Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Trump signs order directing creation of a national voter list, a move already facing lawsuit threats

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and to restrict mail-in voting, a move that swiftly drew legal threats from state Democratic officials ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

The order, which voting law experts say violates the Constitution by attempting to seize states’ power to run elections, is the latest in a torrent of efforts from Trump to interfere with the way Americans vote based on his false allegations of fraud. The president has repeatedly lied about the outcome of the 2020 presidential campaign and the integrity of state-run elections, asserting again Tuesday that he won “three times” and citing accusations of voter fraud that numerous audits, investigations and courts have debunked.

The order signed Tuesday calls on the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to make the list of eligible voters in each state. It also seeks to bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending absentee ballots to those not on each state’s approved list.

Trump is also calling for ballots to have secure envelopes with unique barcodes for tracking, according to the executive order, which was first reported by the Daily Caller. Federal funding could be withheld from states and localities that don’t comply.

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Marine Corporal Arrested for Allegedly Stealing Missile System, Ammo

A 23-year-old Marine Corporal is under arrest for allegedly stealing a missile system and other “weapons of war” from his California base and selling them for personal profit.

AZ Family reported the Marine, Andrew Paul Amarillas, is “accused of stealing a Javelin missile system and cans of ammunition… to sell on the streets in Arizona.”

Amarillas is an ammunition technician specialist at Camp Pendleton.

The New York Post noted that the Javelin missile system “is capable of punching through heavy tank armor from miles away.”

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Pelosi Says Trump and Republicans May Hack Into Voting Machines to Rig Vote Count in 2026 Midterm Elections

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed President Trump and the Republicans are going to go into the voting machines and change the vote count to steal the 2026 midterm elections.

Pelosi, who previously announced she will be retiring after decades in Congress, sat down with MS NOWS’s Ali Vitali to discuss the 2026 midterm elections, Joe Biden, the partial government shutdown, female candidates for president, and other topics.

“I always thought the American people were much more ready for ‘Madam President’ than Congress was for ‘Madam Speaker,’ because it is a marble ceiling,” she said. “It’s not a glass ceiling; it’s a marble ceiling,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi took a swipe at Kamala Harris and said Hillary Clinton was the most qualified person of our generation to run for president.

“She turned out so many more people than who would have voted,” Pelosi said.

At one point, the conversation turned to election integrity and the 2026 midterm elections.

Nancy Pelosi said Trump and the Republicans may try to hack the voting machines and steal the midterms by altering the vote count.

“We always have concerns, but with this president and the Republicans who have no commitment to the rule of law and doing things the appropriate way- we’re ready,” Pelosi said.

She continued, “We have to make sure the elections are safe…. We have to be on guard as to what [the Republicans] may try to do to the technology. They may try to creep into the technology and create a false count,” Pelosi said.

MS NOW’s Ali Vitali entertained Pelosi’s claims.

“How do you guard against that?” she asked Pelosi.

“That’s a challenge,” Pelosi said.

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Yes, Iran Is Playing Chess – But Only After Rewriting the Rules of the Game

The origins of chess are contested, but few dispute that while the game began in India, it was the Sassanian Persian Empire that refined it into a recognizable strategic system. It was Persia that codified its language, symbolism and intellectual framework: the shah (king), the rokh (rook), and shatranj, the modern chess game.

This is not a trivial historical detail. It is, in many ways, a metaphor that has returned with force.

Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, 2026, political discourse – across Western, Israeli and alternative media – has repeatedly invoked the analogy of chess to describe Iran’s conduct.

The comparison is seductive. But it is also incomplete.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu articulated this framing as early as May 2012. Speaking of Iran’s negotiating posture, he said that “it looks as though they see the talks as another opportunity to delay and deceive and buy time… Iran is very good in playing this kind of chess game, and you know sometimes you have to sacrifice a pawn to save the king.”

That statement was not merely rhetorical; it revealed a long-standing Israeli interpretation of Iran as a strategic actor operating within a calculated, long-term framework.

More than a decade later, that framing has resurfaced with renewed urgency. Analysts, policymakers and commentators now routinely describe Iran’s actions as deliberate, layered and patient – defined not by immediate gains, but by positional advantage accumulated over time.

Some observers contrast this with what they perceive as a fundamentally different approach in Washington: one driven by immediacy, spectacle and the politics of rapid outcomes.

But such a contrast, while tempting, risks oversimplification.

Iran’s approach is rooted in historical continuity. It understands the current war not as an isolated confrontation, but as the latest phase in a decade-long process of pressure, containment and confrontation.

In this sense, the battlefield is not defined by days or weeks, but by political cycles measured in years – if not generations.

The objective of its adversaries, however, has remained consistent: Shāh Māt – checkmate – the dismantling of the Iranian state as a coherent political entity.

Yet this is precisely where the central miscalculation emerges.

When the Iranian Revolution overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979, the collapse of the system was swift and decisive. But it was not the result of external pressure. It was the inevitable outcome of a structurally brittle system.

That system was vertical – organized as a rigid hierarchy with power concentrated at the apex and legitimacy flowing downward. When the apex collapsed, the entire structure disintegrated.

If the people are the piyādeh – the pawns – then in that moment, they did not merely encircle the king; they overturned the entire board.

This experience helped shape a strategic doctrine that would later define US and Israeli military thinking: the belief that removing leadership – what is often termed “decapitation” – can trigger systemic collapse.

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Trump, Israel React to France Blocking U.S. Planes From French Airspace

American and Israeli leaders excoriated the cowardly, treacherous French government for preventing American airplanes from flying through the country’s airspace with military supplies for beleaguered Israel.

As the Iranian regime continues to fire at civilian targets in Israel and other nations, and as the United States and Israel take on the world’s worst terror-sponsoring regime (Iran’s), French President Emmanuel Macron and his government are determined to be on the wrong side of history. 

Donald Trump pulled no punches. “The Country of France wouldn’t let planes headed to Israel, loaded up with military supplies, fly over French territory. France has been VERY UNHELPFUL with respect to the ‘Butcher of Iran,’ who has been successfully eliminated! The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!!” the president posted on Truth Social March 31.

The Israeli government immediately took action to punish the French government for their despicable decision. The Israeli Defense Ministry sent a statement to The Hill confirming:

The Director General of the Israel Ministry of Defense. Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amir Baram has decided to reduce all defense procurement from France to zero, replacing it with domestic Israeli procurement or purchases from allied countries.

France has taken a series of actions that have harmed Israel’s security and the operational capabilities of its defense industry…The Israel Ministry of Defense views the French government’s policy with serious concern, as it undermines security cooperation with Israel, a country that is actively operating on the front line against Iran and protecting the security of the Western world.

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Two Different Wars, Two Different Presidents, But the Same Lies

I’m writing this piece well into President Donald Trump’s new war with Iran, which, with the help of Israel, has already killed more than 2,000 civilians, including 175 schoolgirls and staff; displaced some 3.2 million people; and is costing the American taxpayer at least one billion dollars a day. All of which is tragically reminiscent of the last time a Republican president led the U.S. into a war on a river of lies and greed. I’m thinking, of course, about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.

I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim-baiting that had been going on since the 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn’t know how.

Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.

Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies, or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.

Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend’s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a U.S. bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.

Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the “other side” was rare. So, Riverbend’s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days — jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family — in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.

Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn’t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.

One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn’t disappear with it.

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The Seder That Turned on Mamdani

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani walked into the “Downtown Seder” at City Winery in Manhattan ready to set a tone. He spoke first, leaned into unity, and tried to present himself as a mayor who moves easily across lines that divide the city.

Unfortunately for the mayor, the room didn’t follow his lead.

Zohran Mamdani is clearly aiming to convince the world that he isn’t anti-Semitic in the most lefty-coded theater-kid way possible. It didn’t quite go as he planned.

The New York mayor attended what The New York Times called a “hip” Passover Seder on Monday.

The event was also attended by former CNN host Don Lemon, who is in a bit of legal trouble at the moment, and a whole host of other characters, including a drag-queen rabbi who phoned in from Jerusalem and George Floyd’s brother, who spoke about “racism,” according to the Times.

Michael Dorf, founder of City Winery and longtime host of the event, has run the gathering for over 30 years. Mamdani took a seat alongside Don Lemon and Amichai Lau-Lavie.

Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie will appear at the Seder by video from Israel. The rabbi and human rights activist is best known as the subject of the documentary film Sabbath Queen (2024), which followed Lau-Lavie’s “epic journey” as a “drag-queen rebel” who “challenge[s] patriarchy and supremacy.” It is not known if the rabbi will appear as himself or as his drag alter ego, Hadassah Gross. Other guests will include Terrence Floyd, brother of George Floyd, and Matthew Broussard, the actor and comedian who played “Comic 2 at Stage Deli” in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Mamdani addressed antisemitism and told the audience he stands with Jewish New Yorkers, framing himself as a bridge builder, even while promoting a political agenda rooted in democratic socialism and expanded government authority.

That contrast didn’t sit well.

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US territory turned tropical maternity ward has produced thousands of ‘American’ babies for parents living in China

Pregnant Chinese women have turned a tropical paradise into a maternity ward — pumping out babies who automatically become US citizens daily.

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US territory northeast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, has been flooded with so-called “birth tourists” since 2009 when then-president Barack Obama introduced a visa-waiver program for Chinese nationals.

China-watchers estimate about 1,000 companies offer birth tourism to the Northern Mariana Islands, other US overseas territories and even the US mainland. They claim a gob-smacking 1.5 million American babies are being raised in China by Chinese parents who’ve participated in birth tourism.

In a March 9 letter to three Trump Cabinet secretaries, Republican lawmakers demanded an accounting on Chinese birth tourism.

“The concern is about these children born to Chinese parents — do the parents have connections to the Chinese Communist Party, which is an adversarial government to the US?” Chris Chmielenski, president of the nonprofit Immigration Accountability Project, told The Post regarding the letter.

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Former Congressman Matt Gaetz Claims U.S. Has a Top Secret ‘Alien Hybrid Breeding Program’

Former U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz made some interesting claims regarding aliens during his recent interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson.

During his interview with Gaetz, Johnson asked Gaetz who is now an anchor at OAN, what was the most disturbing alien information; he received as a member of Congress.

Gaetz responded, by sharing he received intel of locations of alien hybrid breeding programs.

The former Congressman from Florida stated, “I had someone come and brief me who was in a military uniform, worked for the United States Army, that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.”

Gaetz the emphasized, “An actual uniformed member of the United States Army briefed me on that.”

Shortly after Gaetz made his remarks Australian Senator Ralph Babet who serves in the Australian Parliament echoed Gaetz claims and took to X writing, “Let’s just say some of you would be very surprised who’s not entirely human.”

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Mystery of ‘second Sphinx’ deepens as new footage reveals shafts that could lead to hidden structure

The possibility of a second sphinx in Egypt has sparked renewed debate after new footage revealed dozens of deep shafts surrounding a mysterious mound at Giza.

The video documented more than 100 shafts clustered around the site in the northwest corner of the plateau, near the western cemetery of Giza, a region historically filled with burial shafts and ancient tomb complexes.

The renewed interest follows claims by researcher Filippo Biondi last week that scans detected a large anomaly deep beneath the mound, which he believes may be a long-lost sphinx.

The footage, released by independent researcher Trevor Grassi of the Archaeological Rescue Foundation, captured dozens of square shafts carved into bedrock, many reportedly extending deep underground but filled primarily with sand.

Grassi, who has spent nearly two decades researching Giza, said the video shows him physically walking along the perimeter of the mound, passing shaft after shaft cut directly into the limestone, some only about three feet across, while others measure roughly eight feet wide.

He said the unusually dense concentration of shafts surrounding the mound raises new questions about what may lie beneath the surface.

The footage is among the first to document the full perimeter of the site, offering what supporters of a second sphinx described as critical context for the ongoing debate.

While no definitive proof of a second sphinx has been discovered, researchers say the location warrants further investigation, given the number of openings and the underground anomaly previously detected at the site.

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