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FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev
Hosted by D. Blundell and Z.Shalev · EN
The Top 5 stories of the moment with Canada's #1 Shock Jock Dean Blundell and Former CBS News executive producer Zev Shalev.
www.narativ.org
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FiveStack: Trump Surrenders in Beijing
5d ago00:56:14Tap to summarizeXi 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
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FiveStack: Trump Limps Into Beijing Talks. Brett Ratner, Kash Patel, and the Killing of the First Amendment
6d ago00:54:05Tap to summarize5️⃣ 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
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NEW: EPSTEIN SURVIVORS REVEAL DECADES OF TARGETED HARRASSMENT
1w ago01:11:07Tap to summarizeToday’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 fo...
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BIBI ON "BREITBART LIGHT": THE ISRAELI PM'S DEBACLE ON 60 MINUTES FALLS FLAT, DEAN AND ZEV BREAK IT DOWN
1w ago00:52:36Tap to summarizeThe 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
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VIRGINIA SUPREME COURT REVERSES WILL OF THE PEOPLE; THE GAS CLIFF WILL HIT BY THE END OF MAY; BEIJING MEETS STRAWMAN TRUMP
2w ago00:44:45Tap to summarizeTHE 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. 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BREAKING NEWS: SAUDIS STOP TRUMP'S OPERATION FREEDOM AS IRAN REJECTS HIS PEACE PLAN
2w ago01:05:11Tap to summarizeThe 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
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BREAKING: Pete Hegseth Lied About How Two US Destroyers Came Under Attack By Iranian Forces Last Night
2w ago00:44:58Tap to summarizeToday’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 t...
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J. Edgar Boozer Threatens To Sue, Carney Cracks The Empire In Half, Project Freedom Is A War Plan, Alito, Giuliani & The Dying OG
2w ago00:50:43Tap to summarizeThe 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
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Breaking News: Trump Says Congressional War Authorization Is Unconstitutional
3w ago00:38:10Tap to summarizeThe 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
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Hegseth on the Hill, Bondi on the Calendar, the Court Turns the Clock Back, and Cole Allen Never Fired a Shot
3w ago01:04:18Tap to summarize5️⃣ 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
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