanon is aggression towards Iran.” The White House called reports of a closure “false.” Markets disagreed — WTI fell nearly 20 percent and Brent fell as much as 16 percent, both trading around $95. “The ceasefire has collapsed, it seems, because there is no current open Strait of Hormuz,” Zev said. And the cost isn’t only military. Iran now says it intends to charge $2 million per tanker as a toll to transit the strait — “trillions of dollars of revenue for both Oman and for Iran,” Zev said. That toll gets passed to the American consumer. “Everything that you touch, that you buy, that was delivered to you,” he warned, is about to cost more.1️⃣ Someone Knew: The Oil Insiders Who Cashed Out on the Iran WarThe Fivestack led today with a Narativ exclusive investigation Zev wrote overnight: an exhaustive analysis of market data between February 28 and April 7, 2026, documenting 100 percent correlation between 13 presidential Truth Social posts on Iran and corresponding moves in Brent crude. Every escalation post drove prices up. Every de-escalation post drove them down. Thirteen for thirteen. “I was trying to figure out whether Donald Trump and his network of oil syndicate allied countries benefited from running up a pump and dump scheme on the oil prices during yesterday’s so-called ceasefire announcement,” Zev told viewers. The April 7 timeline is the smoking gun. At 8:06 AM, Trump posted “WHO KNOWS?” — language Zev read as “a man performing uncertainty about a decision that had already been made.” At 12:02 PM, Brent crude began falling 7.3 percent on no public news at all. Twenty-one minutes later, Axios published a story citing U.S. and Israeli officials confirming de-escalation. At 3:50 PM, the Polymarket Iran ceasefire contract surged from roughly 2 percent to 38 percent on about $60.5 million in pre-announcement volume — three hours before Trump announced the deal publicly at 6:32 PM. By Tuesday morning, Brent was at $90.13, down 18.5 percent in two sessions, the largest two-session move since the Gulf War. “Donald Trump has been so cynical about this, that he’s actually just in it to make money for himself, make money for Russia, make money even for the Iranians, definitely make money for the Israelis and the Saudis and the UAE,” Zev said. “This has been a bit of an exercise in running up the stock price or the price of oil per barrel.” Thirteen American servicemen came home in caskets while someone was thinking about selling high. Someone knew when the bombs would fall, and someone knew when the guns would go quiet.Five stories, one throughline: the people running this war made money on it, and the moment the trade stopped working they lit Beirut on fire.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Cheech Previti, Robin Payes, Elaine Cimino, Cathy R. Payne, Marnie Screams Into the Void, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ A Major Named American ExpressThe story of the daring F-15E rescue Trump took a victory lap for this morning got a lot weirder once the photos came out of the wreckage Iranian forces picked through in Isfahan. Geneva Convention ID cards. State of Israel automated border-control receipts. American Express cards. American flag underwear. “God, what is wrong with these guys?” Malcolm Nance, a former Navy SERE instructor, said on the show. “Don’t be bringing your ID cards on missions.” Nance, who studied the crash site photos for hours, told Dean and Zev he no longer believes the two C-130s were shot down at all — he thinks they came in nose-first, hot, loaded, blew a tire on landing, the second one plowed into the rut, and U.S. forces destroyed both planes themselves to keep them out of Iranian hands. “That’s not a crash. They were parked side by side and they were just like, f**k it, we blow it.” Either way, the souvenirs Tehran is now holding up on state TV — credit cards, flight bags, a major’s personal effects — are exactly what a sanitized special-operations recovery is never supposed to leave behind.4️⃣ Hegseth Purges the BrassWhile Trump sets ultimatums on cable news, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is quietly gutting the military’s senior ranks. Last week he removed several officers up for one-star promotion, four of them Black women. The pattern is now numerical, not anecdotal. “In the last 160 years since the Civil War, presidents have only fired 11 four- and five-star military officers,” Nance said. “Donald Trump has fired nine in one year.” McArthur. McChrystal. Now nine more in twelve months. “He’s a racist white supremacist,” Nance said of Hegseth, “and he was mad when they wouldn’t get rid of Blacks and women — guys who had served 30-plus years at the highest level of meritocracy in the United States.” Dean called it the most blatant top-down discrimination in the modern military. The men being installed in their places will be the men holding the phone tomorrow night when Trump’s 8 PM deadline expires.3️⃣ Iran Already Won the StraitTrump spent today fantasizing about America “charging tolls” once it takes the Strait of Hormuz. Nance, who has transited the strait roughly a dozen times — including under fire in the 1980s tanker war — said it cannot be done. “They control the Strait by the implicit threat that they could mine it. Not one mine has to be seen. They’ve got 33,000 small boats that could land in Dubai in three hours.” The U.S. Fifth Fleet has been pulled back from Bahrain to Norfolk. Iran has been systematically degrading Kuwaiti desalinization plants, the UAE’s Habshan-Fajra pipeline pumping stations, and now the South Pars gas field. “Iran has not moved once from their position in 39 days,” Dean said. “No ceasefire. You will never control the Strait. Bring it on.” Meanwhile Iran is making a fortune — physical barrels are selling at $150 spot in Yanbu, and Tehran has already cleared roughly $14 billion since Trump lifted sanctions on their supertanker traffic. The longer the war runs, the richer the regime gets.2️⃣ Bibi Goes RogueThe biggest single problem in the war right now, Nance said, isn’t the Pentagon — it’s Jerusalem. “I’m saying this as a friend of Israel. They are rogue now.” Israeli aircraft have hit near the Bushehr nuclear power plant three separate times. The IAEA has put out formal warnings about what happens if a containment building cracks. Today the Israelis destroyed the South Pars natural gas field — the same field Tehran warned them about two weeks ago, the field that supplies Qatar’s LNG industry. “Netanyahu doesn’t give two f***s about Qatar,” Nance said. “I personally believe Netanyahu is trying to fail that state.” The pattern is unmistakable: refineries, power plants, gas fields, civilian infrastructure. Bibi isn’t fighting a war against the regime — he’s trying to collapse Iran into a failed state, drag the United States in behind him, and survive his own corruption trial in the noise.1️⃣ Tuesday, 8 PM. Hell and Damnation.Trump set the clock today: Tuesday, April 7, 8 PM Eastern. Reopen the Strait of Hormuz or America hits Iran’s power grid and bridges. “That is not military targeting. That is collective-punishment warfare against a country of 90 million civilians,” Zev said in the cold open. Nance was blunter: bombing civilian energy infrastructure on a mass scale to punish a population is, by definition, a war crime — and the order, as written, is technically lawful, which means the new compliant generals Hegseth installed will carry it out. But the bigger problem is that Trump doesn’t have the horses. Six U.S. aircraft were lost over Iran in 24 hours. The American public has turned against the war. Even Trump admitted it on the lawn today, complaining that “the American people don’t want me to do that.” Then, four seconds later, threatened to do it anyway. “He hates that he is tied down by the American public,” Dean said. “How dare they stop him from having his fun.” 27 hours until the deadline. The pilots are home. The strait is still closed. And the man holding the trigger is a drunk monkey with a machine gun, dancing in a circle with Pete Hegseth and shooting up in the air.Tomorrow night at 8:01 PM Eastern, we find out whether the bluff was a bluff.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Robin Payes, Rick Kohut, ann schneider, Leah Anderson, Lalisa, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5️⃣ Noem’s Husband ExposedCross-dressing photos of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s husband Bryon surfaced today — hundreds of messages sent to multiple women showing him in fake breasts and pink spandex as part of what’s being described as a “bimbofication” fetish. Dean Blundell, who broke the story on his Substack, walked through the messages in detail, including exchanges on a fetish platform where Bryon paid tribute to a user listed as “slave” and discussed transitioning fantasies. “She did execute some Americans. She did hurt hundreds of thousands of migrants and people of color in the name of Jesus. She hates trans people and cross dressers. So I can’t ignore that either,” Blundell said. The irony was not lost on either host — the woman who ran Trump’s deportation machine had her own family secret blow up in public, possibly leaked by an undocumented immigrant on the app who recognized who Bryon was. Noem was already quietly removed from DHS weeks ago and reassigned to a made-up “Special Envoy” role. Now we know why.4️⃣ Trump’s Library Is a HotelPresident Trump unveiled renderings of his presidential library Monday — a Miami skyscraper with his name on it, a gold statue of himself, a golden escalator, and Air Force One in the lobby. Then he told reporters he doesn’t “believe in libraries or museums” and confirmed it would “most likely” be a hotel. The 2.6-acre site was donated by Miami Dade College — a public institution giving away public land for $10. “This is a money laundering center. This is a convention hall. This is a hotel. This is a place for people to pay five times what the market value for a condo is just to say thanks to Donald Trump,” Blundell said. Shalev pointed out that foreign governments — the Saudis, Qataris, UAE, Russians — will pour money into the building, turning what should be a place of public study into a generational revenue stream for the Trump family. “Every single thing is only viewed as a money-making opportunity for these guys,” Shalev said. “There’s not a single thing that is about public service.”3️⃣ SCOTUS Shreds Birthright OrderThe Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Trump’s executive order to strip birthright citizenship from children born to undocumented parents, and his own appointees tore the argument apart. Chief Justice Roberts called the administration’s examples “very quirky” and questioned how they could expand to millions of people. Justice Kagan pointed out the government’s own brief was mostly about temporary inhabitants, not undocumented immigrants. The highlight came when Justice Gorsuch asked Solicitor General John Sauer whether Native Americans would qualify as birthright citizens under the administration’s test — and Sauer said he didn’t know. “You’re on their soil, dickhead,” Blundell responded. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered the sharpest line of the day, asking whether pregnant women would be “brought in for depositions” to determine their babies’ citizenship. Trump sat in the courtroom for 90 minutes, the first sitting president to attend oral arguments. A decision is expected by June.2️⃣ Johnson Says We’re Not at WarAt 9 PM tonight, Trump will address the nation claiming the Iran war could end in “two, maybe three weeks” — while Speaker Mike Johnson insists the United States is “not at war.” The House voted 219-212 to kill a bipartisan War Powers resolution, with Johnson calling the War Powers Act “unconstitutional and frightening.” Shalev laid out what Trump will try to sell tonight: that the war is good for America, that $4-a-gallon gas is patriotic, and that NATO allies who won’t join the fight deserve to be abandoned. Blundell catalogued the reality — AWACS sawed in half by Iranian missiles, stratotankers destroyed on the tarmac in Saudi Arabia, 17 U.S. military installations gone, the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian control. “This is operation cover the s**t up as fast as you can and offer 17 different narratives,” Shalev said. Trump told Reuters he’s “absolutely” considering withdrawing from NATO, and MBS put the U.S.-Saudi relationship “on hold.” The free world is closing its airspace to American military equipment for the first time in history.1️⃣ Lutnick Federalizes Your BallotCommerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — whom Shalev called “the crypto secretary” for his ties to stablecoin Tether — stood behind Trump in the Oval Office and laid out the architecture of a federal election takeover. A new executive order directs DHS and the Social Security Administration to compile a national “citizenship list” of eligible voters, with USPS assigned to deliver mail ballots only to names on that list. “They’re just going to send the mail-in votes to Republicans, basically, or white people,” Blundell said. Oregon and Arizona filed suit within minutes. Shalev connected Lutnick’s role to the larger corruption: Tether was under investigation for massive Russian money laundering, Lutnick sold his business to his children who got a loan from the crypto company, and now this same man with zero election authority is inserting the federal government between every American and their ballot — seven months before the midterms. “The whole thing is just a crypto venture,” Shalev said, “and it’s designed to build himself a fortune.”Five stories, one pattern: every public institution — the military, the courts, the postal service, the presidential library — gets turned into a private revenue stream or a tool of authoritarian control.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Elaine Cimino, LC - Silence is Complicity, Leah Anderson, Steven Luker, Lalisa, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Before the countdown even started, Dean Blundell broke news from a fresh court filing: the ATF was unable to match the bullet recovered from Charlie Kirk’s autopsy to the rifle allegedly used by Tyler Robinson. The bullet fragmented on impact with bone, making conclusive ballistics analysis impossible — though the spent shell casing at the scene did match Robinson’s weapon. Robinson’s defense team filed a motion requesting a six-month delay to review the evidence. Meanwhile, Washington County Sheriff Nate Brooksby, who orchestrated Robinson’s surrender, abruptly resigned after 30 years on the job. “This is the biggest story in the world that nobody’s talking about because it’s getting buried,” Blundell said. The case that made Kirk a MAGA martyr — complete with Capitol posters and a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his wife — now has serious evidentiary questions at its core.5️⃣ Let Them Eat CakeFlorida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill renaming Palm Beach International Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport, effective July 1 with airport code DJT — and the Trump family had already trademarked the name plus luggage, flight suits, and plastic shoe protectors. Meanwhile Eric Trump unveiled renderings of a 50-story presidential library tower in Miami, gold arches and Air Force One in the lobby, funded by a tax-exempt foundation planning to raise a billion dollars with no restrictions on foreign donations. The original fund was dissolved after failing to file basic paperwork, with $63 million in media lawsuit settlements unaccounted for. Senators Warren and Blumenthal are demanding answers. An airport, a tower, and a trademarked merch line — none of it is about legacy. It’s revenue streams wrapped in presidential immunity.4️⃣ Gas Hits $4Gas crossed $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022, with the national average hitting $4.02 — up 34.7% in a single month, the largest spike ever recorded in the United States. Larger than after Katrina, larger than after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Diesel is at $4.59 and analysts say $5 is possible if the Strait of Hormuz stays contested. Every gallon is a war tax from a conflict Americans didn’t vote for and weren’t consulted on, delivered by an administration that promised energy dominance.3️⃣ NPR/PBS Funding Ruled UnconstitutionalA federal judge struck down Trump’s executive order defunding NPR and PBS, ruling it violates the First Amendment. Judge Randolph Moss called it “viewpoint discrimination and retaliation,” noting the order specifically cited NPR articles about queer animals and a PBS documentary about a transgender teenager. The ruling connects directly to the broader media landscape — with Oracle’s Larry Ellison moving to acquire CBS and CNN, building what Shalev called “not just a surveillance state but a censorship state” designed to control what Americans see, hear, and believe for the next decade.2️⃣ Judge Halts White House BallroomA second federal judge handed Trump a major loss Tuesday. Judge Richard Leon halted construction of the $400 million, 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom, ruling the president lacks authority to fund it through private donations from Amazon, Google, and Palantir — companies with billions in government contracts. “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner,” Leon wrote. Blundell put it more simply: “He’s the Billy Mays of presidents — he’s always selling someone on his idea.” Trump is expected to keep building regardless, just as he ignored the Supreme Court on tariffs.1️⃣ SCOTUS Guts Conversion Bans / Allies Reject Trump’s WarTwo number one stories today. The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy violates the First Amendment, with Justice Jackson dissenting alone, threatening protections in 30-plus states — on Transgender Day of Visibility. Shalev called it “a Russian copycat policy” and “a pathway to criminalizing homosexuality,” noting Russia banned another LGBTQ organization called Coming Out the same day. Then came the revelation that Kristi Noem’s husband Byron was outed as a cross-dresser on fetish sites while his wife pushed anti-LGBTQ policy in Jesus’s name. And on Day 31 of the Iran war, the coalition of one is collapsing. Defense Secretary Hegseth, who declared Iran “neutralized” last week, is now begging NATO allies for help keeping the Strait of Hormuz open — the same allies Trump called cowards. Italy blocked landing rights, Spain denied overflight, and Qatar asked for its jet back. “They’ve lost the war,” Blundell said. “They’re not willing to admit it, but they’re currently defeated.” Trump’s response to allies: “Build up some delayed courage. Go to the Strait and just take it.”One year of the Fivestack. Two chill middle-aged snacks doing their best to inform the people — and a whole lot more work to do to bring democracy back.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Cheech Previti, Pamela, Leah Anderson, Lalisa, Eric Lullove, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. 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5️⃣ No Kings — 8 Million MarchTwo days after the largest single-day protest in American history, the question is what happens next. Eight million Americans turned out across all 50 states in over 3,300 organized events demanding an end to the Iran war, democratic backsliding, and the suppression of the Epstein files. “250 years of American history, there has never been a bigger protest against its own government, ever,” Dean said, noting the numbers have doubled from the previous No Kings march. Yet Sunday morning shows barely mentioned it — Kristen Welker was the only anchor to reference it, calling it “tens of thousands.” Dean revealed that FCC chair Brendan Carr sent notes to media executives warning them not to cover the march, and the regime is now threatening to charge television executives with treason for showing the footage. “When 9 million people show up, that’s a f*****g revolution,” Dean said. “That’s the beginning of a civil movement that Donald Trump can’t stop.”4️⃣ Russia Targeted US Base for IranUkrainian President Zelensky dropped an intelligence bombshell this weekend: Russia took satellite images of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on three consecutive days — March 20th, 23rd, and 25th — before Iran attacked the base on March 26th, injuring a dozen American troops and destroying an AWACS command-and-control aircraft and multiple stratotankers worth hundreds of millions. Former Congressman Denver Riggleman, who joined the show as a surprise guest straight off the plane, broke down the significance. “This means we have a massive gap not only in how we’re actually responding, but we have a massive gap in our counterintelligence operations,” Riggleman said, calling for the U.S. to seize all Russian economic assets, arm Ukraine with every long-range weapon available, and deploy jammers against Russia’s GLONASS navigation system. Trump’s response to the Russian-assisted attack on American servicemembers: “They do it and we do it.”3️⃣ Bunker Under the BallroomThe $400 million East Wing “ballroom” renovation is really a secret military complex. Trump let the truth slip on Air Force One this weekend, revealing that underneath the ballroom is a massive bunker and command center — something he had been hiding behind the cover story of a ceremonial ballroom with Corinthian pillars. Riggleman explained that what’s really being built is a massive SCIF — a sensitive compartmented information facility — and raised critical questions about other entrances, exits, and whether similar bunkers are being constructed around the country as part of a continuity of operations plan. Dean pointed out that the New York Times renderings reveal bizarre design flaws including stairs that lead nowhere and a front facade with no door, while the building is being funded by private — possibly foreign — donors. “Leave it to Donald Trump to build a brand new ballroom that has no f*****g door,” Dean said. Riggleman warned: “I am worried about 2028, and if this thing is complete by 2028, what that means if he does refuse to leave.”2️⃣ Exclusive: Tether Owns the Lutnick EmpireNarativ published a new investigation revealing Jeffrey Epstein’s direct role in designing the cryptocurrency capture of America — for Vladimir Putin. Emails from the Epstein archive show Epstein pitching an intermediary with a plan to deliver to Putin a vision for Russia to leapfrog America’s financial dominance using cryptocurrency, describing it as a Sputnik-level event. The connections run deep: Epstein’s crypto advisor Brock Pierce invented Tether, the stablecoin whose $133 billion in treasuries are held by Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald — and Lutnick sold Cantor to his kids through a trust funded by a Tether loan. Riggleman called for a crypto investigative task force, estimating Trump family crypto holdings may be close to $10 billion, with 19 of the 25 largest investors in Trump-backed crypto being foreign entities. “It’s almost like it is the Epstein regime,” Zev said. “It’s not the Trump regime.”1️⃣ Greater North America — The Donroe DoctrineSecretary of War Pete Hegseth stood at U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Doral and redrew the map of the Western Hemisphere. Everything north of the equator — from Greenland to Guyana, Alaska to Ecuador — is now America’s “immediate security perimeter,” which he’s calling Greater North America. Dean connected it directly to the Greater Israel expansionist plan and identified the religious through line: Hegseth is framing this as a Christian nationalist mission, tied to the Seven Mountains Mandate and Project 2025’s concept of “re-hemisphering.” Riggleman broke down how the plan maps onto Project 2025’s framework where global powers each claim their own hemisphere, with the U.S., Russia, China, and Israel each carving out territory. “This is an attempt by the Donald Trump regime, by Pete Hegseth, to paint his expansionism as a mission from his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” Dean said.Former Congressman Denver Riggleman joined the show as a surprise guest from Zev’s house — straight off the plane, sharing a microphone, and bringing receipts on the Trump family’s capture of the military-industrial complex. His six-part series on the Trump crime family’s drone and defense industry corruption is at denverriggleman.substack.com.The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.Thank you Marnie Screams Into the Void, Iulia Huiu, Kristen Lepionka, Pamela, LC - Silence is Complicity, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

5. Kash Patel Hacked by IranThe FBI director got hacked by the enemy he’s supposed to be fighting. An Iran-linked hacking group called Handala breached Kash Patel’s personal Gmail account and published photos, emails, and personal documents online dating from 2010 to 2022 — and the DOJ confirmed the material is authentic. Among the leaked files: photos of Patel in Cuba smoking cigars next to cars with Cuban plates, his personal resume, and years of correspondence. The FBI is now offering a $10 million reward for information on the hackers, which as Zev noted means the best the bureau can do about its own director getting compromised is offer a bounty. Dean had his own take: “He’s an honorary screeched-in citizen of Newfoundland — we need to remove that designation right now.” Meanwhile, the White House’s own social media accounts posted two unexplained videos to X and Instagram Wednesday night — one showing someone’s feet with a woman’s voice asking “It’s launching soon, right?” — deleted 90 minutes later with millions of views and zero explanation.4. Johnson Kills DHS BillThe Senate passed a bipartisan bill to fund DHS at 2:20 this morning — everything except ICE — a compromise to end the six-week shutdown that has 510 TSA officers quitting and airports in chaos. Speaker Mike Johnson killed it hours later, calling it a “crap sandwich” and announcing his own eight-week stopgap that funds all of DHS including ICE. Dean’s assessment was more blunt: “It’s not a crap sandwich, it’s a s**t sandwich.” Johnson’s version goes back to a Senate that just left for a two-week recess, with Schumer already calling it dead on arrival. The NTSB chair is still driving five hours to crash sites because she can’t fly through her own country’s airports. Nobody is governing — they’re just positioning.3. Fulton County Sues Over Ballot SeizureA federal court hearing happened today in Georgia that may be the most important legal proceeding you haven’t heard about. Fulton County is suing to get back more than 650 boxes of 2020 election ballots that the FBI seized in a January 28th raid — ordered by Kurt Olsen, the Trump lawyer who was part of the original scheme to overturn the 2020 election and is now the White House’s director of election security. As Zev put it: “A man who tried to steal an election is now in charge of investigating elections, and his first act was to send the FBI to seize the ballots from the county that helped flip Georgia for Biden.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was physically present at the seizure despite having zero authority over domestic elections. Dean connected the dots: “These are the same f*****g people and they’re running it back.”2. Tomahawks Running OutThe United States has fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in four weeks of war with Iran, and Pentagon officials describe remaining stockpiles as “alarmingly low” — some using the word “Winchester,” military slang for out of ammunition. The math is devastating: the U.S. produces between 90 and 100 Tomahawks per year, each costing $3.6 million and taking two years to build. In four weeks, this administration burned through a decade of production. Dean laid out the profiteering angle — the Trump family has secured $1.5 billion in defense contracts through 32 companies since the war began. “He’s basically burning through our ammunition on purpose,” Dean said. Raytheon says it will take a minimum of five years to replenish what’s been fired.1. 10,000 More Troops to the Middle EastThe Pentagon is drawing up plans to send 10,000 additional ground troops to the Middle East — infantry, armor, the 82nd Airborne — joining 5,000 Marines already en route. Their staging area: within striking distance of Kharg Island, the small strip of land that handles 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. Trump extended his pause on strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure to April 6th, claiming talks are going well while Iran says no talks are happening. “You don’t move 10,000 ground troops into theater to negotiate,” Zev said. “You move them to invade.” Meanwhile the Strait of Hormuz is effectively shut, and Russia earned $7 billion in the first two weeks of March selling oil that used to flow through it. April 6 isn’t a peace deadline — it’s a deployment window. And tomorrow, millions of Americans will be in the streets for the third No Kings rally, with more than 3,000 events planned in all 50 states.The FBI director is compromised, the government is shut down, the ballots are seized, the missiles are spent, and the troops are moving. Tomorrow, America answers.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Pamela, Leah Anderson, Lalisa, Skutt Hope, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe