Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

I think nothing enrages Americans more than a lack of accountability from government officials. Yes, it happens often, and the public hasn’t taken up torches and pitchforks (yet), but I would point out that these incidents are cumulative and they light a growing fire within the collective memory. Eventually, people are going to snap if they don’t see action taken to rectify past wrongs.

This week, Dr. Anthony Fauci faced a flurry of questions from the Senate Homeland Security Committee over his handling of the covid response as well as his involvement in the gain of function research which likely led to the creation of the viral variant that spread around the world and nearly triggered a permanent Orwellian police state.

Fauci pleaded the Fifth over 100 times.  It’s not a sign of confidence in his own innocence.

He knows he’s untouchable legally, but I think what the man fears most is public judgment, and he’s not going to offer any confirmation that conservatives and the alternative media were right about him all along.  Unfortunately, even with substantial evidence, there is very little that any congressional committee or even the Trump Administration can do about him.

Fauci is well protected, and not just by the sweeping pardon “signed” by Joe Biden which covers the Doctor back to 2014. No, Fauci is also protected by the system – The bureaucracy and the globalist network of which he is a member.  Fauci is a chaos agent and he served his purpose well. They’re not going to let him face punishment.  If they did, then they might find it harder to procure the cooperation and loyalty of other bureaucrats in future schemes.

There are a lot of commentators out there right now who are agitated by the idea that Fauci might escape penalties for his crimes, but I have to ask, what did they expect? Did they think that Biden’s pardon would simply be ignored?

It’s fascinating to me that so many folks in the alternative media and conservative movements tend to attack Trump every time he takes any action that might remotely bend constitutional rules. They warn with suspicion that he’s “becoming a dictator.” Then, those same people will froth cynically and blackpill when Trump doesn’t act like a dictator when it comes to their pet issues.

It’s rather hypocritical. It would be smarter to admit that Trump’s powers are limited, largely by the same bureaucracy that’s protecting Anthony Fauci. It’s the bureaucracy which constantly interferes with migrant deportations. The same bureaucracy that’s preventing the SAVE Act from being passed. The same system that censored us for years because we dared to share the truth.

Fauci is a prime example of the perversions of that system and why it needs to be cleansed, but he’s also just a symptom of a greater disease. Making an example out of him would be a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the greater problem.  People need to stop waiting around for Trump to unilaterally “take down the deep state.”  He’s not in a position to do so.

For those who might have forgotten what really happened, at the start of 2020 the world was on the verge of a massive globalist coup, facilitated by hysteria surrounding the pandemic. By early 2020 I had written several articles covering the potential for a pandemic event being used by the establishment as a rationale for wider lockdowns of the population.

At this time, it was not clear if the coronavirus in Wuhan, China involved a microbe that was truly deadly, or if the threat was overblown. It didn’t really matter, the end game was the same. The goal, in my view, was to create enough fear and chaos to trigger an economic crisis and expedite a medical dictatorship. Once Joe Biden entered the White House, they nearly succeeded.

At the end of January 2020 I published an article titled ‘How Viral Pandemic Benefits The Globalist Agenda’. In that piece I noted:

“First, the notion that it [covid] was caused by Chinese citizens ‘eating bats’ or being exposed to a live animal market is rather ridiculous. We’ve seen NO hard evidence whatsoever that this is true, and I believe the narrative is a cover for the fact that the city of Wuhan where the virus outbreak began is the home of not one but TWO level 4 biohazard labs.

I have a hard time ignoring the strange ‘coincidence’ of the high level biohazard labs in Wuhan in favor of the idea that the virus was launched by chance due to the odd diets of central Chinese people. Given the evidence it appears that the coronavirus was gestated in a lab, not in someone’s bat and snake soup. In 2017, scientists outside of China warned that these labs were not secure and that a virus might escape one of the facilities.”

I argued that the outbreak might be a controlled incident or a false flag. I noted the strange coincidence of “Event 201” disaster simulation held by the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum only a couple months before the covid pandemic officially began. The simulation involved the international outbreak of a deadly coronavirus.

A few other media outlets came to the same conclusions I did in those early days, including Zero Hedge and the Washington Times. Zero Hedge was ultimately banned from social media (including Twitter), for the position. The Washington Times was pressured to backtrack on portions of their investigation. My website was essentially shadow-banned from search engines like Google.

The media attacked us relentlessly as a “threat to national safety”. They called the idea of a lab leak “baseless conspiracy theory” while citing Dr. Fauci as one of “the most trusted officials in America” when it came to pandemic information (apparently, he was absolutely giddy over his deification by mainstream news platforms).

Six years later we have all been vindicated in our analysis of the pandemic and the abuse of power that it enabled. This week, we have been treated to the release of 1141 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s professional “diaries”, which cover a period from December of 2019 to December of 2022. These diaries confirm everything we suspected at the beginning of the event.

Fauci was deeply embedded in the government’s policy apparatus; he was the go-to adviser for the White House and a primary media representative. He had direct influence over government decisions to enact lockdowns, mandates and vaccine campaigns.  He was also tied to the lab experimentation that (allegedly) led to the creation of the virus in question. In other words, Fauci acted as a primary gatekeeper for the chaos, from inception to solution. From end to end.

I continue to believe (according to the behavior and white papers of globalist organizations) that covid was intended to kill far more people than it ended up killing. The initial estimations by groups like the World Health Organization put the death rate at around 3% and a number of news outlets repeated this data point. I think this was the death rate they expected, but not the death rate they eventually got.

The real Infection Fatality Rate ended up being closer to 0.23% on average. Meaning, the world was shut down over a virus that 99.8% of people would easily survive. This fact was greatly suppressed by the media, by politicians and by bureaucrats like Fauci.  As far as I can tell, Fauci never addressed this data publicly; it was too inconvenient to the fear narrative.

Any mention of the virus being engineered was eventually silenced. Fauci knew of this censorship and often encouraged it in the name of “fighting misinformation”. According to his diaries, he steered the science away from the lab leak theory even though a majority of virologists broached the idea as likely.  Fauci helped organize and participated in discussions that led to the influential “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” paper (published in Nature Medicine in March 2020). That paper concluded that a laboratory-based scenario was not plausible and strongly favored natural spillover.

After considerable push-back, Fauci would later claim that he was open to wider investigations into covid origins.  But, at the height of the pandemic fervor it was Fauci who consistently labeled these avenues of research as “conspiracy theory”. It was Fauci who poisoned the well.  But why was he so obsessed with eliminating the lab leak theory from discussion?

The NIH funded an EcoHealth Alliance grant, providing an award of roughly $600,000 to the Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research. Some of that work involved creating chimeric viruses and testing them in humanized mice or human cells. A GOA review of federal funding to Chinese agencies from 2014-2021 found at least $1.4 million had been transferred to the Wuhan Lab during that time.

In 2024 congressional testimony, Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak acknowledged that the NIH funded this research at Wuhan through EcoHealth. He also admitted that the research met a “generic” definition of gain-of-function. This was a complete contradiction of Fauci’s ongoing denials.

The experiments to enhance viruses for human spread were pursued under a little-known loophole in the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). As long as the research was meant to develop “solutions or treatments” for the potential spread of manipulated viruses, gain of function experimentation was technically legal.  Fauci’s behavior suggests he was covering his tracks on gain of function and the chance that the NIH program was ground zero.

Currently, US national intelligence agencies, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Energy and multiple foreign intel agencies say they believe the Wuhan lab leak theory is probable (i.e. NOT conspiracy theory).

Fauci might have set the powder keg in place. He might have even lit the fuse. However, the ultimate institutional surge to exploit the crisis required a level of organization much bigger than Fauci. I would look to the Gates Foundation, the WEF, the WHO, as well as influential figures at the Imperial College London, etc. for the top of the pyramid when it comes to the medical tyranny side of things.

In the meantime, the good doctor deserves a lifetime in prison (or execution) for his participation in the coup. Will he get it? Not at the hands of any government, I suspect. Like I said, the bureaucracy is the government BEHIND the government. It is a faceless leviathan that defies transparency. It’s the fail-safe in the event that political leadership grows a conscience. The public can vote out politicians, but we can’t vote out the bureaucracy.

If Trump or the Senate or anyone else attempts to prosecute Fauci, the legal infrastructure overrun by activist judges will protect him. This is a fact. This is how the elites maintain a certain level of control and prevent any real reformation or reckoning.

There are plenty of political leaders in the US that fought back against the mandates (nearly half of all states blocked the restrictions). They helped us win the battle and it’s important to give credit where credit is due. That said, these people can only do so much. They are bound by the rules of the system and the system is designed to safeguard the corrupt.

A Wichita machinist, Mason Grimmett, sued his own city this week, arguing that the roughly 200 Flock license-plate readers the police department has bolted around town amount to warrantless dragnet surveillance forbidden by the Kansas Constitution. The complaint, filed in Sedgwick County District Court by the Kansas Justice Institute, does not ask for money – rather, it asks a judge to declare the program unconstitutional and shut it down.

The cameras are made by Flock Safety, one of the largest plate-reader vendors in the country, and Wichita started installing them in 2020. The institute now describes the city as saturated with them – close to 200 AI-powered cameras photographing every passing vehicle and logging its make, model, color, plate, and identifying marks into a searchable database. Grimmett, a lifelong Wichita resident who testified against the program at a public meeting in June, argues that the system violates Section 15 of the state constitution, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, and that the city is, in the complaint’s language, tracking and databasing law-abiding Kansans “without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion” and without any judicial oversight at all.

The Cops Who Already Abused It

Grimmett points to several local cases in which Kansas police used Flock cameras to stalk people, including abuse by former Kechi Police Lt. Victor Heiar, who was sentenced to eighteen months of probation for using Flock cameras to track a woman. According to local reports, a former detective was also accused of using plate-reader technology to stalk his wife, and a Sedgwick-area police chief reportedly ran an ex-girlfriend through the cameras 164 times. The institute is not disputing that the cameras help solve crimes. Its point is that they photograph everyone, all the time, and that the same access which cracks a burglary case also lets a jealous cop follow whoever he pleases.

“This is America, and we don’t tolerate warrantless surveillance,” said Sam MacRoberts, the institute’s litigation director, who says that if the government wants to monitor a citizen it ought to go to a judge and explain why. Grimmett says he cannot drive to work, the gym, a doctor’s appointment, a polling place, or a meeting of the local Sunflower Privacy Alliance without being catalogued by the department and by Flock.

Part Of A Widening Front

Lawsuits over Flock cameras are starting to stack up. In April, three San Jose residents filed a class action over that city’s nearly 500 cameras. In February, a separate class action in San Francisco accused Flock of sharing plate-reader data with ICE, CBP, the FBI, and ATF in violation of California’s ALPR Privacy Act, the sort of out-of-jurisdiction access that keeps surfacing in audits elsewhere and that has already pushed at least one California city to suspend its cameras pending review. The pushback has reached Congress, too, where a cluster of Republican bills – Rep. Thomas Massie’s move to withhold federal funds from any city running the cameras, and Rep. Tim Burchett’s Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which names Flock explicitly – now takes aim at the government-contract model the company runs on. Wichita’s department has previously described its own program as self-auditing, and the city had not filed a response to Grimmett’s suit as of Friday.

None of this will surprise regular readers who have watched the license-plate-reader map fill in city by city while the contracts governing who can query the data stayed conveniently vague. Grimmett, meanwhile, is betting that a state constitution’s search-and-seizure clause is the faster route to pulling the cameras down, and a ruling in his favor would hand every other saturated Flock city a template…

Chinese robotics maker Unitree formally launched its IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Thursday, opening the books on a deal that aims to raise about 4.2 billion yuan (roughly $618 million) at an implied valuation near 42 billion yuan ($5.9 billion). Once the shares start trading, the listing will put a real, daily market price on a profitable humanoid-robot maker operating at scale – the first the sector has had.

Until now, humanoid robotics companies have been raising capital based on numbers nobody could really challenge since nobody has had to actually clear a market. So far we have Figure AI sitting on a $39 billion private valuation, and a clutch of Chinese rivals each pushing past $3 billion in the primary market. A public listing swaps the euphoria of those private rounds for the discipline of a secondary one. Regulators approved the registration in early July after a review that took roughly 104 days from acceptance, one of the fastest STAR Market clearances on record. Observers have linked the speed directly to Beijing’s push to channel capital toward strategic robotics and AI champions. That said, Unitree has been designated a Chinese military company in the US, and Washington is weighing action against subsidized Chinese robotics imports even as the machines turn up for sale on Amazon.

A Rare Profitable Name in a Sea of Losses

Unitree makes an unusually clean test case because unlike most of its peers, it actually turns a profit. The company reported 2025 revenue of about 1.7 billion yuan and adjusted profit around 591 million yuan – a net margin north of 35 percent that, in a field defined by cash burn, is close to an anomaly. It shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year, more than any other company globally, alongside cumulative quadruped sales above 33,000 units. Overseas revenue has consistently run past 40 percent of the total. Founder and chief executive Wang Xingxing controls roughly a third of the business. The prospectus earmarks the proceeds for robot “brains” and model research, robot bodies, new products, and a manufacturing base.

The rest of the field looks nothing like it. UBTech, which is pursuing its own A-share listing, has put its Walker S humanoid through more than 50,000 hours of training on BYD production lines but keeps running losses. It just launched a consumer-grade bionic robot priced as high as 990,000 yuan (about $146,000) in a bid to crack the home market. Overseas, Tesla’s Optimus is slated to reach mass production this year. Every player in the space has a demo reel and a private valuation nobody has to defend. Unitree is about to have a share price that trades every day and settles the argument in public.

Whatever Unitree prints when it debuts becomes the benchmark for the entire “embodied intelligence” trade.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump on Friday said that he still wants compensation for people he said were victimized by a weaponized federal government while acknowledging that a planned $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund is “dead” after the Department of Justice walked it back amid congressional opposition and court rulings.

“It is dead,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting on Friday.

“But I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you. I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused … and I’d like to see them compensated for their pain.

“Their families have been ruined. Many, many suicides—they’ve committed suicide,” he also said in the meeting, which was held at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.

“People that were very successful, that wanted to go to a rally or an event and ended up spending the rest of their lives in horror.

“And this fund, this fund was not for me,” he said.

“This fund was for those people.”

Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced the fund as part of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit where Trump had sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide money for individuals who claimed to have been targeted by “weaponization and lawfare” under the previous administration. Trump’s lawsuit with the IRS was over a leak of his tax returns.

The fund, however, was met with legal setbacks as a federal judge blocked it from going into effect. That block was extended in mid-June.

Plaintiffs who sued to block the payouts argue that the government can’t legally divert taxpayer money into what they alleged was a slush fund for compensating Trump’s allies.

Also in June, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the government is scrapping its plans for the fund in the face of a bipartisan backlash, and government attorneys have argued that lawsuits challenging the fund are now moot.

During a House hearing on June 2, Blanche said, “We are not moving forward with the fund, period.”

“Not moving forward ever?” asked Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.).

“Correct,” Blanche answered.

Earlier on Friday, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that the fund was meant to defend “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed” by the Biden administration.

The president added that regarding the alleged victims, “perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history.”

“They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them,” he said, adding that Blanche should also be approved as attorney general by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Friday’s meeting is the first televised Cabinet session ever conducted at Camp David. The Trump administration previously attempted to hold the meeting in May, but it was scrapped due to bad weather.

During his first term in office, Trump held a Cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat that was closed to the press.

The world’s most sensitive radiation detectors sometimes rely on low background steel produced before the first atomic bomb test in July 1945, according to a new report from SpaceDaily.

Steel manufactured before the nuclear age lacks the tiny traces of radioactive fallout that atmospheric weapons testing later introduced into the environment, making it valuable for experiments searching for extraordinarily rare particles and faint radiation signals.

The report says that this gave rise to the popular story that scientists depend on steel salvaged from pre war shipwrecks resting on the ocean floor. While there is some truth to that, the claim has been greatly exaggerated. Some laboratories have indeed used steel from old warships for shielding, but it is not true that nearly every sensitive detector depends on sunken ships or that science faces a crisis as this supply disappears.

The reason low background steel matters is that, in cutting edge physics experiments, even the detector’s own walls can generate enough background radiation to interfere with measurements. Facilities searching for dark matter, rare nuclear decays, or other elusive phenomena go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate every possible source of interference, often operating deep underground and surrounding detectors with multiple layers of carefully selected shielding materials.

Today, researchers no longer rely exclusively on pre 1945 steel. Advances in metallurgy allow laboratories to manufacture and rigorously screen modern stainless steel, titanium, copper, and other materials with extremely low levels of radioactivity. In many cases, these newly produced metals perform just as well as their pre war counterparts, making the finite supply of old ship steel far less important than popular accounts suggest.

The enduring lesson is not that modern science depends on scavenging sunken fleets, but that the atomic age permanently changed the way physicists design their experiments.

When scientists are trying to detect just a handful of events over the course of an entire year, even the manufacturing history of the steel surrounding an experiment can make the difference between finding a signal and measuring nothing but noise.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on July 30 declined to block new work requirements for Medicaid recipients that states must implement by Jan. 1, 2027.

Judge Richard Stearns of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts turned down a request for a preliminary injunction made by Massachusetts and 25 other states to block the work requirements as the states’ legal challenge proceeds.

Stearns said in a six-page decision that the harms about which the states complained—added costs to comply with the new requirements—are largely reimbursable, since the federal government has said it will pay for 90 percent of the costs.

States have also complained that officials face a “tight timeline” to implement the requirements, which include mandating that beneficiaries aged 19 to 64 work, volunteer, or participate in job training for 80 or more hours per month. The timing, though, was set by Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, not by the defendant, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in its guidance on implementing the requirements, the judge said.

“There is a certain point at which damages fail to justify the issuance of such an extraordinary measure,” Stearns wrote later. “Plaintiffs have not shown that their damages rise above that minimal threshold here. Moreover, the additional costs that may be incurred by the States are unlikely to bloom disproportionately given the familiarity of the responsible state agencies with the tasks to be performed.”

Lawyers for the states and the government did not immediately return requests for comment.

In addition to the Jan. 1, 2027, deadline to implement changes, states in their motion for an injunction noted that under the guidance, they also must inform Medicaid recipients of the looming update in notices by Sept. 1.

The states also opposed the guidance on how to determine whether a person is medically frail, which would exempt them from the work requirements. The guidance suggests that in no case can states base their determinations of whether an individual is “medically frail” solely on their records that an individual has a “particular diagnosis or condition” and improperly limits the short-term hardship exception for individuals experiencing an emergency declared by the president to those who can establish that the emergency renders them unable to comply, state lawyers told the court.

Government lawyers said the One Big Beautiful Bill Act delegated the definition of medically frail to the federal government, and the states are seeking to impose “arbitrary limits” on that authority. They also said the state plaintiffs had not met the standards for a preliminary injunction.

Stearns said on July 30 that the court’s denial of the injunction request “is not a reflection or anticipation of its ultimate views on the merits of the underlying litigation,” which will proceed.

“As illustrated in the pleadings and briefings to date (and in the arguments of counsel during the hearing), this case presents difficult issues regarding the scope of Congress’s delegation of interpretative authority to the Secretary and the faithfulness to Congressional intent with which the Secretary performed his task,” the judge stated.

“This, in turn, requires an examination of the data relied upon by the Secretary and the judgments (some medical) that underlay his amplification of Congress’s legislative outline.

“These are determinations that, in the view of the court, should be made on a developed record of the kind that informs a court’s decision at the summary judgment stage of a case.”

Prices for electronic devices reliant on advanced memory chips, from smartphones to gaming consoles, have risen as the AI data-center buildout tightens supply and drives component costs higher. The resulting memory-chip crunch is now weighing on consumer demand, with Goldman’s latest note showing that the pressure is increasingly visible in China’s handheld-device market.

Goldman analyst Allen Chang, who focuses on everything from smartphones to semiconductors, AI, EVs, and robotaxis, cited new data on Friday showing that China’s smartphone shipments fell 17% from a year earlier and 36% from May, to 17 million units in June.

Second-quarter shipments totaled 69 million units, little changed from the previous quarter and a year earlier but above Goldman’s 59 million estimate. Chang expects full-year 2026 shipments to decline 10%.

June 5G shipments fell 12% year over year to 16 million units, representing 85% of the market.

“We expect 2026 shipments to decline at 10% YoY, given rising memory cost weighing on demand,” Chang wrote in the report.

Chang noted that the average number of cameras per handset declined to 2.9 this year, down from a 2022 peak of 3.8, while the share of cameras with resolutions of at least 20 megapixels increased to 66% of the total, up from 57% in 2025.

Model pricing for various foldable smartphone brands

Smartphone model launch pipeline

Professional subscribers can read more about the memory chip market, data center buildouts, and smartphones at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.

Summary

• Trump orders major strikes on Iran, likely to start this weekend.
• US adds sanctions, Bessent says Tehran can’t pay troops, as Iran faces growing pressure.
• Most Americans say the Iran war isn’t worth fighting: AP poll.
• Iran claims drone strike on US base in Kuwait – after no new US strikes overnight.
• Oil rises as fears of wider conflict grow and lack of talks.

*  *  *

Trump Orders Major Weekend Strikes

The Wall Street Journal and CBS are reporting that major US strikes – perhaps harder than anything of the last two weeks – are set to imminently commence. The attacks could be initiated at any point this weekend, after Trump gave the ‘order’ – it’s being reported:

President Trump has ordered a fresh attack on Iran aimed at getting Tehran to surrender that could begin as soon as this weekend and would last a few days, U.S. officials said.

Earlier on Friday, he told reporters that he planned to resume heavy military strikes to force the regime to come to the negotiating table. He predicted that if the U.S. hit Iran hard enough, the hard-line regime would eventually “peter out.”

Trump made clear earlier at Camp David that the Iranians can’t be trusted, are ‘dishonorable’ – and so he’s not pursuing talks.

The late afternoon Friday CBS report is more alarming, given that “The United States and Israel are planning what would be one of the harshest bombing campaigns to date against energy infrastructure targets in Iran, multiple sources told CBS News, with strikes possible throughout the weekend.”

It adds, “There was some discussion about trying to conclude by the time financial markets open Monday because of concern about how the bombings will affect the U.S. and global economy, but an end point wasn’t locked in.”

Earlier this week there were reports of Trump exploding at his own advisors amid ongoing debates about how the crisis should be handled, and finding an exit strategy.

“Well, they always want to talk, but they break their words so often,” Trump said Friday at Camp David, putting his frustration on display later adding: “All they do is make me angry.”

A key line from WSJ point to where things are likely headed: “Some U.S. officials believe Iran will continue to drag out negotiations, banking that Trump will abandon his war efforts in the long term in the face of mounting domestic political opposition.”

Keep Hitting Them: Trump

Trump is holding a Cabinet meeting on Friday at Camp David. He claimed that the fight against Iran is “going well” and stated that American forces are “hitting them very hard” – adding that “eventually” Iran will have no choice but to “come home” – meaning full surrender.

“It’s going well. Everything we can do is keep winning,” Trump also told Fox News. “But we are hitting them hard, shaking them up, and we’re just continuing to win.” He suggested there will still be strikes ongoing in coming weeks, and that he’s losing faith in the idea of talks with “dishonest” Iran “because they lie”.

Additionally, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is claiming that Iran is unable to pay its troops – though without offering specific evidence to back this, and that the US continues searching for Iranian assets to seize “all around the world”. This is after Thursday Washington rolled out yet more sanctions.

Trump: “We’ll be hitting them. We’ll be hitting them very hard. At some point they’re gonna say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.'” pic.twitter.com/DT1Fcf57EN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2026

In the meantime, the American public continues souring on the Iran war, which has predictably turned into yet another quagmire in the Middle East. Per a new Associated Press poll:

Most Americans say the war in Iran has not been worth fighting, and President Donald Trump’s approval rating on Iran has fallen slightly since last month, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

The results are a stark repudiation of the Republican president’s approach to the conflict, which has dragged on far longer than he originally predicted.

About two-thirds of U.S. adults say the war with Iran, which began Feb. 28, has not been worthwhile, according to the new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That includes the vast majority of Democrats and independents, as well as about 37% of Republicans.

Iran Boasts it Hit Kuwait Base

“We note with concern that the security situation remains precarious,” said Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi on his country’s mediation efforts to find peace between the US and Iran. Talks “are ongoing to normalize the situation, particularly the situation in the Strait of Hormuz,” he told reporters as a week full of renewed fighting as come to a close. But there essentially are no current talks, and US officials have indicated they are not even seeking them.

Early Thursday had seen the last major exchanges of tit-for-tat attacks, followed by a window of relative quiet into Friday – but the Iranian military has said it newly targeted strategic US military facilities at Kuwait’s Ahmad Al-Jaber airbase in a drone attack. This was cast as ‘retaliation’ for US attacks of the day prior which focused on Qeshm island. Several Iranian troops had been killed in the prior assault, and separately a family was slain when their home was reportedly hit.

Semiofficial Tasnim news agency said the armed forces had targeted hangars, satellite communication systems and equipment warehouses using drones – based on the military statement.

No New US Strikes Overnight

“Iranian state media reported the strike on Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base early Friday, but Kuwaiti officials and the Pentagon have yet to comment,” Newsnation summarizes, adding of the current standstill in fighting, “Notably, Iranian media did not report any American strikes hitting targets inside Iran overnight, a change from Wednesday, when the U.S. carried out what officials called a heavy wave of strikes against Iranian positions.”

The day prior saw the Iranians heavily target an American outpost in Jordan. Iran believes the US is amassing equipment there in preparation for further rounds of attacks. As for the Friday targeting of Kuwait: “Iran cited a U.S. strike that killed a mother, father and their 2-year-old child in a home on Qeshm Island as part of its justification for the reported Kuwait attack.”

‘Horizontal Escalation’

On the question of where the crisis goes from here, a Tehran-based researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies, Ali Akbar Dareini, gave Al Jazeera some interesting insight into Tehran’s likely thinking:

He said Iran is likely trying to preempt any future attacks by the US in its current targeting in the region. Iran does not want to “allow the US to decide when to start the war, when to pause temporarily and when to restart the war”, he added. “Iran is now targeting the staging grounds of future operations.”

Dareini explained that while Washington has been pursuing “vertical escalation” by ramping up military attacks against Iran, Tehran has sought “horizontal escalation” by expanding the conflict’s “geographical scope”.

“Iran wants a complete, permanent end to war, or it’s going to be a wide-scale regional war,” he said.

As for the latest on potential US-Israeli plans to escalate against the Islamic Republic…

The U.S. and Israel are reportedly considering a land blockade of Iran to increase economic pressure after months of military action failed to force Tehran back to negotiations.

The proposal would involve persuading neighboring countries—such as Iraq, Pakistan, Türkiye,… pic.twitter.com/uBHO7qx9po

— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 31, 2026

In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) has claimed its forces struck a pair of tankers attempting to pass though the narrow waterway under the “air escort” of the US military.

The IRGC asserted that the “non-compliant oil tankers… were struck and brought to a halt, while four other oil tankers quickly changed course and returned to their previous positions.” Meanwhile, two headlines that don’t line up:

• US President Trump says the Iran war is going well; US is hitting Iran hard and “we just keep winning” (Fox)
• The Persian Gulf Waterway Management Authority announces that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is not possible due to the continued aggressive actions of the US

Oil Climbs with No Offramp on Horizon

Still, despite of a lack of intense tit-for-tat so far on Friday, oil is rebounding significantly as there are no signs of offramp and the two sides aren’t talking – but instead preparing for more rounds in the fight…

But this Friday’s somewhat ‘quiet’ state of things could likely dramatically shift at any moment, as has been the pattern this summer. The aforementioned Tehran-based analyst Dareini describes a serious change and overhaul in Iranian leaders’ strategic thinking, which has gone from defensive to proactive, with an understanding of the need to inflict pain on the US side in a preemptive way.

“Iranians are tired from suffering from limited US attacks,” Dareini said, charging that the US uses its declared pauses as a “deception tactic” merely in preparation for future attacks and operations.

“There has been a profound change in Iran’s strategic thinking,” he added. “The era of restraint is over. Iran has decided that, if needed, it has to take preemptive military action against the US.”