The FiveStack threw out the playbook today, dedicating the full hour to former Congressman and military intelligence expert Denver Riggleman for a war special on Day 3 of the Iran conflict. Four U.S. service members dead, three F-15Es downed by friendly fire from Kuwait, the U.S. Embassy hit, nine countries under Iranian attack — and an administration that, as Riggleman put it, is “confused and incompetent” with no day-after plan. Riggleman, who tracked Qasem Soleimani in 2006-2007 as an F-15E intelligence officer and ran the Counter-ID Operations Integration Center monitoring Iranian EFP supply chains, brought firsthand expertise that cut through the noise.

5️⃣ The Quagmire Is Real

Riggleman laid out why this war has no exit strategy. The CIA warned Trump directly that killing Khamenei wouldn’t lead to regime collapse, but sycophants told him it would be like Venezuela — quick and easy. “You can’t topple a movement,” Riggleman said, pointing to 93 million Iranians, Hezbollah networks across the region, and Iranian sleeper cells that have been preparing since 1979. Dean drove the point home after Riggleman departed: Trump is “bucket listing” as a dying president who doesn’t care about consequences, standing at a podium saying “I don’t get bored” while stumbling through sentences.

4️⃣ Draft EO 14248: Nationalizing Elections

The bombshell of the show was Riggleman’s analysis of a 17-page draft executive order on election interference. He traced the conspiracy pipeline from 2016 Stop the Steal through Italian satellites, Chinese servers, German server farms, Hammer and Scorecard, EO 13848, the December 18 White House meeting with Patrick Byrne, Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell — all the way to the current draft order. “This is absolutely nationalizing elections,” Riggleman warned, noting the order targets specific swing counties, not all 50 states. With Texas primaries tomorrow serving as a bellwether for 2026, the timing is not coincidental.

3️⃣ Three Reasons for War

Riggleman offered the sharpest framework for understanding why this war happened: election manipulation and rationalization for seizing election infrastructure, personal enrichment for Trump, MBS, and Netanyahu — including the Qatar jet, Air Force One billing, real estate deals, and Kushner’s Saudi connections — and cratering poll numbers, since wars historically boost presidential approval. MBS wants geographic control and oil dominance, Netanyahu wants a regional rival eliminated, and Trump needs a distraction. Dean added that Trump has now launched 626 bombing sorties on seven countries, three of which the United States has never attacked, timed precisely to Epstein developments and bad polling.

2️⃣ The Missing Epstein Transcripts

Five days after James Comer promised the Clinton Epstein deposition transcripts within 24 hours, they still haven’t been released. The videos haven’t been released. As Zev noted in the closing, the question remains: why aren’t we hearing from Bill and Hillary Clinton directly, in unedited testimony, about what they said about Donald Trump? The Iran war conveniently buried that story, and as Dean’s data shows, you can set your watch to Trump’s distraction wars.

1️⃣ Sabotage — The Anthem for 2026

Dean closed with a moment that stopped the show — reading the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” lyrics and connecting them to exactly what’s happening in America. “Scheming on a thing, that’s a mirage. I’m trying to tell you now, it’s sabotage.” Written in 1994 by three Jewish rappers from Brooklyn who understood the government wasn’t their friend, the song maps perfectly onto 2026: the mirage of manufactured crisis, the push of a button to shut you up, the Watergate-level political interference. Zev connected it to the Iran-Contra playbook — sponsoring both sides of a war to control the outcome while using crisis for domestic policy influence. Putin’s playbook. Same sabotage, new century.

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 Lev Parnas, Ellie Leonard, Brodee Myers-Cooke, Cat: Poli-Psych, Cathy R. Payne, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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FiveStack: Trump's Iran Invasion is an Election Ploy That's Already Backfiring