Behind the Headlines Week of September 11, 2026

By Rob C.

Trump and Hegseth use 9/11 memorial remarks at Pentagon to defend war on Iran

Twenty-five years after nearly three thousand Americans were murdered by Saudi nationals — not Iranians, let’s be crystal clear about that — Don Borlioni and his crusader-tattooed Secretary of Defense “I’m a real man. Really, I am.” Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon altar and used the bodies of the dead as stage props to justify their entirely unrelated, catastrophically mismanaged war with Iran. This is the political equivalent of showing up to your grandmother’s funeral to pitch a timeshare. The audacity isn’t accidental — it’s the whole strategy. When you can’t defend a war on its merits, you drape it in a flag and dare anyone to object.

Here’s what’s actually happening beneath the solemn music and the folded flags: the defense contractors are printing money. Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman — the holy trinity of the Military-Industrial-Complex — have seen their stock prices doing cartwheels since Hegseth and his ‘Deus Vult’ tattoo convinced Dictator Tot that bombing Iran was God’s will AND a great ratings opportunity. These corporations pour hundreds of millions into dark money networks, Super PACs, and think tanks that spend years cultivating exactly the kind of chest-thumping, history-amputating foreign policy that gets us into these wars. The revolving door between the Pentagon and defense industry boards spins so fast it generates its own electricity.

You should be furious — not just sad, furious — because 9/11 is being strip-mined for political cover to launder a war that has nothing to do with 9/11, everything to do with power and profit, and will produce its own future generation of memorial ceremonies where some future authoritarian will do the exact same thing all over again. They’re not honoring the dead. They’re exploiting them. And the arms dealers funding this political machine are laughing all the way to their offshore accounts while working-class kids come home in boxes draped in flags that got waved at the wrong funeral.

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The Guardian

Wake up, Britain: Donald Trump’s US is no friend of ours. We must secure our own place in the world | Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins is correct, and the fact that this still needs to be said in September of 2026 tells you everything about how thoroughly the ‘Special Relationship’ mythology has been weaponized to keep Britain in a posture of geopolitical helplessness. Let’s be blunt: the United States under Donny Dumb-Dumb is not an ally — it’s a protection racket run by a man who has openly praised authoritarian strongmen, gutted NATO’s credibility, and whose inner circle of Techno-Fascists views European liberal democracy as an obstacle to be dismantled, not a partnership to be honored. Elon Musk didn’t spend millions interfering in European elections because he likes the architecture.

The deeper scandal here isn’t Trump’s personal disdain for Britain — it’s that the dark money networks funding Trumpism have direct financial tentacles into British politics. The same billionaire donor class, the same ‘free market’ think tank ecosystem that manufactured Brexit, that bankrolled the Tory hard right, that is currently funding Reform UK’s surge — these are not separate phenomena. They are coordinated nodes in a transnational oligarchic project to weaken democratic governments, privatize public assets, and ensure that no elected body anywhere has enough power to regulate, tax, or inconvenience the Epstein Class. Britain isn’t just losing an ally; it’s a target.

British readers: the answer is not simply to ‘secure your own place in the world’ as a matter of national pride — it’s to recognize that your own political system has been partially colonized by the same forces destroying American democracy. Fixing your relationship with Trump’s America starts with investigating who’s funding your domestic hard-right insurgency, who’s buying your media, and whose dark money is flowing through your think tanks. The threat isn’t just across the Atlantic. It’s already inside the house.

The Guardian

‘I’m on the ticket’: Trump implores Republicans to vote in November at unusual midterm convention

Let’s translate: ‘I’m on the ticket’ means ‘this is still entirely about me, my legal exposure, my business empire, and my need for the House and Senate to function as personal legal shields.’ President McGrifter has never once in his life said ‘I’m on the ticket’ and meant anything other than ‘I am the ticket, I am the only ticket, there is no other ticket, and if you lose it’s because you weren’t sufficiently worshipful of the ticket.’ The Republican Party at this point is not a political party — it’s a hostage situation where the hostages have developed such advanced Stockholm Syndrome they’re writing thank-you notes.

Here’s the machine behind the curtain: the dark money apparatus — the Koch network remnants, the Club for Growth, the various billionaire-funded Super PACs — has made a cold calculation that Trumpism delivers deregulation, tax cuts, and corporate immunity from accountability faster and more completely than any other political vehicle in American history. So they fund the cult, not because they believe in the theology, but because the theology delivers the legislative goods. These are rational economic actors doing rational economic things. They’re not crazy. They’re just evil in a very organized, spreadsheet-friendly way.

You need to vote in November like your democratic system depends on it — because it does. The convention stunt, the ‘I’m on the ticket’ performance, the manufacturing of MAGA enthusiasm for a midterm that historically punishes the party in power — all of it is a machine running on corporate dark money and authoritarian momentum. Every seat that flips is one less rubber stamp for a man who has made crystal clear that elections are only legitimate when he wins them. This is not hyperbole. This is the stated position of the person asking you to vote for him.

ScheerPost

25 Years After 9/11, How Do We Build A Movement To Stop Endless Wars?

Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years of ‘we’ll get them,’ of ‘the surge is working,’ of ‘we’re turning a corner,’ of trillions of dollars — TRILLIONS — extracted from schools, hospitals, bridges, and insulin budgets and fed into the bottomless gullet of the Military-Industrial Complex. The question ScheerPost is asking is the right one, but we need to be honest about why the anti-war movement has been so comprehensively defanged: it’s not because Americans love war. It’s because the corporate interests profiting from war have spent decades buying the politicians, funding the think tanks, and owning the media infrastructure that makes endless war feel like weather — unfortunate, but inevitable.

Building a movement to stop endless wars means first naming the enemy clearly, and the enemy is not ‘foreign policy establishment thinking’ — it’s a specific, identifiable class of defense contractors, private equity firms invested in weapons manufacturing, lobbying shops, and dark money networks that have turned war into a subscription service. Lockheed Martin’s lobbying budget alone would fund a small nation’s healthcare system. These companies don’t just profit from wars — they actively shape the political conditions that produce them. The Techno-Fascists have added a new dimension: surveillance technology, drone systems, and AI weapons platforms where Silicon Valley oligarchs have discovered that the Pentagon budget is the world’s most lucrative venture capital fund.

The movement needs to be built at the intersection of anti-war activism and anti-corruption organizing — because you cannot stop the wars without cutting the financial arteries that fund the politicians who vote for them. Demand transparency in defense contractor lobbying. Support candidates who refuse defense industry money. Connect the cost of the Iran war to the school in your district that’s crumbling, the veteran sleeping under a bridge, the insulin that costs four hundred dollars. Make the abstraction concrete. Make the money visible. Make them defend it by name, in public, on the record. That’s how you build a movement. That’s how you stop this.

The Guardian

Trump ally resigns from post leading inquiry into alleged conspiracy against president

Another one bites the dust, and the pattern is so consistent it’s practically a subscription service: Trump ally gets handed a government position specifically designed to investigate Trump’s perceived enemies, proceeds to discover that the ‘conspiracy’ is either legally indefensible, factually nonexistent, or both, and then quietly resigns before the whole thing collapses on their head. This is not governance. This is a protection racket that keeps eating its own enforcers. The ‘inquiry into alleged conspiracy against the president’ was never about finding truth — it was about manufacturing enough official-looking noise to flood the zone, muddy the legal waters, and give state media something to run on a loop while the actual corruption continued uninterrupted.

This is what the revolving door looks like when it’s spinning for purely authoritarian purposes rather than the traditional corporate-capture model. Trump allies don’t get these positions because they’re qualified investigators — they get them because they’ve demonstrated sufficient loyalty to the cult. When the cult’s interests require them to pursue investigations that are legally catastrophic or factually absurd, they eventually face a choice: commit what amounts to misconduct, or get out. The ones who got out, like this one apparently, made the slightly less self-destructive choice. The ones who stay — who file the charges, who hold the hearings, who yell about the stock market at congressional testimony — those are the ones who will one day discover that Donald’s loyalty is entirely one-directional.

Care about this because every one of these sham inquiries costs taxpayer money, consumes Justice Department resources, and — most importantly — is designed to intimidate. The target isn’t just whoever the ‘conspiracy’ is allegedly about. The target is everyone watching: journalists, prosecutors, civil servants, judges, anyone who might be considering holding this administration accountable. The message is ‘we will use the apparatus of the state against you.’ The resignation tells you that one specific vehicle broke down. The authoritarian road it was driving on is still very much open.