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Opinion
Donald Trump Deserves the Nobel Prize for War
From Iran to Venezuela, the Trump administration has restored military action as a top option in US foreign policy.
Nov 15, 2025
On his recent tour of Asia, President Donald Trump picked up a number of gifts, including a golden replica of a Silla crown in South Korea and a golden golf club in Japan. Trump has a well-known penchant for gold: The Oval Office has been redecorated in gold, complete with gold trophies and golden coasters with Trump’s name on it.
Trump loves gold, but what he really covets, because it is much rarer, is a Nobel Peace Prize.
In the hopes of getting into the good graces of the US president, many world leaders have promised to nominate him for one. On this recent trip, he received such promises from the new conservative prime minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, as well as from Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet. Earlier this year, Park Sun-won of the now ruling Democratic Party submitted a nomination of Trump to the Nobel committee in Norway. Many other leaders around the world, from the Israeli prime minister to the foreign minister of Malta, have joined the chorus of adulation.
Like all the gold tributes paid to Trump, these nominations are naked attempts to flatter an erratic, cruel, and autocratic leader. They also fly in the face of reality.
One last reason why Donald Trump deserves a Nobel War Prize is his determination to increase the budget of what he now calls the War Department.
Trump, after all, no more cares about peace than a mafioso does. Both Trump and the mafioso want only that underlings follow their orders and adversaries cower in fear. Trump wants Russian leader Vladimir Putin to kowtow to the US president and come to the negotiating table with Ukraine. Trump wanted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop defying US pressure and negotiate with Hamas on a ceasefire in Gaza. Like a mafioso, Trump wants to demonstrate that he is the absolute authority who distributes favors and punishments according to his whims.
Trump often tries to change the fabric of reality by asserting the truth of absolute falsehoods—that former President Barack Obama was born in Africa, that the 2020 elections were stolen, that he’s the smartest person in every room.
So, too, with the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump boasts that he has ended “seven or eight” wars. It’s a questionable claim given that he was barely involved in negotiating ceasefires in several of those conflicts (Kashmir, Thailand vs. Cambodia) while some of the “successes,” like Gaza, remain largely unresolved. In the case of Egypt and Ethiopia, there wasn’t even a war to end.
Instead, through his rhetoric and actions, Trump deserves the opposite: a Nobel prize for war.
For the most part, Trump has been using tariffs as his favorite form of punishing friends and enemies alike. However, he also uses the threat of war, and here too he doesn’t necessarily distinguish between allies and adversaries. For instance, he has threatened to send troops to Greenland, which would set up a conflict with fellow NATO member Denmark. He has also threatened to annex Canada, a friendly neighbor.
More recently—and even more troubling—the Trump administration is seriously considering drone strikes and even the dispatch of US troops to Mexico to attack drug cartels. The Mexican government has strongly rejected any such plans, but that hasn’t deterred the Trump administration.
The possible plan to intervene in Mexico—against the wishes of the government—is an expansion of the drug war the administration is conducting in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It has already attacked more than a dozen ships and killed more than 60 people. The designation of a “war” by the Pentagon is fallacious since it is based on the notion that the United States is engaged in “defensive” actions. But the administration has not furnished any proof that the boats have attacked or had any plans of attacking US targets.
Nor is there any proof that the boats are actually engaged in drug trafficking. But even if the administration could prove that narco-traffickers are piloting the ships, it would mean that the cases should be subject to law enforcement. Instead, the Trump administration has engaged in extrajudicial murder.
The United States has also positioned sufficient firepower in the region to pursue regime change in Venezuela. Although Trump has said that war with the country is unlikely, he has nevertheless ratcheted up the pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by conducting naval attacks near his border, authorizing CIA action inside the country, and considering a plan to seize the country’s oil fields.
Potential wars in Mexico and Venezuela are only the most recent reasons why Trump should be awarded a Nobel War Prize.
For instance, Trump piggybacked on Israel’s attacks against Iran by bombing three nuclear sites in the country. If the president hadn’t destroyed the nuclear agreement with Iran at the start of his first term, there would have been no need for either Israel or the United States to use force against the country’s nuclear program.
Trump has also dispatched the army to American cities, an unprecedented move that has sharpened divisions in US society. He has threatened to use military force against protest movements domestically, even to deport US citizens to prisons overseas.
Trump recently announced that the United States will resume testing of nuclear weapons, in direct violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which the United States signed but did not ratify). His Energy Department insists that the United States will only test the non-nuclear components of the weapons—such as the delivery systems—but Trump wants the return of underground tests to match what he alleges are similar tests by Russia and China.
One last reason why Donald Trump deserves a Nobel War Prize is his determination to increase the budget of what he now calls the War Department. In May, the president presented the first trillion-dollar defense budget: almost $900 billion in spending plus almost $120 billion in supplemental spending from the reconciliation bill.
A trillion dollars to conduct wars and prepare for wars. Much of that money is for the big-ticket items in the Pentagon arsenal that are designed to fight a war with China.
The Biden administration was not exactly peaceful, though it did withdraw troops from Afghanistan and refuse to send troops to Ukraine (or even establish a no-fly zone over the country).
Today, the Trump administration has restored military action as a top option in US foreign policy. Trump deserves an award for this transformation. But it’s not the prize he thinks he should be given.
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Evidence of Epstein Ties to Mossad Grow, But Corporate Media Doesn't Seem to Care
There has been wall-to-wall US corporate media coverage of the Department of Justice’s Epstein files and the battle over its release. So why has new reporting about hacked materials largely been ignored by US corporate media?
Nov 15, 2025
For years, there have been whispers that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had ties to key officials in the US and foreign governments, was involved with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.
However, the Epstein/Mossad ties were often labeled by US corporate media as “unfounded” (New York Times, 8/24/25), dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” (New York Times, 7/16/25), or said to have been “largely manufactured by paranoiacs and attention seekers and credulous believers” (New York Times, 9/9/25). Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has claimed that “Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel.”
It’s true that far-right antisemites like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have promoted a conspiratorial version of the Epstein/Israel connection as part of their bigoted, attention-seeking narratives. But recent investigations by Drop Site News—the nonprofit investigative outlet founded in July 2024—into a major hack targeting Israel revealed that Epstein did play a significant role in brokering multiple deals for Israeli intelligence. Despite the hack’s significant revelations, US corporate media coverage remains scant.
‘Knack for steering the superpowers’
Since 2024, a hacking group called “Handala” with reported ties to the Iranian government (Committee to Protect Journalists, 7/9/25) has carried out a series of cyberattacks targeting Israeli government officials and facilities (Press TV, 12/1/24; CyberDaily, 6/16/25).Aspects of the Handala hack were published on the website of nonprofit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), including hundreds of thousands of emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, one of Epstein’s closest connections.
Since the hacked information was released, numerous independent media outlets—including Reason (8/27/25), All-Source Intelligence (9/17/25, 9/29/25, 10/13/25), Grayzone (10/6/25, 10/9/25, 10/13/25), the (b)(7)(D) (10/16/25, 10/21/25) and DeClassified UK (9/1/25, 11/3/25)—have published investigations on its contents. Among the independent media outlets, Drop Site’s coverage stands out for its in-depth research and broad scope.
Drop Site’s investigations into the Handala hack have included six major stories since late September, four of which have centered around “Epstein’s work on behalf of Israeli military interests, particularly as it relates to his role in the development of Israel’s cyber warfare industry.”
Drop Site reporters Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim (9/28/25) detailed how Epstein wielded his influence to expand Israel’s cyber warfare industry into Mongolia. Drop Site wrote:
Jeffrey Epstein…exploited his network of political and financial elites to help Barak, and ultimately the Israeli government itself, to increase the penetration of Israel’s spy-tech firms into foreign countries.
In their next piece, Drop Site revealed (10/30/25) that Epstein created an Israel/Russia backchannel to attempt to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Hussain and Grim reported that Epstein also worked with Barak and Russian elites to pressure the Obama administration into approving strikes on Iran, demonstrating his “knack for steering the superpowers toward Israel’s interests by leveraging a social network that intersected the Israeli, American and Russian intelligence communities.”
In the same piece, Hussain and Grim quoted Epstein asking Barak to “wait until they could speak privately before Barak notified intelligence leaders of a deal” with Russian-Israeli oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, and to “not go to number 1 too quickly.” Number 1 has long been a nickname for the head of the Mossad, DropSite noted.
Another article (11/7/25) recounted that Epstein sold surveillance technology to Côte d’Ivoire: “Epstein helped Barak deliver a proposal for mass surveillance of Ivorian phone and internet communications, crafted by former Israeli intelligence officials.”
Most recently, Grim and Hussain (11/11/25) reported that an Israeli spy regularly stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment. The spy, Yoni Koren, “made his intelligence career working in covert operations alongside the Mossad.”
Failing to cover the Handala hack
Hacked information must be handled ethically by journalists—including by verifying the files, considering public interest, concealing identities when necessary, and noting its origins. This is what Drop Site has done. And its reporting has significant public interest, revealing the ways in which Epstein served Israel’s interests.
Yet in a search of ProQuest’s US Newsstream collection for “Handala,” as well as a supplementary Google search, the only US corporate media outlet found to have covered the Handala hack is the New York Post (8/31/25). Its single 700-word story, drawing from Reason (8/27/25) and the Times of London (8/30/25), focused on how Prince Andrew stayed in contact with Epstein for five years longer than previously stated—sidestepping the revelations from Drop Site about Epstein’s ties to Mossad.
Hussain, who had not seen the New York Post story, said US corporate media is “deliberately ignoring” the story:
It’s such a goldmine of stories. They’re not going through it, they don’t want to talk about it. I think it’s very difficult for them to conceive what these emails refer to because they’ve spent so much time talking about it as a conspiracy theory. And now contravening evidence is emerging, or well-substantiated evidence, showing that it’s really not a conspiracy theory.
Indeed, recent mentions of Epstein’s ties to Israeli government officials have continued to dismiss them as conspiracy theories, ignoring the hack and Drop Site‘s work. For instance, an LA Times op-ed (10/10/25) on antisemitism in the GOP listed Tucker Carlson’s suggestion that “Epstein was a Mossad agent” (and accusing Israel of “genocide” in Gaza) as evidence of “appalling behavior,” alongside things like “entertaining Hitler/Nazi apologia” and suggesting that “Jews had something to do with [Charlie] Kirk’s death.”
The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang (10/10/25) asserted in his weekly column:
On Planet Epstein, everything that happens—the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the war in Gaza, the suppression of speech by the Trump Administration—proves the country is run by blackmail, pedophilia and fealty to Israel.
While it is of course absurd to blame “everything” on Epstein or Israel—and right-wing conspiracy theories that incorporate antisemitism are very real and dangerous—is it really unreasonable to blame “the war in Gaza” on too much “fealty to Israel”? After all, from October 7, 2023 to September 2025, the US sent $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project—more than a quarter of Israel’s total post–October 7 military expenditures. Epstein’s evident connections to Mossad do raise the question of whether there is more to that “fealty” than the $100 million the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC spent on both parties during the 2024 election cycle (Common Dreams, 8/28/24).
By using the “conspiracy theory” frame, Kang not only overlooked the recently revealed files from Drop Site, but also failed to convey the full scope of Epstein’s influence, leaving the actions of associates and key government officials unscrutinized.
Other Handala revelations
Other aspects of the Handala hack have also been well-covered by independent media, including reports of billionaires funding an Israeli cyber campaign against anti-apartheid activists (All-Source Intelligence, 9/17/25). Other stories describe Iran striking a secret Israeli military site near a Tel Aviv tower (All-Source Intelligence, 10/13/25; Grayzone, 10/13/25), and Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison, meeting with a top Israeli general to plan spying on Americans (Grayzone, 10/6/25). The Grayzone (10/9/25) also reported that a former US ambassador secretly worked with a top Israeli diplomat to help Israel access several prestigious UN committees.
In Israeli media, Haaretz (3/9/25) reported that thousands of Israeli gun owners were exposed in an Iranian hack-and-leak operation. The paper (7/9/25) also revealed the leak of a database containing thousands of résumés belonging to Israelis who served in classified and sensitive positions within the Israel Defense Forces and other military and security agencies.
These details, like those about Epstein, have also been met with silence in US corporate media.
There has been wall-to-wall US corporate media coverage of the Department of Justice’s Epstein files and the battle over its release. So why has the hack largely been ignored by US corporate media? One possible reason is the hack’s likely origin. It has been reportedly attributed to Banished Kitten, a cyber unit within Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence (Committee to Protect Journalists, 7/9/25). Hacks purportedly emanating from Iran are rarely covered in US corporate media—and when they are, the origin of the hack, not its content, becomes the focus.
Look no further than media coverage of the 271-page official dossier of then–Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, which revealed that the Trump campaign believed Vance “embraced noninterventionism,” among other purported vulnerabilities (Ken Klippenstein, 9/26/24). The US government alleged the Vance dossier was leaked through Iranian hacking (FAIR.org, 9/30/24). While the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico possessed the Vance dossier for weeks, they declined to publish it (Popular Information, 9/9/24).
The contents of the Vance dossier were eventually revealed by independent reporter Ken Klippenstein, as well-documented by FAIR contributor Ari Paul (9/30/24). Paul noted that while Klippenstein’s reporting pushed the story into the legacy media, “most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself” (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24).
Today, despite Drop Site‘s thorough and revealing reporting, the Handala hack has been almost completely ignored by US corporate media. Said Drop Site‘s Hussain:
A lot of these [media] organizations, it’s kind of not a secret, they have sympathies or ties to Israel, so it’s not a story which is appealing to them, it’s not politically convenient for these organizations, for the most part.
I think when something’s in the public interest, you report on it, and you’re transparent about where it came from. But in this case, [US corporate] media chose not to.
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Mamdani’s Win Shows That Democrats Can Expand the Their Electorate
His victory proves that Democrats can not only win over Trump voters but perhaps even more importantly reach voters who are not normally part of the political process.
Nov 15, 2025
While it may be hard for Democrats to admit it, the fact of the matter is that over the past 10 years Donald Trump has been able to expand his political base in ways that seem inconceivable. In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 elections, Trump’s achievements were clear to Democratic pollster John Zogby who wrote in The Guardian a week after the 2024 election:
But 2024 exit polling has clearly shown that MAGA has expanded beyond its original base. Trump outperformed his previous runs by substantial numbers among men and women, particularly young men; Black people, Latinos, Asian/Pacific Islanders; and suburban voters. He grew his support among voters in every state.
Many Democratic pundits have been in denial about Trump’s 2024 achievement let alone trying to chart effectively how Democrats can expand their electorate. There is some good news here as the 2025 elections as Zohran Mamdani in his successful run for mayor of New York City has demonstrated that Democrats can also expand their electorate.
It is certainly true that New York City is not necessarily a model for political communications and organizing in the United States. Nonetheless, an analysis of the 2025 results offer the Democrats some lessons. Kabir Khanna, CBS’ director for election analytics, has broken down the 2025 results and come up with some very intriguing conclusions.
All parts of the Democratic Party should study Mamdani’s winning campaign and figure out how Democrats can reach Trump voters and nonvoters.
Khanna’s analysis finds that fully 14% of Mamdani voters either voted for Trump (5%), for a third-party candidate (3%), or did not vote for president (6%).
Mamdani non-Harris voters tend to be younger than the electorate as a whole (two-thirds were under age 45), less likely than Harris voters to have a college degree, and tend to be less affluent (44% under $50,000 annual income). Mamdani was clearly able to expand the Democratic electorate by bringing in more blue collar and younger voters.
To his credit, Khanna acknowledges that New York City is not representative of the country as a whole. However, he does find some interesting parallels in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races:
Democrats Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia won in landslides, thanks both to high turnout in Democratic areas and some Trump voters flipping. And it was voters of color, specifically Latino voters, and younger voters who were the likeliest to flip. In New Jersey, for example, 18% of Latino Trump voters flipped to Sherrill this year, while only 5% of white Trump voters did so. Add to this group voters who backed this year's Democratic nominees but didn't turn out in 2024 and you see many of the same characteristics as we saw in New York: The Democrat-not-Harris voters tend to be younger, less partisan, less affluent, and more focused on the economy.
There is nothing in the CBS data that shows us how effective Mamdani was as a communicator. I do think we can infer that from Mamdani’s ability to reach voters in unexpected ways and maintain a consistent stance on his issue. Contrary to what many thought, after he won the Democratic primary, Mamdani stuck with his progressive platform and did not try to move to the center.
Mamdani’s victory shows that Democrats can not only win over Trump voters but perhaps even more importantly reach voters who are not normally part of the political process. A number of self-styled Democratic centrists are wary of what Mamdani’s win means for the future of the Democratic Party. I would point out to these centrists that future elections will determine the direction of the Democratic Party. In the meantime, all parts of the Democratic Party should study Mamdani’s winning campaign and figure out how Democrats can reach Trump voters and nonvoters. The outcome of the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections will be determined by how effectively the Democrats can learn lessons from the 2025 election results.
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Don't Let Israel Rewrite the Narrative to Polish Its Genocide
The coming months and years mark the most critical fight for truth in the conflict's history.
Nov 15, 2025
Israel’s allies worldwide are desperately scrambling to help Tel Aviv reestablish a convincing narrative, not only concerning the Gaza genocide, but the entire legacy of Israeli colonialism in Palestine and the Middle East.
The perfect little story, built on myths and outright fabrications—that of a small nation fighting for survival amid "hordes of Arabs and Muslims"—is rapidly collapsing. It was a lie from the start, but the Gaza genocide has made it utterly indefensible.
The harrowing details of the Israeli genocide in Gaza were more than enough for people globally to fundamentally question the Zionist narrative, particularly the racist Western trope of the "villa in the Jungle" used by Israel to describe its existence among the colonized population.
Not only have people across the globe, but even Americans have decisively turned against Israel. What began as an alarming trend—from the Israeli viewpoint, of course—is now the irrefutable new reality. National polls indicate that support for Palestinians among US adults has risen, with 33% now saying they sympathize more with the Palestinians—the highest reading so far and an increase of six percentage points from last year.
The final reckoning unfolds in the information warzone.
Even the once unshakable pro-Israeli majority among Republicans is softening in favor of Palestinians, with 35% of Republicans favoring an independent Palestinian state, a significant increase from 27% in 2024, demonstrating a clear shift in a segment of the Republican base.
The Israeli government is now fighting with every resource at its disposal to dominate the information war. It is focused on injecting calculated Israeli falsehoods into the discourse and aggressively blocking the Palestinian viewpoint.
Latest reports of an Israeli campaign to win social media by granting millions of dollars to TikTok and other social media influencers is only a fraction of a massive, coordinated campaign.
The war is multifrontal. On November 4, news reports revealed that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales personally intervened to block editing access to the page dedicated to the Gaza Genocide. He claimed that the page fails to meet the company’s “high standards” and “needs immediate attention.” According to Wales, that specific page requires a “neutral approach”—meaning, in practice, that blatant censorship is required to prevent the genocide from being accurately described as the “ongoing intentional and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people.”
Israel has long been obsessed with controlling the narrative on Wikipedia, a strategy predating the current Gaza genocide. Reports dating back to 2010 confirm that Israeli groups established specific training courses in "Zionist editing" for Wikipedia editors, with the explicit goal of injecting state-aligned content and shaping key historical and political entries.
The censorship campaign against Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices is as old as the media itself. From the very start, mainstream media in the West have been structurally aligned with corporate agendas that are naturally allied with money and power; thus, the prominence of the Israeli view and the near-complete erasure of the Palestinian perspective.
Years ago, however, Israel began realizing the existential danger of digital media, particularly the open spaces in social media that allowed ordinary individuals to become independent content creators. The censorship, however, took an ugly and pervasive turn during the genocide, where even the use of words like "Gaza," "Palestine," let alone "genocide," would result in shadowbanning or outright closure of accounts.
In fact, very recently, YouTube, which was previously known for being less severe in censoring pro-Palestinian voices than Meta, shut down the accounts of three major Palestinian human rights organizations (Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights), erasing more than 700 videos of crucial footage documenting Israeli violations of international law.
Sadly, though not surprisingly, not a single mainstream social media platform is innocent of censoring any criticism of Israel. Thus, it becomes a daily practice that references to Palestine, the Gaza genocide, and the like must be written in coded language, where, for example, the Palestinian flag would be replaced by an image of a watermelon.
Many pro-Palestine activists are now highlighting the direct complicity of Western media, especially in the UK, in attempting to whitewash the rape accusations against Israeli soldiers. Instead of using the unequivocal word "rape,' mainstream outlets refer to the horrific Sde Teiman episodes merely as "abuses." While Israeli politicians and other war criminals are openly celebrating the so-called "abuses" and the rapists as national heroes, mainstream British and French media are still refusing to accept that the widespread torture, rape, and mistreatment of Palestinians is part of a centralized, systemic agenda, not mere individual "abuses."
Compare this to the wall-to-wall, sensationalized coverage of alleged "mass rape" by Palestinians in southern Israel on October 7—despite the fact that no independent investigation was ever conducted, and that the claims were made by the Israeli army without credible evidence.
This is not mere bias and hypocrisy, however, but direct complicity, as stated by the Gaza Tribunal’s final statement on October 26, 2025. “The Jury finds a range of non-state actors to be complicit in genocide,” the verdict read, including “biased media reporting in the west on Palestine and under-reporting of Israeli crimes.”
The final reckoning unfolds in the information warzone. The coming months and years mark the most critical fight for truth in the conflict's history. Israel, relying on censorship, intimidation, and manufactured consent, will use every method to secure a victory. For Palestinians and all who champion justice, this battle for history is as consequential as the genocide itself. Israel must not be allowed to sanitize its image, because polishing genocide guarantees its repetition.
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