Pay Up, Shut Up, and Cheer: How Washington Gaslit America Into Netanyahu’s Forever War

Economy, Government, Iran, Israel, Military, Supply Lines, Trump, Tyranny, War /

From “The Free Thought Project”

The intelligence said no bomb, the president promised no wars, and now the backs of Americans are breaking from all the lies.

The cost of diesel that hauls every loaf of bread, every pallet of medicine and every bag of fertilizer in this country just set an all-time record. The national average hit $6.44 a gallon, up 71 percent since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. Gasoline sits at $4.46, at least six states are already above $5, and Californians are paying $6.11. Shipping giant CMA CGM just slapped an emergency fuel surcharge on its cargo, and the Congressional Budget Office projects the war will add half a percentage point to inflation in early 2027.

But at least Iran doesn’t have a nuke, right?

The president’s response to this infuriating perpetuation of a new forever war sure seems like that’s his stance entirely as he tells you to pay up and smile. Last week Trump said Americans are “going to have to pay some extra for gas” to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and called it “a very inexpensive price to pay.” Back in March he was blunter, declaring that anyone who objected to the price spike was a fool: “ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!” This is the same man who campaigned on two-dollar gas and who is still promising it will fall “below Two Dollars a gallon” once we “WIN.”

The problem is that you are being asked to pay for stopping a weapon that, according to most of the world, including Trump’s own intelligence community, Iran was not building. In March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and that Khamenei had not reauthorized the program he suspended in 2003. When reporters asked Trump about that testimony, he replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Days later he bombed Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan and told the nation the sites had been “completely and totally obliterated.” This blatant lie would then set the nefarious stage for an endless conveyor belt of lies that would run for well over a year down the throats of Americans.

If the program was obliterated in June 2025, what exactly were we bombing in February 2026? Trump claimed that without the strikes Iran would have had a bomb within two weeks, while the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said there was no evidence Iran was building one. Gabbard’s own 2026 testimony stated that the intelligence community assessed Iran was not rebuilding its enrichment capability after the 2025 attacks. As he said on our podcast, the nation’s top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned rather than support a war on a country that posed “no imminent threat to our nation.”

Gabbard’s own path tells the story of how Washington swallows people whole and how that assembly line of lies fills their worlds with half-truths and deceptions designed to keep Americans in the dark. In 2019 she warned that a war with Iran would make Iraq “look like a cakewalk,” and in Congress she introduced the No More Presidential Wars Act to require congressional authorization before any attack on Iran. In 2024 she told voters that a vote for Trump was a vote to end wars. Then, after Trump publicly dismissed her, she posted that the “dishonest media” had taken her out of context and that Iran could build a weapon “within weeks to months.” Shameful indeed. When Senator Jon Ossoff asked her point blank whether the intelligence community had assessed an imminent nuclear threat, she answered that only the president can make that determination. Her spine, like that of an earthworm, as she slipped away back to Hawaii, having betrayed all those who supported her.

But Trump’s reversal runs even deeper. In 2011, he warned that Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to get reelected because he was weak and couldn’t negotiate. In 2012 he tweeted that Obama would “launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” At his 2025 inauguration he promised to measure success by “the wars we never get into.” Even PolitiFact, hardly a friend of anti-war populists, rated his turn on Iranian regime change a “Full Flop.”

The very first day of this war should have ended it. On February 28, missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, and investigators with Forensic Architecture found that more than 121 schoolchildren and 26 teachers were slaughtered like insects. A preliminary US military inquiry attributed the strike to the United States, and a UN fact-finding mission now says there are reasonable grounds to believe the US committed a war crime in doing so. Those little girls died at their desks, in your name, on the opening morning of a war that its architects insisted would be quick and clean… over and over and over.

It was supposed to be over in weeks, and Trump has been declaring it won ever since. According to several running timelines and a review of his posts, the president has said:

  • March 1: “We intended four to five weeks.”
  • March 9: “The war is very complete, pretty much.”
  • March 11: “We won… in the first hour, it was over.” (He added that “we got to finish the job.”)
  • March 14: “We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability.”
  • April 1: It would all be finished “very shortly,” over “the next two to three weeks.”
  • April 7: “Total and complete victory. 100%.”
  • May 1: He told Congress that hostilities “have terminated.”
  • July 10: “The Cease Fire is OVER!”
  • August 10: He shared an article headlined “Donald Trump Won the Iran War.”
  • September: “The war will be over very shortly after the election.”

Alongside the endless victory laps came threats that no American president should ever make against a nation of 90 million people:

Amnesty International’s secretary general said the civilization threat may constitute a threat to commit genocide. Harvard’s Carr-Ryan Center compared it to Nuremberg, where a propagandist was convicted for incitement through words alone.

Perhaps the most insidious part of this entire mass-murdering, genocidal rampage that is breaking the backs of Americans is that behind all of this stands the one man whose story has never changed, because he has been telling the same lie for 34 years. As a member of the Knesset in 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran was three to five years from a bomb. He repeated it in his 1995 book, and in 2002 he sat before the US Congress selling the invasion of Iraq. In 2012 he held up a cartoon bomb at the United Nations, while leaked cables later showed that Israeli intelligence itself had concluded Iran was not doing the work needed to build one. When the bombs finally fell this February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio let the truth slip: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” he said, and the United States went in first to get ahead of the retaliation.

Israel has been playing Washington like a fiddle for decades, and when anyone inside the machine finds the courage to call it out, the propaganda apparatus tars and feathers them. Look no further than Congressman Thomas Massie, whose opposition to the Iran war and to blank-check aid for Israel made him a target. AIPAC’s super PAC and two other groups backed by pro-Israel donors poured more than $15.8 million into defeating him, helping turn Kentucky’s 4th District into the most expensive House primary in American history. Ed Gallrein won with 57,822 votes, which means the Israel lobby spent roughly $273 for every vote cast for the man who replaced him, and about $150 for every ballot cast in the entire race.

The saddest part about all of this is that none of it is new. Lies and propaganda — many which have been funded and amplified by Israel — have started nearly every war in US history, from the phantom Gulf of Tonkin attack to the fabricated incubator testimony that sold the first Gulf War to the WMDs that never existed in Iraq. We at The Free Thought Project have been predicting this exact timeline for over a decade. We warned in 2020 that the neocons were steering Trump toward Iran, and in 2022 we wrote that the war drum was beating again, “this time in Iran,” using the same old playbook. The only thing that changed was the name of the president reading the script.

But this time, the bill has arrived and it’s massive. Central Command puts the cost at $43.6 billion as of September 3, and that’s their numbers. The White House wants another $95 billion. Eighteen American service members have come home in flag-draped boxes, and not a single dime of this was authorized by Congress. All for what? So Bibi can expand his influence in the region?

Despite the pools of blood and piles of burning money, the cheerleaders never stop. The Washington Examiner reported that Netanyahu worked through conservative media figures, including Mark Levin, to fight the June peace deal. This month Levin used his show to urge arming Iranians, and if Washington won’t do it, asking the Israelis to do it instead. Ben Shapiro called the war “the single bravest foreign policy move of my lifetime,” and just weeks ago insisted that “We’re winning the war in Iran” while diesel was breaking records. An unhinged Laura Loomer, who enjoys special access to the president, urged our government to bomb a funeral by calling it “a target-rich environment” and tagging the Israeli military.

The good news is that people seem to be finally waking up. Reuters/Ipsos found Republican support for the war has fallen from 77 percent to 69 percent, and independents now favor Democrats by 14 points. Among self-identified MAGA Republicans, strong approval of Trump’s handling of the war has collapsed by 21 points. This war will likely cost Republicans the midterms, and they will have earned it.

But do not mistake a Democratic wave for salvation. The left loves war as long as it comes with big government, and the right loves big government as long as it comes with war. Handing the keys to the other party only changes who drives the machine to the next slaughter.

So get mad as hell, and then do something useful with it. Stop cheering, stop funding, and stop consenting. Every dollar that flows through their system is a dollar they can print, borrow, and spend on bombs, which is why building parallel economies and moving your wealth into private tools like Zano or ZEC or Monero matters more than any ballot you’ll cast this November. The little girls of Minab and the number on your diesel pump are the same bill, and it was run up in your name. The only way to stop paying it is to walk out of the system that keeps sending it.